The Ragu Bolognese Sauce's triumph over my smartphone

A Sunday of a few days ago. A late-summer sun beginning to set outside. I was lying on the couch, feeling the grateful exhaustion after playing with the kids. Savoring a long-awaited opportunity for winding down and me-time.

Instinctively, I reach for my phone. It had become such a natural part of my "resting" habit that my body knew what to do. Unlock, open a tab and start scrolling. News, feeds, friends' photos, interesting videos... Nothing that extravagant or evil. "I'm just taking a break" (if that’s you too, and that’s not how you want to live your life, I can help, check out my program at the end).

Hundreds or maybe thousands of times that scene played out in my life. Always identical. Same hands motion, same neural pathways, same 15-20 min at a time. The content would be new though, always intriguing, always "more" interesting than just lying on the couch doing nothing. This would ensure that I continue to repeat this same scene thousands of times more, for years and decades until I die...

OR NOT.

Not today. I felt the movement of my arm and fingers reaching. I stopped it right in its tracks. I actually stood up and moved the phone out of sight, into another room. I went back to the couch and lay down.

The first 5 minutes were not fun. A nagging feeling of fatigue that begs to be put to rest. Pulses of tension in my chest, not so intense to be painful, but definitely uncomfortable. Thoughts trying to convince me that "cm'on, now, you're making too much of a big deal, it's just looking at the news for a minute, what the hell, everybody does that”.

This is called addiction. It’s a subtle form, compared to the one you get from alcohol, nicotine or drugs. But the signs are unmistakable. And it’s not there by chance, nor because I am weak or foolish. It’s there by intentional design, layers upon layers of it, fine-tuned over millions of iterations and billions of dollars in testing. Given the ways our smartphones are designed today, addiction is an unescapable force, just like you can’t escape the centrifugal force when driving your car on a turn.

But we can muscle up too. We can learn how to contend with this force and prevail. There are principles and techniques that combined put you back in control. I personally use and teach a combination of mindfulness, emotion regulation, binding constraints and knowledge about the brain.

So I sat there, actively engaging with the discomfort, for about 5 minutes. It felt like an eternity. And then the first shift of consciousness happened…

I started to relax. That restlessness that was begging me to do something lost the plot of its arguments. A dense release took over my body. I drifted into a restorative hypnotic-like state, half asleep, half there, half somewhere impossible to name. And from floating in that space for maybe 5 more minutes, the second and even more profound shift of consciousness happened…

I felt a desire to make a Ragu Bolognese Sauce.

Like, right now. I watched this new energy taking over my mind, with curiosity and some amusement. It’s something I hadn’t done in ages, for sure not since the kids were born. I thought, perhaps it would go away in a minute…

Nope.

It got stronger.

Within two more minutes, I was up on my feet chopping onions and carrots.

On the surface, this made no sense whatsoever. I finally had some time to just chill and flake out. My wife didn’t expect me to make dinner. And preparing a good Ragu Bolognese Sauce is no small task. It’s easily an hour of work, lots of chopping and sauteing and such. It’s much easier to just stick a frozen pie in the oven.

But here is the deeper truth…

It’s delicious. It’s a meal I love preparing. It’s a meal from my country of origin, Italy, that I love to share. It feels like a gift I’m giving to my family. It feels a little bit like magic. And I’m good at making it. It gives me satisfaction to do it. It makes me feel accomplished to do it. So I did it.

This is the working of dopamine.

Unmistakable.

You can feel it, it’s visceral.

It’s the feeling that you’ve got the juice to go out and make stuff happen because you want it and because you believe it’s going to be good.

When it is hijacked, dopamine becomes the engine of addiction. But when it is balanced, dopamine is the engine of living a fulfilling life where you get the shit that matters to you done.

Your smartphone is a dopamine sinkhole. By hitting you with constant dopamine hits, your smartphone is constantly preying on your dopamine reserve and pushing your overall dopamine reserve down. You can still function more or less normally. But you do not feel like you have the drive to do anything more than that. Life becomes subtly dull and like it’s not worth the extra effort. The magic evaporates.

The moment you put that genie back into the lamp, you give your brain a chance to rebuild its dopamine balance. You will be surprised by the things you’ll suddenly be driven to do and excited about. You’ll remember habits that seemed forgotten and that you used to love. And you’ll be more ready to develop new ones.

At every moment in your life there is a spark calling you to make magic.

You can hear it when you listen.

But to listen, you need to put down your phone first.