Anna Lembke

Except to say that we do have information that shows that

As we progressively spend more and more time online, we are more likely to manifest symptoms of anxiety, depression, insomnia, inattention.

So there's clearly a correlation between these two things.

And as I hypothesize, I think there is also causation that it is the enormous amount of time that we're spending online that's contributing to our unhappiness.

And I base that in part on the interventions that we do clinically where we see people who come with anxiety, depression, what have you,

consuming enormous amounts of digital media.

We ask them to abstain for a period of time.

And what we find is that many of them feel better without our doing any other intervention.

And so I make this analogy to drugs and alcohol and the same kinds of benefits that we see in our patients when they can abstain from drugs and alcohol for long enough.

And that's kind of where I'm coming from with that.

I agree with you.

I think there's a real danger here of overgeneralizing, of labeling, of in fact trivializing the disease of addiction by using it in instances where it doesn't really apply.

You know, when we diagnose addiction clinically, we don't do that

casually.

We talk to patients at length.

We talk to their family members.

We try to get a full 360-degree view.

We get the subjective encounter, but we also try to get non-subjective data that might help inform us whether or not this behavior is really harmful.

Because I agree with you, you know, you're absolutely right that the level of intensity

that some people will engage in activities, maybe for them really healthy, right?