It’s recently doomed on me how much westernized society is addicted is endorphin
s, that may come through smartphones, Television, the gaming industry, gambling and even the porn industry. Now you may think I’m being a little extreme but it’s not till you sit back and take in how easily and accessible an endorphin rush is. Instead of having to go for a run or feeling accomplished after a hard day’s work to get your daily dose, you can simply sit in front of a computer and receive endless amounts from a video game. Now the real question is this detrimental to our mental health and general well-being? Well, from my experience yes.
A Study Published in the journal pediatrics on November 14 found an increase of major depression episodes in teens, an increase of 8-9% to 11.5%. Most of the time they report the biggest reasons being coping with stress, school and study, bullying and family conflict. Now these are absolutely an issue to be dealt with, but I think we’re missing some of the issue, if the not the largest part.
What if the growing increase was the do with how poorly we neglect our mental well-being, and how underrated western society looks at the importance of true happiness. Somewhere along the track we’ve swapped happiness and peace of mind with being ‘success in today’s society, aka be financially stable. I didn’t truly understand what this even meant until I recently started to mediate; well try to mediate because at first it was extremely difficult. Having to sit down with nothing but my own thoughts? That was some daunting shit, but why? Throughout my teenage years I spent most of the time trying to escape my own thoughts through pot and video game to only realize that would be a never ending battle of being unhappy when I didn’t have or do those things. Now you mightn’t have the same addiction to me but I can assure you that you’ll have some addictions that the you don’t even realize you’re neurologically addicted too. How about your phone for example, every time you get a text, snapchat or x amount of likes on a post, you feel good yeah? That’s your brain firing endorphin's telling you to keep doing what you’re doing because it made you feel good. So whys this an issue? What’s wrong with doing something fun. Nothing, in moderation but that word is slowly losing its meaning in today’s society. No one is interested in moderation because it’s boring; everyone wants the extreme, something exciting and stimulating. But the more stimulation you get, the more you need next time and here we come back to my first point of the growing issue of addiction to endorphin's. Now days we assume if we’re not happy we’re sad, makes sense right? So therefore if you’re bored you must be sad because you’re not happy. But this logical is fundamentally flawed because being ‘bored’ isn’t a real thing; it’s just the lack of stimulation.
I think if we approach the issue of depression, anxiety and mental health with an attitude of having a peaceful mind, a rested mind then we might be able to help the youth of the coming generations.