Most of us use the Internet every day for a wide variety of functions. It is just a feature of life. So, what makes it a problem? Chronic Internet use of the kind that has become an addiction has a significant number of negative long-term effects, not the least of which is that research indicates that it actually changes the structure of the brain. We will look at the brain in more depth in Chapter 3, but for now let’s focus on the most common problematic issues associated with Internet addiction. These are the negative effects that people experience when they have full-blown Internet addiction and that other people may experience to a lesser degree when overusing their devices.
Anxiety might be the most common chronic condition experienced by people with Internet addiction. Even people who aren’t truly addicted to the Internet often experience low levels of anxiety related to their devices. For example, many of us have experienced “disconnectivity anxiety,” which refers to feelings of fear, stress, anger, and frustration caused by the unexpected inability to connect to our phones or the Internet. This may happen when you accidentally leave your phone at home, when traveling in areas without consistent reception, or when the power goes out for a period of time. You may begin to worry about the messages that you’re missing, feel lost as to what to do with yourself during the downtime, or think that you feel the vibration of a phone alert when the phone isn’t even on you. This latter condition is widely known as phantom vibration syndrome, and some studies indicate that as many as 75 percent of cell phone users have experienced it. These things might be mildly frustrating, or they might cause full-blown anxiety. It can happen even when we consciously decide to take a break from our devices. As anxiety increases, we may break our “digital fast” in order to soothe the feelings.
Disconnectivity is only one form of anxiety that people can experience due to Internet addiction. You can get anxiety when you don’t get a message, such as when you text someone and they don’t immediately respond (especially if you can see that they’ve read the message). You can get anxiety when you post a photo and people don’t respond to it in the way that you want. You can get anxiety when you’ve commented on someone’s content and then worry about how they’re going to take what you’ve said. There are many specific triggers for anxiety on the Internet.
Anxiety is characterized by excessive worry and the feeling that you can’t control your worries. The more time you spend online, the worse your anxiety may get. It may manifest in emotional or physical health symptoms including insomnia, fatigue, trouble concentrating, irritability, achiness, and restlessness. Some people develop panic attacks, which include trouble breathing, racing heart, sweating and shaking, and other physical symptoms accompanied by a feeling of dread or danger. People with Internet addiction may experience panic attacks related to specific triggers online. For example, someone might start to panic when receiving negative comments on a blog post they’ve just made.
There also might be a more widespread feeling of generalized anxiety in our society related to the changes that technology has placed on our social norms and the fact that we don’t have clear etiquette for those changes. Professor and author Jarice Hanson suggests that technology is causing our lives to change so much, and so quickly, that none of us are certain what the new social norms are surrounding our behavior, particularly as it relates to use of technology. Consider, for example, that children today might take offense to a text message sent by a parent that includes punctuation; punctuation is considered aggressive to this younger generation, something that older folks might not be aware of. So, when a parent discovers this, they may start to get anxiety about how to handle the next text message to their child. How many times have you had to correct a misunderstanding because what was said online or through text was taken the wrong way? With so many underlying issues affecting our society, it’s hard not to feel some anxiety when engaging on the Internet.
We may also feel like technology is taking over our lives, and we want to return to a “simpler time,” but we also feel like there’s no turning back from the onslaught of gadgets. All of this leads to chronic anxiety related to an inability to adjust to a rapidly changing world. This can manifest in anxiety triggered by device updates that change things around, trying to learn a new app, or otherwise engaging in a new activity that feels like one more overwhelming thing that you have to learn.
Anxiety is arguably increasing year upon year in our society. In 2017, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) found that two-thirds of those polled were either somewhat or extremely anxious specifically about health and safety and at least one-third were just anxious in general. The following year, the APA repeated the study, and results indicated that anxiety had already increased by 5 percent. Of all those studied, millennials were the ones most likely to report anxiety. Of course, there could be many different causes for this increase in anxiety. However, we can’t ignore the likelihood that Internet connectivity could be one major cause. This is further supported by the fact that studies show that anxiety is more common in wealthy countries, which, of course, are also the most Internet connected.
People with Internet addiction are highly likely to suffer from anxiety. It can often be a chicken-and-egg situation because people with anxiety are also at risk of developing Internet addiction. The addiction is a form of escape that can seem to help soothe the symptoms of anxiety. However, the behavior worsens the anxiety, requiring more need for soothing. Regardless of which came first—the anxiety or the addiction—they reinforce each other.
Anxiety might be the most prevalent problem facing people with Internet addiction. But chronic sleep deprivation might be the most problematic of all. Sleep is critical to mental and physical well-being, and yet a large portion of the population today fails to get enough sleep. Screen time at night, including alerts throughout the night, is a primary contributor to this problem.
Although losing sleep to screen time is one reason for sleep deprivation due to tech, it’s not the only one. More insidious is the difficulty or inability to sleep because prolonged use of devices has left your brain too awake. This especially happens in gaming, last-minute auction bidding, and other Internet behaviors that increase adrenaline and initiate the fight-or-flight response in the body. This reaction gets the body pumping, making it difficult to fall asleep because you have a hyperaroused nervous system. It’s like trying to fall asleep after watching a really scary movie.
It gets worse if you keep those stress response levels high over a period of time, which is not what was intended for the body to do. Over time, a steadily high level of adrenaline can lead to symptoms similar to that seen in bipolar mania—rapid speech and extreme excitability followed by a crash into depression that is often accompanied by sleep loss. So, someone with an Internet addiction to adrenaline-increasing activities such as gaming negatively trains their brain to stay in stress mode, leading to a variety of different issues, not the least of which is trouble sleeping.
Although those activities are the most problematic, any online use, particularly later in the day, may affect sleep. The blue light emitted from our gadgets has been shown to disrupt our sleep cycles. It can change our circadian rhythm, throw off our melatonin, and make it hard for the body to fall asleep at night. The later you use the devices in the day, the more likely it is to affect your sleep.
Sleep problems become a vicious cycle. People give up sleep to be online, and this leads to reduced ability to make good decisions, so they are even more likely to give up sleep even as they need it more. And sleep problems lead to all sorts of other problems including mood changes, trouble concentrating, problems with memory, difficulty completing tasks at school and work, and myriad physical health issues.
Although people have an increasingly large number of “friends” (or “fans” or “followers”) through social media, the number and quality of face-to-face interpersonal relationships have decreased as technology has risen. People with Internet addiction often find it difficult to interact with people in real life, substituting online relationships for real ones.
Sherry Turkle, a somewhat controversial expert in the psychology of technology, describes this phenomenon well in her book Alone Together, which relates her findings of studies of the social use of robots. She explains that robots were once considered to be “better than nothing.” For example, if an elderly person has to be home alone all day, it is better to have an interactive robot than to have nothing to interact with at all. However, as time has gone on, and technology has invaded every part of our society, many people are now experiencing robots as “better than everything.” The elderly person now might rather have the unfailing, consistent response from a programmed robot than to be forced to engage with the complicated behavior and emotions of real-life family members.
Relationships based on technology are naturally one-sided. This is true even in cases where it might seem like you’re interacting with others—through social media, email, text messages, gaming guilds, and the like. Although there is technically another person on the other side of that screen, much of what we read into their messages happens in our own minds. We can’t see their body language, experience their immediate response, or deal with them through honest, authentic interaction. Therefore, we fill in the blanks in our own minds. We are mostly just having a relationship with ourselves and our own projections.
This isn’t always the case. Some people are actually able to enhance the authenticity and depth of their in-person connections by addressing challenging conversations online first, where they may have more time to give a thoughtful response, and then bringing the conversation into the real world. However, that’s increasingly rare. More and more often, people use online communication to avoid depth while still maintaining a feeling of connectedness to others.
This is a self-reinforcing behavior; the more time you spend focused on online relationships, the more difficult it is to interact with people in the “real world” and the more likely the person will ramp up their online activity in response. We seek to stave off the feelings of loneliness by busying the brain with more pseudointeractions, at the expense of authentic, but messy, connections.
In cases of Internet addiction, there may be a desire to be alone in order to keep the addiction secret. People addicted to online shopping or pornography may spend more and more time home alone to engage in the behavior. They may feel intruded upon when others enter their space, and they may feel irritation or anger when the “real world” interrupts their online activities. This desire for alone time feeds into the loneliness.
Loneliness leads to more loneliness. Johann Hari, writing about disconnection in society, says that the longer we experience loneliness, the more we tend to socially shut down and the more likely we are to become suspicious of activities that would break the loneliness. We get wrapped up in our own minds, and we become hypervigilant toward others intruding on our mental space. He suggests that there’s a biological imperative at work here; being alone, we sense that nobody is looking out for us, so we start to constantly look out for threats from others. In other words, what we desperately need is to connect with others to break the loneliness, but the loneliness itself causes us to fear others to the point that we don’t want to connect. The more disconnected we become, the more we engage in behavior that disconnects us further.
The Internet can reinforce this loneliness. On the one hand, we may replace real-life connections with watered-down online versions to soothe some of that loneliness. On the other hand, we may subconsciously seek out the kind of online activity that confirms our worst suspicions about people. For example, we may begin to binge-watch online episodes of true crime, seeing evil lurking in every corner. Or we may engage in negative, destructive, back-and-forth social media exchanges that fuel our beliefs that people are out to get us or that no one understands us.
Loneliness is not just an emotional issue; it can also have physical health consequences. Johann Hari reports on research that has found that feeling lonely increases your cortisol levels. Acute loneliness can cause you as much of a stress response as getting physically attacked by someone can. Prolonged stress in the body leads to many different health issues.
Loneliness is an increasingly widespread problem. Recently, many health professionals are even naming it as an epidemic. Studies have shown that many people don’t feel like they have even one close friend, that loneliness is increasing rapidly over time, and that it leads to a large number of other problems for individuals and society as a whole. People with Internet addiction frequently experience loneliness, and the Internet usually only makes it worse over time. This isn’t to say that it can’t offer some sense of connection for isolated people, a benefit we’ll look at in Chapter 9, but it is more often a problem and is a negative effect for those who do develop addiction.
As we have come to spend more and more time on our devices, we have started to spend less time on physical activity. Kids who used to spend time together at parks, or even at least walking around the mall, are now “gathering” through the screen. A sedentary lifestyle often causes fatigue and may result in obesity, the latter of which is correlated with a large number of health problems including heart disease and diabetes.
Obesity isn’t just a result of the lack of exercise, either, but may also be caused or worsened by certain online activities. Dr. Doan, an MD with a PhD in neuroscience, and a recovered video game addict himself, explains in his interview with Nicholas Kardaras for the book Glow Kids that Internet and gaming activity can alter cortisol levels, which can lead to problems with obesity. He explains that extra cortisol dysregulates the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis, and this dysregulation can lead to weight gain. So, if you’re sitting on the Internet, you are gaining weight not only because of lack of exercise but also because the Internet activities themselves are making you fat.
Obesity isn’t the only health issue associated with a sedentary lifestyle. Additional issues include the following:
An excessively sedentary lifestyle can lead to physical and mental health problems that actually put people at risk for early death. Therefore, those with an Internet addiction that leads to increasing sedentary behavior are facing some potentially serious consequences.
Even people who remain active are at risk of health issues from the chronic use of devices. Many different parts of our bodies can experience aches and pains not only as a result of sitting at the computer but also because of the nature of the repetitive activities that we engage in there.
Staring at a screen all day leads to eye strain. Poor posture while using laptops, desktop computers, and handheld devices creates back pain and other aches in the body. Near-constant typing and swiping can lead to repetitive stress injuries including carpal tunnel syndrome. People with Internet addiction will continue to use their devices despite the pain.
For example, Kevin Roberts has shared his own story of how excessive gaming caused him to experience lower back pain. He ignored the initial pain, upon which he began to experience a shooting pain down his leg that was so bad that it limited his mobility. At the same time, he started getting pain in his right wrist, the one that clicked constantly on the computer mouse. Instead of taking a break, he started wearing a wrist guard so that he could continue putting that strain on his body. His addiction caused him to ignore his health issues in favor of staying online.
Dr. Dean Fisherman, a chiropractor in Florida, created the term “text neck” to describe pain in the neck, shoulders, and back associated with poor posture due to compulsive text messaging. He first called it “forward head posture,” but the term “text neck” stuck, and he opened the text neck Institute. It was intended to treat mostly teenagers, but these days people of all ages are experiencing text neck.
Another similar term that people have used is “texting thumb.” The term is used to describe a repetitive stress injury that typically results in pain at the base of thumb without anything broken, torn, or necessarily even inflamed in the area. The problem has been going on as long as we’ve had devices; in early decades it was called Blackberry thumb and Nintendo thumb, and it is comparable to “writer’s cramp” from the days when people actually wrote longhand with pens. Today it is caused by the variety of things we do on our phones including not just texting but also swiping and scrolling.
People who spend significant amounts of time on their devices, especially those engaging in prolonged hours of gaming, often have an increased level of adrenaline. The body was designed to experience this fight-or-flight hormone for only short bursts of time in order to get us out of dangerous situations. Getting that adrenaline rush without ever moving around can cause a variety of problems, including physical ones; even very young people may get hemorrhoids as a result.
More important, keeping stress levels elevated for so long creates a wide range of different issues in the body. The constant adrenaline rush leads to high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Stress can decrease thyroid function, insulin production, sex hormones, and growth hormones.
As mentioned before, many Internet activities lead to extra cortisol, which dysregulates the HPA axis. This not only leads to weight gain but also causes hormonal issues. Adults spending too much time online may suddenly find themselves with adult acne. Infection can become more common as well. Your whole body gets thrown out of whack, and there is no telling what physical conditions may ensue as a result.
People struggling with an Internet addiction may experience a variety of other health issues that they don’t necessarily immediately recognize as linked to their Internet use. Professionals in the medical field would do well to become increasingly aware of these potential problems so that they can help identify Internet overuse as a possible cause.
One of the vaguer, but very distressing, feelings that people report with Internet addiction is a growing sense that they are losing control over their own lives. Some of this comes from the addictive behavior itself; they want to stop or reduce use but feel unable to do so, which leads to a sense of having no control over the self. As with any addict, Internet addicts may tell themselves again and again that they’ll “stop using tomorrow,” and then when tomorrow comes and they turn the Internet on again, they feel guilt, shame, and a spiraling loss of control.
Often Internet use leads to a sense of control in the moment, which can reinforce this feeling. Playing a game in which you are skilled gives you a sense of mastery and control. Perfecting your image on social media makes you feel like you have control over how others see you through that channel. An addict may engage in these behaviors with increasing frequency to avoid the discomfort of not feeling in control in “real life.” The more time spent online, the less control one feels in the real world.
Additionally, out there in the real world, there may be the feeling that you have to “keep up with the Joneses” in terms of technology. The long lines outside of the Apple store for the latest iPhone are just one example. If you don’t have the newest app, know the latest news sourced from online, or have access to the newest device, you may feel inferior. Trying to keep up increases that feeling that you have no control over where life is going.
The addict spends more and more time online in an effort to “keep up,” but it’s absolutely impossible when so much new information flies at you every second of the day. On YouTube alone, people upload more than five hundred hours of new content per minute. You could watch YouTube every minute of every day and never catch up. The addict who feels lost if they don’t know all of the latest stuff is never going to catch up; trying to only makes the feeling worse.
Depression is a widespread problem in our society, and it’s even worse for people with Internet addiction. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than 6 percent, or 16.2 million, of the adults in the United States have had at least one major depressive episode. The problem affects more females than males and is most common among young adults aged eighteen to twenty-five. Of the adults afflicted, more than ten million had severe impairment due to their depression. The number is even higher for teens; more than three million U.S. teens aged twelve to seventeen have experienced major depression, which is more than 12 percent of the teens in the country. More than two million had serious impairment. Girls are more than three times as likely as boys to experience depression.
Depression and suicide aren’t inextricably linked, but there’s a strong correlation between the two. Suicide rates have climbed steadily in the United States in recent years. The Centers for Disease Control reports that the suicide rate increased by 24 percent between 1999 and 2014. The rate increased steadily between 1999 and 2006, and then the rate doubled after that. It may be no coincidence that the steady rise corresponds to the timing of computers and cell phones entering mainstream culture; the later years of even more rapid increase corresponds with increased prevalence of cell phones and the early days of social media.
Numerous studies have been done exploring the link between Internet use and depression. Facebook-linked depression has been a particular area of study interest. A 2014 study called “Facebook’s Emotional Consequences” found that people expect to feel better after using Facebook, and yet they typically don’t find it meaningful and end up feeling bad about using it so much. Its addictive nature leads us to continue using in spite of this feeling. One reason we do this is related to the way that it affects dopamine levels in the brain, something we’ll look at in more depth in Chapter 3. Essentially, each time that we check our email, texts, or social media, we get a little dopamine hit, which feels really good. Our brains experience euphoric recall; they remember that this behavior caused the dopamine to rise. As a result, we continue to predict that engaging in the same addictive behavior will produce that feeling, even though we are no longer satisfied by the behavior. It’s a problem called affective forecasting error; we think we’ll feel good, then we don’t, and that feels especially bad.
There are many reasons that Internet addiction is correlated with depression. The brain chemistry is one of them. Another is social comparison, a problem particularly linked with social media use. A 2015 University of Houston study conducted by Mai-Ly Steers specifically found that Facebook use increases the frequency of users comparing themselves to others, which in turn leads to depression. Think about it; how many times has it seemed like everyone else on social media is doing better than you are and how has that made you feel? Even if you don’t struggle with an Internet addiction, the experience can have negative consequences on self-esteem and mood. If you do have an Internet addiction, the consequences are worse.
The problem is exacerbated when we experience negative online interactions, such as cyberbullying or rude comments. No matter how many positive things are in our social media feeds, we are drawn to focus on the negative. That’s because negative feedback pings a specific part of the brain that seems to strike us more powerfully than positive interaction does. With so many frequent opportunities for that negative feedback, it’s no wonder that social media can lead us to feel badly about ourselves. This can become, or can worsen, depression.
Before there was Facebook, the big social media giant was MySpace, and it, too, was studied for links with depression. One study conducted through the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand discovered that one in six MySpace users were at risk for depression and even suicide. These people were expressing negative thoughts through the site. The study wasn’t complete enough to know whether MySpace itself was causing any depression or if it simply served as a place for people who were already depressed to express those thoughts, but it was an important early study on the link between depression and users of social media.
Sharing our feelings of depression online can have both positive and negative effects. For some people, opening up about depression reduces the stigma of the condition. A positive response from the online community, combined with support, can help people rebuild self-esteem, seek treatment, and take steps toward healing from depression. On the other hand, a negative response can cause immeasurable detriment. Furthermore, one can get trapped in the cycle of negative commentary online; in depression, the mind ruminates on the negative, and some people use social media as a space to ruminate out loud. Others may join in; they say that misery loves company after all. The result is more rumination, which frequently exacerbates depression symptoms.
Some researchers have suggested that generations growing up with constant online access are more likely to experience levels of depression, although it will take time for studies to confirm or debunk this theory. One interesting study highlighted by Nicholas Kardaras was a two-decade longitudinal study completed by the German Psychological Association and the University of Tubingen, in which it was found that we as a group are steadily losing our increasing sensory awareness, at a rate of about 1 percent per year. The more stimulation we get, the more we lose attention to it. This study ended in 1980, long before the excessive stimulation of pervasive gadgets always at our fingertips. Kardaras links this with a term he uses, called “digitally induced adolescent malaise”; we all feel duller because of this overstimulation. While the result isn’t necessarily clinical depression, it can produce many of the same symptoms as depression.
Dr. Dimitri Christakis describes the same phenomenon in the world of highly stimulating video games. He posits that a growing person’s brain can get habituated to the quick responses and high levels of alertness that are necessary to excel at the game and that keeping the brain at that pace can lead the youth to feel like the nongaming world is understimulating, underwhelming, and possibly even depressing.
One thing that is important to consider is whether an individual experiences depression first or the addiction first. In some cases, depression itself can lead to excessive, addictive use of the Internet; the opposite can also be true. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. In Part 2 of this book, we’ll look more closely at comorbidity and the challenge of deciphering which issue came first. As we can already see in this chapter, many of the issues associated with Internet addiction are chicken-and-egg situations that can be hard to parse out because of the constant use of the Internet in today’s society.
For now, let’s look at the reasons that Internet addiction is correlated with depression. We’ve already discussed brain changes as well as a negative self-image caused by making social comparisons. As we know, Internet addiction also leads to sleep problems, and disrupted sleep can be a factor in depression. Exposure to negative content is also a depression risk factor; whether it’s violence, frustrating news commentary, or negative body image, the content we see online can contribute to an increasingly hopeless view of the world. Finally, there is a strong link between Internet addiction and loneliness as well as a link between loneliness and depression. Each problem reinforces the other, exacerbating the risk of depression among people with Internet addiction.
So far, the consequences of Internet addiction that we’ve discussed may be experienced to some degree by anyone using the Internet. Now, let’s talk about a specific criterion of addiction. Internet addiction means that you continue use despite negative consequences. So, what consequences may those be? The biggest may be a failure to meet responsibilities. Students may fail out of school, while adults may experience job loss and therefore debt and other financial consequences due to excessive Internet use.
One reason for this is that it becomes “easier” to simply stay online. The longer you’re online, the harder it can feel to go deal with the real world. Interacting with people through social media means that you don’t have to deal face-to-face with their criticisms, demands, or emotions; most of the interaction happens in your own mind through interpreting what they’ve written, and you can always turn the device off (or switch to a different online activity) if you really don’t want to deal with them.
Additionally, Internet usage often allows us to experience mastery that isn’t as easy to come by in daily life. For example, it is easier to level up in a video game than to get a promotion at work. Even if you fail in the game, you simply have to restart, whereas failing at a job means that you have to process the experience and work through it before moving forward again.
All of this can lead “real life” to feel too hard in comparison with life online. The longer you spend online, the more likely you are to have reduced skills in interacting with others, coping with failure, dealing with situations that require tact and patience, and so on. Furthermore, Internet addiction frequently leads to elevated stress levels and more impulsive responses, which in turn can lead to behavior, such as aggression, that isn’t taken well in school or the workplace. Staying up late to engage with the Internet causes sleep disruption that makes it difficult to get up in the morning to get things done.
All of this leads to a tendency to skip class or to stay home from work. It means showing up late to important events and meeting, if you show up at all. It means that when you do show up, you feel uncomfortable and aren’t a team player. Students may fail classes, or they may squeak by but be unable to get college recommendations from teachers. Adults may get demoted or fired or find it difficult to seek new gainful employment. Instead, they get online to stop feeling the bad feeling, and this worsens the situation.
Being late is just one time-related issue that can become a problem in Internet addiction. It is also possible to completely lose sense of time. Of course, this further impinges on your life when it comes to work or school, and it also impacts your social relationships. Worse, it can cause a distortion in your sense of reality, since the daily world is structured around time.
This issue has been most closely studied in relationship to online gaming addictions. Jarice Hanson writes, for example, “Games can be dysfunctional … when they offer a sense of time and space that is so different from reality that the user loses control of how long he or she plays a game.” The game’s sense of time is different from real-life time, and addicted users get confused.
This same author goes further to say that the way we view time in a digital world may have social consequences beyond yet what we can currently understand, noting that when you look at a clock face, you can see time passing, whereas when you look at a digital clock, you can see only that moment in time. This leaves us feeling disconnected from any sort of history. The immediacy of the news cycle may exacerbate this as well. Everything is made to feel so important in the moment that we are losing our grasp on the fact that this moment is just one blip in the big arc of history. Internet addiction makes it feel like right now is the only thing that matters.
Technology is now moving so much faster than humans can move. Everything online is happening in “real time,” and this is actually beyond the processing time that our brains require to keep up. This results in a feeling like we’re never going to catch up. It leaves most of us wanting “more time.” We feel constantly rushed, under the pressure of such a fast pace, and this makes us impatient and aggressive. The addict has no sense of patience because they have no sense of time.
As we’ll discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, behavioral addiction including Internet addiction causes structural changes to the brain. This can result in many and varied issues including the loss of willpower, decreased attention span, a lack of long-term goals, risk-taking behavior, and memory loss. Larry Rosen reports that people who are online ten or more hours per day, which is very common in Internet addiction (and increasingly common among regular users), have a significantly smaller amount of gray matter than people who spend two hours or less online daily.
We outsource a lot of our memory now—knowing that we can access all information on our devices at any time. However, memory is use-it-or-lose-it. Memory exercises strengthen the brain and increase our gray matter. Repetitive passive activities including Internet use may deplete the gray matter. The addict is at risk of losing their memory.
We learn best when focused and paying attention to what we want to remember, which isn’t done as easily if we are multitasking. We tend to try to multitask with the Internet, either by using multiple devices/screens at once or by using the Internet while doing other things in the real world. What we call multitasking is really more likely to be “switchtasking”—moving our focus from one thing to the other and back again. Research indicates that it takes a significant amount of time to be able to refocus and attend again to the new task. More than this, there are long-term impacts of frequent switchtasking; the brain gets so used to distraction that it can’t settle down to focus, and this leads to ongoing problems with concentration. Multitasking has also been correlated with a decreased ability to identify human emotions. The Internet addict is at risk of decreased concentration and an inability to connect emotionally to others.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that humans can’t handle distractions. Rather, we need to have a balance between distractions and focus, and people with Internet addiction tend to be very imbalanced in this area. An important thing to understand is that we have two types of attention: top-down and bottom-up. When we attend to something with our top-down attention, the experience is one of focus. We set goals and direct where our attention will go in order to meet those goals. In contrast, bottom-up attention is when something distracts us; the constant alerts from phones and computers are bottom-up attention grabbers that, when not balanced with top-down attention, can lead to decreased attention in our lives overall.
All of this occurs as changes in the brain occur. The brain also changes in ways that increase risk-taking behavior and decrease impulse control. When we have an addiction to the Internet, we can’t pull ourselves away from it, no matter how dangerous it may be to focus on a device. We hear the ping of the cell phone while we’re driving, letting us know that we have a text message, and we take our eyes off of the road to see what it says, although we know how dangerous this can be. The urge to attend to the device overrules our ability to think rationally about the risk. The more time we spend on Internet-addicted activities, the more it affects our brain and the more likely we are to take such risks.
Internet addiction can lead to problems in all of our relationships, due largely to how the addict treats the people in their life but also to the changing relational behavior of someone who spends the majority of their time in a virtual world.
There are several extreme cases of people being so wrapped up in their virtual worlds that it causes devastating impact to others, especially children. One well-known case is that of an Arkansas woman and her boyfriend who were so focused on playing the online game EverQuest that they forgot their three-year-old child in the car and the child died. Less extreme, but more common, are examples of parents distracted by Internet use in ways that can be devastating to the parent-child relationship. A parent may play online games with their kids as a way to bond but then become frustrated and angry when the child can’t “keep up” in a game, eroding the relationship that they are attempting to build.
One very serious potential problem that hasn’t yet been sufficiently studied is the prevalence of infants who are not getting their much-needed eye contact with their mom (or the primary caregivers) because she is busy on her phone or computer while breastfeeding. That bonding time is critical to feelings of security in the world. It forms our first attachments, which imprint on us and affect all of our future relationships. We simply don’t know what it’s doing to an entire generation that might not be experiencing that bonding to the degree kids did in the past. Toddlers and older children are also lacking in parents’ attention because that attention is divided between devices. What is this doing to our ability to form relationships? We don’t know, but it might not be good.
Something we do know is that people with full-blown Internet addiction will often choose to engage with their devices instead of with the people in their everyday lives. This leads to hurt feelings, communication problems, and the potential for more serious long-term consequences in our relationships. People who are wrapped up in an online activity may become irritable with those who interrupt them; they get snappish and angry when parents, children, and spouses want their attention. At the extreme end, this leads to things like “gaming widows”—partners (of any gender and orientation) who feel like they are living as single parents because their spouses spend more time gaming than being with their families, a situation that has led some to divorce. There are support groups for loved ones of people with Internet addiction to help them with feelings of frustration, abandonment, disappointment, hurt, and anger.
One of the specific behaviors of Internet addiction that can devastate relationships is lying. Teens lie about the frequency of their use as well as the content that they engage with online. While some of this is normal as teens learn to differentiate from their family units and become individuals, it can lead to (or point to) problems in the ongoing trust in the parent-child relationship.
Partners/spouses also lie to one another about their usage; this is typically more about content than frequency. Lying about who you’re contacting online and the information exchanged in the online relationship can be symptomatic of a problem in the relationship but can in turn also lead to relationship problems. Lying about, or being secretive around, Internet use provokes an increase in jealousy and a breakdown in trust. Partners may also lie about financial issues related to online gambling and shopping activity. In general, it is much easier to lie about behavioral addictions, like problems with Internet usage, than it is to lie about substance addictions, and the lying can eat away at a relationship for a long time before it is addressed. Sometimes the relationship cannot be repaired.
In general, we as a society often fail to give enough attention to the people whom we are face to face with because instead of communicating with them, we are looking at our devices. How many times have you been speaking with someone and their engagement dropped as they glanced at a phone screen? Our relationships are built in large part on our nonverbal communication, showing other people that we are listening and that we care about them through the attention we give them as they speak. People may think that they can glance surreptitiously at their phone and not interrupt the flow of face-to-face conversations, but the reality is that they are often responding without actually listening and truly communicating. The relationship becomes shallow and transactional rather than deep and relational.
There is also the problem that the more we engage with online relationships, the less inclined we may be to engage in face-to-face social interaction at all. This relates to the aforementioned problem of loneliness but is worth repeating here, because it’s a relationship problem caused or exacerbated by Internet addiction. People with an addiction to the Internet may stop connecting with people in the real world, skip face-to-face interactions, develop social phobia, and simply stop “showing up” for their friends and family. This clearly creates a negative impact on the relationships.
The problem isn’t just in the use of the technology but can also come when we try not to use the technology. As an addiction, it can lead to withdrawal symptoms such as craving and anxiety. If you’ve ever accidentally left your phone at home when going out, you might have felt some of those feelings—anxiety, wondering what you’re missing, reaching for the phone even though it’s not there, sensing phantom vibrations, or simply feeling “a little weird.”
In Internet addiction, withdrawal can present as physical symptoms. Withdrawal can lead to cravings, and a craving goes beyond a desire to the point where your body actually physically thinks it needs the Internet. Some of the things that a person might experience when their use is limited include the following:
The other side of the withdrawal coin in addiction is tolerance. This basically means that you need increasing amounts of a drug to get high. In the case of Internet addiction, you may need more and more time online to get a good feeling from the experience or you may need increasingly exciting online content or both.
As with any addiction, the problems that people experience from Internet addiction exist on a spectrum. Often people begin with very few side effects, but the more intense and prolonged the addiction, the worse those side effects are. People who get into extreme Internet addiction can experience heightened states of distress more commonly associated with drug addiction. For example, it is not unheard of for people to go into psychosis as a result of Internet addiction.
Psychosis is most likely to occur in Internet gaming addiction. Immersion in gaming, particularly highly realistic fantasy gaming for prolonged periods of time without rest, can lead to a break with reality so that the gamer ceases to know whether or not they’re in the game. In psychological terms, the gamer may experience derealization (which is an inability to know what is real) and/or depersonalization (which is when the person doesn’t feel real anymore). As mentioned previously, sleep deprivation can lead to HPA axis dysregulation, and one of the more serious symptoms of that is psychotic breakdown. This dysregulation is exacerbated by Internet use in a cycle.
Psychosis can occur during withdrawal from the Internet. For example, in 2012, two doctors reported on the case of a fifteen-year-old boy with Internet addiction whose parents removed the Internet. Within a few days, the boy had developed several psychotic symptoms including paranoia that his parents had stolen his passwords and were trying to learn secrets about him because they wanted to hurt him.
In that case, the child was treated with psychiatric medication. In other instances, removing devices and setting up a safe space during withdrawal have been shown to be enough to resolve psychosis. Because this is such an extreme reaction to Internet addiction, it hasn’t been studied completely enough to know the best method of treatment. We will look further at treatment options in Chapter 7.