After wishing he spent more quality time with loved ones instead of on his phone, an app developer named Kevin Holesh invented an app called Moment. Moment kept track of how much time one spent using one’s smartphone. After sharing the app, Holesh learned that the average amount of time his users spent on their smartphones was around three hours. As many as 40% of those who play the online game World of Warcraft (or WoW) could be considered addicted to it. Exercise watches and pornography are also common addictions. Tempting and convenient experiences are rampant in society and therefore difficult to escape.

For a behavior to be considered addictive, it must bring more negative consequences than positive ones. Though most people associate addictions with substances like nicotine or alcohol, Alter argues that addictions can be behavioral as well. According to a study by psychology professor Mark Griffiths, around 40% of people have had at least one behavioral addiction in the past year. According to another study, 48% of US university students sampled were Internet addicts. Sixty percent of respondents to yet another study binge-watched television. Finally, Alter reports that there were 280 million smartphone addicts in 2015.

Across many continents and eras, humans have found substances that they become addicted to. Sigmund Freud experimented extensively with cocaine before concluding that its benefits were outweighed by its consequences. After Freud, a former Confederate soldier in the Civil War named John Pemberton believed cocaine might help him overcome a morphine addiction. Pemberton wound up creating what would become Coca-Cola. Though Coca-Cola would go on to become a successful product, Pemberton would find that cocaine only made his morphine addiction worse, rather than alleviating it. It’s tempting to criticize Freud and Pemberton in retrospect for not immediately recognizing cocaine’s negative effects, but Alter suggests that in modern times, technology users are just as naïve to the negative effects of technology.

Children learn many important skills by watching their parents. When parents are distracted by gadgets and devices, children usually follow suit. Teenagers gravitate toward online communication at the expense of face-to-face interaction, and as a result, young peoples’ capacities for empathy are in decline. While many girls spend time interacting online, many young boys are addicted to online games. The creator of the game Flappy Bird saw that his game was extremely addictive for many of his users and chose to pull the game from the market. He then chose to focus on making games that were not addictive.  

While in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, many US soldiers became bored during periods of down time. Heroin was widely available and many soldiers became addicted to it. Hearing word of the problem back in the United States, Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs. According to research, heroin was the most harmful of 10 common drugs. The government attacked the problem both in Vietnam, as well as back in the United States. Against all expectations, however, only 5% of returning soldiers relapsed into heroin addiction once they had come home from Vietnam.

The reason for this phenomenon can be explained by a study conducted by engineer Peter Milner and psychologist James Olds in the 1950s. The study involved a rat that pushed a bar to receive pleasure until it died. A probe in the rat’s brain had been misplaced, and the pleasure center of the rat’s brain had been activated. The pleasure the rat felt was apparently addictive. Other rats showed similar patterns when their own pleasure centers were activated. Furthermore, these rats showed signs of addiction similar to rats who were given alcohol and methamphetamines. What the study proved was that circumstance and environment were enough to make an addict out of a rat. Another study involving a monkey showed similar results.

The reason the Vietnam veterans did not relapse upon returning to the US was that they were no longer in the environment—Vietnam—in which they had first formed their addictions. While a monkey showed signs of addiction when it was put back into its cage, Vietnam veterans were not forced to go back to Vietnam, and so remained free of heroin in the United States. The cues that might have triggered them back into their old habits were missing once they returned home.

A former gaming addict named Isaac Vaisberg further demonstrates this principle. During high school and college, Vaisberg went through periods of extreme addiction to the online game World of Warcraft. His binging interrupted his schoolwork. He was forced to leave American University in Washington DC to attend reSTART, a treatment facility for gaming and Internet addiction. At the end of the six-week program, Vaisberg ignored advice and went back to Washington DC, where he binged again, spending five weeks alone in his apartment playing WoW. Vaisberg went back to reSTART, but after completing the six weeks of the inpatient program, he joined a seven-month program that provided outpatient support. Eventually, Vaisberg managed his WoW addiction, help at the reSTART center, and work a part-time job.

Addiction, Alter suggests, affects many people, not simply a “wretched minority.” Its mechanisms are complicated; addiction can often serve to superficially treat problems such as social isolation and stress. 

Two thirds of all adults are affected by chronic sleep deprivation, a malady whose symptoms include poor brain functioning, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and much more. One reason sleep deprivation is so common is that the blue light emitted by screens signals to the brain that it is still daytime. According to neuroscientist Claire Gillian, both drugs and rewarding behaviors (such as playing video games) engage similar patterns in the brain. Though substances might have more direct effects than behaviors, both “work by the same mechanism on the same systems” (71). Namely, both types of pleasurable behavior release dopamine in the brain. The more one engages in certain pleasures, however, the less dopamine the brain produces. This in turn means that a person requires more and more stimulation to achieve diminishing levels of pleasure.

Alter argues that a key component of addiction involves the use of a substance or behavior “as a salve for our psychological troubles” (73). According to a writer on addiction named Maia Szalavitz, a person cannot be considered an addict until they seek out a substance or behavior because it is necessary to their emotional stability. Szalavitz adds that the throes of addiction are comparable to the throes of being love, but without love’s nourishing qualities.

The idea that the term “addiction” can be applied to legal drugs and behaviors like gambling did not catch on until after the 1970s. According to psychologist Stanton Peele, addiction involves attachments to experiences that are harmful to a person. Because even attachments involving substances have behavioral elements (such as when a heroin user inserts a needle and heats up the drug with a lighter), Peele dismisses the distinction between behavioral and substance addictions. Ultimately, the American Psychiatric Association included the term “behavioral addiction” in the 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM).

For Parkinson’s patients, doctors often prescribe drugs that replace dopamine to help with tremors. Dopamine works on these tremors, but is also pleasurable to the patients. Some develop addictions to the medications while also developing addictions to certain behaviors. For example, Parkinson’s patients might “report problem gambling, problem shopping, binge-eating, and hyper-sexuality” (83). Such behaviors are arguably those that came most naturally to the patients from earlier periods in their lives. Once again, this example serves to illustrate that the distinction between behavior and substance addictions is often blurry.

An experiment involving rats whose brains were prevented from producing dopamine proved that it was possible to want a drug without necessary liking it. In fact, it is often the case for someone who is addicted to something (Facebook, for example) that he or she might hate the thing they are addicted to while still wanting it. This can also be the case in poor romantic matchups in which someone recognizes that their partner is not good for them, but continues to want them anyway. Certain behavioral cues can fire up the same brain mechanisms as illicit drugs. In both situations, one’s dopamine levels rise. In both situations, too, the addict is usually trying to assuage psychological discomfort, or meet a psychological need, but is doing so using a mechanism that is harmful to them overall.