The Dopamine Era: How Your Brain, Body, and Spirit Got Hijacked

Part 1 — The Problem

When I was a kid, I spent most of my time in the library. It was not uncommon for me to leave with books stacked so high that I could only use my chin and the length of my arms to carry them out.

Why no one ever got me a book bag is beyond me. The librarian would look at me as if there was no way I was going to read all those books before the next time she saw me. But I would go home and plow through them one by one.

I had my own room — the privilege of being an only child — and a rocking chair in a corner with two adjacent windows that let in enough light that I could sit there for hours without needing a lamp. It was common for my mom to come in and remind me that dinner was on the table and to put my book down.

Reading was my world. The real world didn’t seem to pay too much attention to me, but when I entered the world of books, I could imagine being anyone I wanted to be with attributes I wished I had.

When we would visit family for the holidays, I would stick around in the main living area as long as I needed to, then find an excuse to slink off to the back bedroom. Invariably I would hear someone say, “Where did Lori go?”

And then they would answer almost in unison: “Oh, she’s reading.”

Fast forward to today. I’m in my mid-50s. I’m an empty nester, a business owner, and a grandma. I’m busy, but not overwhelmed. Theoretically I have plenty of time to read.

But I struggle to focus long enough when I pick up a book to stick with it. I can do it, but it frustrates me, and reading used to never frustrate me.

It’s harder for me to sustain attention, and I don’t think it’s because I’m getting older. I think it’s the result of at least 15 to 20 years of my attention being hijacked. Hijacked away from the depths of thought and the wrestling with hard ideas that once came naturally to me.

With the rise of political machines that prioritize the salacious over truth, and platforms where my eyeballs have become the metric, I’ve finally realized something: in order to get my attention back, I’m going to have to be as intentional as if I were trying to lose 50 pounds. It’s not going to magically happen. I’m going to have to work for it.

My attention has been engineered away. Not just for advertising, although that’s the business model driving all of it. It’s designed to keep me at such a shallow depth of field that everything around me seems blurred.

I know I’m not the only one.

Your focus has been engineered away from you, too. And it’s not just your productivity that’s suffering. It’s your spirit, your mind, and your body — the three things that make us all uniquely human.

You’ve been fighting a war on three fronts over the single most valuable thing you possess: your attention.

And your attention is expressed in the one thing you can’t replace: your time.

What this looks like in your mind.

Your brain runs on chemical messengers called neurotransmitters, and one of the most powerful is dopamine. Dopamine is your brain’s reward signal. It’s released when you experience something pleasurable, novel, or surprising.

Dopamine is the chemical behind motivation, craving, and the feeling of “I want more of that.”

It’s why you feel a small rush when you see a new notification, why you keep scrolling even when you told yourself you’d stop five minutes ago, and why the next post always feels like it might be the one that will change everything for you.

Your brain is doing exactly what dopamine tells it to do: seek the next reward.

The problem is that social media has turned that natural system into an all-day, all-you-can-eat buffet with no closing time.

You can’t really read anymore. Not really. You scan and skim. You jump to an app to check something real quick.

You open an article like this one, and it just looks so… long. Your thumb is already looking for the next thing before you’ve finished the first paragraph.

Nicholas Carr documented the neuroscience behind this in his book The Shallows. Our brains are plastic. They are constantly rewiring themselves based on how we use them.

When I was growing up, there was a public service announcement about drugs that showed a hand holding an egg and a heated frying pan. They put the egg up to the camera and said, “This is your brain.”

Then they cracked it into the hot skillet and said through the unmistakable sizzle, “This is your brain on drugs.”

The inference was that once you destroyed brain cells through drug use, you didn’t get them back.

We’ve since learned that’s not entirely true. The field of neuroplasticity has shown us that the brain can change itself. It will rewire, reroute, and adapt to accomplish a task even when part of it is damaged. It’s remarkable, really.

But the internet has ridden the back of that discovery.

The internet has trained your brain for fragmentation. Your brain — and mine — suffers death by a thousand cuts every day.

The neural pathways for deep concentration and focus, the ones that powered every meaningful advancement in human thought up until now, are weakening from disuse.

A few facts worth sitting with:

• In 2004, before social media, the average person could hold attention on a screen for two and a half minutes. Today it’s 47 seconds.
• It takes 25 minutes to regain focus after a single interruption.
• And you might check your phone up to a shocking 352 times a day (a COVID high), building muscle memory that reinforces the very neural pathways keeping you stuck.*

Here’s how all that fleshes out:

You sit down determined to think, and three minutes later you’re scrolling. Your brain has been trained to need the next hit.

You feel scattered. You start things and don’t finish them.

You feel lost and discouraged when you see how much time you’re wasting.

You feel it, but you don’t quite know how to get out of it. Because stopping all of it seems too extreme. It couldn’t be that bad, could it?

You have ideas that never become anything. You tell yourself you’ll get to it tomorrow. But tomorrow your attention gets captured again before you’ve had your first cup of coffee.

Before you know it, the morning is gone and your time for focus has been eaten up by the priorities of a platform.

What this looks like in your body.

Most of us live in a constant state of fight-or-flight, and we don’t even know it.

Under the surface your autonomic nervous system has two modes.

The sympathetic nervous system is your alarm system. It activates when your brain perceives danger. Your heart rate increases, your muscles tense. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your bloodstream. Blood diverts away from your digestive system and toward your limbs. And your breathing gets shallow.

Your body is preparing you to either fight the threat or run from it. This is an incredible system when you need it, like if an angry mama bear is charging you.

You’re either going to run or stay and fight, and your body will give you everything it’s got.

The other mode, the parasympathetic nervous system, is your rest-and-recover state.

This is where digestion happens, where your immune system does its work, where your body heals, and where deep thought actually becomes possible. If you’ve ever heard the term resting and digesting, this is what it means.

You need to be in this state to think clearly, to create, to problem-solve, to connect meaningfully with other people.

The problem is that your body doesn’t know the difference between a mama bear and a viral outrage post.

Every notification, every salacious headline, every algorithmic provocation triggers the same cortisol spike. They’re structured to get a reaction from you so that you’ll act on it.

And react is the key word.

You’re not responding on a platform. You’re reacting. You don’t have enough time to respond. Responding requires the kind of deep thinking your body can’t access when it’s stuck in sympathetic mode.

Have you ever bookmarked or saved a post, thinking you’ll come back to it when you have more time to respond thoughtfully? Most of my bookmarks are exactly with that intention.

But I almost never go back. The urge to react to the thing that’s making my blood boil right now always seems more important and I forget about the stuff that moved me.

Your body is responding to a world that feels perpetually urgent. The Dopamine Era has been designed to feel that way. The problem is, which one of those urgent things should you focus on? And what can you actually do about any of them?

And it starts right at the top of the day.

You wake up and reach for your phone before your feet hit the floor, dosing yourself with dopamine before you’ve even decided what your day is for and what you want to choose for yourself today.

In one way or another, the feed never ends. There’s always one more thing to react to.

This is what it means to live in the Dopamine Era. Your nervous system is hijacked by a delivery mechanism that never turns off.

What it looks like in your spirit.

This one may be the most devastating, and we’ll look at this a lot more in this series.

Instead of going to God first, we see what our feeds have to say.

You wake up and immediately consume headlines, notifs, feeds, outrage, and entertainment. By the time you think about opening Scripture, your mind is already full of someone else’s agenda.

The world got to you before God did, before you even got out of bed. And it happens so naturally you don’t even notice.

This is one reason I wrote my book 31 Days of Faith-Building Moments. I kept hearing clients tell me they wanted a discipline of reading the Bible first thing in the morning. But before they’re barely awake, they’ve already fallen prey to what’s beautiful and funny and infuriating on their screens.

The book is designed to give them a taste of this opportunity over 31 days so hopefully they’ll go deeper on their own.

Neil Postman warned about this forty years ago in his amazing book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued that the real danger wasn’t Orwell’s 1984 vision — a government that bans truth. Instead it’s Aldous Huxley’s take in Brave New World: a culture so saturated with amusement that no one wants truth anymore.

The truth isn’t forbidden in Huxley’s world. It’s just boring compared to everything else competing for your attention. Does that sound familiar?

When was the last time you sat with a passage of Scripture long enough to be genuinely challenged by it? Long enough for God to ask something of you?

The God of the Bible chose to reveal Himself through the Word, through text that requires the highest order of sustained, focused thought. That wasn’t a coincidence. Wrestling with the truth God offers has never been a passive activity.

But we’ve traded the wrestling mat for the scroll.

We’ve stopped pursuing depth in almost everything. And our spirituality was the first casualty.

We’ve been coasting on fragments for a very long time. And we wonder why nothing feels whole.

The actual problem.

We frame this as screen time, but it’s bigger than that. This is about what’s being built on top of your distracted life — which is nothing.

The Dopamine Era’s cruelest trick is that in all these shallow interactions, you feel like you’re engaged with the world. You feel like you’re informed. You feel like you’re doing something.

But you’re not building anything for yourself, your family, your community, or your God. You’re reacting. And your reactions feel so urgent that you never get back to the building.

How many times have you responded to just one thing out there, only to find you’ve squandered an hour?

Your focus has been engineered away from you. It happened across all three domains:

• your mind rewired for distraction,
• your body running on artificial urgency, and
• your spirit starved of the depth it was designed for.

And the worst part is that the system that took your attention has convinced you that what it gave you in return is enough. And it just serves you more of the same.

The answer isn’t just to turn your phone off. That would help, but your phone is now completely integrated into your life in some otherwise genuinely helpful ways. The better answer is to retrain your focus.

To create the space for deep thought and reflection that makes and builds what matters to you, not just turn off what’s distracting you. And to build the capacity to sit with the discomfort that space initially creates.

Here’s what I want you to do this week.

Take an honest inventory. For three days, write down four things each evening:

• What was the very first thought you had this morning when you opened your eyes?
• What was the first action you took right after that?
• What did you build or create today?
• How many times did you sit with one thought apart from a device?

Don’t judge the answers. Just start documenting the pattern. That’s where we start.

Because the first step in getting your attention back is seeing clearly what’s taking it.

Next in The Dopamine Era: Part 2 — The Machine. How the attention economy actually works on you.

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*Sources

Gloria Mark, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity (Hanover Square Press, 2023). Mark is Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Her research, conducted from 2003 to 2020 and documents the decline in average screen attention from two and a half minutes to 47 seconds, and the twenty-five-minute recovery time after a single interruption.

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W.W. Norton, 2010). Carr’s work examines how neuroplasticity enables the internet to rewire the brain for fragmentation over sustained concentration.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin, 1985). Postman argued that Huxley’s vision of a culture undone by amusement was more prescient than Orwell’s vision of authoritarian censorship.

Asurion, “Americans Check Their Phones 96 Times a Day” (November 2019) and “Americans Now Check Their Phones 352 Times Per Day” (2022). Asurion’s longitudinal surveys tracked phone-checking frequency from 80 times per day in 2017 to 96 in 2019 to 352 in 2022.