A healthy brain is activated, or stimulated, by pleasures in life. Stimulations can be seeing friends, watching a good show or movie, eating yummy food, or sitting next to a calming river. (I’m relaxed just thinking about those things!) These are normal stimuli that give the brain good input and result with a happy brain!
Stimulation or activation of the brain has looked drastically different this past year because of the pandemic, and the normal, mundane stimuli have become just that. So what happens when the normal stimuli don’t pleasure the brain? It needs more stimuli.
Stimulation of the brain has to be kept in check because when given the more extreme stimuli, whether that be increased and/or constant screen time or increasing the severity of content (more violence in shows, movies or video games, or even pornography.) There has been a spike in addiction cases as well as a spike in the viewership of pornography during the pandemic.
During lockdown, it seems that brains were no longer being stimulated the way they used to and the mundane stimuli were no longer activating the brain, which led to needing more and more stimulus to the brain for activation.
Here is an example: You work for $3/day. It’s fine for a while, but you start learning more skills and taking on more responsibility. Naturally, you think working for $3/day is no longer satisfying and you desire more. So what would keep you at that job? More money? More recognition? A higher title? You are needing more to stay there.
The brain’s activation is similar. When the brain gets different or more extreme stimuli, it will crave that extremism and is no longer satisfied by the normal stimuli. This is why drug use typically starts with pain killers and turns into chronic use of a serious drug, like heroin. Therefore pornography viewers start with weekly heterosexual videos, which turns into daily viewing and/or turns into harsher, more violent videos. What started as a “normal” interaction, turns into something more taboo and destructive in order to satisfy a (now) insatiable desire for extreme stimuli.
And therefore, detoxing whatever the addiction has become (screen time, eating, drugs, pornography, etc.) can be so difficult.
How can this be helped? And maybe even overcome?
NEUROFEEDBACK.
It is a non-invasive, medication-free re-training of the brain. If you are interested in learning more about it, call us or send us an email! We would be happy to talk with you to see if you are a candidate for neurofeedback training.
Source material: Dr. Trish Leigh Youtube Channel, Brain Reboot: How is Quarantine Causing Addictions?