This was on pace to be a 5 star book for me, but the final chapter which covers possible solutions to deal with addictive technology was not as strong as I had hoped.


Here are some quotes I marked from the book for later review:

“The highest risk period for addiction is early adulthood. Very few people develop addictions later in life fi they haven’t been addicted in adolescence. One of the major reasons is that young adults are bombarded by a galaxy of responsibilities that they’re not equipped to handle. They learn to medicate by taking up substances or behaviors that dull the instant sting of those persistent hardships. By their midtwenties, many people acquire the coping skills and social networks that they lack in adolescence. “If you aren’t using drugs as a teenager, you’re probably also learning to deal with your troubles using other methods,” Szalavitz said. So you develop a degree of resilience by the time you emerge through the gauntlet of adolescence.
The most striking thing Szalavitz told me was that addiction is a sort of misguided love. It’s love with the obsession but not the emotional support. That idea might sound fluffy, but it’s grounded in science. Pg74-75.

…addiction isn’t about substances or behaviors or brain responses. Addiction, to Peele, is “an extreme, dysfunctional attachment to an experience that is acutely harmful to a person, but that is an essential part of the person’s ecology and that the person cannot relinquish.” Pg 78

Peele…railed against abstinence and Alcoholics Anonymous, and wrote again and again that addiction wasn’t a disease. Rather, it was the association between an unfulfilled psychological need and ta set of actions that assuaged that need in the short-term, but was ultimately harmful in the long-term. Pg 79

What makes addiction so difficult to treat is that wanting is much harder to defeat than liking. Pg 87
Addictions aren’t driven by substances or behaviors, but by the idea, learned across time, that they protect addicts from psychological distress. Pg 89

The sense of creating something that requires labor and effort and expertise is a major force behind addictive acts that might otherwise lose their sheen over time. It also highlights an insidious difference between substance addiction and behavioral addition: where substance addiction are nakedly destructive, many behavioral addiction are quietly destructive acts wrapped in cloaks of creation. Pg 174

“Remember: once your cucumber brain has become pickled, it can never go back to being a cucumber.” The phrase was designed to discourage inpatients from doing what Vaisberg had done where he life the center: believing that they could play just one more game without their addictions returning. Pg 229

One study found that gamers aged between the and fifteen years wo played more than three hours per day were less satisfied with their lives, less likely to feel empathy toward other people, and less likely to know how to deal with their emotions appropriately. Pg 233

…kids do better at a task that drives the quality of their social interactions when they spend more time with other kids in a natural environment than they do when spending a third of their lives glued to glowing screens. Pg 240

There is good early evidence to support the idea that small doses of mental hardship are good for us. Young adults do much better on tricky mental puzzles when they’ve solved difficult (rather than easy) ones earlier. Pg 241