It is our nature to excuse bad behavior by calling it an addiction or blaming it on an addiction.
That’s not to say the addiction isn’t real. Being physically or psychologically dependent on a thing — food, drugs, alcohol, pornography, people, whatever — is not pleasant.
Before the addiction sets in, it may feel good to overindulge. But as the addiction progresses and deepens, you need more of the substance to feel the same “high.” You find yourself seeking that first high, which will continue to elude you. Nothing else in your life is as important.
Well, that was my experience, anyway. 
That’s why I didn’t laugh when I read this article about Internet addiction. Does Internet use work on our brains the same way a substance like alcohol does?
Alcohol is a depressant and in small doses, it can make you feel relaxed. It helps “take the edge off.” In large doses, it can cause disorientation, slurred speech, memory lapse, etc. Alcohol slows down the functioning of the central nervous system. Biochemically speaking, people addicted to a substance have some sort of mix up in their brains. Their levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate emotion, are lower than normal, which can cause depression or a craving for something to relieve the discomfort.
I sometimes joke that I have an “addictive personality.” When I find something I like, I go all the way and tend to overindulge. Do I overindulge in Internet use? That’s hard to say. I work on the Internet. I play on the Internet. I read news on the Internet. Rare is a day I don’t surf. When I travel, I have my Treo.
One way to tell if you’re addicted to the Internet is whether your relationships suffer. Do you lie about how much you do it? Have you tried to cut back but failed? Is the Internet becoming more important to you than the people in your life? Has it become a substitute for real life? According to the study:
- 13.7 percent (more than one out of eight respondents) found it hard to stay away from the Internet for several days at a time
- 12.4 percent stayed online longer than intended very often or often
- 12.3 percent had seen a need to cut back on Internet use at some point
- 8.7 percent attempted to conceal non-essential Internet use from family, friends and employers
- 8.2 percent used the Internet as a way to escape problems or relieve negative mood
- 5.9 percent felt their relationships suffered as a result of excessive Internet use
Are you addicted to the Internet? Tell us. Go on. Admitting you have a problem is a problem half-solved. 
{ 39 comments }
No question about it. My laptop is on from 8:00am to 10:00pm. I even take 2 classes online.
Oh, I am definitely addicted. My computer is on 24×7, and I’m on the net at work too. Well, only when I am not busy at work. I don’t let my addiction interfere with work or family. Yet, anyway.
I will admit to a reasonable amount of addiction for me in that once I get on, I find it hard to get off and I end up staying on much, much longer than planned and often until my eyes hurt. Time flies amazingly fast while you are on the internet.
And if the computer is on and I have nothing else to do, it is difficult not to get on.
First, I will say that I like the ease of the internet and the entertainment it brings, although I can go for days without it. It doesn’t ’soothe my soul’ or take me away from my worries and so-called woes…
——–
“It is our nature to excuse bad behavior by calling it an addiction or blaming it on an addiction.”
I quoted this portion because I wanted to add an extension to the statement. How about ‘…or blaming it on law enforcement…’ I’m from Columbus, OH and I saw on the news this morning where a SERIAL DUI offender is on trial for Aggravated Vehicular Homicide for the death of her six year old daughter. The defense wants to blame the death on law enforcement personnel, because they didn’t ‘respond fast enough’ to calls from concerned citizens about her erratic driving… let’s just forget the facts – that she chose to drive drunk – with her daughter in the car – and blame it on someone else.
Sorry, Lashawn, for getting off topic…
Am I addicted? I don’t think so. I did take time off awhile back, not touching the internet for a few days to see if I was addicted. I certainly missed it, but I didn’t get the sweats or anything.
When I want a cigarette, I think about getting on line and checking out my usual haunts. Then when I’m on line, I light up one after the other and say on much too long while I cough more and get less work done at home. I end up feeling miserable for smoking too much and for not getting the vacuuming done..so I guess I am addicted not only to the internet but obviously also to smoking and somehow they’re both intertwined.
Last night I smoked what I hope was my last cigarette. This morning I laid in bed a bit longer than usual because I wanted to avoid the I want a cigarette and let’s see what Drudge has to say habit.
Today I am going to spend much less time on the internet and hopefully I will do things that occupy my time without smoking.
See y’all tomorrow – now we’ll see if I can help from getting back on line later today to see what everybody else has to say and NOT SMOKING.
I’m sure going to try.
I’m at a computer all day as part of my work, trapped in an office with gray carpet and flourescent lights. The internet is a welcome distraction, and part of my job.
But at home, I rarely go online.
Going days without it is not hard for me. It’s resisting it when it is right there in my face and getting off of it once I get on. If my computer is off at home, the mere boot-up process is enough to dissuade me from getting on (unless there is something specific I need to search). But if it is on, not being used by anyone else, and I have nothing important to do, I am sort of drawn to it.
On the topic of alcohol, I think that sometimes we are cursed or blessed by our own bodies. My initial attempt at drinking wielded unpleasant results. I found beer and alcohol to taste unpleasant. I found the “buzz” to be an uncomfortable feeling (like pressure on the head) that included a later upset stomach.
Needless to say, I rarely ever had a drink. The only reason I would drink occasionally was due to dating pressure. I found that women tend to like to drink and feel uncomfortable when their dates don’t drink. Thus I ended up putting away a daiquiri or some other wussy drink that had a fruity flavor to offset the taste of the alcohol.
I know first hand what it’s like dealing with and addiction. I’m a recovering alcoholic/addict and I watch loved ones spend their life on the computer, morning, noon, and night, and openly admit that it is there escape from reality, which is another attribute to addiction. I love the internet with the ways of getting information and sending it as well, but i also at the end of a 9 hour day can’t wait to turn it off and do, and also seldom get on during the weekend. But I can totally see anyone like myself (addictive personality) or someone who wants to continually escape reality where it will become an out of control addiction. I watch it happen everyday…
That “study” doesn’t impress me much.
My computer is always on and I check it frequently throughout the day. Friends write me from all over creation and I love that. We send each other “stuff” and I love that too.
I have favorite blogs I check up on. I put comments on a few. I love to read differing points of view.
But addicted? I’m in deep denial on this one. I need the contact with the outside world. I get it by travel, television, newspapers, the telephone and the internet.
The net is a neat tool and I miss it when I can’t get on. But then again, if I am off snorkeling for hours on end, the net, the phone, the TV and the papers don’t mean a thing!
I have an addictive personality (used to be an alcohol). Awhile back noticed I was getting sucked into surfing the Internet so I have cut back. It wasn’t that difficult because I wasn’t posting every hour of the waking day like some do. Also, I never take my computer to Starbucks or anything other place for that matter.
I think that modern life is so isolating, you can’t help but go online. So many jobs require a computer, and even if you’re not working with text or images or data, you might still be working with machines alone in a room. I wish that our jobs and lifestyles involved more human contact.
I guess I’m an addict. However, I barely read the papers or watch much TV news. I spend most of my time on the web keeping up to date on the world. Therefore, I don’t use the web to escape reality or put myself in a better mood. If anything it bashed me with the world’s problems and seriously irks me.
La Shawn:
I am addicted to your web site – just kidding.
I feel a certain compulsion to view your and a number of web sites every day.
But when I go to a convention where Internet service is expensive, I don’t surf for a few days.
I didn’t surf for a week during several caribbean cruises, and for 2 weeks when I visited Russia in 2002.
But I have to admit – when I returned home, I surfed like crazy to “catch up” and look at archives where available.
I think internet “addiction” is a replacement for getting out and getting interactive. That’s why I am deadset against internet dating. We’re losing our ability/willingness to get out there and meet people, do things, and take the risk of missing some “important” story that just happened miliseconds ago.
When I’m away from home (vacation, business trip, whatever) I intentionally stay offline. Sure I miss some things, but look ma; I’m still alive!
The internet is probably one of the causes of the death of civility. God said it would happen, and I think the impersonal nature of the internet causes a rotting of these skills in life.
I’m no more addicted to the Internet than I am to TV, reading a newspaper, talking to my friends, or playing games.
I think the “addiction” terminology is misleading. There will always be people who do things to excess, but that could be more accurately characterized as an obsession rather than an addiction.
The Internet isn’t a substance that causes a real chemical change within the body. It’s just a tool for doing the same things (albeit in slightly different ways) that people have been doing for years. Think about it – when someone retreats socially into something like books, do we say they’re addicted to reading? No, they’re most likely depressed and using that particular activity to escape.
I’m inclined to believe that “Internet Addiction” is really a constellation of other conditions and behaviors rather than one condition on its own.
I was addicted to a text-only BBS from 1994 to about 2001. I don’t think it was physiological, but it was definitely psychological.
In “real life” I was a loser–19, never been on a date or had a boyfriend, never invited to party, dumpy, funny-looking, engineering major. Online, I told people I was a 19-year-old female with red hair and they would talk to me for hours! They thought I was funny and cute! In the main “hangout” forum I was popular! It was a whole new virtual world inside my head (text-only BBS; I could imagine the guys looked anyway I want, just as they imagined what I looked like) that was much better than the sad word I inhabited in “meat space.”
And I definitely lied to people about how much time I was spending online. My grades suffered because I’d be up until 4 a.m. chatting (with the same core of addicts, many of whom flunked out of their schools). If I had ten minutes between classes, I’d hit the computer lab. I spent a lot of time and money traveling around the country to meet men from online (instead of having a real relationship with someone at school). Over breaks from school, I’d dial into my school’s modem pool long distance to “check in” with my virtual friends.
Somehow managed to graduate, and two years later was fired from my first job for poor performance because I was spending 8 hours a day on the BBS instead of doing my assigned work (then I would go home for another 6-8 hours online). But I didn’t figure out that I had a problem until September 2001, when my next boss noticed I was spending all day typing in a telnet window–chatting online about the 9/11 attacks–instead of fixing bugs and told me if he saw that window again I’d be looking for a new job. It was just the level of disgust in his voice…I logged out and didn’t log back in to the BBS, even from home, for a month (I continued to use e-mail, listen to internet radio, read newspapers online; this doesn’t seem any different to me than using the phone, AM radio, or dead tree newspaper).
When I did log back into the BBS, no one outside the handful of people I’d gotten to know well offline as well as online had noticed I was gone (and those people had all called me on the phone to make sure I was OK). Big freaking flash of insight–I was ruining my life “hanging out” with people who couldn’t care less.
I joined a gym and a quilt guild. I started spending my weekends hiking in state parks and forests. I started keeping a paper journal. I even saw a therapist for a couple of years to deal with the childhood trauma that was keeping me from meeting people in the real world. I wasn’t “cute and popular” anymore, but I was definitely back in the real world. My life still sucks, but at least I’m aware of it and trying to change it.
I don’t think alcoholism is the right analogy for my experience; it was more like joining a cult. “So what if the real world doesn’t like you? We think you’re special!” I could be someone entirely different and ignore how shitty my life really was. Or maybe alcoholism is a good analogy–I was using the BBS as an escape mechanism (all of my mother’s brothers and most of their children have had alcohol or drug problems at some stage in their lives; my father theorizes depression runs through the family and maybe they were self-medicating…hrm, maybe I’m not any different).
And I think this happens to thousands of people every day in multi-user role-playing games like World of Warcraft and Second Life (heck, the whole point of Second Life is to pretend you’re someone different than you are). In real life, you’re an unemployed schlub with no girlfriend living in your parents’ basement; online you’re a 50th level wizard with bikini-clad honeys crawling all over you.
I don’t think spending your evenings researching online and posting to blogs is “addiction” anymore than spending your evenings researching at a library and writing a newsletter would be (unless you’re researching porn; porn addiction is another beast altogether), but virtual worlds can definitely be addicting. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more people losing jobs, friends, families, houses, etc. because they’re spending too much time in a virtual world.
Anyway, I know this is long, but LaShawn–thanks for prompting me to think and write about this today. I think I learned something about myself.
I suspect any behavior can become an addiction if it affects brain chemistry. Substances such as narcotics and alcohol do, but for some, internet use, gambling, porn or shoe shopping produce the same results. I think LaShawn’s lists of questions if a good place to start with any behavior which is out of balance.
Like others, I’m in front of a screen all day, so anything I have to do on the computer at home seems like WORK. I avoid it whenever I can.
Addicted to the internet? Nonsense. I can quit any time I want. Here, I’ll prove it. I hereby quit for 24 hours, right now.
Um…. did I say 24 hours, or 24 seconds? Seconds, I’m sure. Yeah, that’s it. Seconds.
Yes, I admit it. I’m an internet addict. As far as my relationships suffering — well, my husband gets upset because I often surf right through dinner (well, I mean, “dinner time” cause there isn’t any dinner . . . )
Sigh. However, I DID swear off a couple of websites that were wasting a lot of my time, so I’m improving.
My only serious addiction is breathing. All the rest is delightful pasttimes. Except that I AM addicted to La Shawn Barber’s Corner! That I will proudly proclaim!
I like that addiction, Gayle. Thanks!
I am not addicted to Al Gore’s invention. I can bash liberals face to face…!;-})
Actually, work prevents me from being addicted.
The true test is if it adversely affects your work or family. I’m at work now…..Damn!
In early high school, my son was diagnosed with ADD (no hyperactivity, though), and they said the “deficit” was more a matter of having a low level of one of the neurotransmitters (possibly dopamine, but I can’t remember). Sitting at the computer was a stimulant to him that would raise his levels of that neurotransmitter up to the normal range, which is also what Ritalin does.
He took Ritalin for a little while, which helped him in school for a little while, then he quit taking it. He spent most of his homework time getting sidetracked on the internet and only managed to graduate from high school by raising his three F’s to D minus at the very last second.
He’s in college now (a Film Studies major) and is saved from an internet addiction by virtue of living at his dad’s, where the cable-internet modem goes kaput for months on end.
As for me, I’m hooked. I blog at lunchtime and browse the internet as my mini-breaks from work (instead of taking a non-smoking cigarette break). I check my favorite blogs in the morning at home as soon as I get up, and look again at night. The internet doesn’t interfere with my normal life. Much.
Does reading a newspaper every day mean that you are addicted to reading newspapers?
This kind of “study” sounds more to me like another drive-by media attack than anything else.
The Internet itself can be used for a variety of purposes, perhaps a delineation of the actual type of Internet activity would be a better study. For instance, I would say that if your Internet activities consisted almost entirely of visiting Porn or Gambling sites, you got a problem, bud. But would a daily visitation of news and blogsites be the same problem? Only if you are of an ideology that does not appreciate the new media and the power it enjoys among those who want to know more about things than what the MSM driveby types would have us believe.
Typical leftoid practice though, kind of like an ad hominem attack on the technology itself, cleverly involving the people who use it.
Nope. Not addicted. I’m a pretty fast typist though, and manage to post comments, sometimes very lengthy, on a lot of posts…so it looks like that’s all I spend my time doing, but it’s not.
I think “internet addiction” doesn’t quite describe it accurately.
I think a lot of people have a “Gadget” addiction. Or, a “wireless” addiction.
Being tethered to these little devices.
Ask yourself how many times a day do you pull out your cell phone, blackberry, cranberry…..or whatever those little things are that people can’t seem to keep their hands off of.
I can’t imagine some little gadget having power over me, much less having to check it every minute.
In the old days, the phone rang, and you either answered it, or you didn’t.
La Shawn, you need to do a book about how you kicked alcohol. I’m sorry but that one article, in a magazine, isn’t substantial enough for such an important topic.
You’ve got a story, and it certainly can’t be any more controversial than James Frey’s ‘alcohol’ story.
I can’t believe the kind of lies that are told, now in the Rehab community….that if you just stop drinking….your life will then be perfect.
How can you tell an alcoholic that? Complete lies.
Stopping the alcohol, drugs, addictions, etc… is just one part of the equation.
“Are you addicted to the Internet?”
I dunno …
Does living vicariously through one’s own blog count?
Is it a sign that you’ve been surfing blogs WAY too long when you’ve HAD an impure thought about La Shawn Barber??
Radish seems to be the only one who meets the level of medical addiction to me. (I don’t even want to know what a 50th level wizard is)
If the Internet never existed, the rest of us would likely be newspaper addicts, book addicts (bibliophiles), C-Span addicts, NPR addicts, or arguing with others in bars or coffee shops or if black barber shops (this may be a stereotype but I first thought this blog was named after a barber shop like Sparpton’s).
I would guess that the people more into fiction, science fiction, romance novels, are more the Second Life type.
Some people would be porn addicts, gambling addicts or Foley addicts with or without the Internet, and I am not sure if the categories should be combined into one “internet addiction.â€
Like if a person was a porn addict in 1990 watching VCRs would he be a “porn addict†or a “VCR addict.â€
It’s also another common example of researchers increasing the importance of their work by widening the definition – just as women’s advocates increase the number of raped women by including drunken sex…..
The press also jumps on the higher number bandwagon since higher numbers are more newsworthy.
Lets see I am online almost daily but I don’t think it is an addiction. I read news, follow my fantasy football league, read my favorite blogs, surf ebay, chat sometimes and play WOW (World Of Warcraft) and reasearch articles I write on occassion for my friend Jake’s blog. Ireally don’t see it being any different then the things I do in real life, watch TV, read, work, shop etc. I think it is just another medium for the things we normally do. Is it an escape? yes to the same degree a book, a movie,television and hobbies are an escape. We all escape from time to time..it is how we recharge our mental motors..I doubt anyone could handle real life 24-7 365 without thoush little escapes. I do agree that if it effects work, relationships or family life then it is a problem..or to be more accurate a symptom of a deeper problem. And those are the issues that need to be dealt with.
I’m surrounded by computers all day at the office, and we have two at home so I can work there as well. Wife and I have 3 cell phones (demonic creations) between us. [grumble]
When I can get away, I do, and I relish not having anything electronic anywhere near me.
I’m going to admit it: I am a TECHNO-SAPIEN.
My computer is the most expensive electronic device in my home: all the latest internals, dual LCD monitors, wireless input devices, high-speed modem, surround sound, etc. etc. Even saving the money of buying the parts and building it myself, it still cost thousands $$$. It is the newest of three I have in a home network.
I spend hours in Bible research, political blogging, programming, academic/career study, and playing games. I even refer to my computer by name.
“Addiction” doesn’t even come close. Are there any therapy groups for technomania?
Well, I’ve always been really into computers. I managed to live without one for months when I joined the Air Force.
Before the Internet, I’d be happy to go to the library and check out books.
Now my life is online. I have a RL job. But I’m also making money from the net. I do need to learn to get out and socialize, but I’m having trouble finding any incentive to do so.
La Shawn,
Thank you for linking your article. I have failed at stopping drinking, and hearing from people who have been able to do it gives me hope.
I find that I go to the internet more than i should. There are times when I figure that I’ll go, and then pull up and say to myself “You’ve already done that 1/2 hour ago. There are plenty of other things to do. Go find one and do it.”
The PBS Kojo Nnamdi Show today had a discussion of this paper with author and other academics if any of you Internet addicts need to listen to a radio show while surfing online:
http://www.wamu.org/programs/kn/06/10/24.php#12057
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