I thought I had a motivation problem, but it turns out I was overstimulated.

Last year, Americans streamed 21 million years' worth of content, according to Nielsen. Yeah, you read that right. Twenty-one million years worth of content. 

Estimates show that you’ll spend about a third of your life in front of a screen, unless you do something about it. And what on earth are you supposed to do about it?

I mean, you wake up: screen
Go to work: screen 
Get home from work: watch a giant screen while scrolling on a tiny screen

It’s truly unfathomable… and the odds are stacked against you, because next year we have to stream at least 22 million years of content to keep the shareholders happy 😩

What. Is. Happening???

The Slot Machine 

By now, you know that our devices and apps are designed to be addictive, that every time you unlock a screen with your face, you add coins to the slot machine. Dopamine has become the media darling as our screen time relentlessly ticks upward. TikTok is dripping with misinformed trends like dopamine-dressing and dopamine-decor, because when it hit the zeitgeist, we ran with the idea that dopamine is the pleasure chemical — and we’ve been wrong.

Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky clears it up: “Dopamine is not about pleasure, it’s about the anticipation of pleasure.”

To put it another way — dopamine is the pursuit of happiness, not the happiness itself.

It informs what Michael Easter calls the Scarcity Loop. The loop requires three phases: opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability. Sound like any apps you know?

The Scarcity Loop is deeply ingrained in our evolutionary development from the days of needing to hoard scarce resources to propagate the species. And even hough we’re no longer hunting for berries to feed our kids, it persists today. The loop still makes us feel like we’re hunting, but the only “reward” is occasional entertainment and astronomical screen times. The infinite scroll feeds the anticipation mechanism, which leads to overstimulation. There’s too much information coming at you too fast.

Overstimulation causes behaviors like snapping at people who didn’t deserve it, shutting down, increased anxiety and difficulty concentrating… and slowly your motivation disappears. The term for it is languishing.

Prolonged states of overstimulation lead to what UMass Medical Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn describes as the feeling that “our lives are somehow unfolding faster than the human nervous system and psyche are able to manage well.” I bet that sounds familiar.

A Very Peaceful Protest

There are a few ways to push back — none of them as easy as scrolling TikTok for 8 hours, but all quite rewarding.

📍 Awareness

It all starts here. Simply practice noticing when you’re parked in front of a screen. In many contemporary Buddhist teachings, it’s called a U-turn toward awareness. Just notice when you’re driving the the wrong direction and hang a u-ey.

👀 Anticipate Elsewhere

Scrolling is the anticipation of reward, not an actual reward, so you’ll have to find somewhere else to locate the feeling of anticipation and reward, preferably somewhere IRL. I picked running and hiking and Portuguese and French, but you can pick anything as long as it feels more interesting to anticipate then next thing on your news feed.

📵 Tech Rest

While is does sounds nice to go off the grid and become a fairy living in a cobb house, most of us won’t be doing that. It’s healthier (and way more possible) to find pockets during the week where you can fully disconnect. It’s unrealistic to go cold turkey, especially if you’re like me and make a living off being someone on the internet.

A few years ago I figured there must be a middle path, and that’s how I landed on Tech Rest as an ongoing lifestyle practice that makes me feel better, just like eating my vegetables, exercising, and meditating. Typically, I delete Instagram and TikTok on my phone on Friday night and download them again on Monday. Maybe it sounds more doable to just take a night off. Any form of Tech Rest is the right kind of Tech Rest. Give your nervous system some downtime. Suddenly you will begin to see your motivation glimmering in the distance again.

Your Willpower’s No Good Here

Living with technology and maintaining your sanity only gets more difficult from here. The most brilliant behavioral scientists in the world will continue to design technology that way that keeps us hooked, and corporations making money off your lack of awareness. It’s incumbent upon each of us to recover our agency wherever we can and encourage those we interact with regularly stop looking down and begin looking out.