How much time do you spend on a certain sound or a certain hand every day? Why do these short videos have such a magical power that you can't stop scrolling through your phone? What does all this time bring you? After a short period of happiness, why are you surrounded by anxiety and emptiness, and you can't get rid of it?
To understand this, we must first understand dopamine and endorphins.
Endorphins are endogenous peptides that have analgesic and mood-regulating effects. It relieves pain, relieves depression, uplifts spirits, and increases creativity and productivity. As a compensatory mechanism, neurotransmitters are secreted when people face difficulties and pain, thus motivating people to persevere and overcome difficulties and complete tasks, so that people feel pleasure and satisfaction. Therefore, endorphins are associated with self-discipline and achievement.
Dopamine is known as the "expectancy hormone" and plays a role in regulating mood and reward in the central nervous system. It is a reward mechanism that secretes dopamine when we get what we want, bringing pleasure and satisfaction. Therefore, dopamine is associated with desire, addiction.
In a word, endorphins are the ones that propel you to success, and dopamine is the reward messenger for success.
Why do you feel empty after watching a short video? Because it reverses the order of giving and receiving, and creates the illusion of success for you when you should use the time to improve your cognition, improve your own strength, and strive to achieve a relatively successful life, inducing your brain to secrete more dopamine, and immersing you in illusion. And once a person comes out of the illusion, the predicament and shackles of reality are like barbs on a growing thorn, piercing deeper into the skin until the blood flows like a river. This is also the reason why anxiety and emptiness are rampant after a short period of happiness.
The popular short videos on the market, like the poisonous snake in the Garden of Eden, are good at weaving beautiful dreams, grasping the weaknesses of human nature, stimulating your latent desires, and constantly inducing you to eat the forbidden fruit under the stimulation of dopamine, and develop addictive behavior habits, indulging in empty happiness, unable to extricate yourself.
Those short videos that attract you don't require you to think or put in hard labor to make you laugh. But everything has a cost, and the short-term happiness you get comes at the expense of happiness.
So, what is the difference between happiness and joy?
In English, happiness is well-being, which refers to a stable feeling of satisfaction that lasts for a long time, while happiness is happiness, which is a short-term satisfaction. To achieve success and happiness, you have to work hard for a period of time, not because of the dopamine you produce when you eat a delicious cake, watch a long-awaited movie, and go to a mysterious and beautiful tourist destination, but by the endorphins produced when you don't give up in the face of difficulties, go through a thousand difficulties, and achieve your goals.
If you have achieved success in the worldly sense, then you can let short videos continue to stimulate your dopamine, but if you are not happy in real life, then please control yourself, reduce the consumption brought by short videos, return to reality, solve difficulties, let endorphins play their role to the fullest, and continue to drive you to become a relatively successful person.
So, if you just want to be happy, then go for dopamine, and if you want to be happy, then stick to embracing endorphins.
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