We all know its happening. It started somewhere between 2005-2010 when you bought your first smartphone. Over the next year, the way your brain worked began to change.

You probably noticed that your brain had a new friend through out the day, dopamine. Constantly fueled by Angry Birds, E-mail, the internet, Facebook, etc. Unfortunately, around that time you also stopped using your imagination in the same way. Unless you worked in a creative industry, you didn't need it anymore. If you had a burning question about life or that meal you just ate you could simply reach in your pocket and Google it. Voilà, the answer and some more dopamine are a mere reach away! No more waiting for and wondering what the answer could be. No more using your imagination to come up with creative solutions to the questions in your mind. I am not quite sure what the long lasting loss of imagination will be on society as a whole, but I don't imagine it could be too good. 

That being said, the mass granting of access to information has been a powerful movement since web 1.0, but it has been a few years now. We need to ask ourselves is the knowledge we soak up like a sponge from the internet everyday the best use of our time, the most precious resource we are ever given. We must remember to protect our time.

So how bad have you gotten and how bad is your old friend dopamine affecting you today? Let's find out. I recently watched a video from Adam Conover who is the host of TV's Adam Ruins Everything, a pretty brilliant show if you haven't checked it out yet. In this video Adam asks for 3 minutes of your time. 3 minutes of your focused, attention, distraction free time. The best part of this video isn't actually the video itself, it is the self awareness that is created with every little lunge for your phone, browser tab you think to open, or fear of boredom you experience while you are watching. So give it a shot. I dare you to watch this entire video.