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According to addiction expert Dr Anna Lembke, our smartphones are making us dopamine junkies, with each swipe, like and tweet feeding our habit. So how do we beat our digital dependency
Dr Anna Lembke, a world-leading expert on addiction, is concerned about my “phone problem”. During our interview I confess, in passing, to having an unhealthy attachment to my iPhone, checking it every few minutes like a compulsive tic (sound familiar?) Lembke is having none of it. She wants me to abstain from using it for at least 24 hours by locking it in a drawer and going out. The first 12 hours will be filled with anxiety and Fomo, but as time unfolds, I’ll experience a sense of “real freedom”, will gain insight into my relationship with my digital companion and will “resolve to get back to using it a little differently”, she says, speaking with a soothing yet firm tone.
I’d do well to heed her advice. As the chief of Stanford University’s dual diagnosis addiction clinic (which caters to people with more than one disorder), Lembke has spent the past 25-plus years treating patients addicted to everything from heroin, gambling and sex to video games, Botox and ice baths. The bespectacled 53-year-old psychiatrist has written an influential book about the prescription-drug epidemic, delivered Ted Talks on America’s opioid crisis and appeared as a talking head in the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma to discuss the drug that is social media. She’s a whiz on why we get hooked on things – and how we can enjoy pleasurable things in healthier doses.
Her new book, Dopamine Nation , emphasises that we are now all addicts to a degree. She calls the smartphone the “modern-day hypodermic needle”: we turn to it for quick hits, seeking attention, validation and distraction with each swipe, like and tweet. Since the turn of the millennium, behavioural (as opposed to substance) addictions have soared. Every spare second is an opportunity to be stimulated, whether by entering the TikTok vortex, scrolling Instagram, swiping through Tinder or bingeing on porn, online gambling and e-shopping.
“We’re seeing a huge explosion in the numbers of people struggling with minor addictions,” says Lembke.
That has consequences. Although we have endless founts of fun...
