We have already looked at how Internet addiction can affect relationships. Now it’s time to look at different types of Internet addiction, and it is interesting to learn that many of these addictions are themselves related to online relationships.
There are two broad types of Internet addiction: general and specific. People with general Internet addiction are simply addicted to the act of spending time on their devices, without too much focus on any specific content. Most people, though, have a specific addiction, which means that they are only addicted to very specific content.
A lot of content online involves or simulates human relationships, so it’s of very little surprise that a lot of specific addictions relate to that content. This also makes sense with human psychology and culture. We are social creatures. Our entire being is primed to exist in relationship with others. We seek approval from others, we want to fit in with them, and we often define ourselves in relation to others. For better or worse (and in the case of addiction, it’s often for worse), we increasingly utilize technology to facilitate, enhance, or even simulate our need for social connection and inclusivity. All of the specific addictions in this chapter relate to relationships and include addictions to social media, texting, and compulsive use of dating apps. Pornography addiction, which is one of the most widely studied forms of Internet addiction, also falls into this category.
One of the most common types of Internet addiction is addiction to the use of social media. This is due in part to the content itself; the relationships online are compelling enough to garner our attention. However, the design of the sites is what really makes them addictive, and social media designers have been tweaking that design steadily to increase addictive qualities. The sites want people coming back frequently, and they create incentives to do so, which can lead to or exacerbate addictive use.
Social media launched back in the late 1990s, but it didn’t become widely used until the convergence of broadband Internet and smartphones. More and more people were getting online, and they were doing it more often since the Internet was now at their fingertips, and this opened the door to truly connecting those people. Facebook launched in 2004; Instagram launched in 2010.
Back in the early days of social media, including the beginning of Facebook, the purpose—and the reason that people spent time on the device—was to connect with other people that they already knew in real life. People spent time on the site as a novelty, because it was fun and somewhat social, but it didn’t dominate their attention. Over the years, Facebook has added countless tools designed to exploit the brain’s addictive nature.
Take, for example, the “like” button. Do you remember back in the early days when it wasn’t there at all? The button actually wasn’t introduced until 2009, five years after the company launched. Why did Facebook add that button? Author and social psychologist Adam Alter posits that it marks the turning point in how Facebook has changed to become more addictive, because it shifted the platform from one in which you passively perused updates to one in which you were an interactive participant. This exploits several of those addictive features that the human brain loves including the following:
At least two of the people on the original team that designed the Facebook like button (project manager Leah Pearlman and engineer Justin Rosenstein) have come out publicly to explain how addictive it is and that it was designed to be so. So, make no mistake, of all of the content out there on the Internet today, social media is among the most addictive, in large part because businesses have spent a lot of time, money, and energy to make it so.
But what exactly is a social media addiction? Essentially, it means that you keep using social media with increasing frequency even though the rewards that you get from it are diminishing and/or there are negative consequences in other areas of your life. For example, if you find yourself spending time connecting with people on social media at the expense of your face-to-face relationships, that can be a sign of an addiction. You aren’t getting as much from that online interaction as you could from face-to-face connection, plus your real-life connections begin to suffer, and yet you can’t stop yourself.
Of course, it’s challenging to tell when use has become abuse. In trying to determine whether someone has a social media addiction, it’s common to use a question-based assessment. One example comes from psychologists Mark Griffiths and Daria Kuss, who work out of Nottingham Trent University to study the impact of technology on behavior. They offer the following six questions for basic assessment:
People who answer yes to a majority of those questions might have an addiction to social media. Moreover, if you’re experiencing consequences and have withdrawal and tolerance to social media use, then there’s probably a problem.
In a 2017 paper written by Griffiths and Kuss, the authors lay out some important conclusions about social media and its potential for addiction. They emphasize that you can utilize social media without becoming addicted to it, but that social networking is a way of being that you can easily become addicted to. They note that within social media addiction, there are specific addictions that include Facebook addiction as well as specific disordered thoughts and behavior including nomophobia (fear of being without a smartphone) and FOMO (fear of missing out).
In this paper, the authors also lay out some helpful models for defining social media addiction:
These are different lenses for looking at social media addiction (and Internet addiction more generally) that lead us back to the brain and the psychology of humans. People who are interested in working professionally with Internet addicts, such as counselors, can utilize these different models for helping to both assess and understand a person’s addiction to social media. Through psychoeducation, they can help their clients better understand the issue as well.
As mentioned, an individual may have a general social media addiction, or they may have a very specific addiction to one aspect of social media use. This can be an addiction to only one specific platform. For example, someone may be able to take or leave Instagram but have an addiction to Twitter. Another person may have a Facebook addiction but not use any other social media at all. The specific platform isn’t the only thing that people can become addicted to though; it’s also possible to develop an addiction for certain activities on one or more sites.
For example, you can become addicted to the act of taking and posting selfies or to the act of catfishing others.
Selfie addiction sounds a little bit ridiculous if you’ve never encountered someone who struggles with this problem. However, it’s quite a serious issue for a small group of people. Some people will take hundreds of photos of one pose just to make sure that they have the best one to post on social media. After posting, they look obsessively at the comments people are making, and their mood and self-esteem can be greatly impacted by what they see there. They’ll delete a photo within minutes if it hasn’t gotten the quick, positive reception that they expected, and they can feel terrible about themselves for hours afterward as a result.
Instead of, or in addition to, taking many photos, a person with a selfie addiction might spend hours tweaking one photo just to get it right. They’ll use different apps and filters to perfect the lighting, erase their perceived flaws, and enhance certain traits in order to appear exactly as they want to appear. It becomes an obsession, and this obsession leads to addiction. They keep taking and tweaking more and more photos, looking for the perfect one, never quite satisfied. Every once in a while, they’ll get the image or response to an image that feels great, and it’ll offer that big hit of dopamine, and then the cycle starts again.
Selfie addiction is often inextricably linked with self-image issues. When you’re constantly trying to tweak your appearance for the perfect photo, it’s hard to be satisfied with the way you look in real life. As you zoom in on the screen, you see all of your (real or perceived) flaws magnified. This can lead to, or exist in combination with, body dysmorphic disorder, a mental health condition in which the person obsesses over their flaws, grooms and exercises excessively, avoids mirrors, constantly works to change their appearance, and obviously has negative self-esteem. Whether or not a selfie addiction gets to that extreme, someone with this addiction is at risk of basing too much of their self-worth on their image to the point that it causes problems with both physical and mental health.
As we’ve seen, a characteristic of addiction is that it causes problems in a key area of your life. In the case of selfie addiction, the person might spend so much time trying to get their images to look a certain way that they don’t actually do the things they desire to do. In extreme cases, the individual might live an entirely fake life. For example, they might invest in thousands of dollars of props to make it look like they’re at the beach in their photos. Meanwhile, they’re really never leaving the house. They’re spending so much time and energy on that online image that they can’t even afford a beach vacation.
That’s an extreme example, of course. In most cases, the person will actually attend the events in the photos. However, they may not be enjoying them or participating fully, because they are obsessed with getting the right photos to post later. Let’s say that a man focuses so much on his appearance and the right photos at a mixer that he fails to do the networking that would land him a job that he really wants. This is an example of someone whose real life is negatively impacted by his selfie addiction.
Selfie addiction can also negatively impact real-life relationships. There is a 2018 Taco Bell commercial that captures this perfectly. Most commonly known as “Sunset Heart Hands,” it features an “Instagram boyfriend” whose primary role in his relationship seems to be to take cute photos of his girlfriend to post on Instagram. Then he discovers a new Taco Bell item, so his hands are full, and he can’t take the photos. She starts insistently repeating the phrase, “Sunset Heart Hands,” because she desperately wants him to take the all-so-often-posted image of her fingers forming a heart that frames the sunset. She gets increasingly agitated; he says, “Let’s just enjoy the moment,” and she snaps. Of course, this is an ad for Taco Bell and it’s not exactly a selfie, but it dramatizes an increasingly common problem—the couple selfie that becomes more important than just being together in the moment. The addict becomes so obsessed with documenting their relationship together online that the actual relationship suffers. This brings us directly into a different, but related (and often intertwined), social media addiction: an addiction to curating the “perfect” life.
This type of addiction goes beyond the selfie to include an addiction to posting pictures of your room or home, pets, clothing, children and family, vacations, and so forth. In addiction you don’t merely want to record and share some your favorite things from your life; you want to make everything look perfect in your online world. This can impact your real life. For example, are you ignoring that your dog is completely stressed out by the outfit you’ve put him in and the camera always in his face? Or have you failed to notice that your child never actually gets to enjoy the experience of feeding the ducks because you’re so consumed with getting her to pose properly for the duck-feeding picture? As with “Sunset Heart Hands,” these small things add up day after day to eat away at your relationships and diminish the quality of your actual life experience.
As with selfie addiction, the addiction can be to taking multiple photos, tweaking photos, and/or seeing the response that those photos receive on your social media platforms. The addict may pay constant attention to the number of followers they have from day to day, feeling devastated when they lose some and elated when they gain a few. They may get a huge surge of dopamine when one of their images gets reposted by a bigger account, validating the idea that their life is “perfect.” However, the addict often feels like a fraud, because they know that there’s a mess cropped out of the image and that nothing is perfect at all. This can lead to a cycle of trying to perfect the next image even more to try to escape being “found out.”
This belief that you’re a fraud is a condition often called imposter syndrome. And this can lead you to feel depressed about your own life while simultaneously making you feel like you have to keep up with this perfect online charade. This experience also exacerbates any pain that you already experience about unrealized dreams you may have; it looks like everyone else is living the life that you want to have. You don’t want to feel that pain, so you desire an escape, and social media offers the perfect, terrible escape so you become more and more addicted.
Internet marketer Morra Aarons-Mele writes about this in her book Hiding in the Bathroom: An Introvert’s Roadmap to Getting Out There (When You’d Rather Stay Home) when she criticizes what she calls “achievement porn.” She talks about how achievement has been fetishized thanks in large part to social media images of the peak experiences of life. For example, a pregnant mother might feel like she has to contort herself into the perfect glowing yoga pose on a cliff side in her second trimester to get the perfect image of her “perfect pregnancy.” So, even something as natural as pregnancy becomes a subject for achievement in photos. The person suffering from an addiction to this is constantly performing for the camera, seeking validation through images. She may eventually start to feel like she doesn’t even know what’s true about herself anymore. This sense of being out of touch with your inner self can wreak havoc on your mental health.
Relative to this, someone addicted to curating the perfect online life often grapples with the feeling that they don’t measure up to the other people that they see online. Human beings have a natural tendency to compare ourselves to others. To the addict, it may always look like someone else’s house is better decorated, their closet filled with cuter purchases, their food prepared more perfectly, and their friends happier in photos. If you suffer from this, then you keep trying to make your life look that same way, but you never quite feel like you measure up. You can become increasingly dissatisfied with your own (normal) life because it doesn’t match what you see in pictures. And yet, you can’t seem to stop yourself from looking. You have to know what other people’s pictures look like. You may become particularly obsessed with specific influencers or feeds, feeling jealous of them as you strive to match their following. This leads us to another type of social media addiction: stalking others.
Social media has stoked the human drive toward voyeurism. Although frequently associated with sexuality, voyeurism more generally means that you take pleasure in watching someone else, particularly when they’re doing something private, dangerous, or scandalous. Social media has put everyone’s private lives out there for all of us to see. Watching what someone is eating for dinner has become a very regular part of our everyday lives, and that is one of the more mundane things we get to glimpse each day. Some people share every waking moment of their lives on social media, and other people can get addicted to following those lives online.
An addiction to someone else’s content can develop into stalking behavior. Stalking encompasses a broad spectrum of things that range from quietly obsessing over the person and following them online without contacting them to full-blown, in-real-life following them and causing them fear if not actual harm. Of course, most people with an addiction to other people’s content don’t become dangerous real-life stalkers, but given the right (or rather wrong) brain chemistry and environmental factors, it can happen. Alternatively, someone with unhealthy stalking tendencies can now easily find and follow their object of desire online and become addicted to tracking them in that way.
This type of social media addiction may manifest as becoming an online “superfan” of one or more people, usually celebrities or online influencers. The addict begins to feel like they are part of the person’s life because they see everything that the other person is doing. They think that they truly know the person. And they may come to think that they have a relationship with that person, feeling hurt or offended when the person doesn’t post in a timely manner, respond to a comment, or follow back the addict’s account. The superfan may comment on every single post, tag the object of their addiction in all of their own images, and follow link after link after link to try to learn more about the person’s life. They may contact the person through direct messaging, and if that fails, try to connect with the person’s other online friends and followers.
As mentioned, all of the addictions discussed in this chapter relate to people’s relationships, and that is particularly true with this type of social media addiction. Another way that it can manifest is through online addiction to the content of someone you know in real life. The most prevalent example is in the case of breakups; the relationship ends, but one or both partners become addicted to stalking the other on social media as a way to maintain something of the relationship. Other types of addiction, besides to an ex’s content, could be to the content of their new partner or to the content of someone they have a crush on and want to get involved with. It’s one thing to Google a potential new partner to learn some basic things about them; it’s another entirely to fall down the rabbit hole of reading every old post they ever made on social media and trying to analyze it for clues about where your own relationship might go.
Yet another way that this form of addiction can show up is when you become addicted to checking your partner’s accounts. Jealousy as it relates to social media is a significant problem in many modern relationships. The more you look at your partner’s online activity, the more your mind whirls and the more you try to soothe it with even more information, blowing it up into a full-blown addiction by stalking their social media accounts.
Many of the people who develop a social media addiction, particularly an addiction to other people’s content, are driven by a fear of missing out (FOMO). This is the feeling that other people are online doing something interesting and that if you fail to get online as well, then you’re going to be excluded from the fun. The term was originally coined by MTV who had found that even though 66 percent of young people found it exhausting to constantly be online, 58 percent worried that they were missing out on something if they didn’t check in.
FOMO itself predicts addictive use; the more prone you are to the feeling, the more likely you’ll engage in addictive behavior. It’s a cyclical problem; more use leads to greater FOMO. FOMO has been associated with lower feelings of life satisfaction, well-being, and general mood and with increased likelihood of engaging in risky online behavior. FOMO can affect anyone, but it’s particularly a problem for young users, who are in a stage of life when acceptance and inclusion with peers is at a high point.
People who are driven to use social media out of FOMO are more likely than others to develop addictive behavior. Author Larry Rosen explains that there are two major reasons people will compulsively use technology; FOMO being one of them. The other reason would be that they really love the experience. People who are driven by pleasure may still develop addictive behavior, but the pain of not using the device is worse for people who are driven by fear (or FOMO).
Author Morra Aarons-Mele emphasizes that FOMO can be a particular problem for people with introverted personalities. The introvert doesn’t necessarily want to be out there in the world doing the things that people are sharing on social media. However, they may feel like they should be, like they are missing out on opportunities for growth, because of those introvert tendencies. Social media is a way to check in and feel connected to experiences without having to get out there.
In fact, social media relies on FOMO as a marketing strategy. The creators of social media want you to fear that you are missing out so that you’ll keep checking back in to the app. The more time you spend there, the more money they make. Therefore, they exploit your fear to keep you active on the site. Coming back again and again becomes an addiction.
It is important to note that FOMO affects people of all ages. The quirky MTV-coined term often makes people think it only applies to teens. It can also make it seem like it’s a problem that isn’t that big of a deal. However, it can impact people’s lives in deep and lasting ways. In her book I Can’t Help Myself, advice columnist and author Meredith Goldstein wrote about how FOMO has affected the lives of the people she knows who are in their twenties and thirties. She shares that these people are overwhelmingly miserable in their day-to-day lives. They often feel like the slightest thing is the end of the world. She attributes this catastrophizing to FOMO. She explains that the plethora of opportunities available makes them feel that every single decision could be the wrong one. It relates to FOMO because, thanks to social media, they “know the specifics of every lost opportunity.” For example, after a decision to move to New York instead of Los Angeles, a person might enviously see all of the beautiful lives being lived out in Los Angeles and mistakenly feel like they made the wrong choice. There is a constant reminder of the road not taken, and it can make the FOMO-motivated addict feel like all of their choices were the wrong ones.
Catfishing is the act of pretending to be someone else online in order to lure one or more people into a relationship with your fake persona. Catfishing can become addictive behavior for the person doing the catfishing, and it can naturally be intertwined with the addiction to curating a perfect life. A catfish can also exploit the social media addiction of others to secure victims.
A person addicted to catfishing might spend hours each day honing their fake profile. These days, most people can tell if a social media page or website looks a little bit fishy. If you want to really trick someone, you have to make it look good. On Facebook, for example, this means that you flesh out the page with photos taken at different places. The catfish steals someone else’s photos, so they spend time searching online for suitable images and then tweaking them to add them to their profiles.
The catfish will not only fill out the profile. They have to make the interaction on the page look real. They add a variety of friends, communicating with these people regularly to generate comments on the page. In some cases, the catfish crafts full fake profiles of people to friend the original page to make it look even more realistic. The MTV reality television show Catfish has countless examples of people doing this.
This is all in addition to the time spent actually doing the catfishing. That’s time spent finding people to catfish, searching the profile for information to prey upon, chatting and sharing messages and photos, and further developing the relationship. People catfish for a number of reasons including the following:
Any of these reasons for becoming a catfish in the first place can become addictive. You can become addicted to being the fake person that you’ve created. You can become addicted to the relationships you’ve created. You can become addicted to the “high” of getting away with it.
Why would someone fall prey to a catfish? Sometimes, it’s as simple as really believing the best in people and assuming that everyone is who they say they are. However, it’s often driven by something else. Loneliness, periods of grief and self-doubt, and low self-esteem of the victim are all possible reasons that someone would be susceptible to catfishing. Another key reason is that the victim already has a social media addiction. They spend so much time online already that they don’t sense the warning signs of a stranger interacting with them there.
The way that the catfish interacts with the person can also worsen the victim’s social media addiction. The catfish feeds the victim positive thoughts and feelings of validation, so of course the victim wants to hop online frequently to find out if they have a message that will give them that dopamine high.
Just like someone can become addicted to the act of catfishing, it’s possible to become addicted to other negative online behaviors including cyberbullying and trolling. Cyberbullying is persistent bullying of one or more people that takes place through apps, text, and social media. Trolling is when someone purposely posts inflammatory comments online in order to get a group riled up and engaging negatively. Both have similar roots and can become addictive for similar reasons.
People bully or troll others in large part because it gives them feelings of power and control. People who engage in these behaviors often have low self-esteem, symptoms of anxiety and/or depression, or problems at home or are in some way discontent with themselves and their lives. Instead of resolving those issues, they make themselves feel bigger and better by diminishing others. Although this can play out in real life, it’s much easier to bully or troll people online than it is in person. You can do it anonymously, without many real-life consequences, and still derive the faux pleasure of feeling like you’ve done something powerful. If you’ve made someone cry because of your bullying online, then you’ve caused a reaction, which can give you a sense of control. Likewise, if you are able to generate a huge online fight about a topic through trolling, you’ve essentially controlled an entire crowd of people.
That feeling of power becomes addictive. The addict wants more of it to keep feeling powerful and in control. The Internet moves fast, and people’s attention doesn’t stick for long. In order to keep feeling powerful, the addict has to increase the frequency and intensity of their actions.
In a comprehensive Vice Motherboard article about whether or not trolling is addictive, writer Virginia Pelley describes a troller pseudonymed Dave who argued obsessively with people online under both his real name and several fake names, increasingly ruining his relationships with people in real life and even threatening his job security. For him, what was addictive was that he got to feel like he was right about things as he laid his arguments out for the world to see. He stopped caring about the real effects his arguments were having on people, including his own sister and childhood friends, because he was addicted to trolling.
George Caspar is a former Internet troll who shares his story in an e-book that describes how all of his troll behavior was motivated by shame. In a blog post about the book, he says that he has a shame-based personality, which is also an addictive personality, because in an effort not to feel shame, he tries to escape through behavior that becomes addictive. He highlights that the troll (and one could argue also the cyberbully) often particularly loves to shame their targets, and the reason is because they themselves feel so much shame. This doesn’t justify the behavior but can explain some of the motivation behind these harmful online activities and furthermore highlight how they can become so addictive.
It’s important to note that the victims of these acts may be prone to social media addiction, but they may also become addicted to the activities that victimize them. For example, someone who is being bullied online may feel terrible when they go online, but they can’t stop themselves because they feel desperate to know what others are saying about them. Research indicates that, at least for teens, the more time spent online, the more likely the risk of getting cyberbullied. So, the Internet addict is at greater risk than the average person.
Research also shows that teens who experience cyberbullying are at greater risk of other addictions including substance misuse. Cyberbullying causes a number of problems and mental health issues; it’s linked with depression, anxiety, and eating disorders as well as low self-esteem and self-harming behavior. These problems all put people at greater risk of addiction. This may manifest as addiction to social media specifically, Internet use generally, and/or to other behaviors or substances.
Not all relationship-related online addictions are to social media. Texting is another huge culprit. You don’t even have to be connected to the Internet to text with people, although oftentimes you are. These days, it’s hard to even define texting as separate from other forms of messaging. I have friends whom I know in real life who “text” me not only to my phone number but also through Facebook messenger and Instagram direct messages. The technology changes quickly; I used to chat privately with people on GChat and AOL, but I no longer use those applications. Snapchat and WeChat are two other major places where people “text” or send one-to-one messages to each other. So, for the purposes of this book, we’ll loosely define a texting addiction as an addiction to sharing one-on-one private messages through any phone, computer, or other similar device.
Texting, even with someone you don’t know, feels more personal than publicly commenting on social media. You’re doing it privately (although sometimes in group texts), so it’s got the sense of a new level of intimacy. This makes you feel more connected to the person on the other end of the message. Therefore, you place a higher value on their response. You text and your brain immediately starts to get excited for the response, seeking the dopamine hit of the reward of hearing from them. Sometimes you don’t get the hit; you craft a carefully composed text message and get back just “ok” or “cool.” That’s not at all satisfying to the brain, so you immediately want to text again to see if you’ll get a better reward.
Of course, just because you text frequently doesn’t mean that you necessarily have an addiction. Dr. Kelly Lister-Landman did an interesting study into texting addiction, which found that teens differ by gender when it comes to texting addiction. Although boys and girls exchanged the same number of texts, the girls were significantly more likely to develop an addiction. In this study, addiction was characterized by trying to cut back on use but feeling unable to, getting frustrated by the behavior, and feeling defensive about their use. The boys weren’t likely to have those problems, and although they texted often because of social norms, they could basically take it or leave it. In contrast, the girls had emotional attachments, and emotional consequences, associated with compulsive texting.
Many of the tools that we use to text offer addictive features. For example, there’s the typing indicator; you can see that someone else is typing but hasn’t yet sent the message because your device either tells you directly “typing” or shows you through symbols such as an ellipsis. You get anxious and excited for the response. Your brain is ready for that potential hit. Likewise, some services allow you to see that someone has read your message. How do you feel when someone reads what you wrote but hasn’t yet responded? Do a million questions start going through your mind? Do you wonder what they’re thinking and what you did “wrong” that made it so that they haven’t responded yet? Does your worry cause you to want to text again?
Pairing text messaging with notifications can exacerbate addiction. In psychology, there’s a well-recognized concept called classical conditioning. If you know the story about how Pavlov’s dogs would salivate at the ringing of the bell, then you know about classical conditioning. Basically, you pair two things together (the dog hears the bell and then gets the food that he salivates over) and eventually just the first thing triggers the response (the dog hears the bell and begins salivating even if there’s no food). Your text messages are probably paired with one or more triggers—a ping, a vibration, a notification number on the screen. You hear or see it, and you immediately start to have the feelings associated with the addiction. These days, you can choose from any number of different sounds to pair with your text messages, assigning different sounds to different people that you text with, and this increases your level of investment in the texting relationship so that you’re even more easily triggered by those specific sounds.
Texting addiction can lead to physical problems—like text neck or texting thumb. It can lead to problems associated with lack of sleep due to waking up in the night to text. Texting during class can lead to problems at school; excessive or inappropriate texting at work can threaten your job. It’s hard to say what amount of texts constitutes a problem, so it’s important to consider the effects texting has on your social life, activities that you’re passionate about, health and work performance, and so forth.
Back in 1995, Match.com launched the first-ever commercial dating website. The people who paired up on Match back then could never even have envisioned what online dating would look like in the twenty-first century. There are hundreds of different dating sites and dating apps, some general and many niche. You can satisfy just about every interest you could possibly desire and connect with someone else who desires the same. “Connecting” with another person is as simple as swiping a finger across your phone. And with that prevalence and ease comes the increased likelihood of addiction.
The reasons, motivations, and problems associated with an addiction to dating apps are similar to those associated with other relationship-oriented Internet addictions including social media addictions. In fact, it’s often directly tied in with other addictions. For example, you might have some selfie addiction or addiction to curating the perfect image as you try to present yourself to be the perfect dating material on different sites. You could become addicted to the “likes,” constantly checking how many people are swiping positively for you. You might become addicted to looking at potential partners but never actually following through on dates. You could become addicted to the one-on-one messaging, including texting and sexting addiction. Or you could become addicted to short whirlwind relationships that you ultimately find unsatisfying, so you go back to your online connections.
In terms of harm, addiction to dating apps is most likely to cause problems in your current relationships. If you’re in a relationship and “cheating” with dating apps, then that’s an obvious trigger for problems. If you’re single, then you might neglect your friendships and family in favor of your online dating world. Many dating apps are free, but some cost money, and of course going out on the dates costs money, so you might also develop negative consequences in your financial life as a result of dating app addiction. It can even lead to physical problems; just like there is texting thumb, there’s also so-called Tinder Finger, which is pain in the index (or swiping) finger from constant, repetitive swiping on dating apps.
The problem of dating app addictions seems to be more prevalent than one might guess. One Match survey, reported on by VICE in 2017, found that one out of six single people feel addicted to the process of seeking out a partner online. Men are far more likely to feel addicted to it than women are, but women are more likely to report that the whole process makes them feel fatigued and even depressed. Dating app addiction may correlate with increased depression, anxiety, self-image issues, and low self-esteem.
Pornography addiction isn’t necessarily the same as social media addiction, but it falls under the same umbrella in the sense that it is an online addictive behavior directly related to and impacting relationships with others. Compulsive behavior focused on online pornography is also known by the term “cybersexual addiction.” We can see that it’s on a spectrum with other social media addiction when we look at the similar term “cyber-relational addiction.” This latter term refers to addiction to online relationships at the expense of relationships in real life, which describes any of the different types of addictions described in this chapter so far.
Along with gaming, pornographic content is considered one of the most potentially addictive content types available online. It is also one of the most widely studied behaviors of Internet addiction. It takes time for enough scientific studies to be done to really fully understand a mental health issue such as addiction; porn was one of the first popular content types on the Internet, so it has a long history available for study (or comparatively long anyway).
As such, this is a rich topic that really requires a full book to completely review and understand—and there are several of those books out there for people who are interested in the topic. Instead of digging that deep into it, we’ll use what we already know about addiction in general, and Internet addiction specifically, to get a general grasp of online porn addictions. Specifically, let’s recognize that porn has existed a lot longer than the Internet has and to take a look at what makes it much more likely to develop an online porn addiction than addiction to other types of porn.
This has to do directly with the technology itself, in particular the advances in that technology. Remember the story earlier in this book about how early games like those on the Atari system were naturally self-limiting in terms of addiction? No matter how exciting a single game was, it eventually got boring. And there were only so many games, so eventually you stopped playing Atari and did something else. Older versions of pornography are similar; you can only look through a single magazine so many times before the excitement is gone. Plus, the magazine is only a still image, so you have to utilize your imagination, stimulating other parts of your brain beyond just those that get addicted. The VHS tape or DVD porn movie uses a little bit less of your imagination, and it’s a little bit more addictive, but eventually you’ve memorized it, and it no longer excites you.
But fast forward to pornography on the Internet today: there is virtually endless content of all types and varieties, and you can easily click from one to the next within seconds. You don’t have to use your imagination at all because the Internet feeds you far more scenarios than you could imagine on your own. You passively consume the content, there’s more and more of it, and you can easily see how this becomes much more addictive than the days when you had to covertly enter an adult bookstore to find the video that you’d watch for the next few weeks.
It’s easy to see how online pornography feeds the brain’s desire for intermittent reward. You click the video, and you may or may not like what you see. When you do, you get the dopamine reward. Online pornography also directly plays into the human desire for novelty. People follow a common trajectory starting out with “vanilla porn” and heading deeper and deeper into niche and kink porn. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with a person’s preference for a particular type of sex, Internet addiction can lead people to seek out more and more unique sex acts in the search for novelty. The desire to see more new things fuels more addictive behavior.
This has led to some disturbing issues, particularly for young people exposed to online pornography when their brains are still developing and their sexual desires still forming. Some people with addictions to Internet pornography find that real-life sexual experiences don’t stimulate them because they feel dulled or muted in comparison with the intensity and click-click quickness of the online version of sex. They want to have sex with their partners in theory, but they can’t get aroused or reach orgasm in the real world; yet, they have no trouble doing so with online porn. Even if you haven’t experienced this yourself, you can easily imagine the many and varied problems that this can cause in relationships.
There’s also the problem of desensitization to the other person when you do have real-life sexual relationships. Digital technology generally, and online pornography addiction specifically, may cause reduced empathy. If you don’t recognize that the other person whom you’re having sex with is a living, breathing, emotional human being, then you’re at risk of causing a whole host of problems. At the very least, both of you leave the situation feeling a little bit empty, a little bit used, and very unsatisfied. Seeking a better feeling, the addict returns to porn and continues the cycle.