Are You A Dope or Dope?

Ever notice how a quick scroll leaves you oddly restless, even when nothing was wrong a moment before? Today I pull back the curtain on the brain’s reward system and show how dopamine—meant to fuel motivation, learning, creativity, and hope—gets overloaded by blue screens and AI-shaped feeds. When rewards arrive too fast and too often, the signal desensitizes. The result is a nervous system stuck in seek mode, chasing pings instead of savoring presence. Join us as I continue the Scrolling the Blue Is Killing the Real You series.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Series Framing
• 1:24 What Dopamine Is For
• 2:39 How Screens Engineer Dopamine Spikes
• 5:23 From Presence To Past And Future Loops
• 6:40 Spiritual Framing And Loss Of Essence
• 8:29 Natural Dopamine Resets And Practices
• 11:05 Reflection Questions And Phone-Free Update
• 13:10 Teaser For Tomorrow And Closing Blessing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I may be a dope to even try to come against the proverbial progress that blue screens have brought to humanity. And I'm not here to dope you all up with a pie in the sky answer to our massive disconnect. But hopefully, by the end of this scrolling the blue is killing the real you series, maybe some of my listeners might say, Wow, that was dope. And I welcome you back to Free to Just Be, the podcast where I share my awakening experience with other folks so that maybe they can awaken too, and we can come alongside each other and dance this wonderful dance of life that we're going through. And I'm Teresa Marie, an ambassador of Qi, here to come alongside you and offer my documentations of my personal journey. And I am with you this morning, uh January 8th. It's a Thursday at 5.08 a.m. And I'm gonna make this really brief. And of course, as you can tell, I am opening with Dope, Dope, Dope, Dope, Dope. We're gonna talk about dopamine today as we continue the series. So, first off, uh, we're gonna we're gonna talk a little bit about what exactly dopamine is and its benefits and pitfalls. So it's a vital chemical in our brain that actually helps us move, learn, create, and even pursue meaning in our life. It's involved in a lot of things, for example, motivation and drive, simple things like getting out of bed or setting goals. It helps us with learning and focus because it reinforces what matters, and that's an important one. It is involved in our creativity and curiosity, it helps us explore and it gives us inspiration, it helps with movement and vitality because it initiates our action. And my favorite is hope. It brings in the feeling that something meaningful lies ahead. So, in a healthy balance, dopamine actually helps us to engage with life. That's a good thing. Now, the pitfalls, especially with screens, the problem isn't the dopamine itself, it's how often and how artificially it's triggered within us. So, modern technology, most specifically social media and AI-driven feeds, creates these incredibly repeated and rapid dopamine spikes and offers different rewards, you know, the likes, the thumbs up, the comments, um, you know, being uh the novelty influencer, and it offers endless novelty loops, so it's constant information over and over and over and over and over again. And what this can lead to is dopamine desensitization. So we end up needing much more of it to feel less of the the good stuff that dopamine offers us. It leads to restlessness and anxiety, you know. Uh if you're not getting that dopamine fix, you're you're gonna begin to feel it physiologically. It offers difficulty focusing or even enjoying simple moments. How many of you have been around a gathering and half the people at the table have their heads down, they're not even looking up, they're not engaging with the people. Or how about being in the same room and people are texting each other instead of speaking to each other? Now that is difficulty focusing, or literally enjoying simple moments. It leads to emotional numbness, chronic dissatisfaction, and addictive scrolling behaviors. So a brain gets trained to chase this stimulation instead of what? Learning to be present, to rest in the present moment, right? Uh, where it it creates this incredible, it they don't want us to be present, so you know, we're gonna look back. Well, what did my post avail me? Did I get likes? Did people look at it? So that causes us to be stuck in the past, and then we're future tripping. Well, if I post this, you know, maybe this is the response I'll get. And we find ourselves always in either of those loops, the past or the future, and we're missing real life. And the blue screens are so powerful because phones and our feeds, wherever we're getting them, deliver instant gratification, quick validation, and rewards that we really don't have to work for. It's very low effort. But they often bypass our body, our breath, our real connection and true meaning in life. And over time our nervous system stays in this seeking state instead of being settled. This is why we find ourselves so out of freaking whack. And this isn't dope, okay? This isn't, you know, and I just I love the play on words, right? I mean, dope, if you look it up in the dictionary, has like six or seven different meanings. And isn't it interesting that the world, quote unquote, and and and I bet if we took the time, and of course I'm not going to, but if we took the time to find out where the origin of the word that's dope, you know, as a good thing came from, I bet it could be traced back to one of the nefarious uh players in this darkness, because you know, they they want us to think that what they are causing, because they're after the effect, and what is the effect that all of this programming uh what is the effect of the the matrix? Ultimately, it is to steal our essence. Okay, and if you take it back to truly where the darkness comes from, we've talked about that a couple of episodes ago, it's straight from Satan himself. He wants the glory, he wants all of it, and we have it, folks. We have the spark of God within us, which is why we are under constant attack. And make no mistake, these blue screens, oh oh baby, you know, in the darkness, in the demonic world, they know when they talk about the blue screen, they're saying, under in in their dark world, they're saying, oh man, these screens are dope. We're gonna we're gonna get all of these people. So we want to return back to presence. We want to stay in our body and and feel things again. We don't want to be so numb and allow ourselves to just continue to scroll and scroll and scroll and miss life. So rebalance is the key. And healing ourselves isn't about eliminating dopamine, it it really becomes coming back to restoring our national our natural rhythms. Um, the way we can naturally reset ourselves is really the opposite of what scrolling does. We naturally reset our dopamine by movement, by being in nature, by eye contact. Think about just think about it today. How often are you around somebody uh at a store or just any any people contact? Notice eye contact. It is becoming something that we can't do anymore because we're so freaking distracted. Dopamine resets when we're in creative flow. Often we we find that we we don't have any creativity. We feel stuck. Why? Because we think we're gonna get inspired by looking at um, oh, what's that? The Pinterest, right? We're gonna look at other people's ideas and we're gonna get our own creativity. It naturally resets when we do meaningful work, service, right? When we do things for others, when we're we're actually engaging in something. Silence helps us naturally reset. Prayer or contemplation, and any kind of embodied practice like my moving meditations, journaling, all of these things, this is dopamine coming from real life, and that type of dopamine nurtures us instead of drains us. So, in closing, dopamine was never meant to replace meaning, it is always meant to support meaning. And so when we slow down and reconnect with our bodies, our breath, and with each other, dopamine finds its rightful place again. Not as a master, but as a servant to a life well lived. And so the question to ask yourself today is are the screens serving us? Or are we being controlled by them? Are we feeling stuck? Are we feeling depleted? Are we feeling uncreative? Yes, I just created a new word there, didn't I? So think about your life today. How many hours are you spending on your blue screen? I am, let's see, Friday. I I'm getting close. Today'll be day five, no, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. No, at three o'clock today, it'll be six days that I have not had my phone. And I keep telling you I'm gonna tell you about my documentation, and I promise I will do that tomorrow. I've been taking notes about how I feel, what I went through in the beginning, uh, where I'm at now, and you might be very surprised. And on on that note, I want you to think about it. What would you do if let's let's pick some scenarios. Um you dropped your phone and it it it broke so badly you couldn't use it. You dropped it in the toilet or off a boat, or you lost it like I did. What would you do? How would you feel? Use your imagination, resurrect your own curiosity, and just think about that scenario. But uh I caution you, if you're down the um ascension pike, or or rather should I say, uh maybe you've been on this journey a little bit longer, be careful what you think, because like myself, thinking all about this topic, it led me to what? To lose my phone. And yeah, that could happen. You can think about the scenario of losing your phone so much that the universe will comply and you'll lose your phone. No, no, don't blame Theresa Marie if that happens. But it definitely is worther worthy a ponder. Pause and think about it today. And I will be back tomorrow, and tomorrow I will walk us through what it looks like when you first lose your phone all the way up to day seven. And in the meantime, I just hope that today you are filled with great health and vibrant energy, and I wish you nothing but peace.