Technology
Brain Rot: Internet addiction
In this episode of Brain Rot, we explore the complex relationship between technology and internet addiction. Through personal stories and expert insights, we examine the signs of addiction, its impact...
Brain Rot: Internet addiction
Technology •
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Interactive Transcript
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This is an ABC podcast.
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Christopher and Pixie's face were the it couple of the 80s.
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or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Okay, a thought experiment.
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You've left your phone at home for the day.
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How does that make you feel?
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Upset?
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Stress?
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In different?
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The answer might go some way to showing just how attached
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you feel to your phone or how much you need it.
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And that is the topic today on all in the mind
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from ABC Radio National,
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because it's episode four of BrainRot,
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a special series about your relationship with tech.
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In this episode, we're digging into internet addiction.
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Here's the show.
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If you're one of the world's 5.5 billion internet users,
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and let's face it, you probably are,
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then you already know what I mean when I say
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there's something addictive about being online.
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I'll be watching Netflix and also watching,
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like, BrainRot at the same time.
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If you don't have your phone on you for an outing or something,
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I'm very much like, oh, where is it?
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I'm jumping with my phone.
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I get like, sad to notifications as well.
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I find myself, you know, really not wanting to scroll,
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but it's just kind of like an addictive thing.
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But how do you know when it's gone too far?
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The moment for me was when I realized that it was destroying me,
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I was just losing days and days and days.
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I might have a night where I would just stay up
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till like 2, 3, 4 a.m. and then my child wakes me up at like 6.
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So I felt hypnotized, I guess you could say mesmerized,
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that'd be the word mesmerized.
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I'm Angela Voipier, the ABC's National Technology Reporter,
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and this is BrainRot, a series from science friction
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about how tech is changing our brains.
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Today, in episode four, the surprisingly controversial world
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of internet addiction.
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Most people who use digital media
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will not go on to develop a severe and life-threatening
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digital media addiction, but a vulnerable subset will.
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At the same time, there is a live debate
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over whether internet addiction exists at all.
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We don't yet have an official diagnosis
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that's a smartphone addiction in the way
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that you can have an alcohol addiction or a gambling addiction.
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So is internet addiction real?
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If it does exist, what are the signs you've got it?
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And how do you recover?
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Well, I was probably a late starter.
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This is Julian. She's 68 now,
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and she didn't even have home internet until 2020.
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I initially got on to the internet at the library
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to look up real estate, because I was thinking and moving.
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And even then, I was aware that I seemed to sort of like
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lingering on it just for its own sake.
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She lives by the coast, and I used to go walking on the beach.
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And I'd reach a point where I'd just be on the beach thinking,
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I want to go to the library, I want to go to the library,
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I want to be on the internet, I don't want to be wasting my time at the beach.
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By this point, she'd moved on from house hunting to social media.
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I went to a school reunion and they said,
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we're all on Facebook, get on to Facebook, I got on to Facebook,
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and just fell in love with it.
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And became obsessed very quickly with Facebook,
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obsessed with my posts and how many likes or not likes
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that we're getting obsessed with what other people were doing.
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And for some reason, that just felt fantastic.
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So when the library's shut during lockdown,
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she got wifi at home.
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And that's when things got out of hand.
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It was the time factor. I thought, I can't stop.
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I'm waking up every morning thinking I'm not going on it today.
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And I do things like put it in a drawer or force myself
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to not use it till lunchtime or put it in the garage.
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She'd always break in the end.
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And not necessarily for editing special either.
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So I kept watching this short video of Elon Musk
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being booed at Silicon Valley.
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I'm here in a world of...
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CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
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Did I have no interest in Elon Musk?
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I have no interest in him at all.
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I mean, if I think about it now,
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how I kind of felt inside, it was this sort of glassy-eyed fascination.
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The problem wasn't so much what she was doing online.
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It was just that she couldn't tear herself away.
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And then I'd go, but I'm just going to look up this one thing.
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And then I'd look up that one thing.
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And then before I'd know it was dark, the day was over.
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I hadn't fed my cats properly. I hadn't looked after myself.
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I'd put off going to the Lou. I was showering less.
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Just my whole life was just diminishing to me and the screen on my kitchen bench.
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I was just losing days and days and days.
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Gillian's also a recovering alcoholic.
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She struggled with it in her 20s.
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And the way she was using tech four decades later
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felt familiar in the worst possible way.
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I just felt as if the gates of hell were sort of clanging shut on me
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and that I couldn't do anything about it.
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That's what was most terrifying.
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It was like I could see what was happening, but I couldn't stop it.
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In 2022, she started looking for support groups.
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And after a few false starts, it's dark.
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That's where she met Kate.
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Well, so the second meeting that I went to was actually an open meeting.
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It's called a beginner meeting.
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You're invited at a specific time if you want to introduce yourself.
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But I identified myself and where I live.
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And at the end of the programme, this person piped up and said,
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I live nearby and we compare actual suburbs that turned out we live maybe,
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I don't know, 20, 25 minutes drive from each other.
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Which was quite amazing because a lot of the members are international.
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So they took it offline.
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It's a bit of a luxury to be able to meet up with somebody for coffee
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as we do every few weeks.
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And discussing person face to face rather than on technology
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is a really important part of my recovery.
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I've got to say, yeah.
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At 37, Kate's a slightly more typical candidate for screen over use than Gillian was.
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But things only got really bad for her after her kids were born.
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My child would wake me up for night feeds.
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And then I'd be awake anyway.
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And then I would start watching reality television on my phone for hours.
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So my child would be back asleep.
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And I'd still be watching, I don't know, love island on my phone.
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So I think that's where it started spiraling.
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And I got very bad mental health because of that.
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Most people wouldn't necessarily know that I have that addiction.
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But I was functioning on extremely low amounts of sleep.
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So I might have one or two good nights of sleep per week.
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But then I might have a night where I would just stay up to like 2, 3, 4 am.
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And then my child wakes me up at like 6.
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And even though there are two generations apart,
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there are some striking parallels in their story.
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Like Gillian, Kate's problem wasn't the content itself.
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You know how some people get into conspiracy theories around news.
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I sort of got into conspiracy theories around celebrities.
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I remember watching like a lot of body language analysis of like Prince Harry
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and Meghan Markle's Oprah interview.
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That's just like an example.
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But like I would get very into the conspiracy theories of trying to speculate
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about what was the internal lives of famous people.
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The real issue was the lost time.
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The time was just one long whole day rather than particular days with boundaries of this is when you sleep.
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So I think when you dismantle all those sort of normal markers of time
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then it's hard to know for me how much time I've spent on things
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that I would imagine that when I was in my addiction it would have been like,
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yeah, well over 10, 12 hours a day.
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Listening to Kate and Gillian, it's easy to forget that internet addiction
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isn't an official diagnosis.
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So if the problem was real enough to take over their lives like that,
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then why not?
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The medical consensus, the medical literature, leading medical organizations
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make it very clear that digital media addiction is real.
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This is Anna Lemke.
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She's a professor of psychiatry in addiction medicine at Stanford University.
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And as you can hear, a big believer in the existence of internet and screen addictions.
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Even if psychiatry's key diagnostic manual known as the DSM doesn't agree.
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Gaming disorder is provisional in the DSM, but social media addiction, pornography addiction,
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all the other kinds of internet addictions are not yet in the DSM.
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And actually that means very little.
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What it means is that the DSM has not yet caught up with the science.
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Because the science is robust, that people are getting addicted to the internet,
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to technology, to digital media, and in some cases developing even life threatening addictions.
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So I think it's just a matter of time before it's a diagnostic code in the DSM.
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It's not unusual for the DSM to lag behind the science.
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We only get a new one every five to seven years.
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We're currently up to DSM five, published in 2022.
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And there's no timeline yet on the release of the next one.
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But there is a debate over whether internet addiction should be added.
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You can probably guess what Annelemki thinks about it.
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Many of these platforms were made to be addictive, meaning we're made to make it frictionless and easy for us to access the content.
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And very difficult to get off because of the reinforcing nature of the medium itself.
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Most people who use digital media will not go on to develop a severe and life threatening digital media addiction.
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But a vulnerable subset will.
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And it's probably going to shake out at around the same 10% that we see for addiction to drugs and alcohol.
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Basically, there are two broad categories of addiction.
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There's addiction to a substance such as alcohol, and then there's addiction to a behavior such as gambling.
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But all addiction boils down to the same thing.
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Our tireless quest for dopamine.
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Basically, when we do something rewarding or pleasurable, or just simply something that our brain recognizes as important for survival,
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our brain releases dopamine in the reward pathway.
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The reward pathway is the brain network responsible for processing pleasure.
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The more dopamine that's released and the faster that it's released, the more likely that substance or behavior is to be potentially addictive for a given organism.
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And the reason it's called the reward pathway is that it's evolved to reward survival behaviors, like eating, drinking, and sex.
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The problem is it evolved for a way less abundant environment than the one we currently find ourselves in.
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We're all wired to reflexively approach pleasure and avoid pain.
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And it's what's kept us alive for most of humanity because for most of humanity we lived in a world of scarcity and ever-present danger.
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The problem is that now our ancient wiring is mismatched for this modern ecosystem of overwhelming overabundance.
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We're wired to survive, to find food clothing, shelter, and mate.
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And these are deeply conserved parts of our brains that haven't changed across species for millions of years.
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But we humans have changed the environment.
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And as a result, we're really struggling with unprecedented problems of compulsive overconsumption, even in people who are not necessarily innately or genetically predisposed to addiction.
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And the risk with abundance is that having too much of a good thing can effectively fry your reward pathway and set you up for a dopamine shortage in the long term.
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What happens over time is that we build a tolerance to this sort of dopamine release and this pleasure.
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And so what we find is that we need more and more of a certain substance or behavior to get that same pleasurable experience that we're seeking.
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This is Anastasia Heronas. She's a clinical psychologist and the author of a book called The Dopamine Brain.
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So there's a few key features that constitute an addiction. So one of them is salience.
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So this is essentially the idea that that behavior, that thing in our life that we feel hooked to is very prevalent in our mind.
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We keep thinking about it and we, it pops into our mind in day to day life.
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So if I'm sitting working, you know, thinking about checking social media or my phone will pop into my mind.
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There's some degree of mood modification. So when I use a substance or I use a behavior, my mood will change as a result of it.
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And we do see that with smartphones. There's some sort of tolerance that can build.
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So I need more, I need to use more, I need to experience in some way more of it to feel the feeling that I'm seeking.
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And then also this sense of withdrawal. So when I stop using the substance, when I stop engaging in the behavior,
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I feel the urge to go back to it. I feel these withdrawal. So it's the idea of if you leave your phone at home or you can't find it for a moment,
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you get that panic that sets in and that urge to sort of pick it up and look at it again.
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If you're lucky, that's not you. But if it is, Anastasia says you're not alone.
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What we see clinically is very much patterns and features of someone who might be addicted to a smartphone
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that are very similar to someone who might be addicted to something else that we can diagnose.
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So it's not yet a diagnosable condition. But the evidence emerging is certainly telling us that children, teens and adults can certainly become hooked
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and experience some sort of harm as a result of using their phone.
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Of course, there's another argument that the science doesn't stack up just yet.
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I think it's too early to tell right now.
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Dameshi is an associate professor at Michigan State University, specializing in behavioral addictions and social media use.
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There really aren't that many studies that have been done. First of all, it's hard to just measure social media use.
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Some of my studies I've found that people sometimes overestimate by as much as two to three times the amount of what they're actually using when I look at the evidence.
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And the amount that they've been using it on their iPhones.
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Then there's the question of what we're actually doing online, which is an important one to answer because a video chat with your mom is substantially different to doom scrolling on TikTok.
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But the research doesn't always make a distinction.
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I do think that there needs to be a much more nuanced take on it, understanding also as well what people are doing on the platforms
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because there is some research indicating that you can use social media one way and not have problem and actually get lots of benefits,
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but you can use social media another way, then you actually have more negative effects of social media.
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Da also says the jury is still out as to where the social media is actually causing all the harm it's often blamed for.
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It could be that the problematic social media use is driving the mood disorder symptoms,
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but it could also be the other way around that someone has higher anxiety, sometimes are higher depressive symptoms.
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And as a result, they then develop more problematic social media use.
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The research is almost in that state of really trying to define what it is to have a phone addiction
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and it's not necessarily the phone itself, but the app specifically.
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So is it a phone addiction? Is it a social media addiction? And what does that kind of look like?
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Especially when we're looking at such a huge majority of the population who report that they have some sort of negative relationship with their phone.
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So I think in the literature and the research, we're still in those days of trying to define and figure it out so that we can maybe come up with those more clinical and official diagnoses to be able to develop official treatments for it as well.
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Our understanding of addictions has definitely changed whereby we have a better understanding of the existence of behavioral addiction.
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So it used to be that drugs alcohol tobacco, we understood that you put a substance in your body, it affects how your body and your brain work,
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but it took a little bit more time for behavioral addictions to sort of be as recognized, but I'll also say it's taken time for behavioral addictions like gambling, pornography, etc.
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to also not have the same level of shame and stigma attached to them because with drugs and alcohol people can understand you put something in your body there for you get addicted to it, but with behaviors,
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the general population can sometimes view it as like, we'll just stop, just stop playing the pokies or just stop doing that thing and you'll be fine and it's not that simple.
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Many technologies have been vilified when they enter popular society like the television TV will rot your brain, right?
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Or light bulbs, right? Like light bulb is not natural to have light bulbs and to be able to stay up all night, usually there's a wave of this pushback on this technological advancement.
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Sometimes it's justified, other times it's not, and I do think we're in one of these stages right now where we have to do better and try to understand really what the technology is really doing.
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I'm someone that believes in meta-analyses and I like to see not just one study come out, but I want to see studies replicated multiple times with different populations and different ages and different methods.
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I would like to see a meta-analyses done on the body of work that for me would then conclusively demonstrate the effects.
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I think there's some compelling evidence right now, but I think if I were to discuss this with other researchers who might be talking about their fears about the technology, I think they would agree with me that some of the evidence hasn't reached the levels of the technology.
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Proof such as meta-analyses, and there are some that have been published, but much of the meta-analyses have been published with correlational and not causal studies, and that's why I am hesitant to make such bold claims.
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On all in the mind from ABC Radio National, this is BrainRot, a special series about your relationship with tech, and this week, shaking the habit when it comes to smartphones.
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It is a growing field of research, but the results are very much still taking shape.
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In the meantime, people around the world are going to keep calling it addiction anyway, either because that's how it feels, or maybe because the horse is already bolted, and that's just what we call it now.
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Someone says, oh, I'm so addicted to Instagram. They're not really addicted to it. They're just saying that they're spending a lot of time on it, and maybe they think they should be spending less time on it.
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Someone could say that the same way someone else says, oh, I'm addicted to chocolate, or I'm addicted to ice cream.
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And so I do think that there is a little bit of, yeah, this disconnect between what the research is actually showing and what the common everyday experience of people using these platforms is like.
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Either way, addiction is the label that's starting to stick, which means if you want to help limiting your tech use, it's probably going to come in the form of addiction treatment.
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Using existing frameworks from that field.
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I first got involved in this field of internet addiction back in the 90s when I moved up to the Seattle area and opened my private practice there.
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This is Hillary Cash. She's a psychologist who spent the past three decades treating what she describes as internet addiction.
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I opened that practice in 1994 and one of my earliest clients was a young man of 25 who was severely addicted to an online video game, a Dungeons and Dragons early game.
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So this young man had already lost a job at Microsoft because of his severe addiction.
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He was married, but he was in the process of losing his marriage and a second job.
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I at the time knew nothing about the internet except what I might have heard on public radio.
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I didn't own a computer. It really was all a mystery to me.
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To be fair, it was a mystery to most people in 1994, but Hillary was so interested in screen addiction after that first client that it led her to open an inpatient center 14 years later in 2008 in order to treat more acute cases.
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It's called restart and these days it's located on a rural property near a small town west of Seattle in Washington state.
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When our clients come, they are abstinent from screens and the internet for three months or longer.
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And we believe that that period of abstinence of total abstinence is extremely important.
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And they are during that time, they are learning skills, basic life skills, like how to cook, how to make a bed, how to do it their own laundry, many of them did not know those basic things.
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And all during that time where they're getting individual therapy, they're doing lots and lots and lots of group therapy and they have time to read, to reflect all of which is rather difficult for them.
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They are not used to doing anything except going online. We want them to be able to entertain themselves without the internet and connect with other people without the internet.
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And if it sounds a lot like drug rehab, you're not imagining things. It's a similar model.
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The brain is going through the process that is recognized as withdrawal and that means that they're more anxious, more irritable, more bored than they were before they came.
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They're not sleeping well. They are having vivid dreams, often high levels of anxiety.
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And so the brain is just slowly coming back to normal function.
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After that first intensive phase, the three month detox, Hillary's clients are instructed to join a 12 step program specifically designed for internet addiction and attend meetings twice a week.
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It's modeled on a more famous 12 step program, alcoholics anonymous. In fact, Kate and Jillian attend a version of the same program.
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It came about after a huge number of attempts to rein in my technology use by myself.
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So I tried everything from giving my laptop to somebody, trying to get a phone that was more laggy, installing lots of blocking software on different devices,
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reading every single book under the sun about digital minimalism. And none of that was sufficient.
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And I must have put the right search term eventually in found internet and technology, addicts, anonymous.
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And I did use just some of their resources off their website to start with because while my self-esteem was at an all time low, my social anxiety was at an all time high.
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So I did not really desire to meet a bunch of strangers on an internet site.
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But one day I just saw that there was a meeting happening like five minutes from when it was and it ended up being the best possible outcome.
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Internet and technology addicts anonymous or ITAA is pretty new. It's been around for less than a decade.
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But it works in pretty much the same way as other 12 step programs.
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Which is that there is somebody who's chairing the meeting that day. They have no more authority than anybody else, but they're just chairing the meeting.
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And then there might be some readings or a topic and people share their, essentially, their experience, strength and hope.
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So I was sitting in this meeting, listening to other people talk about internet and technology, the way I'd been sitting in AA meetings for years, listening to people talk about alcoholism and talking about alcoholism myself.
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And so over the past six months I've been a member there attending the online meetings.
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And it's just recovered my sense of self-confidence and also started to uncover my sense of purpose and service in this world and just feel so much healthier about myself.
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There aren't really reliable statistics on how well this kind of addiction focus treatment actually works for internet over use.
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Although Kate and Jillian clearly rate it pretty highly. Apart from anything, it's tough to measure because every person has a different definition for internet sobriety.
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That's less dubious than it sounds when you remember that total abstinence isn't really an option. And it's 2025, you're probably still going to need an email address.
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For the time being, Kate is managing to avoid celebrity gossip online.
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I haven't used any video streaming for instance for like over three months and other things since I joined the program.
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So it's just like slowly tipping away at what's healthy for me, but it's still a process of discovery.
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You suddenly might have all this empty space that you don't know what to do with.
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So like internet use was my hobby for 20 years. So I've had to find other things.
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Meanwhile, Jillian has been what's sometimes called internet sober for more than two years.
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I take nature walks, I certainly walk on the beach again.
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If anything, she's even happier outdoors than she was before.
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My love of nature has returned tenfold. I contemplate nature at a deeper level. I will, it sounds really ridiculous.
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I'll look at the lighting leaves, I'll look at the light on the water, I'll look at individual leaves.
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I study nature in a way that means I see it in much more detail and much more depth than I used to see it.
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It's exactly the kind of activity we're involved for if you ask Annelamb Keene.
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So the time that we live in now is sometimes referred to as the Anthropocene.
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Anthro for human and postene for era that we live in.
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And the reason that it's called the Anthropocene is because it's the first time in the history of humanity.
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That our actions have changed the ecosystem on such a scale that we're really living in our co-constructed niches as opposed to living in nature.
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But hey, apparently we're pretty resilient as a space-ease.
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I think the pendulum is already shifting, so I'm super hopeful. Humans are adaptable.
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We tend to adapt in an extreme pendulum swing.
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We never quite get it in the middle, but we don't stay at one extreme for very long.
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That is it for this episode of the BrainRot series, which we've showcased over the past few weeks and next week is the last episode in the series.
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Then I will be back with all new episodes of All in the Mind.
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BrainRot's producer is Fiona Pepper. The senior producer is James Bullin and sound engineer is Tim Simons.
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The series originally aired on our sister show, Science Friction.
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Next week, in episode five.
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You know, something clicked and I was like, oh my god, I am wasting my life.
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I'm just sitting in my bed wasting away. I'm 14 years old and the world is so big.
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And I've decided to just bend my hold down the phone. I need to do something about this.
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It's been really nice and it's also kind of funny that now I'm the one who's like at family dinner.
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And like, mom, get off of Facebook because it used to be James' in Get Off of Instagram.
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And if you want more on smartphones and staying focused, we have other great episodes on that topic.
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You can find those recommendations in the show notes.
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From ABC Radio National, I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening.
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I'll catch you next time.
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Topics Covered
internet addiction
digital media addiction
technology and mental health
screen addiction
social media obsession
brain and technology
dopamine and addiction
impact of technology on life
ABC podcast
BrainRot series
technology recovery
mental health and tech
addictive technology
digital media effects
internet usage habits