Not Tonight

Wasn't feeling it.

Last night, I had a few things in mind for what I wanted to do, what I wanted to write and all that. I got showered up and tried to get into my normal routine, but it just wasn't happening. I ended up saying fuck it and went to bed!

I know we all have these things come up. We intend to do specific things but then life throws a wrench at us and we just change and do something else, sometimes we do something better like get more sleep LOL. It's a normal thing, or so I thought.

I was listening to a podcast the other night and it really interested me because it mentioned something that makes a LOT of sense when you think about it, but you really don't think about it until somebody mentions it and you're in the right, receptive mood.

Historically, we've been a species that either sees very normal things all the time and occasionally has some type of traumatic thing, and we can process it but largely there isn't a lot of chaos. With the world we live in today though.. the internet and cell phones have completely up-ended our normal psychology in some really intense and crazy ways!

Psychologically, we are NOT meant to fuck with our dopamine receptors so intensely the way we do with our phones. The example that Danny Jones was talking about when he was talking with his guest Iryna something-Russian about brain psychology, is that we are absolutely NOT meant to be scrolling through apps and have one video be something hilarious, another video be something really sad like a dog with a broken leg limping, another video being something political, another video being something about food, another video being somebody getting killed, then another video about something funny.

We are putting our minds on absolute roller coasters of emotional regulation, and it's having CRAZY consequences! We are adapting to it, those of us who have been around it for long enough and have some sensibilities, but for the majority of people, they are not recognizing the signs of trauma that they are putting their brains and emotions though. It's no wonder why there are a lot of mental issues in the world, seriously!

Tying this back to what I was mentioning above, I think that on the nights that I am just having an absolute pit of a night in terms of motivation, I am trying to figure out if it's related to spending too much time on a social media app that I use to see some news, mostly get memes and things to laugh about, but does occasionally show you some horrific shit. I've seen more than one person get killed on the app, and it's really wild to think 50 years ago, the only people that saw someone get killed were typically police, military and others associated with potential violence.

The episode with Iryna was a really good one, where they talked about the psychology of how we process things with the various senses that we have, and there are way more than 5. The big example was firefighters where they feel the change in temperature, sense the change in direction of the wind, the perspiration goes up or down and other things they didn't know they were aware of.

Our bodies have far more complicated senses and mental states than we realize, and if we expose ourselves to horrific things when we try to be productive, it's a recipe for failure for sure.

I am going to try and get the algorithm to stop showing me those horrific things, but I think that's also not getting to the root of the problem, where I have a little bit of an addiction to scrolling through the app in the evening. Thankfully, it's not a BAD addiction in terms of how much I do it. Some people are on it 8, 10, 12 hours a day. I am on it MAX 2 throughout the entire day which I think is reasonable, sadly, in the day we live in.

What about you, have you realized that hitting social media before you want to do something can have some pretty serious negative consequences for you? Do you think about it now after reading this? Let me know in the comments!