Zoom Calls, Cell Phones, And Burnout: Is It All Dopamine Depletion?

Zoom Calls, Cell Phones, And Burnout: Is It All Dopamine Depletion?

By

Leonard Zwelling

I was listening to a recent episode of the NPR broadcast called Fresh Air. It’s essentially an hour-long talk show with one guest about one topic. How rare!

The guest was author Derek Thompson who has recently written a piece in The Atlantic about the increase in loneliness and isolation in society especially among the youngest of us. To make a long story short, his argument is that humans are essentially social creatures and due to the technologies of the past hundred years, we can function without interacting with anyone face-to-face. The car took away meeting people in transit to work. The television allowed entertainment to be a solo activity. Now the computer and it’s off-spring, the cell phone, have even eliminated the work place cementing working from home where you meet no co-workers.

These technologies are not going away. In fact, there will surely be new ones to increase our ability to be people who don’t meet other people.

This got me thinking about my administrative job at MD Anderson and what really gave me the greatest joy in the best job I ever had.

My job then as the Vice President for Research Administration can be summed up quite simply. I was supposed to help the faculty overcome the barriers they encountered in performing federally-regulated research. This included human subject research, animal care and use, grants, contracts, biosafety, research misconduct, and a new one then, conflict of interest. The real fun (pleasure, engagement, meaning) part was the face-to-face interactions I had with the faculty to help solve a problem.

I vividly remember the day a prominent faculty member came to my office with a protocol for a novel drug to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia. He needed the protocol approved quickly in order to get the new drug from the pharmaceutical manufacturer. It was then he revealed the remarkable results that were being seen elsewhere with the new drug. I was able to pull the right levers and get the protocol approved and the Gleevec studies at MD Anderson were begun.

On another Saturday, I was called by a faculty member with a very sick marrow transplant patient. The patient had systemic strongyloides, a parasitic worm. The faculty physician wanted to give his patient ivermectin which was not approved for human use in the United States, but had been effective against this worm in Europe as reported in the literature. My Associate VP and I spent the day tracking down someone at the FDA to grant us that approval. It took hours, but we got it done and the faculty member administered the drug.

These were just two of the many incidents where I could help a faculty member accomplish his or her job. It gave me great satisfaction in mine.

I do not think I would have felt the same level of satisfaction had all of this been done on Zoom. This was personal “service with a sense of urgency” the prime mission of my office.

In the show on Fresh Air, Mr. Thompson related a lot of statistics that demonstrate that people are more alone than ever. He even reported that there is a Tik Tok phenomenon of people being happy and doing dances when their plans to go out with others get cancelled. This sounded strange, but, aren’t you happy every time a scheduled Zoom meeting gets cancelled?

Here’s the bottom line from Mr. Thompson. “Your cell phones are stealing your dopamine.” The hit we get as social creatures from real face-to-face interactions is happening all day long via cell phones and Zoom calls augmented by the use of social media. It’s an addiction to virtual reality. You want to find a reason for burnout, try the fact that you are never far from the device that is there to rob you of more dopamine.

My suggestion is to put down the phones or only use them to actually communicate, not for entertainment. No more Tik Tok, Instagram, and Facebook. Try to get your dopamine hits from real people who are in the same room as you are.

All I can tell you 20 years down the road, is that the only thing I miss about the best job I ever had—dealing with the faculty face-to-face is probably a rarity today for the administrators who have replaced me.

I still treasure my dopamine as I did then.