Brain Fact Friday ”Overcoming Digital Addiction Using Neuroscience”

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast for Brain Fact Friday and episode #157 on a topic that I think we should be aware of: Digital Addictions: Do You Know What’s Happening to Your Brain When You are Using Certain Apps on Your Smartphone, or Using Your Smartphone at All? EXCITING UPDATE: Stay tuned (early September) for an exclusive interview with Dr. Anna Lembke, Professor and Medical Director of Addiction Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine who inspired this episode. I'm Andrea Samadi, author, and educator from Toronto, Canada, now in Arizona, and like many of our listeners, have been fascinated with learning and understanding the science behind high performance strategies in our schools, our sports, and workplace environments with ideas that we can all use, understand and implement immediately. This week’s Brain Fact Friday kind of snuck its way into my schedule, as I wasn’t planning on writing this topic and think there are many other podcasts that cover the subject of addiction[i] more thoroughly than I ever could, but it all started last Friday night when I was out at dinner with my husband and our two friends that we met on the hiking trails, Scott and Ruth. Scott, a business consultant who travels for his work, was home for a change, so we met up at a local restaurant and chatted about life, and what was on our minds that day. The conversation took a turn towards our phones, that we never have out at the table, and social media, and how addictive some of the apps are for the human brain. Scott mentioned he rarely uses social media, and I think I said something along the lines of “That’s really smart” remembering the Netflix Documentary Social Dilemma[ii] that scared the living daylights out of me. I wrote this down (on my phone) while watching the movie that “Magicians were like the first neuroscientists” What do magicians and neuroscientists have in common? Both are concerned with how the brain works. In magic, people try to fool the brain and in neuroscience, they are trying to understand the brain and this documentary will show you how the creators of technology apps have designed their software to trick or fool the human brain, just like magic, into addiction. When we can use an understanding of neuroscience, or how our brains work in these situations, we can take a powerful stance towards being in control, instead of being controlled by these apps. I was blown away when I heard one of the app developers in this movie, say that he had to develop a code to break his addiction to Reddit. I don’t use Reddit, but completely understood what he was saying. The next morning, we hit the hiking trails as usual, and we ran into Scott and Ruth along the way. Scott told me that he saw an article in the newspaper that might interest me about our conversation last night, and he had put it on the windshield of my car. “Sounds good” I said, forgetting what we were even talking about the night before, and then at the end of the hike, sure enough, he had pinned The Wall Street Journal on my windshield with an article called “Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine[iii]” by Dr. Anna Lembke (who also appeared in the Netflix Documentary Social Dilemma) with a headline that would catch anyone’s attention these days “Rising rates of depression and anxiety in wealthy countries like the US may be the results of our brains getting hooked on the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure.” I read the article written by Dr. Lembke, a psychiatrist and professor at Stanford University and saw that this article was an essay from her forthcoming book (coming out next week-August 24th) called Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence[iv] that was about a young patient of hers who came to her with debilitating anxiety and depression and what was interesting is that instead of prescribing him antidepressants like she would have done 20 years ago, she uncovered that