The Psychologically Addicting Nature of Blogging

Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash

I’ve never been a compulsive gambler. Sure, I’ll occasionally pop into a casino when I’m in a country that has one, but I treat it as a night out to the movies rather than a chance to win millions.

I think of it like this:

For 2 hours and $40 I can play a slot machine. Or I can go see Thor make some trolls sore, or something like that.

But I’ve seen gambleholics.

I’ve gambled with them, gone to casinos with them, watched them play at poker tables for 36 hours straight, and saw as their eyes glazed over for 5 hours in front of a mind-numbing slot machine.

It’s not a pretty sight, but I do understand it, at least to some degree.

I smoke, I play video games, I occasionally binge eat and binge drink. These are all kinds of addictions, incredibly unhealthy ones to boot. But for me, I was always just kind of shocked that I, too, never fell into a state of dumbed-down dopamine-upped state of flow when it came to gambling, especially given my partiality towards addictiveness.

That is—until I started blogging a few years ago.

Flow States

A lot of successful bloggers will advocate for reaching a “state of flow.”

“Want to write 40 jaw-dropping articles a month like I do, for years on end? Just enter the flow state, idiot! (P.S. Buy my $6000 course now please. Teehee.)”

You know the usual line if you’re in the writing game like I am.

But they say it because it works.

And it works because it’s an addiction.

Flow is described as the state of mind where an activity renders time to become transformed. Where hours can feel like minutes or the complete vice versa.

A professor at MIT, Natasha Schüll, defined flow states as having four criteria:

1. There must be little goals throughout the exercise

2. The rules to achieve each goal must be clearly understood

3. The activity must give immediate timely feedback to the user

4. The tasks have to be at least slightly challenging

The most common example is to talk about elaborate computerized slot machines at casinos.

All the bright lights, the dings and dongs of wheel spins and bonus rounds encouraging you to keep coming back regardless of winning or losing are all designed to appeal to our inner brain chemistry.

The little goal is to win the next spin, where most users understand that 5 cherries in a row are better than 4 cherries and a dog poop emoji. The dings and dongs are programmatically timed to encourage us to keep going depending on our assumed feelings, and the tasks are, of course, slightly challenging, as we all know we’re going to lose money if we keep playing.

But keep playing, many of us do.

These systems are designed to keep us in a state of flow, in a state of semi-dopamine-induced bliss. And for some of us, where our brains react to near misses just as strongly as an actual win, we become addicted.

I believe blogging can elicit the exact same biological response.

I Wanna Be Virated

Last June, I read Slaughterhouse-Five over a few sunny days in a COVID lockdowned park here in Taiwan. Around a week before, I had a quirky little idea for an article I jotted down in my notes app.

For whatever reason, thank my mirror neurons or just sheer luck, I sat down after finishing the book and blasted out a quirky non-fiction story about how I lived with a serial killer growing up. I ended up unwittingly writing the story in an imitative style of the book—or at least I think I did. A little while later, I hit publish, thinking it would be a normal experiment with a few hundred views.

Crazily, it went viral and ended up making over $1,300 at the time of this writing. Not a bad paycheck for 1-2 hours of work, si?

So, of course, I had to spend hours and hours breaking it down.

• What made this article so successful?

• Was it the timing?

• Was it the voice?

• Was it the surprise ending?

• Was it more emotional than my normal drab?

The answer didn’t really matter, because there’s no way I could narrow it down in the first place.

Writing is subjective and unique to each person that reads it. Just because I wrote a piece doesn’t mean I could step into the mind of a stranger and know why they liked the piece. Hell, most people don’t know why they like anything.

So, of course, since I couldn’t narrow down the cause, I had to try the next best thing. Spending hours and hours recreating the story structure with other ideas!

And, of course, I failed to recreate the same success for similar styles of articles.

But damn it if it wasn’t fun trying.

The Magic of Addiction

It’s the feeling above that I equate to the glaze-eyed gambleholic who just re-mortgaged his house to take another trip down to the Tangiers Casino.

When some bloggers, those who are really trying to make a go of it, first get those BIG hits, that’s when the addiction can set in.

We enter the flow state with our writing.

To successful bloggers, they brag about entering this river of rewarding fun. They propose that it’s a good thing, that to enter the flow state is how to achieve success as a blogger.

And they’re kind of right.

But, in a sense, I think they’re advocating for people to become addicts.

Remember the flow state rules, and let’s apply them to blogging:

1. There must be little goals throughout the exercise—Satisfaction in good writing + huge views + monetary reward

2. The rules to achieve each goal must be clearly understood—The rules of publishing online + going viral and the resulting rewards

3. The activity must give immediate feedback to the user—Comments, likes, shares, highlights, Mom saying she loved your piece but not all the naughty swears

4. The tasks have to be at least slightly challenging—Do you know how much friggin blogging competition there is these days?!

And there’s one final kicker here. The part I think puts many of the successful bloggers (or addicts) over the top from hobby to obsession.

It’s the randomness of success.

The Almost-Win

B.F. Skinner was an American psychologist and professor at Harvard who came up with a nifty little test called an operant conditioning chamber (colloquially called a Skinner box).

In this little box, a pigeon was rewarded with a nugget of food every time it pecked away at a little lever. Of course, the pigeon learned this behavior through trial and error and repeat scenarios.

It peck peck pecked its way to ever more food after hitting the lever.

But later experiments found a somewhat surprising variation of this. When scientists started messing with the pigeon’s trust, in the sense of when the food would actually be delivered, the results drastically changed.

Oddly, at least to me, the lever-click-to-reward sequence that made the pigeons most likely to keep on peck peck pecking the most was when the food was given at random intervals.

Sometimes the pigeon pecked, but it wasn’t rewarded. Sometimes it did, and the pigeon packed it on.

This type of reward system is called a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement and it exists all around us nowadays. From notifications on your favorite apps to opening up a messaging app just to see if Sally actually did bake those cookies for her grandma last night, even though we all know Sally is lazier than a stuffed pigeon.

The point is, maybe she did make those cookies, maybe she didn’t. Maybe someone did message you on Twitter, maybe they didn’t. Maybe your pellet of food will roll out of the tube after one more lever peck, might as well try and see.

Or if you’re a blogger, maybe that next great piece of yours will go viral.

Write a great blog post. Hit publish.

Crickets.

Try again. Publish.

Crickets.

Try again. Publish.

Spiders!

Sorry, a little 8-legged friend just clamored onto my screen for a second there. No, this time, your article got 1,000 views and made you $10.

Bam!

Time to get back in the flow state, baby. Because surely, as our brain thinks, we’ll be rewarded again with $10. Or even $100. Might we even dare hope for $1000? Let me go ask a serial killer.

The Words Must Flow

In the end, I suppose it doesn’t really matter if writing in a flow state can or should be considered addictive. Even if it was, most people would say it’s a healthy addiction, right?

I’m basically addicted to going to the gym. We’re all addicted to sleep. A few of us even think Sally’s cookies don’t taste like dead pigeon guts and want to keep eating them hand over fist.

Everyone has an addiction. I guess we can only hope to acquire the healthy ones, like writing and expressing ourselves creatively, more than the bad ones.

So, fire me up a hit of that sweet sweet random virality, I can’t wait to hit it again.

---

This message has been brought to you by a non-lizard-king named J.J. Pryor.

👇Click the heart thingy? The algorithm loves it. I love it more.👇