It’s not that we don’t know how to be happy, it’s that we don’t know how to be unhappy.

And as, really, most of the life of a human being is statistically spent in a sub-happy state, it’s something worth getting good at. And yes it is something you can get good at. It all comes down to practice, but as any music teacher will tell you- practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. Repeating the wrong behaviours will cause them to become mind and muscle memory, which means it takes some resetting to not resort back to them when you feel weak. 

But we don’t need to tell you that the mind can be changed.  How many times have you changed your mind this week? Or even today? Quite a few I imagine.

The best way to really change your mind is to understand what it is being moulded by. 

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“I feel tremendous guilt” admitted the former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, Chamath Palohapitya, to an audience of students at Stamford. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works”. 

Social media exploits the same neural pathways as cocaine to monopolise our time and make us mercy to addiction. The key to this is in understanding how dopamine works. Dopamine does not give us pleasure itself, as people commonly presume, it is in fact what motivates us to do things that will bring us pleasure. It is what makes you want a Maccies when you smell their chips, or sex when you watch a saucy film scene. Our dopamine levels increase in anticipation of doing the thing and when we do the thing, but dopamine metabolises very quickly, so we almost instantly experience a comedown and a craving to start the cycle again. This is because our brain constantly regulates itself via a process called homeostasis, which means what comes up will always come down. The higher the high, the more the brain will compensate with the subsequent low, that is, a few hours of scrolling will always be followed by a comedown, this is your brain working healthily. It is also important to remember that each time we interact with these social media stimulants, the initial joy will actually become less enjoyable; not every text, or video will always deliver as much dopamine as our brain now wants and expects.  We therefore keep scrolling to try and match it, now dependent on this boost to bring us up again after the low that is growing in its absence.  We may even try and engineer it ourselves: Have you ever suddenly sent out messages just to feel a bit of connection or posted something for a bit of sudden valuation?  

Unlike drugs, however, there are no practical limitations with social media, i.e we don’t run out of substance or money. The feed is infinite, and called so, I would say, because it feeds off our neural vulnerabilities.  

Okay so we get what this means in these moments when we are on these apps, but what does it do to our mind that affects… all moments? Reducing attention spans and comparison culture you’ve heard about before, but what’s really important to understand is that this obsession with short-term gratification causes us to live in our limbic brain; the part that processes emotions, instead of in our frontal cortex, which is the bit dedicated to problem-solving, future planning and personal growth. Which means we are hanging out with our emotions a lot at the moment. And then we start to think that’s all we are. So when they are unhappy ones (which in a normal human they are more often than not) we escape to the version of reality on screen, full of filtered faces, time lapses, lacking in awkward silences and essential moments of self-reflection.

Pursuing enjoyment is hard-wired into us, Freud explored it through  the ‘pleasure principle’  and the need for social connection is a “fundamental feature of human evolution that predates smartphones by hundreds of thousands of years,” according to Dr. Veissière. Pursuing enjoyment through social media however is not in our wiring, it is however changing how we are wired. 

But wait, there is light, a lot of it, and it doesn’t need to come from the backlit LED sort of your screen. Whilst you may feel a bit anxious when you are disconnected from social media, or pang for it during the first few hours of a detox day, there are not any seriously debilitating withdrawal symptoms like other drugs. Which means you can reset your habits,
the difficulty is just deciding when. 

Youni was born when the answer to that question became now. And when we realised that it shouldn’t be down to just the users to reset their habits, to set time limits, to force themselves outside of their comfort zone, to meet new people, to try new things. What if a tech company could actually have that hard wired into its business model? What if there was a social media company that was actually more about the social than the media?  What if that company was built by the people that suffered the consequences of the previous generation not predicting the long term impacts of their apps? 

For years, it has become industry standard for companies to calculate and reduce their carbon footprint for environmental health. We think it’s about time tech companies took into account their cerebral footprint for mental health. Youni’s aim is to go beyond just saving students time and money, to changing the way we interact with social media and power a new generation through their uni experience by helping them find their passion and people.