Are You A Digital Addict?

By Karen and Erica

Do you suffer from digital addiction? We have observed younger people who seem unable to leave their phones alone for more than five minutes. But apparently we’re getting hooked, too.

What is digital, or computer, or social media, addiction?

Digital addiction can come in many forms, including excessive interaction with social media, internet gaming, online gambling, online shopping and online pornography. As with gambling and pornography, the internet can amplify addictions by increasing accessibility. Some people can be especially vulnerable to falling into digital addiction, like “those with high levels of internet use for socialization, education and entertainment,” said Psychiatry.org.

Many of us have children who are at the forefront of the era of digital users, but women our age grew up without tech experience. We have not been as much use to our children as we might have been. The world changed in fundamental ways and they, digital natives, seem always to know more than we do. We are starting to catch on, apparently, but unfortunately we are starting to catch up, as well. 

Teens and young adults are some of the groups most addicted to the internet, but there has also been a stark rise in addiction for baby boomers. A recent report found that approximately 50% of the mostly baby boomer–polled sample “reported spending more than three hours daily on their smartphones” and “roughly 20% spent more than five hours per day,” said Newsweek. This suggests that a “notable portion of the Baby Boomer generation exhibits patterns associated with digital addiction,” the report said.

Why is social media so addictive? Because it is designed to be addictive.

These apps can cause the release of large amounts of dopamine into our brains’ reward pathway all at once, just like heroin, or meth, or alcohol. They do that by amplifying the feel-good properties that attract humans to each other in the first place.

Then there’s novelty. Dopamine is triggered by our brain’s search-and-explore functions, telling us, “Hey, pay attention to this, something new has come along.” Add to that the artificial intelligence algorithms that learn what we’ve liked before and suggest new things that are similar but not exactly the same, and we’re off and running.

Indeed, even some developers think social media has gone too far. The introduction of Sora, OpenAI’s new free text-to-video application allows users to  create and use videos, that appear to record human activities but are entirely AI generated. OpenAI sys you can turn your ideas into videos with hyperreal motion and sound. Watch  the OpenAI video describing what Sora2 can do. It is pretty amazing. And really fun. And allows us to forget reality altogether..

That’s also a growing concern among developers who say there are now too many social networking apps that have a poor understanding of social dynamics. Like Sora, they are “inherently antisocial and nihilistic,” says Rudy Fraser, the creator of Blacksky, the custom feed and moderation service for Black users on Bluesky. “They’ve given up on fostering real human connection and are looking to profit on supplying people with artificial connection and manufactured dopamine.”

For many of us, when our children were quite small, their schools began giving them homework on iPads. We thought it seemed a reasonable idea–save paper and all that–but we did notice that there was no instruction on how to prevent them from wandering away from homework into other, more entertaining, sites. We kept an eye on what they were up to, but we suspect the basic lesson was learned–the internet is a huge, critical part of life, with amazing entertainment, and the grownups don’t really have a way to chaperone you.

Social media has become an integral component of everyday life. Instant entertainment, information, and connectivity make social media appealing. For some individuals, having access to these platforms transforms into an addiction. Social media addiction is characterized by excessive and compulsive usage that affects daily functioning and overall well-being. It encompasses more than just spending an excessive amount of time online; it involves compulsively checking for updates, feeling anxious when offline, and suffering from negative impacts on real-life relationships and responsibilities 

And then, of course, came COVID lockdowns. We don’t blame anyone-–everyone was panicked by the onset of COVID. But the isolation of lockdowns was bad for all of us, on many levels, including by further inculcating the internet into our lives, in critical ways.

Adhering to adequate physical separation involves maintaining a distance of 6 feet from others during face‐to‐face interactions. On the other hand, social distancing entails remaining at home and limiting outside activities, which leads individuals to communicate virtually. The quarantine has several repercussions that require addressing individuals’ mental well‐being, such as the manifestation of dread and worry, melancholy and restlessness, sleep disruptions, anger, and even aggressiveness. 

Another significant consequence of quarantine is the reliance on the Internet for remote task management and obtaining information about the disease, including its prevalence, risks, and mortality. This increased exposure to information can potentially instill fear of the coronavirus. However, it is important to note that there is a risk of receiving inaccurate information from unreliable sources. 

We think all of us are still overcoming COVID-imposed antisocial tendencies. We are learning to be social once again—by which we mean learning to interact with warm-blooded humans. We no longer need to conduct our entire lives online. We can fall in love with real humans; we need not fall in love with a bot.

We think warm-blooded humans are much more fun to hang with than bots. But bots can be quite delightful in the way they tell us exactly what we want to hear-–that we are brilliant and beautiful, and that what we want to do is exactly what we should do. We don’t hear that enough from most of our partners and friends, right? But it’s not real. Some of us do need to face up to the fact that we, or one of our loved ones, rely more on the remote world than is good for us. Whether digital dependence is ultimately recognized as an actual illness, the NIH says health professionals should advance public education, diagnosis and treatment of this important disorder.

What can we do? Apparently there are those who treat internet addiction, and these are some of their approaches: 

• Talk therapy is almost always incorporated into the treatment of Internet addiction. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and group therapy are common.
• Medication may be used to help manage symptoms of underlying mental illness and control intrusive thoughts about going online.
• Exercise may be incorporated into Internet addiction treatment to ease the effects of reduced dopamine in the brain resulting from restricted Internet use.
• Internet addiction treatment aims to create boundaries and balance around Internet use rather than eliminating it entirely. However, if there is a certain app, game, or site that seems to be the focus of the addiction, stopping its use may be part of treatment.

Have you haad experience with digital addiction, among friends or family? Do you have advice?