Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, reported to the Wall Street Journal that we are facing a new and dangerous form of addiction these days – an addiction served up by digital technology:
Dopamine.
Dopamine, the pleasure/pain drug that lives in our brains, giving us a “reward” for eating certain things or doing certain things that are survival-positive (or would have been, 100,000 years ago), is our new drug of choice, she maintains.
Dopamine dings in our brains when we ingest good food; when we have sex; when we find something we’ve lost and have been looking for. Dopamine dings occur whenever we have a good or happy or productive experience. It’s a behavior modification trick of evolution, reinforcing actions and decisions that are good for us.
The trouble, of course, is that our dopamine dings evolved in an environment where pleasures and pain occurred for very different reasons, and both happy and dangerous experiences looked nothing like they do today.
Most dopamine-triggering things, today, have nothing to do with our survival, in our super-abundant and super-safe world.
Today, we can trigger our dopamine response, not just with healthy food, but with cocaine and refined sugar. We can trigger it, not just with a sunrise or a bright moon, but with the dazzle of video games and the brain-tickles of Facebook and Twitter.
Lembke tells of a patient she saw recently, a young man suffering from near-suicidal depression. This young man had, by all appearances, a good life – he really had nothing to be depressed about. After some investigation, she learned that he was a video game addict; he played hours and hours, every day, giving his brain an unending stream of dopamine hits.
When the brain goes heavy into dopamine stimulation for extended periods, it will counter by trying to restore homeostasis – it will depress itself. The young man’s depression was an automatic balance-restoring mechanism. The solution was obvious, and it worked: cut way back on the video games! It worked; he felt better than he had in years.
The danger in any addiction is that once it’s in place, its indulgence is no longer a way to feel high – it becomes the only way to feel normal, because “the brain’s set-point for pleasure changes,” Lembke said. “As soon as we stop, we experience the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance: anxiety, irritability, insomnia, dysphoria and mental preoccupation with using, otherwise known as craving.”
Video games are the standard-bearer for this kind of addiction in the digital domain, and this perhaps explains why the video game market hauls in more billions annually than even the motion picture industry; but it is by no means the only digital addiction. There is, Lembke notes, “a whole new class of electronic addictions that didn’t exist until about 20 years ago: texting, surfing the web, online shopping and gambling. These digital products are engineered to be addictive, using flashing lights, celebratory sounds and ‘likes’ to promise ever-greater rewards just a click away.”
But the rewards are costing us more than we’re getting in return.
“Rates of depression, anxiety, physical pain and suicide are increasing all over the world, especially in rich nations,” she reported. “According to the World Happiness Report, which ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be, Americans reported being less happy in 2018 than they were in 2008. Other wealthy countries saw similar decreases in self-reported happiness scores, including Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Japan, New Zealand and Italy. The Global Burden of Disease study found that the number of new cases of depression world-wide increased 50% between 1990 and 2017, with the highest increases in regions with the highest income, especially North America.”
What do we do with this?
“Not everyone plays videogames, but just about all of us have a digital drug of choice, and it probably involves using a smartphone—the equivalent of the hypodermic needle for a wired generation,” Lembke wrote. “Reducing phone use is notoriously difficult, because at first it causes the brain’s pleasure-pain balance to tilt to the side of pain, making us feel restless and cranky. But if we can keep it up long enough, the benefits of a healthier dopamine balance are worth it. Our minds are less preoccupied with craving, we are more able to be present in the moment, and life’s little unexpected joys are rewarding again.”
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