The Brain That Forgot How to Wander: Why Short Videos Might Be Our Newest Addiction

Aug 1

It starts with a flick.

A thumb brushing glass.
A screen lighting up like dawn.
A video, short and sweet, dancing across your dopamine like morning sugar.

And then another.

And another.

Until time itself forgets how to tick.

We are the generation who scrolls.
Not always because we want to, but because to stop scrolling feels like letting go of the only rope we have left in the middle of a howling void.

We tell ourselves it’s nothing.
Just a little reel, a little TikTok, a little escape.

But what if that escape comes with a toll more dangerous than the one you pay at the bottom of a bottle?

What the Claim Actually Means

A recent viral post claimed that “watching short videos is five times more dangerous to the brain than alcohol.”

That’s a bold statement. Is it true? Let’s unspool it.

The post doesn’t cite a specific study, but the concept draws from a growing body of neuroscience. And while the phrase “five times more dangerous” is likely hyperbolic or at least metaphorical, it touches a nerve we should not ignore:

Short-form videos hijack your reward system.

And they do it with the same ferocity as gambling, sugar, pornography, or yes…alcohol.

But unlike alcohol, which often comes with social stigma, a warning label, or a hangover…short videos are served with a smile.

And we give them to toddlers.

The Dopamine Factory

Here’s how it works.

Your brain is a pattern-seeking machine.
It lives for novelty.
It lights up like a city skyline when something surprising or exciting happens.

Short-form videos are custom-built to exploit this.

Each video is a new stimulus, a fresh dopamine burst.
Whether it’s a dance, a prank, a fact, or a cat playing piano, your brain doesn’t care what it is.

It only knows: “Different = Reward.”

In just sixty seconds, you can go from ancient ruins in Greece to someone deep-frying a whole wheel of cheese to a motivational quote spoken over dramatic violin to a toddler falling into a fountain to a conspiracy theory about the moon being hollow.

No time to process.
No time to integrate.
No narrative arc.
Just hits of dopamine over and over and over.

This is called variable reward reinforcement: and it’s the same system used in slot machines.

Your brain becomes a lab rat pressing a lever for sugar water, but the sugar is serotonin, and the lever is your thumb.

The Attention Span Collapse

You’ve likely heard that goldfish have longer attention spans than humans now.

That’s false…but the deeper truth isn’t any better.

Our ability to focus has shrunk, not because we’re lazy, but because we’ve been trained to seek interruption.

Every scroll teaches our brains that if something doesn’t entertain us in the first two seconds, it isn’t worth our time.

And so we grow bored with books, with movies, with long conversations, with silence.

Even with ourselves.

The brain begins to believe:
“If it isn’t instantly stimulating, it’s a threat to my time.”

This is digital malnutrition.

We consume endless content but absorb nothing.

Our memories weaken.
Our creativity withers.
Our capacity for deep work fades.

In one study by Microsoft, the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8.25 seconds by 2015. It’s likely even shorter now.

Alcohol dulls your thinking.

But short videos retrain your thinking.

And perhaps that’s the scarier transformation.

What Alcohol Does to the Brain (And Why the Comparison Matters)

Let’s talk about alcohol for a moment…not to glorify it or demonize it, but to understand it.

Alcohol is a depressant.
It slows your nervous system, numbs emotional centers, impairs memory formation, and reduces inhibitions.

In moderate amounts, its damage is temporary.
In excessive amounts, it erodes the hippocampus, damages the liver, destroys impulse control.

But the thing is: alcohol is easy to spot.

A drunk person acts drunk.
Their impairment is visible.
Their addiction, diagnosable.

But someone scrolling through 200 short videos in bed?

That’s normal.
That’s “relaxation.”
That’s “just a little screen time.”

Except their prefrontal cortex (the part responsible for planning, logic, impulse control) is under siege.

Their limbic system (the seat of emotion and reward) is being rewired.

It’s not as loud as a hangover.
It doesn’t smell like gin.

But the damage is being done all the same.

The Invisible Toll: Short Video Burnout

Let’s name what’s happening here:

Mental Fatigue: Your brain is doing micro-switching hundreds of times an hour.

Decreased Imagination: You are being fed imagery instead of creating it yourself.

Decision Paralysis: When every video is a new opinion, your mind becomes a war zone of contradiction.

Addiction Creep: You don’t crave alcohol. You crave the next reel.

Sleep Destruction: The blue light. The stimulation. The stress. The rabbit hole.

You go to bed full of facts but empty of meaning.

But What If You Need the Escape?

I see you.

I see the way the world weighs on you.
The grief you haven’t named.
The anxiety you try to outrun.
The loneliness that sits beside you while you scroll.

And I know that sometimes, a funny dog video feels like the only relief you have left.

So no…this isn’t a condemnation.
It’s a gentle invitation.

To look up.

To breathe.

To reclaim your attention the way you would reclaim a lost child.

Because that’s what your mind is: a child, overstimulated, overtired, and begging for a slower story.

What We Can Do Instead

If short-form video is fast food for the brain, what’s the slow food?

Read long-form content. Let a story unfold across chapters. And read more of my blog!

Take walks without headphones. Let your thoughts unspool.

Listen to full albums instead of snippets. Music is meant to be a journey.

Do boring things on purpose. Like watching water boil or clouds move.

Practice creative boredom. Draw. Journal. Daydream. Doodle.

Let your mind wander.
Wandering is where the soul speaks.

When the Silence Hurts

The most terrifying thing about stopping the scroll is what it reveals.

Your thoughts.
Your fears.
Your traumas.
Your unmet desires.
Your deep longing to be held by something real.

That’s why it’s easier to scroll.

But on the other side of that discomfort is the birthplace of art, connection, and healing.

It’s the soil where wonder grows.

Rebuilding a Brain That Knows How to Rest

The truth is: we’ve been at war with our attention for decades.
Television started it.
Smartphones accelerated it.
Short-form video weaponized it.

But your brain is still plastic.
It can heal.

Neuroplasticity means you can train your brain back toward focus.
Back toward joy.
Back toward stillness.

You just have to give it space.

Start small.

One minute of silence.
One page of a book.
One full breath.

And build from there.

The Myth of “Just One More”

The scroll lies to you.

It whispers, “Just one more, and then you’ll sleep.”
But each swipe spins a new thread around you, a silky cocoon that tightens until you can’t remember what the world feels like without it.

You watch your thumb move without thinking, watch your mind blur at the edges, watch time evaporate like breath on glass.

The lie isn’t in the scroll: it’s in the illusion of control.

Because each “just one more” becomes a ritual, a modern rosary of distraction, and soon your nights are nothing but ghost hours stitched together by algorithms.

The videos might be short, but their shadow stretches across your life.

The Hijacked Default Mode Network

There’s a part of your brain called the Default Mode Network: a sacred space where the soul stretches out and whispers.

It activates when you daydream, when you rest, when you think about yourself and others in deep, reflective ways.

It is the home of empathy, of imagination, of meaning.

But when your mind is constantly flooded with content, that network flickers and fades.

It doesn’t know how to activate anymore.
It’s not that you don’t care about the world, it’s that your brain has forgotten how to care in silence.

Short videos don’t just entertain you.
They evict the parts of your brain that make you human.

Why You Can’t Remember Anything Anymore

Have you ever closed the app and realized you couldn’t recall a single video you watched?

That’s not forgetfulness.
That’s fragmentation.

Short-form video fractures your memory into confetti: colorful, fluttering, and impossible to gather.

Your brain never has time to consolidate anything.
No narrative.
No emotional anchor.
No long-term storage.

It’s not your fault if your memory feels like fog lately.
It’s because you’ve been walking through a storm of moments that never settle.

The Illusion of Connection

Short videos promise you closeness.
They show you people laughing, crying, dancing, confessing.
They stare into the camera as if into your eyes, and for a moment, it feels like you’re not alone.

But this isn’t real connection.
It’s parasocial intimacy: one-sided relationships where you feel known by people who will never know you back.

It soothes the ache for community, but it never truly feeds you.

You close the app lonelier than when you opened it.
Because your brain knows the difference between touch and pixels, between presence and performance.

And no amount of reels can replace a hand on your shoulder.

When the Algorithm Becomes the Author of Your Mind

The algorithm doesn’t care what heals you.
It only cares what keeps you watching.

And so it starts with a cooking tip, then shows you a diet hack, then a “before and after” body transformation, then a girl crying about being alone, then a man raging about society, then a joke that lands too sharp.

And suddenly your entire worldview shifts not because you chose it, but because it was drip-fed into your nervous system until it felt like your own thought.

This is not entertainment.
This is influence architecture wrapped in the disguise of fun.

And it’s happening to all of us.

Healing the Fractured Mind: A New Kind of Sabbath

Maybe we need a digital sabbath.
A day where the scroll stops.
A sacred pocket of time where your brain can exhale and remember its original shape.

Not because it’s trendy to “detox,” but because your mind deserves rest from being a battleground of attention wars.

You are not a robot.
You are not a consumer.
You are not a target market.

You are a poem in motion.
A soul in a body, aching to remember what it feels like to be fully present in the cathedral of now.

You Are Not Broken

If you’ve fallen into the vortex of short videos, you’re not weak.

You’re human.

You’re living in a world engineered to distract you, to monetize your attention, to keep you clicking instead of creating.

But you can resist.
Not through force, but through wonder.

Feed your mind stories that take time.

Let your boredom bloom into imagination.

And most of all: be kind to your brain.

It is trying to survive in a landscape it was never built for.

Let it rest.
Let it play.
Let it wander.