In my own behavior regarding social media, I’ve noticed a near constant need while at the keyboard to check for notifications, scroll, and generate pithy status updates. I’ve noticed it in others, too. Writer after writer—my friends—comment about the distractions that prevent them from making progress on their writing projects. As it turns out, the rewards—hearing the sound of the ping and seeing the little red number in the top right of my Facebook page—are precisely what make social media so insidious. Thanks to our biology, the pleasures of publishing can hardly compete.

Researchers have discovered that self-disclosure strengthens our urge toward instant gratification. The minute we update our status and begin waiting for the “likes” and comments to roll in, we are strengthening the pathways in our brains that cause us to seek this form of pleasure again. Victoria Sadaat writes, “An extremely psychologically intuitive business model, social networks take cues from human psychology ….”

Research now suggests that dopamine is closely associated with seeking, working in tandem with our brains’ opioid systems, which cause us to experience pleasure. The notification that we have a “like” or a comment tickles our neurotransmitters, triggering a dopamine dump in our brains, teaching us to seek pleasure in the same form. A behavioral loop is set into motion, and after awhile, it seems we can hardly get enough.

This loop is dangerous for writers. Dopamine and the opioid system are also active when a writer writes and is published. The act of publishing creates pleasure so the writer will then seek out that pleasure again and again, creating a loop in which the writer writes, publishes, writes, publishes. But this loop is often thwarted by social media because, biologically, our brains are wired to choose pleasure now rather than pleasure later, just like Pavlov’s dogs. There is no instant gratification associated with writing and publishing—the rewards are long term.

That goes for the actual act of writing, too. Writers find pleasure when they discover the perfect word or turn of phrase. Doing so takes actual work and thought. The difference is that snapping a selfie or generating a funny status update is much easier than finding the precise words and images for creative work. The pleasure of finding the beautiful word or turn of phrase is endangered by the instant gratification of public recognition.

Lately, I’ve pulled back from social media because I’ve developed behaviors that I find unseemly: nosiness, a short attention span, and, of course, a need to check in too often when I’m at the keyboard to write. I’ve decided I’d rather save my dopamine for when I actually publish. But the decision has been hard. I’ve trained my brain over the past several years toward instant gratification, and I’ve found that pulling back has me going through a certain sort of withdrawal. I’ve had to work harder to refocus on my creative writing tasks. When I find myself stuck, trying to find the precise image or word, I often have to fight the urge to click over to my newsfeed and zone out. It’s been a battle of sorts to remain present in my creative work. When I do succumb, click over and zone out for any length of time, it’s harder to re-enter my creative work and I often find myself stymied by my inattention, unable to locate the words I want and need.

Slowly, slowly, I’m weaning myself away, but I’m addicted. And, I’ve found that my addicted brain wants to zone out rather than do the hard work of writing. I’ve begun logging out of my Facebook page rather than allowing myself to stay logged in. Logging out has allowed me to take a step back and think because it takes a bit of time to log back in. I’ve also changed my settings so the notifications’ sounds don’t interrupt my writing. When tackling particularly difficult pieces of writing, I’ve had to disconnect my wi-fi so I can’t get online.

I know what you’re thinking: why don’t you simply de-activate your account?

I’m not quite ready to go cold turkey.

Jennifer Ochstein is a writer and teacher living in Indiana. She has published book reviews with the “Brevity” and “River Teeth” blogs as well as essays with Hippocampus Magazine, The Evening Street Review and Connotation Press. Follow her at jenniferochstein.com.

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I don’t believe in writer’s block. If I can’t write, I go out and live. Then, if I’m a writer, I’ll find something to write.” –Peter Arpesella

Confession: as someone who writes memoir, I often get sick of myself. For several years I’ve been working on the same project—growing up in poverty with a closeted homosexual single mother—first as a graduate student in an MFA program and now as a writing professor at a small liberal arts college, where tenure in part depends on publication. I’m on the third and, hopefully, final draft.

This summer, I spent my break rearranging, rewriting, and recreating. By the end I was saturated once again with the sticky, cloying oil of my past. It coated everything. Every time I licked my lips, I tasted it. Every time I sat with my laptop to write, I smelled it, scorched and dark. My skin was thick with it, my vision blurred; sounds were distorted. Immersed in that world for months at a time, my sense of who I am now—writer, wife, teacher—begins to waver as though my adult self were only a mirage shimmering in the foreground of my past. That’s when the words get stopped up and I don’t want to write. Often, I take a vacation from myself, from writing.

I also take heart. I’m in good company. Dorothy Parker, a poet, short story writer and screenwriter, once sent a telegram to her editor Pascal Covinci bemoaning a late manuscript. She wrote, “Don’t know why it is so terribly difficult or I so terribly incompetent.”

I recently read an article in The New Yorker that pointed toward mental illness as the reason why creative people sometimes get blocked up. One researcher, though, says malfunctioning brain mechanics can block many writers. “Block shares some characteristics with disorders arising from frontal-lobe damage …”

I hate to think that I suffer from some sort of mental instability, but I’ve read enough about the processes of writers to recognize that I may, in fact, be unbalanced. Even still, I’m not sure which is worse: the idea that I need a break from writing because I’m mentally unstable or because of brain damage. After all, I live in the Midwest where these sorts of causes are looked at as suspicious at best and as a character flaw at worst.

Writers aren’t supposed to admit that they get tired of writing. It would be like a Christian minister saying he gets sick of working for God. We’re supposed to say we must write. There’s nothing else for us but to write. We would somehow be incomplete if we didn’t scribble at least a sentence or two every day. That we know we would be. Incomplete. If we didn’t write.

Sometimes the words are just too damned much. Sometimes, we are just too damned much. Sometimes the stories, the images, are too overwhelming. Of course, there are the genius writers among us, the ones from whom the words pour forth as if from a waterfall. Not that the writing isn’t difficult work for them too, but they seem to live in some sort of perpetual spiritual state of writing that I can barely find on my best day. For me, the writing is work. Immersion into my created worlds is often exhausting. For days, even weeks, I stay out of my head and take a break to recalibrate and reorient myself in the present reality, anchored in the world with my current self. It is then—after I’ve grounded myself in the present with people who exist in my here and now, three-dimensionally and off the page—that I am able to return to the words, because it’s true when writers say they must write.
 

Jennifer Ochstein earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Ashland University in 2012. She’s published book reviews with Brevity and essays with Connotation Press, The Lindenwood Review, Evening Street Review, and Hippocampus Magazine. She’s currently at work on a memoir about her mother and teaches at Bethel College.

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