Breaking the pleasure trap

Reclaiming life beyond the scroll

How I feel after endless scrolling

I managed to get myself into a rut over the holidays by loosening my normal routine. I normally get up early, work, exercise, and carefully control what I eat every single day. All of that went out the window for the last month because of the holiday. I also developed a habit of scrolling on my phone to fill up the empty spaces in my day or to pass the time when I couldn’t sleep. The result was a return of feelings of depression.

I'm getting out of this rut by jumping back into my routine, with two major additions. This week I cut way down on daily scrolling and I also went mostly "silent" with my workouts. This has already improved my mood significantly.

With these two lifestyle additions, I have

• eliminated Instagram almost entirely. Instagram is a massive time- and energy-drain with almost no benefit.

• cut down time spent on X and Notes to about 30 minutes total per day, mostly in two shots (beginning and end of the work day).

• replaced the time I'd usually spend scrolling with reading long-form articles and paper books. In the evening, I only read paper books under full-spectrum light. If I’m bored or need to pass the time, I pick up a book or magazine. If I can’t sleep, I do the same.

• cut way back on the amount of music I listen to while working out.

This came on the heels of watching this interview with psychiatrist Anna Lembke about dopamine depletion through too much stimulation and how it destroys motivation and increases feelings of anxiety and depression. I highly recommend watching it in its entirety.

Dopamine is central to our brain’s reward system. It gets released when we have a pleasurable experience, which motivates us to seek the reward of pleasure by doing that activity again. The key here is that we’re not actually motivated by pleasure but by the anticipation of pleasure. If we overdo it with something—like drugs or too much social media or junk food—we can deplete our brains of dopamine and with it any sense of motivation. Without motivation, our general sense of satisfaction with life is also depleted.

My scrolling habit and hours of loud workout music were killing my dopamine, and I realized this through “diagnosis by treatment.” I felt much better after severely cutting back on both, even before returning to my routine of getting up early, working, exercising daily, and watching what I eat.

I believe good can come from using social media, but in very mitigated doses. I have gained good friends and tremendous opportunities through X and Substack. But endless scrolling was making me deeply unhappy and unmotivated. Cutting back to only “necessary” social media use made a big difference.

Music can be a force-multiplier when working out, but listening to it for hours was leaving me feeling drained and unhappy at the end of a hard workout instead of peaceful. Last night I went music-free at the gym and noticed a difference in my mood afterward.

This is part of the much larger issue of pleasure-overdosing. We don’t seem to handle an abundance of pleasure very well regardless of whether it’s in socially-acceptable forms like social media and food or stigmatized stuff like drugs and pornography. There’s just too much availability.

Like it or not, we can only handle so much pleasure. Whether you believe in a God-designed world or a world shaped by nature alone, it’s clear that the human organism cannot adapt to the exponential increase in the availability and intensity of pleasure that’s available to us.

The human system responds to a continuous glut of pleasure by eventually shutting down. People in this state lose the motivation to engage in even the most basic activities. If you wonder whether the survival instinct kicks in at some point to override lack of motivation, the rat experiment Dr. Lembke describes in the interview suggests there’s a point at which it does not: rats whose brains were deprived entirely of dopamine simply stopped eating, even when food was readily available.

If the leap from rat experiments to human demotivation sounds absurd, consider the way drug and alcohol addicts waste away or that several people have literally died after hours-long binges of video games. These are extreme cases of dopamine depletion, but even moderate depletion has a profound effect on daily life. If this were not true, then in our world of highly palatable foods, readily available social media, endless entertainment, and super-addictive drugs, we would be perplexed by the rising rates of anxiety and depression.

The truth is, if we don't actively mitigate our consumption of pleasure, it will consume us. We need a certain amount of discomfort and boredom to feel like life is meaningful. But we do also need pleasure. Without the anticipation of the pleasures of food and companionship, we would never seek those things. But it’s the anticipation that’s key, and that comes from a sufficient amount of dopamine in a well-regulated system. That means we need to focus on small and slow pleasures that don't overwhelm our systems, like unprocessed foods and the kind of human contact that requires investment, like family and close friends.

Managing the consumption of pleasure used to be a problem only for the wealthy and upper-classes, but now it's a problem for nearly everyone. If we’re going to survive and thrive, learning to balance pleasures has to become as fundamental to daily life as learning to balance finances. But I’m not sure how this is to be done effectively in a secular world. For me, this is fundamentally a spiritual issue, because without the greatest motivation there is—God’s love for us and his promises to us—what does it matter if we pleasure ourselves to death? If we have an otherworldly perspective, and a belief in eternal life, then ironically what we do here becomes a lot more important.

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. —Jeremiah 29:11