Is Phone Addiction Really That Bad?

Digital Dopamine Nation

In Dopamine Nation, Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences Anna Lembke argues pervasive, cheap, and easy-to-access products and experiences that release dopamine in the brain are creating a mental health crisis unlike any other in human history. This is for the simple reason that most people in history lived with scarcity—limited access to the foods, substances, and experiences that release dopamine in the brain—but now we live in a world of abundance. Our brains were not designed to live in such a world.

The consequence of dopamine abundance is addiction. To understand how this works, Lembke says it’s helpful to imagine your brain like a seesaw. On one side is pleasure; on the other side is pain.¹ Your brain wants to retain equilibrium, to keep the seesaw flat.

The longer you spend with your mental seesaw tipped to pleasure, the harder the pain comedown. While your reflexive self-regulation mechanisms press the pain side down, you may experience heightened levels of stress, depression, and irritability, and a whole array of psychological symptoms that make your brain want more dopamine to relieve your psychological distress.

Scrolling Ourselves to Death

Brett McCracken, Ivan Mesa

Drawing from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and applying his insights to today’s scrolling age, this book helps believers think carefully about digital technology and inspires the church to turn difficult cultural challenges into life-giving opportunities.

Throughout most of history, it was hard to find substances and experiences that could press the pleasure side, so equilibrium was more commonly attained. But when you live in a society awash with dopamine factories—social media, pornography, gaming, high-calorie foods, alcohol, online gambling—you face a constant, pathological temptation to press the seesaw on the pleasure side.

The problem is that the more you repeat a dopamine-releasing behavior, the greater your tolerance becomes. This applies to social media—a proven dopamine-releasing substance—which was designed to be addictive.² Thus, if it took only two TikToks to spike your dopamine the first time, it will take four the tenth time, and dozens the hundredth. Whatever your drug of choice, you need more and more of it to get the original high and more and more of it to reduce the psychological pain you experience when you come down from your high.

It’s a vicious cycle. Anyone who experiences ghost vibrations in his pocket—beckoning him to clutch his phone—knows this cycle. Anyone who’s opened YouTube or Instagram to watch a video for five minutes only to inexplicably lose an hour knows this cycle. Anyone who cannot resist the impulse to watch digital pornography or gamble online knows this cycle. If the faintest shadow of boredom makes you compulsively check your phone, then you know this cycle. If you are easily distracted during a conversation with your spouse by the strange and desperate urge to check your phone, then you know this cycle. If a brief moment of anxiety makes you swipe madly through your phone looking for any unread notification, then you know this cycle.

Your brain is seeking dopamine. It’s whispering, “Get out the digital syringe. Take another hit. Then the boredom, stress, irritability, and blues will go away.”

In the brain, what goes up must come down. And the comedowns from consistent use of dopamine media are causing a social and mental health catastrophe on a scale never before seen.³ NYU psychology professor Jonathan Haidt analyzed countless studies to determine that social media and smartphones are causing this catastrophe, especially among our children. Teenage boys and girls are experiencing higher levels of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.⁴ According to a recent US surgeon general’s advisory report, it’s all correlated to smartphone use.⁵ The advisory report urges parents not to give their children access to social media. Despite laws prohibiting social media usage under the age of thirteen without parental permission, 38 percent of children between the ages of eight to twelve are using regularly—many for hours a day.⁶ Ninety-five percent of teens between thirteen and seventeen are using digital dope, and most parents can’t bring themselves to tell them to stop, even though social media’s dangerous and addictive effects are now widely known.

The transition from entertainment culture to dopamine media culture created more addiction in more households. To resist this addiction, we must first understand what it is and how it addicts users. Only then can we explore pathways forward for Christians and churches.

Dopamine Media Is a Digital Las Vegas

Postman suggested every era in American history is represented by a city.⁷ Boston was the apotheosis of revolutionary fervor. Chicago was the incarnation of industrial dynamism. New York was the personification of melting-pot America. And finally, Las Vegas became the avatar of overentertained America.

Our addiction to dopamine media is training us to love much what ought to be loved little.

Postman was right about Las Vegas. The city is world-renowned for its extravagant, ubiquitous entertainment. But Vegas is more renowned for something else: gambling. And thus, it’s also the ideal embodiment of the current phase of American history: dopamine media.

While most Americans tend to think of substances as addictive— especially those that directly deliver dopamine—new research shows that behaviors can be profoundly addictive as well because they release dopamine in the brain. In 2013, pathological gambling was reclassified as an addictive disorder by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And the way gambling works on the brain is exactly how dopamine media works. Lembke explains: “Studies indicate that dopamine release as a result of gambling links to the unpredictability of the reward delivery, as much as to the final (often monetary) reward itself. The motivation to gamble is based largely on the inability to predict the reward occurrence, rather than on financial gain.”⁸

A 2010 study found those addicted to gambling experience higher levels of dopamine release not when they won money but when they stood an equal chance of winning or losing money.⁹ The best dopamine high came from uncertainty, not victory. In other words, when it comes to dopamine, anticipation of a reward can create more pleasure than the reward itself.¹⁰ A slot machine is addictive because it keeps you in an anticipation loop: the big win is always just around the corner, so you pull the lever one more time, releasing anticipation dopamine in your brain.

This insight is key because it’s central to how dopamine media works. Behavioral psychologists in virtually every big tech corporation design their platforms and apps (social media, news media, video media) using intermittent variable rewards, what have been called digital slot machines. Natasha Schull, author of Addiction by Design—a book researching actual slot machines—explains that “Facebook, Twitter, and other companies use methods similar to the gambling industry to keep users on their sites.”¹¹

Every time you post on social media, you pull a digital lever and receive an intermittent variable reward. Sometimes you win two likes, sometimes you win two hundred. If you’re scrolling through reels, some videos are duds but some make you squeal with laughter. The great appeal of short-form video content—pioneered by TikTok and replicated by Meta and YouTube—is that the brevity allows the user to pull the lever constantly. The brain is constantly releasing dopamine as it anticipates a reward. When you lose and get a lame video, you experience brief frustration or boredom, which only sends you back for more.

Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.

Every time we do it, we’re rewiring our brains the same way gambling addicts do.

What sets dopamine media apart from entertainment media isn’t just its slot machine design, however; it’s dopamine media’s constant accessibility and algorithmic curation.

In Postman’s day, humans had limited access to TV. Physically, it was stationary. To watch TV you had to sit in a room with a large device that needed to be plugged in. Additionally, you could watch only what was being broadcast on certain channels at certain times, on a schedule you didn’t design. While cable networks tried to curate more niche-based spaces—think HGTV, the Food Network, or Comedy Central—television was never actually personalized.

Dopamine media is entirely different. It is physically unencumbered, traveling on your person and accessible anywhere. It’s also temporally unconstrained. There aren’t schedules. Thus, you can access whatever media you want, whenever you want, wherever you want.

But here is the real secret sauce: artificial intelligence. Everything you see on virtually every app and platform—from ads to videos to posts to search results—is generated by recommender algorithms: advanced AIs that use your data to create a digital model of you so it can feed you bespoke content to keep and monetize your attention.¹² Your social media feed is bespoke. It is designed to keep you specifically addicted, by AIs whose computational knowledge of you is shockingly vast and actionable. Their main job is to keep you on the platform—to keep you addicted—by tracking your behavior like a dystopian digital Pavlov.

“Amuse” doesn’t quite describe the effect dopamine media has on us. Dopamine media is designed to distract us to death. Or, if we’re more honest, to distract us into an addiction that leads to death. Research shows that the more available and normalized a drug is, the more pervasive addiction to that drug becomes. So it’s no surprise the vast majority of American adults are walking around shooting up digital dope without raising an eyebrow. The best of us are responsible users who can consume media in moderation. But none of us is fully sober.

The addiction trade-off that dopamine media offered us isn’t a possibility; it’s already here. And if the first victims of our addiction are our time and attention span, the second (and far more important) victims are our families and relationships.

Research shows that the more addicted you become to dopamine-producing behaviors, the less your brain rewards you for being in relationship with others. This is even true of rats: if a free rat finds a caged rat, it will try to free it. But if you allow that rat to self-administer heroin, it will no longer be interested in the caged rat. The heroin gives a better high, after all.

Our addiction to dopamine media is training us to love much what ought to be loved little. It’s making us miserably unhappy, hurting our relationships, and demanding more and more of our time to get the next high. Augustine wrote,

The person who lives a just and holy life is one who is a sound judge of these things. He is also a person who has ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more), or love two things equally if one of them should be loved either less or more than the other, or love things either more or less if they should be loved equally.¹³

Dopamine media is the most powerful, pervasive, and engineered form of communication technology in human history, and it’s not shaping us to love Jesus most. It’s not shaping us to love our neighbor. It’s shaping us into pleasure-seeking addicts. Christians must recognize that, at its heart, this technological revolution has resulted in an institutional, relational, and formational crisis for the church.

Institutional Crisis for Churches in Digital Las Vegas

Yuval Levin defines institutions as “the durable forms of our common life” and “the frameworks and structures of what we do together.”¹⁴ While I don’t expect most people to get excited by words like institution and institutional, Christians must understand that Jesus not only announced “the gospel of the kingdom” but also established that kingdom by his death and resurrection. His kingdom is, of course, a durable social structure that orders common life and gives a framework not only for our ethical norms but also for the smaller structures (families, small groups, communes) that collectively form the larger ones (churches, parishes, denominations). Local churches are designed to bridge God’s kingdom on earth and heaven.

Brad Edwards, a pastor and writer, argues that social media platforms are “pseudo-institutions” and “counter-institutions.”¹⁵ They mimic what real-world institutions can offer—think faux community, faux discourse, faux authenticity, faux intimacy, faux mentorship, faux wisdom—and in the process destabilize the very institutions they mimic. As digital addiction drives more people to seek influence and mentorship online, localized institutions will undergo a crisis of authority. As digital addiction drives more people to find connections and conversation online, they will undergo a crisis of community. As digital addiction drives more people online to find information and wisdom, they will undergo a crisis of moral norms.

What does this mean for the future of the church and evangelism globally? At the very least, it means Christians must recontextualize the gospel not only in light of their local milieu but in light of a global digital milieu made up of hundreds of thousands of AI-tailored microcultures. This is no small task, and it’s one that requires a sovereign, transcendent, all-knowing Lord to guide us.

Thankfully, such a person sits on the throne of heaven.

As much as we may wish to cloister ourselves from dopamine media, we must instead take confidence in the power of God’s grace. He knows more than the AIs. He has more resources than big tech. His spirit can heal broken minds. He commands time itself. We’re not on the losing side of a pointless battle. Instead, we’re serving a King who’s calling us to ask once more how we can be faithful in our generation and offer his healing in a broken, digital dopamine-addicted world.

Notes:

Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (New York: Dutton, 2021), 51–53.
Lembke, Dopamine Nation, 191.
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin, 2024), 14.
Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Atlantic, April 11, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com.
Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory, US Department of Health and Human Services, 2023, https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth -mental-health-social-media-advisory.pdf.
V. Rideout, A. Peebles, S. Mann, and M. B. Robb, “Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens,” (San Francisco, CA: Common Sense), 2022,https://www.commonsense media.org/sites/default/files/research/report/8-18-census-integrated-report-final-web_0.pdf.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 20th anniversary ed. (1985; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 3.
Lembke, Dopamine Nation, 61. Emphasis added.
Jakob Linnet, Arne Møller, Ericka Peterson, Albert Gjedde, and Doris Doudet, “Dopamine Release in Ventral Striatum During Iowa Gambling Task Performance Is Associated with Increased Excitement Levels in Pathological Gambling,” Addiction 106, no. 2 (February 2011), 383–90, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2010.03126.x.
Lembke, Dopamine Nation, 62.
Mattha Busby, “Social Media Copies Gambling Methods ‘to Create Psychological Cravings,’” Guardian, May 8, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us.
Lev Grossman, “How Computers Know What We Want—Before We Do,” Time, May 27, 2010, https://time.com/.
Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1.27–28.
Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (New York: Basic, 2020), 19.
Brad Edwards, “The Church amongst the Counter-Institutions,” Mere Orthodoxy, April 1, 2021, https://mereorthodoxy.com/.

This article is by Patrick Miller and is adapted from Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa.

Patrick Miller (MDiv, Covenant Seminary) is the co-lead pastor of the Crossing in Columbia, Missouri. He’s the author of multiple books, including Joyful Outsiders and Truth Over Tribe. In his spare time, he cohosts the daily devotional podcast Ten Minute Bible Talks.

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