advertisement
Behavioral Addiction is ubiquitous, and most of us can’t do without the dopamine rushes that come from social media, shopping, gambling, and even exercise. Adam Alter’s book Irresistible explains the extent and the mechanics of our addictions.
I have a deep interest in addiction. I was a professional poker player for a few years, and noticed that many of the people around me were addicted to poker. I played the game with regard to math and game theory, but others were chasing dopamine rushes. I felt, after a while, that I was exploiting their addiction. I tried to make interventions in the case of a couple of people I became close to, and they agreed with my analysis on a rational level, but remained slaves to their impulses.
Eventually, I saved up enough to quit the game and get back to writing. But I worried, What if, despite my scientific approach to the game and my winning record, I also happen to be addicted? To my relief, I felt no craving to play poker once I quit. But I did need the dopamine. I would sometimes play online chess all day. And I would spend far more time on social media than I should have.
Does that sound familiar to you? If so, you might be a citizen of the fourth-largest country in the world, after China, India and the USA. That’s the United State of Nomophobia. ‘Nomophobia’ is a term that broadly means smartphone addiction, and this notional country is invoked by Adam Alter in his excellent book, Irresistible.
The conventional view of addiction involves substances like cocaine or alcohol or nicotine – but one does not get addicted to substances alone. Irresistible is a book about ‘behavioural addiction’, and details the various mechanisms of such addiction, with suggestions of how to mitigate them. It also begins by describing the extent of such addiction – and the statistics are frightening.
“Most people spend between one and four hours on their phones each day,” Alter writes, “and many far longer.” One study found that its subjects spent “an average of a quarter of their waking lives on their phones – more time than any other daily activity, except sleeping.” Over a lifetime, this amounts to eleven years that you spend on your smartphone. (We tend to underestimate the amount of time we spend on our smartphones, so I’d recommend you download an app called Moment that tracks your smartphone usage. The results will surprise you.)
It’s not just the time that you spend on your smartphone that is disturbing. It is also the impact it has on your attention. On average, we tend to pick up our smart phones three times every hour.
The constant distractions around us, and the addictions that weaponize them, ensure that we can never enter a state of sustained focus. That affects our productivity, as well as the quality of our work.
An important thing to note about such addiction is that it is not a defect of character. It is not a weakness of willpower but the wiring of our brains that causes and sustains addiction. The mechanics of both substance addiction and behaviour addiction are identical: the same regions of the brain are involved, and the same chemicals cause our cravings. One illustration of the biological basis of addiction came from an experiment carried out by the psychologist James Olds and the engineer Peter Milner.
Olds and Milner made their discovery after a blunder on their part. The experiment involved giving electric shocks to rats, through probes inserted in their brains that would release a current when the rat pressed a metal bar. They expected the rats to recoil and scamper away, which all but one rat did. The famous Rat No. 34 kept pressing the bar again and again. He did this repeatedly for 12 hours, ignoring other positive inducements, and then died of exhaustion.
Olds “removed the probe from the rat’s brain and noticed that it was bent.” All the other probes delivered the current into the rat’s mid-brain, but this probe was flawed, and the current went into Rat No. 34’s septum – which Olds called the “pleasure center” of the brain. Humans also have this “pleasure center.” Alter writes:
Altering the chemical balance of the brain can have a similar result. Alter writes about Andrew Lawrence, a professor of neuroscience at Cardiff University, who noticed a range of unexpected addictive behaviours among people who had Parkinson’s Disease. As Lawrence told Alter, “Parkinson’s results from a dopamine deficit, so we treat the disease with drugs that replace dopamine.” Dopamine, of course, is the key chemical involved in addictive behaviour. Lawrence published a review paper in 2004 that contained the following story (in Alter’s words):
It wasn’t just this one man.
That these mechanisms of addiction exist in all of us is just part of the problem. Every addiction benefits a supplier somewhere, and there is now a science to getting people hooked onto a poison of choice, and keeping them hooked. Alter compresses a significant part of his book into one paragraph when he writes:
Alter explains and illustrates each of these ingredients, with examples of how companies, sometimes unwittingly, use one or a few of them to fuel addictive behaviour. (As you might expect, Tetris comes up as an example of a game designed to be addictive. So do slot machines. So does Netflix’s ‘post-play’ feature, that promotes binge watching.) Blaming these suppliers, though, would miss the point: those who design a user-experience can hardly be blamed for wanting to make the experience as pleasurable and habit-forming as they can. The onus has to be on those of us who recognise ourselves as addicts to find a way out of our addictions.
The last section of Alter’s book is about mitigations. We cannot change the way our brains are wired, but we can reduce the probability of being addicted by controlling our ‘Behavioural Architecture’. This involves two elements: the creation of “temptation-free environments”; and measures that “blunt unavoidable temptations.” Alter writes:
Fending off addictive temptations is a new industry, and Alter describes many innovative attempts. There is an app called Facebook Demetricator that hides the likes, comments and retweets on our social media apps. (All those metrics trigger dopamine.) One entrepreneur named Maneesh Sethi created a wristband named Pavlok, that gave its users an electric shock when they indulged in an activity they wanted to control. (This is known as Aversion Therapy. Before inventing Pavlok, Sethi had once hired a girl to slap him every time he went on Facebook.) Even companies have tried innovative ways to save their employees from addiction. Alter writes, about two companies that recognise work and email respectively as potential addictions:
Most companies aren’t as enlightened as the two above, and the onus falls on us citizens of Nomophobia to do something about our addictions. This is not an abstract subject for me – I have been addicted to my smartphone for a long time now, and need to find a way to sort this out. You will be glad to know that I have found a way to do this, and I’ll share it with you in my next book review, next week, this time. For now, do read Adam Alter’s Irresistible to understand the extent of our enslavement.
(This article was originally published on Pragati and has been republished in an arrangement with the BloombergQuint. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint and BloombergQuint neither endorse nor are responsible for them.)
(The Quint, in association with BitGiving, has launched a crowdfunding campaign for an 8-month-old who was raped in Delhi on 28 January 2018. The baby girl, who we will refer to as 'Chhutki', was allegedly raped by her 28-year-old cousin when her parents were away. She has been discharged from AIIMS hospital after undergoing three surgeries, but needs more medical treatment in order to heal completely. Her parents hail from a low-income group and have stopped going to work so that they can take care of the baby. You can help cover Chhutki's medical expenses and secure her future. Every little bit counts. Click here to donate.)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)
Published: undefined