How to deal with tech addiction

Millions of Americans live with substance use disorders, and the impact of those disorders reaches beyond individuals to countless families and communities. Dr. Anna Lembke, medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford University, explains how a wide range of risk factors, from biology to bad luck, can make anyone susceptible to addiction.

Video Transcript

People can get addicted to behaviors just like they can get addicted to drugs.

We are seeing more and more patients coming in with severe and even life threatening addiction to pornography to video games to social media, to the internet more broadly and what they describe mirrors identically what we see when people get addicted to drugs and alcohol, they have out of control use, compulsive use, cravings and continued use.

Despite consequences that can be relationship problems, physical health problems, mental health problems, work problems.

So for people who are in these sort of early stages of compulsive overconsumption, maybe not yet, you know, full blown addiction.

One of the things I often recommend is a self intervention of four weeks of abstinence.

Those 1st 10 to 14 days can be extremely difficult and we'll probably experience some degree of withdrawal, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, dysphoria, and craving.

But if we can just make it past that to a weeks, three and four, we often will feel better and even more importantly, have more clarity on the true impact of that behavior on our lives, which then motivates us to moving forward, want to change that behavior, which is really hard in a world that's constantly inviting us to over consume but really valuable as we try to find that middle ground between healthy adaptive use and unhealthy maladaptive teetering toward addictive use.