Dr. Anna Lembke

We are living in an unprecedented time of overwhelming abundance, where we've drugified almost every human experience.

Yeah, I think it's a great reframe because unless we're thinking about digital media as a drug, we're not going to appreciate the extent to which we and our children lose agency in terms of our ability to change the behaviors.

Yeah.

It's a drug.

It really is a drug.

It's incredibly reinforcing for our brains.

It activates the same reward pathway as drugs and alcohol.

And for people who are uniquely vulnerable to digital drugs, it can really lead to life-threatening addictions.

And I think this is a really important point that I want to make up front that we're all wired a little bit differently.

And so each person has a different potential drug of choice, right?

Based on their unique, for some people it's food.

Mine was food.

Okay.

For some people it's romance novels.

That was mine.

That sounds silly, but I actually did develop a kind of addiction to this genre.

For some people it's alcohol, cannabis.

And for some people it really is social media, online shopping, adult content, video games, whatever it is.

And when we encounter whatever that digital drug is, it's just we are very susceptible to getting caught in that compulsive overconsumption loop.

That's exactly right.