If you've ever lost a weekend to a season of "House of Cards," or feel you can't stop checking your email, you're not alone. According to recent studies, as much as 40 percent of the population suffers from some form of internet addiction.
In fact, modern technology has never been so "efficient and addictive," says Adam Alter, PhD, associate professor of marketing and psychology at New York University's Stern School of Business and author of the 2017 book "Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked."
Alter spoke to the Monitor about his research on why today's technology is so compelling and what psychologists can do to help people use it more sustainably.
What makes today's technology so hard to put down?
Our devices, and the content that fills them, are designed to capture our attention for as long as possible. There are a lot of elements that come together to keep us hooked.
First, their portability makes them perfect delivery vehicles for addictive content. Research suggests that 70 to 75 percent of us can always reach our phones without moving our feet, which is a big reason why we're so tethered to them both physically and psychologically.
Modern technology also lacks the "stopping cues" that older mediums had built-in, such as the end of a book chapter. Social networks, Netflix and games like "World of Warcraft" are effectively bottomless and don't have natural stopping points, making it harder to regulate our use.
Of course, a big one we've known about in psychology for a very long time is variable feedback. Take social media. Like gambling, it has the uncertainty of reward built in. You post content and wait for feedback. Sometimes you'll get a flood of engagement, other times none at all. It's that unpredictability, as well as the social feedback, that keeps people coming back.
Other elements include artificial goals, such as the Fitbit daily quest for 10,000 steps, and cliff-hangers, like the hit podcast Serial, where the unresolved "open loop" of each episode kept millions enthralled.
You mention a study in which 41 percent of respondents in a 1.5-million-person analysis had experienced some kind of behavioral addiction in the past year. When does an innocent Netflix binge or Candy Crush obsession tip into behavioral addiction?
For me, it's any experience that you return to compulsively in the short term, despite the fact that it diminishes your well-being in at least one respect in the long term.
The main aspect is social, where the behavior diminishes the quality of interactions in relationships. Then there's financial, with people compelled to spend more than intended with online shopping or in-app purchases for games.
There's also the physical aspect. There are people who play games for weeks in a row and become very unhealthy. At the very grave end of things are people wandering into the street while playing Pokémon Go or texting while driving and having terrible accidents.
It's a wide spectrum of potential problems, and the test is to a large extent subjective, but the key is that well-being is affected in the long run for it to be considered a behavioral addiction.
Were the psychologists you spoke to for your research seeing tech-related issues show up in their practice?
All of the psychologists and psychiatrists I spoke to said technology is an issue with many of their patients. It may not be the primary reason they are there, but their interactions with technology play a role.
A colleague told me about a teenage client who was recounting a series of conversations. The client talked about these experiences in great length. "He said this, and then I said this," and so on. It was only at the end the client said something that suddenly suggested he wasn't recalling a face-to-face conversation.
To this teenager, there was no real material difference between texting and face-to-face conversations. It was striking to my colleague that digital communication has become default, especially among younger people.
Texting is a very clinical medium; we can pick and choose responses with almost mathematical precision. We don't have the nuance of nonverbal expressions and tone of voice. It's still too early to know the long-term impact of screen-based communication, but I think a role of psychologists is to ensure that we understand when people are communicating face-to-face versus digitally.
What are some practical ways we can loosen the hold of addictive technology?
There is no silver bullet solution, and going cold turkey is nearly impossible. It's really about sustainable use. The best thing we can do is to section off parts of our lives from technology to keep them sacred and tech-free.
A great way to do this is to choose something you have to do every day, like eating dinner. If you commit to keeping this time screen-free, it's hard at first and there's a withdrawal period. But those who try it eventually say their dinnertime conversations are richer and they feel better for the absence of screens. People then tend to expand screen-free time to other parts of their lives. There's nothing particularly catchy or sexy about this advice, but it's powerful.
