Whoops! I’ve Been Overstimulating Myself For Four Months Straight

On how quickly too much becomes too little, Sam Kriss' portable suicide booth, and Love Island

The Fire Orchids Descent to Civilization, Rosśa Crean

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What’s a bad miracle? They got a word for that?

                                                                                     – Jordan Peele (2022), Nope

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Love Island is a reality dating show. It runs two seasons per year in the UK, airing one to two-hour episodes six nights a week for two months. It’s been a bastion of trash TV for years: a pillar of hun culture: a stronghold of spray-tanned guilty pleasure. I am distanced enough from my ‘not like other girls’ phase to admit that I love reality TV (it always starts with a troubled relationship with America’s Next Top Model, doesn’t it?) and I’ve tuned into pretty much every go of Love Island since I was 18 and season three was airing — my friend Rachel went on a rant about how much she hated Chris and I felt left out.

At the start of the year, while the winter season was on, I started catching up on episodes in the morning as I was getting ready for work. I tried watching it live at 9pm but it didn’t align with my temperament. The best part of the day, of course, perhaps even one of the great highlights of life, obviously, is getting into bed and being cosy time, and after a few nights of staying up late to observe straight people like they’re in a zoo, I was real sleepy at my desk, sue me. The bright lights and pop music were extremely effective at waking me up and I could arrive at the office primed and ready for the second best part of the day: gossiping.

This routine lasted for most of the eight-week runtime. I didn’t even really enjoy the show that much. Many critics have called it one of the worst seasons of the show,¹ but I just kept watching. After it finished, I felt compelled to fill this now highly important morning slot with something else. I’d adjusted. I needed other stuff. After my 6am alarm went off and I got out of bed, it became a reflex to add some sort of background chatter as I made breakfast and got ready. Whatever it was would escort me while I walked to work, while I settled into my desk, if I needed to block out distractions. Working in a loud and interesting environment is not always ideal for my attention span, so it seemed helpful to submerge myself in my own world at the press of a button.

As the hours of my exposure ticked on, I enjoyed the chance to consume more music than I’d had time for previously, but other media made the cut too. Anything that I didn’t have to actively watch would become part of the rotation. I got through two seasons of my favourite D&D show and relistened to old podcast episodes. I used YouTube videos and audiobooks to feed the growing appetite of my attention while I worked out. With time, I was wearing my noise-cancelling headphones for most of the time I was awake.

Around the middle of April I realised I felt really weird. Actually, I’d been feeling weird for a long time but hadn't connected the dots. I was tense and stressed even when I was trying to actively relax. Everything felt weirdly high-stakes, from picking a TV show to figuring out what playlist I wanted. And I was followed around by the sensation of being untethered to myself. It had a sickly quality within my body. I had moments of dissociation, feeling like I was sitting behind my eyes, watching the world in a strange slow motion.

I used to get really car sick when I was a kid, and it was just like that: my body in one place, my mind in the Cloud, my soul nauseous from the split, spinning out as it tried to understand where I was. I chalked it up to a shitty mental health phase.

I got home from the gym one evening and as I put my key in the front door I noticed that I couldn’t remember anything past leaving work that day. Two hours of my life, in which I’d been doing something I really enjoyed, were basically blank. 

I could recall being at the gym and I knew I’d done my full routine but I’d been thinking about work and about the music I was listening to and about whether this song was the right song for right now and about what I would listen to later and about what to do for lunch tomorrow and about getting home. My time had been eaten away while I was plugged into my phone, opening it between sets to swipe between apps aimlessly.

The next day I snoozed the alarm on my phone and left the screen locked. I got ready in silence, made my breakfast alone, and walked to work listening to the world. I was overcome with a feeling of peace and calm. Whenever a bike went by me the ticktickticktick of the wheels brought me real joy. It was early-in-the-morning-quiet, the type I associate with being young and getting up early for a long family road trip, and the air felt so clean. I wrote a poem called luckiest girl in the world.

I encountered the term ‘low dopamine morning’ a few days later. 

In brief: bombarding yourself with content while your brain is still waking up puts you on the back foot for the entire rest of the day. This overstimulation doesn’t necessarily have to be from a phone, but it usually is. From the moment you get that first dopamine rush, you’ll be stuck trying to get back to the initial hit and you’ll default to whatever gave it to you in the first place. It also makes the presence of external stimuli a constant expectation for your system, creating discomfort in quiet. Avoiding this will look different for everyone, but in case you’re the kind of person who likes rules, Stylist lists them as:

• Avoid your phone for at least an hour after waking

• Wait for 90 minutes before having any caffeine

• Eat a high-protein breakfast

• Complete a low-stress task, like emptying the dishwasher

• Swap early morning HIIT, sprints or boxing for low-intensity workouts like a walk or yoga

Tami Sobell told Stylist that “if we avoid social media or other easy pleasure-seeking activities, such as watching TV for the [first] hour or so that we are awake, our brains find more balance, calm and focus during the day, and are content with receiving a lower level of dopamine and not fired up to search for big, unnatural highs.”²

As a case study, I can, unfortunately, attest to all of this being 100% accurate. Since my first accidental ‘low dopamine’ morning, I’ve stuck to it as gospel, and it’s basically rewired my brain to be calmer, more focused, less anxious, and less attracted to spending hours on TikTok. And the worst part is that this is in no way a shock at all. I mean, for fuck’s sake, it’s been proven that too much time on your phone literally rots your brain.

Red areas designate abnormal white matter in internet addicted teens. Credit: Lin, Zhou, Lei, et al

But I know how it sounds – I, too, was once 15 and delighted in rolling my eyes when my parents suggested my poor mental health was because of ‘that phone’, and I, too, have had to do the impossible in admitting to myself that they may have had a point. Phones are extremely powerful little dopamine dispensers. They can take your consciousness away at a moment’s notice, bringing sleep-like relief from worries about rent, from pining or relapsing or crying. Phones can deliver any information you want within a second. Phones can call your mum. Phones are simply brilliant at doing the thing they’re designed to do, but if you gave TikTok to a Victorian child for 20 minutes, they’d bleed from the face.

I’ve become significantly less online in my 20s, but I still get that teenage twinge of annoyance when I come across people who actually do not use any social media at all. I approach them with caution. How do you do it, I ask. How do you live, missing out on all of this? On what, you ask? Well, this funny video of a dog wearing a hat, of course. You’re telling me your life was better before you saw this 10-second clip of a woman getting a game show answer wrong? Look at her; she’s an idiot. Everyone is laughing at her. It’s hilarious. It’s fantastic. It’s been retweeted by someone you used to date. Now you remember they exist and you feel sad all of a sudden, and then, because it’s there, because you can, you check on their most recent posts and suddenly your whole day has been emotionally hijacked when all you originally wanted was Top 10 Funny Steve Harvey Moments Ever (Gone Sexual). But not to worry – one flick of your finger and here’s the next court jester to distract you, and if you don’t like the routine he’s got, you’re in luck. The queue of offerings goes on forever and ever and ever. 

It’s porn and death and laughter. It’s noise. It’s colours and opinions: news about the latest school shooting, and then news about the next one. A fun and easy DIY for the ugliest object you’ve ever seen. Videos of women making recipes that are mystifyingly strange (pasta and hot dogs and feta? In one big pan? For 45 minutes? What is happening?), and then a different video telling you that what you just watched is actually fetish content. Satirical conspiracy theories about the moon that you’ll see a Facebook relative sincerely posting about in three weeks. An Instagram infographic on who’s had plastic surgery recently. Memes about a domestic abuse court case. Cleavage. It’s never-ending. It’s mostly useless and forgettable and is starting to feel suspiciously like a shitty part-time job I can’t get away from. And you’re saying no to it? Fine. More for us. Fucking hippie.

I saw a TikTok of a man who had emptied the entire contents of the kitchen ‘chaos drawer’ into a cardboard box. The chaos drawer, of course, is that designated place in your house where Stuff goes: rubber bands, paintbrushes, a sewing kit, miscellaneous pieces of string. He closed the box before his girlfriend could look inside and told her that she could have back anything she could specifically name. The rest would get thrown away. 

I wonder how much of the content we consume daily would pass this test. Spend an hour on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, whatever, and then see how much of it you can recall. Some parts stick but the majority is only interesting for exactly as long as it’s blinking into your face. Once it’s gone, it’s difficult to remember what it even was. It is a highly efficient destruction of meaning and value for the sake of empty attention and we are the babies captivated by a set of jangling keys.

What’s more, during my period of constant overstimulation, I adjusted very quickly. Within a few weeks, if I found myself alone – no music, no podcasts, nothing to stretch my mental bandwidth taut, just me and myself – it felt so wrong that I would start to feel a small panic when I couldn’t fill the gap quickly enough. I remember getting very frustrated when my Spotify shuffle kept suggesting songs that weren’t quite right, leaving me hitting next and getting angrier and angrier for no real reason.

I’ve been disillusioned with the internet since I fell out with a career on YouTube at the end of 2019, but my vague dread has now crystallised. I fear that we are learning to avoid our feelings. After so many years, we are unable to spend time with ourselves, so we watch TikToks instead. We are overstimulated, outraged, exploited, insecure, and overfed. We reach for our phones without realising we’re doing it, our fingers moving to the apps that give us the biggest rush, even if we just closed fucking Twitter three seconds ago. We sink hours into scrolling and come out of it dazed. We are so far removed from our experience of ourselves that most people aren’t sure what they actually want. We are all angry and upset and confused. Why does everything feel so disconnected from everything else?

In his essay ‘The internet is already over’, Sam Kriss wonders how long we, and the material of social media, will cling to life. Things which will survive, he says, are the natural world and language: “Things with deep fathoms of darkness in them.” Novelty and trends, fads and outrage, opinions and 20-second videos will not be granted the same fate.

“You know it’s all very boring, brooding nothing, but the internet addicts you to your own boredom. I’ve tried heroin: this is worse. More numb, more blank, more nowhere. A portable suicide booth; a device for turning off your entire existence. Death is no longer waiting for you at the far end of life. It eats away at your short span from the inside out.”³

For my generation, the shift is particularly tectonic. All of the YouTubers we loved for years have either stopped making videos or been outed as sexual predators/racists/transphobes/assholes, doomed to grasp onto the ledge of relevancy while releasing episode after episode of a terrible podcast which fewer people listen to every week. 

We’ve watched apps be born, blaze brightly, and die. Seen countless updates to timelines and homepages. As kids, we posted and snapped and replied and got a rush from the attention. But once it stops being exciting it starts being another routine. We’ve bickered on Twitter. We’ve read all of the fanfiction we could have wanted (and a few we didn’t). We’ve seen all the funny Vines again and again and again and again. And the kids who started puberty with a YouTube channel are now adults. We have jobs and relationships and things which take up the mental bandwidth we once gave wholly to the internet. 

It’s evident in the changing aesthetic on Instagram. When I was posting regularly, I had an app which let me preview what the grid of my profile would look like with different posts added. I’d play around with my various options, wanting the shiny portfolio of my life to look perfect and balanced. Now, it’s much cooler to post photos of yourself which seem unposed and allegedly random. These are quick, nonchalant snaps and snippets of privacy meant to convey a lack of planning. They were, at one point, probably a form of counterculture, but within a few months these ‘photo dumps’ became the new norm.

What was once a revolution against the polished, overly edited images we all got so good at producing is now just another way in which we pretend not to care, while proving, by offering pieces of ourselves out to strangers on the street, that we still do: a dinner I made, a blurry selfie which I picked out of a selection of 25, a screenshot of an out of context but witty text exchange. Please, please, please take a piece of me with you before you move on.

Not here, not now I Painting, Inga Knysh

Last summer, this changing attitude resulted in the rise of an app which aimed to break the cycle and get users to develop a healthy relationship with social media. The cynic in me struggled to see the value in thousands waiting, for their entire waking day, for their devices to beep at them, to scramble for good lighting, lest they miss their precious window to post a photo. Stop whatever unimportant shit you were just doing. Drop everything and pick up your phone: it’s time to be real. A few times a week, the name of the app trended as people tweeted angrily that the notification went off too late in the day to capture what they wanted it to. When summer was over and life was less sun-soaked, BeReal’s usage dropped,⁴ halving between October 2022 and March 2023. It’ll be interesting to see if people are more inclined to be real once they start going on holiday again.⁵

But onlineism is so woven through the way we all function that ultimately, I’m left a huge hypocrite. I will probably never manage to be completely severed from my phone, and I will probably always be ashamed of my screen time, and I will probably spend the rest of my life engaging with and contributing to the digital world. Moral grandstanding about the internet does very little but irritate all of your friends. What’s more important, I think, is to start factoring in how we interact with the internet as a huge part of wellness.

I’m a chronic dissector. Partly because of our immediacy culture, I aspire to have a full and comprehensive understanding of everything around me and I get very frustrated with mystery. When I was younger and going through a phase of low self-esteem, in trying to work out why, I would never consider how much time I’d spent on Instagram that week. But I should have, because it was the main culprit.

The creepiest part of realising I was overstimulating myself was how long it took for me to look at my phone as a suspect. This is even harder for those younger than me, who had an ever-slimming developmental window before screens were introduced to their system. Our phones, like salespeople and landlords, are not our friends. They are money-making devices (every second you spend on your phone is a second you spend doing unpaid labour for a bunch of billionaires, but we don’t have time to unpack that right now) which are constantly evolving to better capture your attention and dilute the importance of it.

Sometimes, an hour on TikTok is exactly what I want and I won’t deny myself the pleasure. But when it gets to the end of the day and my skin feels wrong and everything is Just Not Right and I drive myself crazy trying to understand what I can do to fix it, I’ll start by counting the minutes: how much time have I spent doing things I can touch and feel and hold; that I had to pay full attention to; that gave me something to think or write about; that I look forward to talking to my parents about? And how much time have I spent staring into the cogs of the bad miracle machine?

1. ‘Nine Seasons In, Has ‘Love Island’ Gotten Boring?, Becca Holland, Collider. https://collider.com/love-island-season-9-boring/

2. “I tried starting my days with low-dopamine mornings – this is how they improved my wellbeing in just 7 days”, Anya Meterowitz, Stylist. https://www.stylist.co.uk/fitness-health/wellbeing/low-dopamine-mornings-benefits/772364

3. The internet is already over

4. ‘How BeReal missed its moment’, Casey Newton, The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/26/23698859/bereal-losing-interest-missed-opportunity

5. My distaste for BeReal is partly due to my own idiocy. When it first launched, I saw the name popping up on social media channels and— reading ‘bereal’ like ‘cereal’– spent a few days genuinely thinking this new hip app was one for people who wanted to share photos of their breakfast. Imagine my disappointment. I’m now further embittered by it because after finally caving at the start of the year, I do actually quite enjoy the app. It is actually very nice to see what my pals across the globe are up to, which is even more infuriating than the cereal thing.