Your Brain Is Not Built for Infinite Scrolling
We don’t usually give this fact any attention, but Homo Sapiens have the largest growth curve in terms of population and social and technological progress as a civilization among all other creatures that share this planet with us.
We haven’t quite adapted to the position of “Rulers of the World” yet. In fact, our brains are still ancient. Very ancient.
It’s STILL running on its initial design of looking for food, watching out for danger and gossiping about all things relevant or irrelevant around a bonfire, to strengthen your social circle and survival odds.
Unlike tigers or lions who had millions of years to adapt to their roles as apex predators and actually provide their DNA with enough time to realize this, we humans progressed in a mere few tens of thousands of years. Hence, when we are born, we are only given the software to survive in a world like the one that existed about thirty thousand to seventy thousand years ago during the cognitive revolution.
In other words, our brain is not designed for all the changes that have taken place around us over the past few millennia of rapid development. Especially, not to scroll through 400 videos a day of people dancing and arguing and even selling skin care, without stopping.
Yet here we are.
Infinite Scrolling: The Modern Trap
In real life, everything has to come to an end without any exceptions. Every book has a last page that ends the story it delivers.
Every TV show ends at some point after years of airing and keeping its audience on edge (even if some feel like they don’t).
Even exams eventually stop at one point of our lives (thankfully).
However, there is one thing that doesn’t quite end in that sense. That is social media. There is absolutely no stop signal when it comes to this.
You can go on scrolling till the very end of your life and even then, you will only have watched about 0.02% of all the reels that’ll will have been uploaded by then.
Since there is no natural stop to this like other things, you brain thinks “Maybe the next scroll is important”.
Spoiler: IT IS NOT!
Your Brain Loves Rewards (And Hates Discipline)
In a way, every scroll is a gamble. You never know what will come next.
It could be a funny video or a completely boring one. It can be drama or a massive dopamine hit.
This unpredictability is addictive. It is the same principle as slot machines. The only difference is, instead of losing your money, you lose your focus.
This is why discipline doesn’t work most of the time when it comes to social media. Each scroll takes a very small amount of time.
And before you do it, you will have scrolled through about a hundred “small amounts of time”.
Why You Feel Drained but Did “Nothing”
Scrolling feels like the easiest thing in the world, right? You simply lie on your couch and move your fingers from one reel to the next and so on and so forth.
This is not true. There is a lot going on inside your brain while you scroll through reels in multiple parts of the brain. The brain processes images, reads texts, reacts emotionally and makes several micro-decisions, all within the span of a singular reel. And this cycle perpetuates for a good while!
It’s the equivalent of running 20 apps on a phone with only about 5% battery. In fact, it’s worse than that.
And then, you wonder why you can’t concentrate on a book for 10 minutes.
Your brain is exhausted, not broken or anything of the sort.
The Hidden Damage
Scrolling causes problems-big problems.
Scrolling overtime not only shortens one’s attention span but also kills boredom. Whenever some is bored, they rush to their phone and click on their favorite icon.
This is a terrible thing to do. Boredom is the birthplace of creativity. If you are not bored, the chances of you getting an innovative idea reduce drastically.
Worst of all, it makes deep thinking extremely uncomfortable. People become unable to think for themselves.
This causes reading to feel hard, silence to feel awkward and thinking to feel arduous.
Is Scrolling Evil?
This is subjective. Those who are extreme refuse to let their mind be taken use of by anyone would without a doubt infer that scrolling is evil.
However, one does not have to delete everything and move to the mountains and join the hermits to save themselves.
Scrolling isn’t the enemy. Mindless scrolling is.
In other words, the problem is not using your phone. It’s letting these algorithms decide how long you can use your own brain.
A Smarter Way to Scroll
There are a multitude of things that you can try to not be preyed on by these algorithms and protect your psyche.
Before you open any app, make sure you set a reason to do so. Stop whenever you feel an urge to just keep on scrolling. Replace scrolling through reels with scrolling through small reads (your brain might not be pleased about this but tell your brain to deal with it since you are doing this for its own good. Yes, be a parent to your brain).
It isn’t willpower that you need. You simply need to set some much-needed boundaries between you and mindless scrolling.
Final Thoughts
Our brains are powerful as well as creative. Most of all, they are expensive hardware.
Infinite scrolling turns these power machines into nothing more than mere reaction machines. This is like using an extremely high spec computer only to use Google and Word.
The future of this world always has and always will belong to those who can focus and think deeply. In this day and age, such people are usually the people who are capable of putting away their phones on purposes.
Everyone else will still be scrolling, probably like they are right now.