Did you know that your phone can act as a substitute for booze when you need a dopamine hit? EEK. Opening up a news or social media app lights up the reward center of the brain because our brains are information junkies. But just as with alcohol, excessive phone scrolling, and especially doomscrolling, can throw off the brain’s homeostasis and desensitize us so that we need to do more of it to get the desired “reward” effect.