Einstein, AA, and my sour mood

I was in a real sour mood last Tuesday night.  I wasn’t happy about anything.  I was tired of everything.  The thought of anything that I had typically taken enjoyment from…honestly sounded stupid and/or disgusting.  I even became mad at myself for feeling this way – because I knew (even if I didn’t want to admit it) that I had no good reason to be like this.

Nothing had necessarily “gone wrong” throughout the day, either.  Work was just normal stuff.  I hadn’t been in an argument with my wife or anyone else.  But the longer the evening went on, the darker my attitude went.  The bugger was that I had planned on writing a blog post that evening…and I was definitely not in the proper headspace to do that!  So, I did what most of us would do in this situation: I retreated to scrolling on my phone.

An hour later, I wasn’t feeling any better, and I was now cranky about being on my phone.  And then, it hit me.  I realized what was a big contributor to my mental bleakness.  I wasn’t fond of the conclusion, either, because it came with the recognition that my sour mood wasn’t really a one-off.  I’d been on this path on other recent nights, just that this night was the most sour I had felt lately.

The problem was the amount of time I was spending on my phone.  There’s a lot in the world to try and “keep up with”, but it’s impossible to do so.  There’s the normal rounds of news, social media, and sports, but there’s also a recent natural disaster in my state of North Carolina.  My family and I are fine, but starting about 1.5 hours west of us, “catastrophic” doesn’t even begin to describe what Hurricane Helene has caused.

So yeah, I’ve been on my phone a lot.  Scrolling, watching, listening…lather, rinse, repeat.  The problem is that all the things we use our phones for (especially social media) causes dopamine hit, after hit, after hit.  Once your brain gets used to it, all it wants is more.  Being overstimulated with dopamine can lead to addictive behaviors as the brain seeks to maintain that dopamine high…and over time, this can result in a decreased interest in other activities, including ones that were previously enjoyable.  There are tons of studies that prove out what I’ve described.

So, being in a sour mood and then hiding in my phone was actually the worst thing I could have done at that moment.  Kinda like putting a drunk alcoholic in a bar and telling him to sober up while he’s there.

While often attributed to Albert Einstein, the following quote actually first popped on the scene in the early 1980s within addiction recovery circles, specifically Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I knew that if I wanted to change my output (my sour evening mood), then I gotta change my input.  I can’t expect to keep doing what I’m doing and think that somehow everything will get better on its own.

So, I put me and my sour mood to bed, with plans to make better choices on Wednesday.  Fortunately for me, my church had its monthly serving opportunity with Feeding Lisa’s Kids, a non-profit that provides food on a monthly basis to food-insecure families in the High Point area.  I really didn’t want to go, but made myself anyway.  I purposely chose the music I listened to on the way there and back – David Crowder.  I kept my phone out of reach during work and kept its use to a minimum in the evening.  What I was trying to do was follow the advice Paul gave to the believers in Colossae:

Colossians 3:2
Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things.

Gotta remove the clutter to focus on the most important things.  The dopamine-driven noise isn’t going to help me see clearly.  I’ve already experienced the cloudy-minded sour mood it leaves me with.  Wednesday has been better, mentally – but it’s not like you can fix a dopamine addiction in one day, either.  This will require repeated choices over many days to build habits that don’t drive me down that path.

I’m also going to follow a piece of advice my mentor Joe gave me years ago, which I’ll pass on to you:

Let God’s Word be the first thing you read in the morning and the last thing you read before you go to sleep.

Before any other inputs in the morning – the news headlines, your email, social media, etc. – allow God to speak into your day.  And then, just before you slip into bed, go to God’s Word and read a chapter from the New Testament.  Give your mind something godly to ponder while you sleep.

I’ve followed this advice (imperfectly) for a long while, but going forward, I will make the choices to do it daily and change my inputs.  I know my struggle isn’t unique to me, there are too many studies and too much data proving that we’re all in various stages of dopamine addiction.  But if you want out of it, you gotta change your inputs.

So set your mind on things above, not on earthly things.

Keep Pressing,
Ken