Some thoughts on dopamine, phones and the demise of mankind (+ some links)
May 2025 Newsletter
Happy May to all who celebrate! Here’s what we’ve got today:
🤔 A thought I’m processing [on dopamine & phones]
💕 A thought I’m loving [on smartphones & the demise of the human race]
🗳️ A poll [on cohort naming & spiritual coercion]
🔗 Some link love & images
📆 A full recap & links to this past month’s posts
🤔 A thought I’m processing [on dopamine & phones]
I can’t help it, guys. I’m deep in the Dopamine research. It started a year or so ago when I had some Long Covid success with a Parkinson’s med. I had to come off the med due to side effects, but I began to investigate the mechanisms of the medication to see if I could help myself in other ways.
Parkinson’s is a degeneration of nerve cells that produce dopamine. So began my investigation into dopamine. It didn’t take long to figure out that this dopamine situation goes well beyond Long Covid.
Guys, I have bad news: we have a SERIOUS dopamine situation going on. (“We” = all of us who own a smartphone.) It has become increasingly clear that the way our phones impact our dopamine is very similar to how drug addicts experience dopamine. It’s too big a dump at one time. And our brains have to balance the scales - they have to lower our pleasure to compensate, and they have to reduce our dopamine receptors, which in turn means we experience less dopamine in response to everyday basic magic (like sunshine and hugs); it means we have way less attention and motivation.
All thanks to our phones.
(And you know what’s crazy? Much like drug addicts - even when we find out our phones are slowly killing us - we still don’t put ‘em down.)
On a related note…
❤️ A thought I’m loving thinking about a lot [on smartphones]
A study, published in February, reports what we probably sort of know. They had participants block the ‘smartphone’ part of their phone for 2 weeks - still leaving them access to texts/calls. And you know what? After JUST TWO WEEKS, people experienced significant improvements in attention and mental health.
ATTENTION: “People’s change in objectively measured sustained attention ability is about the same magnitude as 10 years of age-related decline.”
DEPRESSION: “The observed effect of the intervention on depression symptoms (dz = 0.56) was larger than the meta-analytic effect of antidepressants.”***
Why stop here? How about another study, where participants’ concentration and attention were tested while their smartphone was just NEARBY (not being used) vs. removed from their context. And it turns out:
“the mere presence of a smartphone results in lower cognitive performance, which supports the hypothesis of the smartphone presence using limited cognitive resources.”
Just having it nearby shuts off part of critical thinking in your brain because your super smart brain is into saving resources, and if a phone can do it for you, you don’t need that part of your brain.
All this to say —> I’m pretty sure the destruction of the human race (which I previously would have predicted as AI-induced) is going to happen without any help from our decaying earth or robot oppressors. I think it’s gonna be our phones, which will help our brains ‘evolve’ to lack attention, motivation, pleasure, and the ability to create.
🗳️ A poll on [cohort content & spiritual coercion]
I’m currently working on pulling together some summer cohorts for my church, and I’m going to get you to help me figure out what to include in one of them.
The cohort will be an exploration of unhealthy Christian cultures, but I’m not sure what to focus on within that.
My research (🥰 did I mention I’m a research associate at the University of Salford now? 🥰 ) finds themes and patterns in cultures of spiritual coercion. I began this work as a part of my MSc on the psychology of coercive control and how it impacts our psycho-spiritual-social-bio frameworks.
I like sharing about this stuff, but what are people interested in? The specific patterns I’ve found in Western churches that correlate with themes of spiritual coercion? The impact on the brain? How to recover? How to know if you’re experiencing it?
What do you think would be helpful for most people?
🔗Some link love
📆 What you missed in April
Below are some links to thoughts I’ve shared this past month! (Please note that some of my messier thoughts and musings are behind a paywall. You can read more about why I do that here, and feel free to upgrade your subscription to access them.)
3 ways to tell if it’s prayer or ‘magical thinking’ - what’s the difference between true prayer and using ‘prayer’ as a cover for just wishing away and ignoring a broken world?
The danger of optimization - a little rant about how we keep trying to optimize things that aren’t supposed to be efficient
Jesus didn’t want today - a good Friday reminder
Profound thought of the day - what if my illness is making me healthier?
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***(RE: depression - Before you go telling people that they can cure their depression by getting off their phone, it is important to note that the population in this study is not the same as the population with clinical depression that tends to be involved in an antidepressant study).