Internet addiction – do you have it, what are the threats?
- Marta Hardzei (Uniwersytet Papieski w Krakowie) Joanna i Jarosław Burdek (offlajnowi.pl)
- August 6, 2024
Table of contents
Nowadays , using the Internet is a normal thing. Quite a lot of people have already switched to the virtual world for good. Hardly anyone uses a phone or a computer without a constant connection to the Internet. But hardly anyone also knows why too much Internet can cause real trouble and lead to chronic brain overload and worse mood. So, if you’re here, that means maybe you have observed some of the behavioral disorders in yourself and you’re worrying whether you are addicted to the Internet.
What is an Internet addiction (definition of addiction)?
Internet addiction is an addiction to using the Internet. In other words: weboholism or internetoholism. The Internet may have a bad impact on you when you use it too often and for too long. You feel the effects of addiction in your everyday life, contact with others and at work.
Internet addiction is a kind of behavioral addiction – like gambling or shopaholism. However, it is more insidious. Why? Because you can practically use the Internet without limits and at minimal costs.
What are the symptoms of Internet addiction – what does Internet addiction come down to?
Internet addiction is, among others, the loss of control of how long we use it. An addicted person thinks they spend much less time using it than they really do. Over time, the effects of Internet addiction may become more severe. And, as with any addiction, Internet addiction needs treatment.
You often feel a higher amount of stress, excitement, you don’t know what is happening to you. Sometimes you spend hours on such doomscrolling and then you have a guilty conscience or a sense that time is slipping through your fingers.
Internet addiction consists of: playing video games, using social media, surfing the Internet, chatting with others for a long time, watching pornography, and even binge-watching series for hours. While you do these Internet-related things:
You use the Internet for a long time. You spend a lot of time online.
You don’t control or you don’t want to control how much time you spend in front of the computer screen.
You try to limit the time spent online, but you still reconnect.
Being online is more pleasant for you than other activities.
You neglect your responsibilities (including your school/work/home responsibilities, relationships and hobbies).
You feel lonely. But in fact, you yourself have withdrawn from life. Because you are constantly online. You have more social connections on the Internet than in real life.
You limit your physical activity, since you are always sitting at home. You feel worse physically, your back aches (sitting for a long time may cause bad posture and spine curvature, and when it comes to kids, looking at a phone may cause short-sightedness).
You have sleep problems. Blue light delays the production of melatonin (sleep hormone).
Using the internet may cause mood fluctuations and deterioration, and over time, there may appear symptoms of depression.
You feel the information overload. Your brain doesn’t rest, information comes flooding in from all directions. All the time. This has a negative influence on your mood.
You feel bad, the problem of addiction causes the feeling of unrest when you are away from the Internet.
Low self-esteem — using social media means constantly comparing yourself to others, which contributes to low self-esteem.
If you watch too much pornography and online erotomania becomes your “hobby”, it may lead to the start of another addiction, this time to online sex. Same with video games. Too much video games may lead to a gaming addiction.
What are the most common causes of Internet addiction?
Consequences of Internet addiction may be severe. Internet overuse may have really negative effects. For you and your family.
Health problems
The effects of Internet overuse may include health problems in the physical and mental spheres. Researchers note that the more time is spent online, the higher the risk of depression is. Internet addiction is related to the risk of many ailments, including:
back pain
obesity
short-sightedness
insomnia and sleeping disorders
depression.
Neglect of responsibilities
Internet addiction may negatively influence your professional and private life. Negligence of official matters (because of the reluctance to go outisde), and even forgetting to pay the bills are the extreme cases. Remember that a behavioral addiction is very insidious. Behavioral disorders develop slowly and the addicted person may not even realize that something is not right. At first, you handle your professional duties reluctantly, and in time you spend more and more time working online. Until your boss realizes that you aren’t working. It may lead to serious consequences for the addicted person.
Social isolation and a decline in emotional bonds
Being constantly online and focusing on virtual life may lead you to no longer enjoying the life outside the Internet and social isolation. And this leads to loneliness. According to A. Hansen (you will find the bibliography at the end), loneliness is very dangerous to the brain. Lonely people sleep worse and see the same events that others see as more threatening. That’s because a long time ago, a lonely person was threatened by animals and other people. Human brain remembers it and that’s why it considers loneliness a major threat. People who use the Internet a lot, who don’t go out and don’t have normal relations, may have difficulties with forming and sustaining healthy interpersonal relations. Online communication may replace face-to-face contact.
Impairment of cognitive functions
Exhaustion caused by the overuse of the Internet may be a burden on our organisms. The brain needs moments of reset, detox, of ordering our knowledge on the “shelves” of the cerebral library. Unless there we have times when we can switch off, our cognitive functions may suffer: memory and ability to make decisions.
What are the causes of addiction?
Getting addicted to the Internet is often a long process and has many causes, e.g. easy Internet access, using it since childhood, and the fact that an escape to the Internet may save us from dealing with emotions.
Is the easy Internet access a cause of Internet addiction?
We can use the Internet anywhere, on many devices, such as computers, smartphones or tablets and smartwatches. Home appliances are connected to the Internet. All this makes the Internet easier to use and more accessible.
You have the Internet everywhere and always, and cheap.
The Internet is available practically 24/7 – it can be used without limits, at any time of day. Smartphones allow you to access the Internet in practically any place. You need to go to a shop to buy alcohol, to the fridge for food, and you also need to make an effort to be able to gamble. And you have the Internet all the time, in your smartphone, in your pocket. Additionally, Internet access is not exclusive anymore. Subscriptions are cheap and you can use them on your phone.
No one points a finger at you (yet).
People addicted to the internet are anonymous. They don’t have to be ashamed of their addiction. No one points fingers at them, because nowadays everyone is online. Unfortunately, the fact is that we find out about the effects of addiction with time. It’s like with asbestos – people wouldn’t cover their houses with it if they knew it isn’t healthy. Cigarettes used to be advertised by real doctors on TV, too! Just because everyone does something, it doesn’t mean it is OK!
Here you can do ANYTHING!
The Internet and Internet access replaced a lot of devices: maps, then GPS, a telephone, a watch, a camera, TV (watching films) and radio, as well as newspapers, a wallet and money, meetings with friends and for business purposes (offline), a walkman and a CD player. Applications replaced many devices, including those for games and entertainment. Everything is online! And this causes Internet addiction.
The alternative for A Difficult Life
For some people the Internet is a hideaway. The virtual world is a good option if you have problems in your life. I’ve recently read an interesting book called igen.
iGen, Jean M. Twenge
In the book the author describes a generation of young people addicted to the Internet. She provides data showing that nowadays young people (from the USA) don’t go out and seldom meet up with friends, they don’t make decisions on their own, they are less eager to get a driver’s license, they spend less time doing homework and extracurriculars, and they even drink less alcohol! Nowadays, young people don’t want to “grow up”, because being online is very pleasant…
A Habit
We use a phone, because after some time it becomes a habit. Habits are a clever way for our brain to save energy. If we do something habitually, e.g. get out of bed with our right foot, we don’t need to constantly think about it. The same goes for our phone. If we use it when we are sad or to kill boredom – – then our brain saves energy. Besides, it is one of the simplest activities we can do. Practically effortless. And that is why our brains love smartphones, because they like to do things which don’t require extra energy.
Manipulations
You are only a cog. Nothing is free. There are just different currencies. In the case of social media, for which you do not pay with money, the currency is your time and attention. Big companies cash in on your time and your purchases. Their interfaces are programmed very meticulously so that you spend as much time on them as you can.
In a phenomenal book called Four Thousand Weeks, O. Burkemann points out the fact that the Internet is designed in such a way that companies can make money off of it. If you have a free app, in reality you pay for it with your attention and time: “Each time you open a social media app, there are “a thousand people on the other side of the screen ” paid to keep you there” “.
There are many manipulations which are supposed to keep you on the Internet, e.g. in the past there were websites and you could choose to move forward, today you can scroll endlessly, so that you lose the sense of control and you are online for more time.
Another thing is FOMO (the Fear of Missing Out) — used in video games, when the developers add so-called drops and events in which you must take part, otherwise you’ll miss out on them. This feeling is also caused by the Internet content on social media platforms. You are afraid that you’ll miss out on something, which is why you check the Internet frequently.
The structure of the brain
Our brain was created thoooooooousands of years ago and it operates on pretty old software. The evolution works really slowly and it hasn’t caught up with the Internet! We have many cognitive errors inside our heads, for example:
we don’t like to break a sweat — because we needed to save energy in the past. There was not as much food as there is now, and a death of starvation was a real threat. The brain eats up as much as 20% of our energy!
we chase after information — that is why we love the Internet so much, because the access to information always gave us a higher chance of survival (today, in my opinion, it is the other way around — the more unfiltered data, the worse)
we love gossip — our life depended on it, we needed to know where the food or an unknown tribe is (the Internet is full of gossip!)
our brain focuses on negative information — our survival largely depended on it (is the location of a bad tribe was more important than that of a friend).
we love to be in a group — people living in groups had a higher chance of survival.
the brain treats that which happens now as more important (in the past we needed to eat our fill, because we couldn’t know when we would hunt down some food again).
As you can see, there are hundreds of such errors, and the Internet doesn’t help us with having a “healthy” brain. Especially since the brain needs to rest to, for example, put our knowledge in order and cleanse itself of toxins. And the best ideas come to our heads the moment we rest, when our subconsciousness works instead of the conscious mind. It is said that Mendeleev first saw the periodic table in his dream!
Why is it so addictive? Popping the Net.
“The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.”
Source: Lembke Anna, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
Dopamine is a hormone of (pleasure) anticipation. By using the Internet and social media, you flood your brain with it, which makes you want it more. But the more you “take” it, the more your brain wants of it to achieve the same level of pleasure. It’s like drug abuse, but with screens. It’s addictive, especially for children, whose brains are not entirely developed and can’t fully handle the dopamine and temptations yet.
It’s a kind of self-powered machine. When we get used to the doses of dopamine delivered by short posts or videos, we can’t focus on reading, watching longer content – we want to have it short everywhere. Dopamine is unleashed by receiving notifications, waiting for the ending of short videos, waiting for what is hidden behind a clickbait, waiting for reactions and comments under posts. “Applications, in short—apps. They look harmless on the screen: colorful icons arranged in rows. This makes us not think right away what is hidden behind them. They are like mushrooms. When walking around the forest we only see the pileus, which is exactly what we call mushrooms. We pick them and fry them with onion or dry them. But underground there still remains a grown mycelium, the rest of this peculiar organism. The same goes for applications – these innocent icons hide underneath not only complicated IT systems, but social and political systems, too. Nowadays, the mycelia of applications fills all the space, rearranging our life and our world. Source: Zabójcze Aplikacje, M. Wiśniewski
The problems is that dopamine works like a drug. The more you take it, the more you watch funny videos and wait for their funny ending, the more dopamine you need to achieve a similar level of enjoyment. Over and over again. This is how behavioral addictions are born. You do something, you feel good, you do it more and more. Examples of behavioral addictions include gambling, workaholism, shopaholism, compulsive overeating, and Internet addiction. At a certain point you stop controlling how much you use the Internet, how much time you spend on your phone. Unfortunately, when you just sit like that, you usually don’t grow at all. It makes you usually feel worse, stressed, you are simply not feeling good. But the more you “take” it, the more your brain wants of it to reach the same level of pleasure. It’s like drug abuse, but screens. It’s addictive, especially for children, whose brains are not entirely developed and can’t fully handle the dopamine and temptations yet. At a certain point, your life itself becomes a search for addiction.
How to treat an addiction? Is treating an addiction possible?
You feel that you are addicted. You or someone close to you. What next?
Psychotherapy for an addicted person – Specialist’s Help – The first step in the case of addiction.
The diagnosis of Internet addiction and psychotherapy may help to identify and change harmful behaviour.
And I fully recommend it. Because if you want to treat your teeth you do not do it on your own. How much more serious is mental health? A specialist can help overcome the difficulties, and the addicted person will get professional support. It is worth getting help from a specialist – a psychologist, an addiction counselor.
Here you will find a list of counselling offices funded by the National Health Fund (NFZ) – it is worth getting help immediately: check it out
Here you will find specialists who can help you for a fee and you can see their reviews: check it out: check it
What can you do even today in the case of Internet addiction syndrome?
Think about treating Internet addiction with a help of a specialist – consider it a priority.
Turn off notifications on your phone.
Delete applications, at least those which consume your time and do not give anything worthy in return.
Use social media only on your computer, in certain time brackets.
Reach out for support to your family and friends – tell them that you have a problem.
Are you worried that your child might be addicted to the Internet? Make sure to reach out for help for an addicted person. If the problem concerns a child, go to the class teacher or the school counselor to ask for help. There is no shame in that. Consider installing parental control on the phone – there is a lot of such applications, for example this one: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.kids.familylink&hl=pl&gl=US
Make sure you also read:
Internet addiction – different names
Problem uzależnienia od internetu jest bardzo popularny i nosi wiele nazw:
Cyberaddiction
Internetoholism
Mediaholism
Cybermania
Web addiction
Digital addiction
E-addiction
Internet addiction syndrome
Technoholism
Conclusion – symptoms of addiction
In the case of Internet addiction, the symptoms may appear gradually, in such a way that you won’t even notice them. Certain symptoms of Internet addction should serve as “red flags”. The research shows that overusing the Internet may have many negative effects:
You spend majority of your free time online
You neglect your responsibilities
You spend less time with your friends, avoid social life and relations in the real world
Problems with mental health appear, and over time, with physical health as well
You have trouble sleeping
You feel anxious without Internet access
You have problems with focus, memory, and making ordinary decisions
The problem of Internet addiction is a constantly growing social problem. You are not alone. But remember. It is better to prevent an addiction than treat it. So if you’re not sure if you “have it”, start doing something about it today and limit your time spent online. Be careful, your brain is used to the doses of dopamine, which is why it will be hard to relearn how to live offline.
If you feel that these symptoms begin to have a negative influence on your everyday life and functioning as an individual, make sure to pay attention to them and consult them with a specialist, who can help with understanding and dealing with potential Internet addiction. Early diagnosis gives a higher chance that Internet addiction will not destroy your health and life.
Sources:
iGen, Jean M. Twenge
The Smartphone Epidemic, M. Spitzer
The Digital Dementia, M. Spitzer
Stolen Focus, J. Hari
Skärmhjärnan (Eng. Log your Brain Out), A. Hansen
Depphjärnan (Eng. Calm Your Brain Down), A. Hansen
