Dr. Anna Lembke

But, you know, afterwards, there's this come down.

And over the long run, we're not really pursuing our goals, which with social media is nominally to connect with other humans.

We are living in an unprecedented time of overwhelming abundance where we've drugified almost every human experience, the food we eat, the games we play, the way that we connect with other people.

And as such, we've all become more vulnerable to this problem of addiction.

And I always like to sort of upfront define addiction for folks.

Please do.

It's the continued compulsive use of a substance or behavior despite harm to self and or others.

And importantly, sometimes we can see the harm and sometimes we can't.

And it is a brain disease.

I think that's really important to communicate to folks, the disease model of addiction.

We're not at a place yet where we can use brain scans or blood tests to diagnose addiction.

We base the diagnosis on phenomenology or patterns of behavior, often what we call the four Cs, out of control use, craving, compulsive use, and continued use despite consequences.

But it's a very recognizable behavior when we see it, especially in its most extreme forms.

And we're living in an addictogenic world where not only do we have more access to drugs that have been around for thousands of years, but we have drugs that never existed before, right?

All of the digital drugs, drugified food, right?

We have a food supply with the addition of fat, salt, sugar, flavorants, processed food.

So that...

Not only are we getting calories when we eat, we're getting hits of dopamine that make it very difficult to stop, even when we've reached our natural satiety point.

And that's true for almost everything now, including, importantly for this discussion, digital media.

When you expose a child's brain to a digital drug that is incredibly reinforcing