Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
How much time did you spend on your phone this week? It’s okay; you don’t actually have to tell me. But chances are good, like really good, that the number is higher than you’d like it to be: according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center, more than half of U.S. adults say they spend too much time on their phones. Folks under 50 are especially dissatisfied with their device usage: 64 percent of adults aged 30 to 49 think their screen use is out of hand, and 70 percent of adults aged 18 to 29 say the same.
Setting aside the survey data and just speaking personally, I think that these days, you’re either someone who actively avoids using screened devices, someone who knows they use screened devices too much or someone who’s currently in deep denial.
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There are now apps, physical phone accessories and even pared-down smartphones designed to help us curb our reflexive swiping and scrolling. But some people are taking things a step further by treating screen addiction with the same kind of programming traditionally reserved for substance abuse.
Scientific American associate editor Allison Parshall explored the new frontier of screen addiction in a feature for the latest issue of the magazine. She’s here to tell us what she’s learned about our dependence on technology—and what we can do to take back control.
Allison, thanks so much for coming on to chat. It’s always great to have you.
Allison Parshall: Thank you for having me.
Feltman: So I’d love to start by asking how you, you know, first got interested in writing this piece.
Parshall: I don’t know if you saw there were a lot of court cases to do with social media addiction earlier this year. They’re still ongoing, but, like, some of the biggest headlines were hitting. Basically Meta and Google were on trial from plaintiffs who said that their products were addictive and that they’d addicted kids, and the jury actually held them liable for that, which was a big first. So that got me interested in understanding, kind of, what’s behind these social media addiction claims because the companies claim it’s not an official addiction because there’s no diagnosis, and then, on the other side, you know, clinicians are like, “No, we’re seeing a problem.” So I kinda wanted to understand and get to the bottom of that tension.
But there was also a more personal motivation, which was that I just kept getting those, like, Sunday weekly screen time recaps, and they were always, like, way higher than I could possibly ever have fathomed. Like, I think I pushed up to seven hours a day, and that’s outside of work. So I’m doing the math, going like, “Am I on my phone literally every waking moment? That doesn’t seem possible.”
Feltman: Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what you will—is all we will phone. [Laughs.]
Parshall: All I will is phone. And then I, like, run through justifications, right? It was the winter. I was actually talking with friends most of the time; I’ve got a lot of really close long-distance friendships. A lot of it was, like, engaging creatively in things that I was very passionate about.
And then a lot of it was frankly just TikTok scrolling. So, I basically have just been kind of at war with myself and noticing a lot of my friends at war with themselves over these screen times and, like, wondering, “At what point do I say this is actually a problem? At what point does this helplessness and ambiguity I feel, like, resemble something closer to the experience of people who experience addiction to substances or to gambling and other behaviors?”
So that’s kind of where I started, with a little bit of a personal mission to figure out if I thought this was a problem or not. I can’t say I landed on a really satisfying place.
Feltman: [Laughs.] Well, it is, as you know, like, such a complex question. You know, even just speaking personally and, you know, based on the experiences of other people I know personally, because so much of it is very contextual, like you said. Like, there isn’t a distinction between online life and real life anymore. We live a lot of our lives through the channeling of these devices, so it’s like, there are many, like, good, prosocial, beneficial things one can and maybe even should do that involve staring at a screen. And then there’s the stuff that we know is just scrolling through TikTok.
I’m curious, you know, I have some familiarity with the whole, you know, “Is it an addiction?” question, not just for screens and social media specifically but really anything that’s behavioral. And I think it feels especially complicated when it’s behavioral and involves a relatively new technology. So I’d love to hear, sort of, you know, what you’ve learned and, and what your takeaways are in terms of that whole “Is it an addiction?” question.
Parshall: I think, [the] “Is it an addiction?” question is one that I am just going to have to say: I think we’re just gonna have to live in the nuance of this forever. I don’t think we’re ever gonna have a super satisfying answer because the more you look into the history of our concept of addiction, the muddier it gets.
I think a lot of people have an understanding of, like, okay, drugs are straightforwardly addictive because they can hook your brain in a chemical way. Then when we start getting into behaviors, things get a little more squishy. Gambling, we’re like, “That’s really an addiction because it does something very specific to your brain, almost like a drug.” So, you know, that—you could put it there. Well, then you get into love and sex addiction, food addiction, and it all gets quite complicated.
But I think the thing that I realized in talking to researchers was, like, even when you go back into the history of drug addiction, we’ve had to push this line to get cocaine accepted as an addictive drug. So there’s, like, all of [these] questions of: “At what point are we going to broaden it enough?” And there’s a lot of concern among various pockets of addiction researchers and clinicians that if we make it too broad, the word loses meaning. It’s, like, a serious concern, but at the same time, you do have to let it be broad enough to encompass the problems that people are experiencing, and people are experiencing this problem of tech addiction.
Feltman: Yeah. There is so much nuance, and the focus on whether screen addiction is a real addiction or not can kind of miss the point. I mean, what do we know about why screens are so compelling to us and, so often, you know, leave us feeling worse or to make worse choices in our lives?
Parshall: Well, I mean, I think it would be helpful to start with, kind of, threading the needle on where we do want to demarcate the line of addiction, not around specific behaviors and what can and can’t be addictive but around, like, what we actually see with people that we say, “Okay, that’s where it becomes an addiction. That’s where it’s not. Hanging out with your friend for eight hours on video games, that’s where it actually becomes a problem.”
One of the researchers I talked to is Mark Griffiths, and he’s one of the people who helped develop this framework. And he was saying, you know, video game addiction, you can have someone who plays video games for seven or eight hours a day, and they are not addicted to video games. Excessive use and the length of time you spend doing something is not the marker of it. It can really dovetail with it, but it’s not the marker.
So there’s six characteristics of addiction, according to this framework, that a lot of researchers use. It needs to involve a salient behavior or a drug, so something that, kind of, is grabby to you, that causes mood modification effects, which you develop tolerance to over time, which leads to this cycle of increasing use and then withdrawal when you can’t use enough. Then those withdrawals induce craving, which induces a relapse, and that can cause conflict in your life. So those six factors are salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, relapse and conflict.
And it’s not like every single researcher agrees that you need all of these in order for things to be addictive. There’s a lot of questions specifically around withdrawals and their importance because that, kind of, comes from the drug framework and not necessarily the behavioral one. But it’s really, like, this cycle of amplification where things are getting worse and your life is deteriorating that I think is what leads people to seek help in the first place from doctors or from 12-step programs, and that leads doctors to point to that and say, “Okay, we can count that as addiction.”
And for tech addiction, specifically, or social media addiction or Internet addiction or whatever grab bag of technologies you wanna use, there’s not really any great data showing the prevalence of it. Like, it seems like it’s in the low single digits, but it really depends on how wide of a net you wanna cast. People will overestimate their own addiction to technology if you give them the opportunity. People are more ready to say, “I’m addicted to this technology” and then you give them little screening tools, and they’re actually not really that addicted. Part of that is because we use this word very casually, colloquially.
Just to, like, set the groundwork here, there’s a lot of people probably who are clinically addicted to social media and technology. Whether you want to call what I’m experiencing, which is, like, periodic loss of my ability to stop scrolling TikTok even though I know it’s not good for me, and maybe, like, I’m not taking full advantage of the in-person opportunities of my life because of it, that’s a very different thing.
Feltman: So moving from this idea of “Is it addicting?” “Are people addicted?” You know, we know that the reality is, like you said, separate from people who do have clinically significant addictions to this behavior. Many of us, myself included, again, feel this compulsion to be using screens, be on social media, be on the Internet more than we know actually makes us feel good. And I feel like it’s important to stop and reflect on the fact that that is what they are designed to do. So can we talk a little bit about tech culpability here?
Parshall: Yeah. I mean, I talked to, like, 30 people for this story. Everyone I talked to would stop in the middle of saying—whether or not they were saying, “Social media addiction’s overblown. We should just call it problematic social media use,” whether they were saying, you know, “The tech companies are driving us into the ground”—um, basically everyone stopped in the middle to say, “This is how these products are designed.” And there’s a concern with putting a lot of focus on the individual: How do they deal with social media? What are their habits? What is their, I don’t know, family genetic history of addiction and predisposition to find this really hooking?
There’s a concern that you’re, kind of, looking in the wrong place for the problem. And I’m very sympathetic to that. Like, I think part of the reason I can’t put this down, even though I wouldn’t say I have a lot of tendencies toward addictive things, is because it’s, like, kind of uniquely designed to hook me, and I will scroll forever. You know, you know that thing where you go back to see a video you just saw, and you scroll back up to it, and it’s, like, actually 10 videos ago? That’s what these cases are kind of resting around. These cases are really more about showing what social media companies knew based off of internal documents about the potential of their products to hook people, especially kids, and how they proceeded, kind of, regardless of those concerns.
So there’s a lot of papers that came out both in the Facebook files—I know that The Social Reckoning movie will be out by the time listeners hear this—and through these court cases with discovery, there are cases of people internal at Meta saying explicitly, “Instagram is a drug. We’re basically pushers.” What the plaintiffs argue is a company that knew what its product could do and could have harms and didn’t do anything about it. So the company argues that, like, you know, social media addiction is not an official diagnosis, which means that it’s not something we should be resting these court cases on.
It was interesting how hard it was to find legal experts to analyze these cases on the terms of social media addiction. It’s kind of like the word we use to talk about it, but it’s actually not the main character of these trials. The main [characters] of these trials are, like, the kids who are bringing these personal liability cases and the state’s [attorneys] general that are saying, you know, “You defrauded our consumers,” or, um, “You’ve [misled] our consumers.”
Feltman: Well, so getting back to individual action, in this idea of addiction or at least, you know, excessive, unhappy social media use. You talk to folks who are really treating this in themselves as an addiction, including with 12-step programs. Could you tell us a little bit about how this seems to be similar to, you know, treating drug or alcohol addiction and how it seems to be different?
Parshall: I talked to one woman who I met through this Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous. And she had her own struggles with alcoholism, and she has been clean and sober for 30 years now, and from alcohol specifically.
And then, you know, when Facebook came out, she kind of realized that she was getting sucked in. And sometime in the last, I believe it was five years, she managed to start attending these basically AA meetings but for technology and get sober from that. She says that it feels like the same thing to her. Like, internally, this, like, loss of control, this [is] doing things that she doesn’t want to do and looking around at the people in her life that she feels like she’s constantly letting down and are increasingly learning to expect very little of her as, like, kind of the same kind of heartbreak.
It seems from talking to these people who go to these 12-step programs that, for certain people, they can be really beneficial in the same way that they’re really beneficial for people who are struggling with other addictions. I mean, just from the outside looking in, it seems like a lot of that is down to community support and dedication. You get involved in these programs, and you can just go to meetings. There’s, like, a saying, “Meeting makers make it.” But also a lot of the people I talked to said, like, getting involved, volunteering, helping run the meetings, everything like that really helped pull them out.
And I think some of that is, like, it’s something to fill your life with purpose, becoming a sponsor for other people. You know, some of the addiction researchers I talked to pointed out that there’s a reason that you’re smoking all the time, or there’s a reason that you are filling all your time with TikTok. I mean, I feel that way, like, at times of life when I feel that TikTok is hardest to resist is when everything else feels like a monumental effort, and scrolling is the only thing that can, kind of, turn my brain off. The things that 12-step programs and then other forms of treatment that are more clinically evidence-based, like, you know, seeing psychologists or therapists, many of which do use 12 steps but—can help you, kind of, fill that gap or fill that hole or however you wanna think about what it is that the vice is coming into your life to replace or to fill.
And so, yeah, I think that could be done through 12-step programs. For some people, those don’t work very well ’cause they have such a heavy focus on sobriety. You can get trapped in a cycle of shame of, like, getting sober and then breaking it and then hating yourself and coming back crawling, and for some people, that just doesn’t work well. Addiction treatment in general is kind of trying to move away from the sobriety approach to a more evidence-based harm reduction. Like, okay, we’re not going to say you have to be 100 percent sober from this thing. You see this with sex and porn addiction a lot where, like, that can be a really harmful cycle.
And so the point of therapy might not necessarily be: we’re gonna cut out social media entirely. It might be: we’re going to build these guardrails around it, or we’re gonna make sure that you find a way to only stick to just a little bit. For some people, that’s also not possible, and that’s why they go for the whole sobriety thing. The researchers and clinicians and people who have been through these 12-step programs, they all kind of stress that, like, you need to have compassion with yourself and find something that works for you.
Feltman: Yeah, I know that, for me personally, relative to how much I was on social media until this point, for the last couple of years, I’ve been, like, functionally not on social media. And it’s really interesting because, every once in a while, I start to feel, you know, disconnected enough that I really want to, like, be spending some time on Instagram on my phone, and I redownload it. And the first couple times this happened, it was a real shame cycle because I was like, “Wow, I can’t do it in moderation.”
And now I’ve really, I think, successfully reframed it as less of trying to be sober from social media and more like detoxing, where it’s like, you know, I know what it feels like when it doesn’t feel good anymore. And, like, when I really miss it in a way that feels kind of holistic and healthy and that, like, I just sort of want to be enjoying the Internet again, I redownload it. And then when I get to the point where I’m like, “Oh, no, now, now it’s poisoned my brain again,” then I get rid of it for a while.
And I think it does, for me at least, seem to work in terms of, like, recalibrating me to stop, the decreased sensitivity to it where you’re just, like, totally desensitized and spending more and more time on there and not actually using it for the things that, like, again, are prosocial and actually feel good, like reaching out to friends and seeing cool art they’re making and stuff. But, yeah, I feel like it—what that looks like is [so] personal and context dependent that it feels really tough and unfair that, like, everybody has to figure out what that looks like for them.
Parshall: And it’s constantly changing, too. That’s the thing that gets me. Like, I feel like I’ve navigated, I’ve, like, negotiated a good relationship, and then it changes. It’s kind of like the slippery slope doesn’t stop.
Feltman: Yeah, the algorithm changes; what’s going on in your life changes.
Parshall: I think part of that is, like, the way they’re designed to, like, kind of keep it as a slow slope. So, like, even if you start it with a good relationship, it is pretty easy to stop, and then you look up and you go, “Where am I?” And then you delete the app because you’re like, “I don’t like that I’m here.” I think your point about reframing is a really good one and one that I wanna stress that, like, if the addiction framing to you feels like it is unhelpful, it is really not necessary that you think of it as addiction.
There’s a lot of other ways to think about it. Some researchers really like just thinking about it as a habit. And the differences between those things are a little bit hard to literally pin down. You know, a habit is like biting your nails. We don’t really say people are addicted to biting their nails, but it’s like there’s a particular cue: “I’m bored; I’m anxious.” With your phone it might be “It’s bedtime,” and you develop these habits.
And, like, you know the thing where, like, you literally can open Instagram through muscle memory or any other app that you use and start scrolling and realize you didn’t even realize that you’d chosen to do it? So, like, the researchers I talk to stress that, like, we do know how to get people to change their habits. I mean, we have more research than we do maybe on, like, tech addiction. You can shuffle around the way the apps are on the home screen. You can delete them entirely. Something I do with TikTok is: on the iPhone, it lets you remove it from your home screen but not from your phone entirely, so every time I want it, I have to search for TikTok. That doesn’t always work. Um, but it stops, it stops me from having a literal rote muscle memory on it. I might need to do that with Instagram soon, honestly. So yeah, there’s little tweaks that you can do to try to resist this thing that is probably, profit-motive-wise, going to continue to exist to want to pull you in.
And you don’t have to think of it like addiction if you don’t want to. That can be a really stigmatizing framework, and it can be one that, you know, I mean, especially with alcoholism, like, the, kind of, the way that people who are alcoholics talk about it often is like, “I am an alcoholic,” and for the rest of your life, you frame yourself as an alcoholic. You’re just, like, in recovery. People I talk to in 12-step programs, some of them did have that framing for tech addiction. But I would say their experience is, like, more extreme than a lot of the people that I know who use technology—in, subjectively, in their experience—too much.
Feltman: We’ve brushed against this, but I would love to hear where you actually have landed in terms of managing your own screen use and social media use?
Parshall: Yeah, I would love to say that I cut down my screen time drastically. When I first started this story, I was like, “How great of an arc would it be if, at the end, I can say that I managed to cut it down to three hours a day, and here’s what I did?” I did not do that. My screen time last week was higher than ever, but I was sick, in my defense.
And I think what I’ve noticed through observing these Sunday screen time notifications every week is: it really depends on the type of week I had. And there isn’t some terrible trend line for me where it’s getting worse and worse and worse and worse. It looks like this more than anything. And I think taking the advice of the researchers I talked to who said to give yourself grace ’cause you’re in kind of a screwed-up system, I’ve been trying to do that.
I’ve also been trying to listen to myself when I have that little voice in my head that’s saying, like, “You’re doing this to numb yourself,” and the things that are worth living about life in the physical world are things that take time to build. Like, you’re gonna have to go through going to, like, a deeply unpleasant social situation for a little while in order to meet the friends, to meet the friends, to meet the friends, instead of just focusing on the vicious cycle of screen time, thinking of the virtuous cycle of doing things that you’re passionate about and that can be on a screen. Trying to not have this bifurcation in my head of, like, screen time—bad. Like, noticing when I have had seven hours of screen time, being like, “Oh, actually four of those was ’cause I was reading a book I really liked, and that’s okay.” So yeah, I, I haven’t fixed myself. But I do think I’ve started to pay more attention in a way that is healthier. I would say I hope other people can, too, but I know that I’m not leading the charge on this. I’m in the muck with every single person in my life, trying to figure out what works for them. So I hope you’re able to, to make it work better for you, too.
Feltman: Thank you so much for that. And, thank you for coming on to talk about your story with us.
Parshall: Thank you for having me.
Feltman: That’s all for today’s episode. You can check out Allison’s feature article online or in the latest issue of Scientific American, on newsstands now. We’ll be back on Monday with our weekly science news roundup.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Allison Rodgers and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Marielle Issa and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!