Just a few days in the past, whereas speaking to a circle of mates about child-rearing, one mom in contrast an toddler’s tendency to throw tantrums when sugary meals have been withdrawn to what many dad and mom have been dealing with with trendy youngsters’s video packages and that she’d discovered within the teams she belonged to that quite a few dad and mom have been now switching to exhibiting their youngsters the reveals they’d grown up watching as these reveals didn’t have the identical destabilizing results on their youngsters.
As we mentioned this subject (e.g., many people have banned screens after noticing how negatively they impression creating nervous programs), I noticed this wanted to be publicly mentioned on account of:
• How unfair and tragic it’s that on account of the modern toxicity they are bombarded with, so many youngsters now not have well being and spark inside them that deliver pleasure to everybody round them.
• All the issues we mentioned with youngsters straight tie into the central points I really feel are dealing with a lot broader segments of society (e.g., the dopamine lure society makes use of to regulate us and make us really feel lifeless inside).
Notice: It regularly astounds me (and people I level it out to) how completely different naturally raised youngsters are, and the way a lot rarer they’re changing into, given the various fronts on which the predatory forces round us are attacking our well being. For these , a few of the most vital methods I’ve come throughout for raising healthy children are discussed here.
Addictive Programming
Giant swathes of fogeys describe trendy youngsters’s content material (notably YouTube movies like CoComelon) as extremely participating to the purpose of dependancy, with intense emotional reactions when eliminated:
• A 2025 Talker Analysis survey of two,000 U.S. dad and mom discovered 22% report “full-on tantrums” as a aspect impact of extreme display screen time, alongside irritability (27%) and temper swings (24%).1
Notice: This survey has different disturbing statistics (e.g., 67% of fogeys worry dropping treasured time with their youngsters on account of display screen dependancy).
• The 2025 Widespread Sense Media Census states that 25% of fogeys use display screen media to assist their baby settle down when upset, with 17% reporting their baby makes use of cellular gadgets to self-soothe.2
• On Reddit parenting boards, searches for “CoComelon tantrum” yield hundreds of threads describing comparable patterns: calm throughout viewing, explosive tantrums upon shutdown — far worse than with slower reveals like older Sesame Road.
• The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) acknowledges in medical tips that high-engagement digital media can result in tantrums when interrupted on account of behavioral reinforcement designed for max engagement.3
On-line experiences from dad and mom surged after 2015 as YouTube children content material shifted to being optimized for toddlers viewing with out dad and mom. Analysis suggests this creates ADHD-like signs:
• Trendy reveals’ speedy cuts (1 to 4 seconds) overstimulate creating brains, making it laborious to maintain deal with slower duties (the “overstimulation speculation”).4
• A 2011 examine uncovered 4-year-olds to 9 minutes of fast-paced SpongeBob (11-second cuts) vs. slower Caillou or drawing; the fast-paced group confirmed instant deficits in government perform lasting as much as 4 hours.5
Notice: The AAP recommends dad and mom keep away from fast-paced packages for youths beneath 5.
• A 2004 examine discovered over 2 hours of TV day by day earlier than age 3 was linked to consideration issues by age 7.6
• A 2018 overview discovered early fast-paced publicity correlated with later attentional deficits, because it “rewires” brains towards novelty-seeking.7 In mice, extreme sensory stimulation decreased studying and reminiscence whereas growing risk-taking.8
• A 2023 examine linked increased toddler display screen time to elevated anger/frustration later, with every additional hour elevating danger by 13%.9
Many dad and mom particularly cited CoComelon as notably problematic, attributing it to quickly altering frames each few seconds. I watched a number of episodes to confirm this, noting how disorienting pictures altering each 1 to 4 seconds felt.
Notice: Many imagine shorter segments earlier than display screen cuts have been immensely harmful to the American psyche, taking away folks’s potential to take care of the attention spans necessary to perceive deeper meaning in life.
Why YouTube children channels do that:
• This maximizes “watch time” (how they revenue). Very younger youngsters have quick consideration spans — speedy cuts act like a visible “ping” yanking consideration again, growing view length.
• Each sudden reduce triggers the mind’s “orienting response.”10 In toddlers, this reflex is very robust. CoComelon exploits it a whole lot of occasions per episode, making a near-constant dopamine loop.
• It is designed for “auto-play.” Quick pacing retains children watching throughout the important 3-6 second window earlier than the subsequent video begins, chaining them for hours.
• These channels use analytics to optimize pacing, colours, and sound results, discovering that cuts each ~2 to three seconds retains toddlers glued extra successfully.
• Basic reveals (Mister Rogers, outdated Sesame Road, Blue’s Clues) have been intentionally calm with lengthy takes, designed for developmental appropriateness. Trendy YouTube content material is meant to be watched alone by toddlers, so “seize and maintain consideration in any respect prices” wins.
Notice: Basic youngsters’s reveals like Mister Rogers would go away pauses so youngsters may course of their emotions — the polar reverse of those channels.
Key Implications
1. Evidence has emerged that screens have been designed to be as addictive as attainable by dopamine-triggering stimuli. Many social media executives express regret about what their merchandise have achieved to youngsters’s brains. Many tech executives even ship their children to colleges the place screens are banned.11
Notice: I imagine this partly as a result of entrepreneurs consistently concoct methods to hook folks, a course of accelerated by internet-enabled speedy testing and distribution of addictive content material.
2. After the DPT vaccine entered the inhabitants, neurological and behavioral points rippled through society. Within the Nineteen Fifties, “minimal brain damage” [MBD] was coined, with hyperactivity as its defining attribute. MBD signs overlap considerably with encephalitis, DPT accidents, and autism. Finally, they discovered it might be “handled” with stimulants, and the dysfunction was renamed ADHD.
Notice: Physicians like Gabor Maté have reported that many homeless, addicted sufferers confirmed undiagnosed ADHD, and when it’s correctly handled as a part of trauma-informed care strategy, it stabilized them and sometimes enormously improved the trajectory of their lives.12
3. I believe one thing comparable is occurring with screens — their dopamine-releasing nature is getting used to counteract behavioral disturbances in vaccine-injured youngsters. Many dad and mom missing bandwidth to deal with misbehaving youngsters are pressured to offer addictive know-how, remodeling youngsters into lifelong customers.
4. I’ve lengthy believed slavery ended partly as a result of financial servitude grew to become extra worthwhile, with labor outsourced to poorer nations the place cruelty may exist out of sight. For the reason that want to take advantage of folks by no means disappeared, different strategies emerged — like turning folks into lifelong pharmaceutical clients (a course of typically set in movement by persistent diseases triggered by vaccination). The identical is occurring with harvesting attention online and collecting data.
Take into account: one thing dad and mom belief their youngsters to look at was designed to hijack their youngsters no matter hurt to creating nervous programs — and moderately than be penalized, it is amassed billions of profitable views as a result of algorithms incentivize this rapidly produced content material.
Notice: There are various different points with algorithmically AI generated youngsters’s content material, equivalent to quite a few distressing grownup themes routinely being proven to youngsters.
Dwelling By way of Dopamine
My circle believes most of the issues in our society stem from the truth that the present financial system depends upon folks consuming as a lot as attainable. That is problematic, as the one means you possibly can preserve getting folks to purchase issues they do not want is by emotionally advertising the merchandise to them. Because of this, the advertising system advanced to create a way of future gratification (moderately than contentment within the current) and to make folks really feel depressing till they’ve it.
Put otherwise, since these expectations have been crafted to set off addictive dopamine spikes, the society shifted to reworking one’s conception of actuality from a clean circulate you felt linked and enlivened by to a jolted, disconnected set of spikes the place happiness was all the time fleeting and artificial moderately than actual.
Notice: I can’t touch upon this on account of missing direct expertise with them, however many individuals I’ve spoken to have analogized this to the distinction between taking stimulant medication (which produce sharp, spiky dopamine releases adopted by crashes) and the basic (serotonin mediated) hallucinogens/psychedelics (which create a sustained opening of notion and that means, typically described as a richer, extra steady sense of presence and connectedness that may persist lengthy after the drug is gone).
Whereas many have described the dynamic I’m alluding to, what is much much less appreciated is that your disposition to at least one polarity or the opposite (the hole dopamine spikes vs. a vivid reference to the current) is enormously influenced by the state of your nervous system.
It’s because when the nervous system is depleted and fatigued (e.g., from extreme pc use or stress), people are way more predisposed to the dopamine spikes as they’re much much less in a position to respect the subtleties of life (which arguably are the place the precise worth and content material of being alive comes from) and as a substitute can solely register robust stimuli (e.g., tough bodily contact or robust flavors).
Worse nonetheless, our society not solely regularly circumstances us to hunt the robust dopamine producing stimuli, but additionally regularly depletes and injures our nervous system.
Notice: Fatigued nervous programs are additionally much less in a position to preserve sustained long-term consideration on one thing.
In my case, two issues made me conscious of this:
1. I’m fairly delicate to adjustments inside my physique (e.g., how otherwise I understand issues relying on my power ranges — notably after extended durations with out sufficient restorative sleep).
As know-how has advanced, I’ve additionally observed increasingly how all digital media (notably computer systems, tv, and music) unnaturally affect you and continuously use very comparable methods to induce these dopamine spikes or shift your inner rhythms and feelings whereas concurrently disconnecting you out of your atmosphere (e.g., I’d continuously discover myself getting “amped up” or “pulled in” after which typically having a crash the place I felt worse as soon as it was withdrawn — at which level I grew to become very involved I might invited an exterior affect into my life which did that to me).
2. Once I was in my teenagers, after studying processed sugar was dangerous for you, I attempted to give up consuming sugar and went by a withdrawal course of the place some very odd issues occurred (e.g., I had desires about by chance consuming sugar, failing, and therefore needing to give up my food regimen) — lots of which I discovered matched basic withdrawals from an addictive substance (which I discovered fairly disturbing as I might gone out of my solution to keep away from all addictive psychoactive substances).
Then, as soon as I hadn’t eaten sugar for a couple of month, apart from a really distant longing, I now not had any want to eat it, and extra importantly, observed that at any time when I (primarily by chance) ate a sugary processed merchandise, moderately than having fun with it, my physique rejected it because the meals was devoid of nourishment.
From this, I made two main conclusions:
• A big quantity of dependancy got here from the microbiome, because it felt like one thing else was making an attempt to hijack my thoughts to make me eat sugar, and since all of it abruptly disappeared in a timeframe which coincided with these microbes dying off from hunger.
Notice: There’s a massive physique of knowledge exhibiting sure microbes and parasites can create vital psychological results on their hosts.
• The physique has a pure potential to inform if meals is nice for you, and would reject “dangerous” or nutritionally poor meals. In flip, since that pure reflex destroys the processed meals business’s enterprise mannequin, an answer needed to be discovered, and this was to combine in addictive medication, which overrode this pure response.
Over the a long time, I’ve come throughout key items of proof supporting these conclusions. A few of the most poignant (latest) ones included:
• In 2010, David Kessler (a former FDA commissioner) revealed The Finish of Overeating: Taking Management of the Insatiable American Urge for food, which highlighted that American meals has been engineered to be as addictive as attainable and that meals business executives had confirmed this to him.13
There, he highlighted that whereas People have been educated to prioritize robust tastes moderately than delicate tastes in meals, and that overseas cooks discover People have an especially unrefined palate and demand fatty-salty-sugary meals moderately than the wealthy mix of flavors seen within the conventional ethnic cuisines, and due to this, ethnic cuisines would all the time be pressured to change into Americanized (e.g., Chinese language meals right here is vastly completely different from what it is like in China) or be pressured to exit of enterprise.
Notice: This level echoes a longstanding frustration of mine, as I’ve had so many occasions I discovered a restaurant I actually preferred (on account of them catering to the advanced depth of flavors seen within the conventional delicacies moderately than the spikes in Americanized meals) which then went out of enterprise (together with many circumstances the place I attempted to assist them and get others to as effectively).
• I just lately discovered (by Calley Means14) that within the Eighties, Large Tobacco purchased out the processed meals business after which, as that they had achieved with cigarettes, prioritized making processed meals as addictive as attainable.15,16
• Lastly, in 2017, one other revered writer on this discipline, Robert Lustig M.D., in search of to clarify the why behind Kessler’s 2010 work, revealed The Hacking of the American Thoughts: The Science Behind the Company Takeover of Our Our bodies and Brains.17 It tied collectively a lot of what I might concluded on the difficulty, revolving round the concept that the mind has a dopamine-driven “non permanent pleasure” circuit alongside a serotonin-driven “sustained happiness” circuit.
Lustig argued that deliberate efforts have been made to shift us away from serotonin towards dopamine circuits, utilizing dependancy to those spikes to regulate society at each stage and preserve us in a relentless state of monetizable misery, disconnection, and unhappiness.
This dynamic is very tragic in romantic relationships, the place the culturally inspired chase for dopamine-fueled highs and fleeting pleasure pulls folks away from the steady, profound, and actually nourishing connections that lie on the coronary heart of lasting intimacy.
Notice: Lustig’s work additionally highlighted that extreme digital utilization (on account of its addictive nature, notably extremely stimulating video video games, social media, playing, or pornography) prompts the dopamine circuits, priming youngsters to change into extra inclined to junk meals cravings.
I imagine the pornography side is especially tragic because it’s made numerous folks change from having the ability to benefit from the deep contentment of a visceral and alive reference to one other human being to in search of out fleeting dopamine spiking experiences which might solely be present in psychological fantasies (which pornography caters to), a string of latest companions, or excessive sexual actions (an issue which is additional compounded by depleted nervous programs being unable to understand the subtleties of human contact).
Reconnecting with Life (Conclusion)
At this level, I imagine the “dopamine” way of life life is a lure most individuals profit immensely from being free of — notably since, as each drug addict is aware of, any dopamine spike is all the time adopted by a low that makes you’re feeling much more lifeless and disconnected inside (together with more and more robust spikes being required to recreate the enjoyment the preliminary spike introduced).
Sadly, extricating oneself from this lure is kind of difficult, partially as a result of our society has been designed across the dopamine mannequin, and partially as a result of, when your nervous system has been depleted, it turns into a lot more durable to understand the subtler (however way more nourishing) experiences of life. This creates a vicious cycle the place nervous system depletion drives one towards dopamine-spiking behaviors, which in flip additional deplete and dysregulate the nervous system.
Over time, I’ve come to imagine crucial factor you are able to do is to restore the health of your nervous system. When the nervous system is wholesome and resilient, the pull towards synthetic stimulation naturally diminishes, and the capability to really feel alive and linked in abnormal moments returns.
In parallel, I feel that one of many main causes folks search out a wide range of religious and mind-body or meditative practices is to reclaim this state of being, and the truth that there may be an ever rising marketplace for that demonstrates that the depletion of our society is reaching the purpose individuals are seeing that may now not handle this depletion by overriding it with extra stimulation.
Notice: To revive the connection to life it’s important to utilize practices which relax and integrate the nervous system moderately than stimulating ones which strain and fragment the nervous system.
Feeling alive inside is the pure antidote to dopamine dependancy; while you genuinely really feel alive, the hole promise of the subsequent spike loses its enchantment. Our nervous system is likely one of the most treasured sources we’ve.
Notably on this society, the place extremely functioning cognition is important inside so many features of the financial system — but concurrently, our nerves are consistently beneath assault from an unprecedented variety of instructions, robbing each our well being and the immense pleasure we will expertise from merely being alive (moderately than really feel empty and regularly looking for robust stimuli which can provide us a quick sense of being alive).
Creator’s Notice: That is an abridged model of a longer article which discusses the factors lined right here in additional element and highlights most of the easy practices (e.g., respiration workout routines) which will be achieved to revive the nervous system and reconnect with life. That article will be learn here.
A Notice from Dr. Mercola Concerning the Creator
A Midwestern Physician (AMD) is a board-certified doctor from the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I respect AMD’s distinctive perception on a variety of matters and am grateful to share it. I additionally respect AMD’s want to stay nameless since AMD remains to be on the entrance traces treating sufferers. To seek out extra of AMD’s work, be sure you take a look at The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.
