In our digital heavy lives today - a cocktail of TickTock, Facebook, Instagram and Google are destroying us mentally by the minute. In the past, we were were forced to use our brains extensively. From memorizing how to get to anywhere, problem solve and retain knowledge and socialize with our friends and family. With social media, everything is being replaced by a post, a text, or a Google search.

Natalie Worth makes an excellent point:

Dopamine also causes us to spend a lot of time in the limbic area of our brain, which is responsible for our emotions, instead of the pre-frontal cortex, which helps us plan for the future and problem-solve — not an ideal mix. And even worse, when we do get the chance to solve a problem, we’re offloading it to Google.

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Traditionally, we learn by committing information to memory, but because we can look up any information at any time, we don’t need to retain things in our own memory. We’re offloading our retention and memory to Google. In 2011, Harvard researchers coined the term ‘The Google Effect’ when they found that when we’re faced with a difficult question or problem, instead of knowing how to answer it ourselves, we’re instead really good at knowing where to find the answer — our trusty searching tool, Google.

So what to do about this? The solution is to force yourself into using your brain for 1-2 hours a day. Solving puzzles, art, language learning, playing games or musical instruments, reading, or writing.

Basically everything we used to do before social media.