Irresistible, By Adam Alter

Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply

- In late 2010, Jobs [said] "We limit how much technology our kids use in the home." - Chris Anderson, former editor of WIRED, enforced strict time limits on every device in his home, "because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand." His children were never allowed to use screens in their bedrooms. -Evan Williams, a founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, bought hundreds of books for his two young sons, but refused to give them an iPad. -Lesley Gold, the founder of an analytics company, imposed a strict no-screen-time-during-the-week rule on her kids. She softened her stance only when they needed computers for schoolwork. -Walter Isaacson, who ate dinner with the Jobs family while researching his biography of Steve Jobs, told Bilton that, "No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices."

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

"Drugs and addictive behaviors activate the same reward center int he brain," according to Claire Gillan, a neuroscientist who studies obsessive and repetitive behaviors. "As long as a behavior is rewarding- if it's been paired with rewarding outcomes in the past- the brain will treat it the same way it treats a drug." What makes drugs like heroin and cocaine more dangerous in the short-term is that they stimulate the reward center much more strongly than behaviors do. "Cocaine has more direct effects on the neurotransmitters in your brain than, for example, gambling, but they work by the same mechanism on the same systems. The difference is in their magnitude and intensity."

Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply

"IRRESISTIBLE" traces the rise of addictive behaviors, examining where they begin, who designs them, the psychological tricks that make them so compelling, and how to minimize dangerous behavioral addiction as well as harnessing the same science for beneficial ends. If app designers can coax people to spend more time and money on a smartphone game, perhaps policy experts can also encourage people to save more for retirement or donate to more charities.

PART 9 SOCIAL INTERACTION

"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 believing that they could play just one more game without their addictions returning. An addicts brain is forever pickled, in a sense; their addictions are always on the cusp of being rekindled.

PART 7 ESCALATION

"When you analyze why people use these gadgets less often, it's when they become irritating- an obstacle. So I used to buy the latest and greatest tech gadgets and I learned, as a harm reduction strategy, to wait two or three years before buying a product. The addict self wants more power and more speed, easier accessibility, the latest and greatest. So I pat my non-addict self on the back and say, 'good job'- you didn't go and buy the new iPhone; you haven't upgraded your computer." -Cosette Rae, founder of reSTART

PART 1: WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

(According to Mark Griffiths' study) The bottom line: a staggering 41 percent of the population has suffered from at least one behavioral addiction over the past twelve months (according to a thorough review paper published in 2011). Almost half of the population had experienced the following symptoms: '[The] loss of ability to choose freely whether to stop or continue the behavior (loss of control) and [the] experience of behavior-related adverse consequences. In other words, the person becomes unable to reliably predict when the behavior will occur, how long it will go on, when it will stop, or what other behaviors may become associate with the addictive behavior. As a consequence, other activities are given up or, if continued, are no longer experienced as being as enjoyable as they once were. Further negative consequences of the addictive behavior may include interference with performance of life roles (e.g., job, social activities, or hobbies), impairment of social relationships, criminal activity and legal problems, involvement in dangerous situations, physical injury and impairment, financial loss, or emotional trauma.'

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

95 percent of adults use an electronic device that emits light in the hour before bed, and more than half check their emails overnight. Sixty percent of adults aged between 18 and 64 keep their phones next to them when they sleep, which might explain why 50 percent of adults claim they don't sleep well because they're always connected to technology. Sleep quality has declined dramatically in the past half century, particularly over the past 2 decades, and one of the major culprits is the bluish light that emanates from many of these electronic devices. For millenia, blue light existed only during the daytime. Candles and wood fires produced a reddish-yellow light, and there was no artificial lighting at night. Firelight isn't a problem, because the brain interprets red light as a signal for bedtime. Blue light is a different story, because it signals morning. So 95 percent of us are inducing jet lag at night by telling our bodies that the day is beginning just before we go to bed.

PART 10 NIPPING ADDICTIONS AT BIRTH

A couple of years ago, I became interested in what we call HARDSHIP INOCULATION. This is the idea that struggling with a mental puzzle- trying to remember a phone number or deciding what to do on a long Sunday afternoon- inoculates you against future mental hardships just as vaccinations inoculate you against illness. Reading a book, for example, is harder than watching the TV. Mild, initial struggles are critical. Depriving our kids of them by handing them a device that makes everything easier is dangerous-- we just don't know how dangerous.

PART 8 CLIFFHANGERS

A season once stretched on for months at a time, but now it's consumed in under a week, at an average of two to two and a half hours a day. Some viewers report that binge-watching improves the viewing experience, but many others believe that Netflix-- and post-play in particular-- has made it very difficult to stop watching just one episode at a time. Much of this rise reflects the effectiveness of cliffhangers and the absence of barriers between the end of one episode and the beginning of the next.

PART 7 ESCALATION

Addictive experiences live in the sweet spot where stopping rules crumble before obsessive goal-setting. Tech mavens, game developers, and product designers tweak their wares to ensure their complexity escalates as users gain insight and competence.

PART 5: FEEDBACK

After a string of losses, even die-hard gamblers begin to lose interest, some faster than others. This is a big problem for casinos, which aim to keep the gambler in front of the machine for as long as possible. It would be easy to change the odds of winning so that players become more and more likely to win after a series of losses, but, unfortunately for casinos, this is illegal in the U.S. The odds need to stay consistent across every spin, regardless of the previous run of outcomes. Natasha Dow Schull told me that casinos have come up with some creative solutions. "Many casinos use 'luck ambassadors.' They sense that you're reaching your pain point- the moment when you're about to leave the casino- and they dispatch someone to give you a bonus." These bonuses were either meal vouchers or a free drink or even cash or gambling credits. Bonuses are classified as "marketing" rather than a way of changing the odds of winning, so regulators turned a blind eye. With a new dose of positive reinforcement, gamblers tended to continue playing anew, until they reached another pain point after a series of losses.

PART 12 GAMIFICATION

Almost everyone wants to change at least one behavior. For some, it's spending too much and saving too little; for others, it's wasting nine tenths of the work day checking emails; for others, still, eating too much or exercising too little. The obvious path to change is with effort, but willpower is limited. People are more likely to do the right thing, DDB showed, if the right thing happens to be fun.

PART 12 GAMIFICATION

At a popular park, an electronics expert created the "deepest bin in the world"-- a trash can rigged to emit an echo implying that each piece of garbage plummeted before crashing far below. Other cans in the park attracted eighty pounds of trash each day; the deepest can attracted twice as much. Elsewhere, people were misusing recycling bins around the city, so DDB turned one in into an arcade game. The game rewarded people who used the bin correctly with flashing lights and points that were recorded on a large, red display. An average of just two people used most nearby bins correctly each day; more than a hundred people used the arcade bin correctly each day.

Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply

At an Apple event in January 2010, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad: "What this device does is extraordinary... It offers the best way to browse the web; way better than a laptop and way better than a smartphone... It's an incredible experience... It's phenomenal for mail it's a dream to type on." For ninety minutes, Jobs explained why the iPad was the best way to look at photos, listen to music, take classes on iTunes U, browse Facebook, play games, and navigate thousands of apps. He believed everyone should own an iPad. But he refused to let his kids use the device.

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

At first, the upsides [of an addictive behavior] dramatically outweigh the downsides as the brain translates the rush of dopamine into pleasure. But soon the brain interprets this flooding as an error, producing less and less dopamine. The only way to match the original high is to up the dosage of the drug or the experience- to gamble with more money or snort more cocaine or spend more time playing a more involving video game. As the brain develops a tolerance, its dopamine-producing regions go into retreat, and the lows between each high dip lower. Instead of producing the healthy measure of dopamine that once inspired optimism and contentment in response to small pleasures, these regions lie dormant until they're overstimulated again. Addictions are so pleasurable that the brain does two things: first it produces less dopamine to dam the flood of euphoria, and then, when the source of that euphoria vanishes, it struggles to cope with the fact it's now producing far less dopamine than it used to. And so the cycle continues as the addict seeks out the source of his addiction, and the brain responds by producing less and less dopamine after each hit.

PART 6 PROGRESS

Beginner's luck is addictive because it shows you the pleasure of success and then yanks it away. It gives you unrealistic ambitions and the high expectations of a more seasoned competitor. Your second dose of success is a mirage that seems nearer than it actually is, and the sense of loss that mounts with each new failure drives you even harder till you recapture that early (and undeserved) sense of glory. "luck" that graces novice gamers is engineered.

EPILOGUE

Behavioral addiction is still in its infancy, and there'a a good chance we're still at base camp, far below the peak. Truly immersive experiences, like virtual reality devices, have not yet gone mainstream. In ten years, when all of us own a pair of virtual reality goggles, what's to keep us tethered to the real world? If human relationships suffer in the face of smartphones and tablets, how are they going to withstand the tide of immersive virtual reality experiences? Facebook is barely a decade old, and Instagram is half that; in ten years, a host of new platforms will make Facebook and Instagram seem like ancient curiosities. Of course we don't know exactly how the world will look in ten years, but, looking back on the past decade, there's no reason to believe that history has ended today, and that behavioral addiction has peaked with Facebook, Instagram, Fitbit, and World of Warcraft.

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

Berridge and his colleagues had shown that there was a big difference between liking a drug and wanting a drug. Addiction was about more than just liking. Addicts weren't people who happened to lie the drugs they were taking- they were people who WANTED those drugs very badly even as they grew to dislike them for destroying their lives. What makes addiction so difficult to treat is that wanting is much harder to defeat than liking. "It's not easy to disrupt the activation of an intense want. Once people want a drug, it's nearly permanent- it lasts at least a year in most people, and may last almost a whole lifetime." Berridge's ideas explain why relapse is so common. Even after you come to hate a drug for ruining your life, your brain continues to WANT the drug. It remembers that the drug soothed a psychological need in the past, and so the craving remains. The same is true of behaviors: even as you come to loathe Facebook or Instagram for consuming too much of your time, you continue to want updates as much as you did when they still made you happy. One recent study suggests that playing hard to get has the same effect: an unattainable romantic partner is less likeable, but more desirable, which explains why some people find emotionally unavailable partners alluring.

PART 1: WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

Beyond Internet addiction, 46 percent of people say they couldn't bear to live without their smartphones (some would rather suffer physical injury than an injury to their phones).

PART 7 ESCALATION

David Goldhill explained why some degree of hardship is essential. "People don't understand why movie stars are often miserable. Imagine getting the girl every night, and never paying for a meal. A game in which you always win, for most people, is boring." To some extent we all need losses and difficulties and challenges, because without them the thrill of success weakens gradually with each new victory.

PART 5: FEEDBACK

Despite the promise of VR, it also poses great risks. Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford's Virtual Reality Interaction lab worries that the Oculus Rift will damage how people interact with the world. "Am I terrified of the world where anyone can create really horrible experiences? Yes, it does worry me. I worry what happens when a violent video game feels like murder. And when pornography feels like sex. How does that change the way humans interact, function as a society?"

PART 2 THE ADDICT IN ALL OF US

Few of these soldiers had been within a mile of heroin before joining the army. They arrived healthy and determined to fight, but now they were developing addictions to some of the strongest stuff on the planet. By the war's end, 35 percent of the enlisted men said they had tried heroin, and 19 percent said they were addicted. The heroin was so pure that 54 percent of all users became addicted- many more than the 5-10 percent of amphetamine and barbiturate users who developed addictions in Vietnam. A TIMES editorial piece argued for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam "to save the country from a debilitating drug epidemic." At a press conference on June 17, 1971, President Nixon announced a war on drugs... [he] said, "Public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse."

PART 1: WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

Flappy Bird was addictive in part because everything about the game moved fast: the finger taps, the time between games, the onslaught of new obstacles. The world beyond Flappy Bird also moves faster than it used to. Sluggishness is the enemy of addiction, because people respond more sharply to rapid links between action and outcome. Very little about our world today- from technology to transport to commerce- happens slowly, and so our brains respond more feverishly.

PART 1: WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

Intrusive tech has also made shopping, work, and porn harder to escape. It was once almost impossible to shop and work between the late evening and early morning, but now you can shop online and connect to your workplace any time of the day. Gone are the days of stealing a copy of PLAYBOY from the newsstand; all you need are Wi-Fi and a web browser. Life is more convenient than ever, but convenience has also weaponized temptation.

PART 6 PROGRESS

For decades, video games were played by teenage boys and men who never grew up. That's no longer true, because gamers don't need consoles or big chunks of free time. Smartphones have changed the gaming landscape completely. Experts may have believed that games were fundamentally more attractive to males than femals, but that difference turns out to have been cultural. Now aht smartphones have become game delivery devices, many of the most popular games, such as FarmVille, Kim Kardashian's Hollywood, and Candy Crush, are played by more women than men. All you need is the right environment- and the removal of barriers that prevent novices from taking their first hit- and you'll find a brand-new segment of addicts that looks nothing like the addicts who came before them.

PART 1: WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

For two and a half years, Nancy Jo Sales traveled around the United States, visiting ten states and speaking to hundreds of girls. She, too, concluded that they were enmeshed in the online world, where they learned and encountered cruelty, oversexualization, and social turmoil. Sometimes social media was just another way to communicate- but for many of the girls, it was a direct route to heartache. As addictive contexts go, this was a perfect storm: almost every teenage girl was using one or more social media platforms, so they were forced to choose between social isolation and compulsive overuse. No wonder so many of them spent hours texting and uploading Instagram posts every day after school; by all accounts, that was the rational thing to do.

Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply

Greg Hochmuth, one of Instagram's founding engineers, realized he was building an engine for addiction. "There's always another hashtag to click on," Hochmuth said. "Then it takes on its own life, like an organism, and people can become obsessive." Instagram, like so many other social media platforms is bottomless. Facebook has an endless feed; Netflix automatically moves on to the next episode in a series; Tinder encourages users to keep swiping in search of a better option. Users benefit from these apps and websites, but also struggle to use them in moderation. According to Tristan Harris, a "design ethicist," the problem isn't that people lack willpower; it's that "there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have."

PART 11 HABITS AND ARCHITECTURE

Not all addictive experiences are bad. In theory, the same hooks that drive addiction can also be harnessed to drive healthier eating, regular exercise, retirement saving, charitable giving, and committed studying. Sometimes the problem isn't that we're addicted to the wrong kinds of behaviors, but rather that we abandon the right kinds. Behavioral architecture isn't just a tool for doing less of the wrong things; it's also a tool for doing more of the right things.

PART 9 SOCIAL INTERACTION

Hilarie Cash, a clinical psychologist and cofounder of reSTART, has seen dozens of adolescents, mainly boys but also girls, who have no problem interacting with peers online, but can't carry a conversation with someone sitting across from them. The problem worsens when you encourage adolescent males and females to interact. "How do you learn to talk and flirt and date and end up in bed if you've only mixed with other people online?" Cash asked. "Our guys get sidetracked, and they develop intimacy disorders. They don't have the skills to bring sexuality and intimacy together. Many of them turn to pornography instead of forming real relationships, and they never seem to understand true intimacy. "

PART 11 HABITS AND ARCHITECTURE

How far are you from your phone right now? Can you reach it without moving your feet? And, when you sleep, can you reach your phone from your bed? If you're like many people, this is the first time you've considered those questions, and your answer to one or both will be "yes." Your phone's location may seem trivial-- the sort of thing you'd never bother to consider in the midst of your busy life-- but it's a vivid illustration of the power of behavioral architecture. Like an architect who designs a building, you consciously or unconsciously design the space that surrounds you. If your phone is nearby, you're far more likely to reach for it throughout the day. Worse, you're also more likely to disrupt your sleep if you keep your phone by your bed.

PART 4: GOALS

How long do you think the average office email goes unread? The truth is just six seconds. In reality, 70 percent of office emails are read within six seconds of arriving. By one estimate, it takes up to twenty-five minutes to become re-immersed in an interrupted task. If you open just twenty-five emails a day, evenly spaced across the day, you'll spend literally no time in the zone of maximum productivity.

PART 2 THE ADDICT IN ALL OF US

Isaac Vaisberg (WOW addict) taught the world a profound lesson about addiction and its victims: there's so much more to addiction than an ADDICTIVE PERSONALITY. Addicts aren't simply weaker specimens than non-addicts; they aren't morally corrupt where non-addicts are virtuous. Instead, many, if not most, of them are unlucky. Location isn't the only factor that influences your chances of becoming an addict, but it plays a much bigger role than scientists once thought. Genetics and biology matter as well, but we've recognized their role for decades. Even in the sturdiest of our ranks- the young G.I.'s who were free of addiction when they left for Vietnam- are prone to weakness when they find themselves in the wrong setting. And even the most determined addicts-in-recovery will relapse when they revisit the people and places that remind them of the drug.

PART 4: GOALS

Human behavior expert Oliver Burkeman explained: "When you approach life as a sequence of milestones to be achieved, you exist "in a state of near-continuous failure." Almost all the time, by definition, you're not at the place you've defined as embodying accomplishment or success. And should you get there, you'll find you've lost the very thing that gave you a sense of purpose- so you'll formulate a new goal and start again."

PART 4: GOALS

If you want to compel people to act, you whittle down overwhelming goals into smaller goals that are concrete and easier to manage. Humans are driven by a sense of progress, and progress is easier to perceive when the finish line is in sight.

PART 1: WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

In 2013, a psychologist named Catherine Steiner-Adair explained that many American children first encounter the digital world when they notice that their parents are "missing in action." "My mom is almost always on the iPad at dinner," a seven-year-old told Steiner-Adair. "She's always 'just checking.'" Parents with younger kids do even more damage when they constantly check their phones and tablets. Using head-mounted cameras, researchers have shown that infants instinctively follow their parents' eyes. Distracted parents cultivate distracted children, because parents who can't focus teach their children the same attentional patterns... "Caregivers who appear distracted or whose eyes wander a lot while their children play appear to negatively impact infants' burgeoning attention spans during a key stage of development."

PART 8 CLIFFHANGERS

In August 2012, Netflix introduced a subtle new feature called "post-play." With post-play, a thirteen-episode season of BREAKING BAD became a single, thirteen-hour film. As one episode ended, the Netflix player automatically loaded the next one, which began playing five seconds later. If the previous episode left you with a cliffhanger, all you had to do was sit still as the next episode began and the cliffhanger resolved itself. Before Autust 2012, you had to decide to watch the next episode; now you had to decide to NOT watch the next episode. At first this sounds like a trivial change, but the difference turns out to be enormous.

PART 7 ESCALATION

In a classic paper, marketing professors Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester showed that people will pay up to twice as much for the same item when using a credit card rather than cash. Credit cards, like slot machine cards, hide all feedback from a spender, who has to keep track of his own gains and losses instead. American Express once coined the slogan, "Don't leave home without it," but Prelec and Simester cleverly turned that slogan on its head when they titled their paper "Always Leave Home Without It."

PART 5: FEEDBACK

In a podcast released on April 28, 2016, author and sports columnist Bill Simmons asked billionaire investor Chris Sacca about his experience with VR. "I'm afraid for my kids, a little bit," simmons told Sacca. "I do wonder if this VR world you dive into is almost superior to the actual world you're in. Instead of having human interactions, I can just go into this VR world and do VR things and that's gonna be my live." Sacca, an early Google employee and Twitter investor, shared Simmons' concerns: "That's very legit. One of the things that's interesting about technology is that the improvement in resolution and sound modeling and responsiveness is outpacing our own physiological development. Our biology has been the same- we weren't built to ingest all this light and sound in this incredibly coordinated way... you can watch some early videos... where you are on top of a skyscraper and your body will not let you step forward. Your body is convinced that that is the side of the skyscraper. That's not even a super high-res or super immersive VR platform. So we have some crazy days ahead of us.

PART 7 ESCALATION

In an experiment, students were willing to pay 5 cents for someone else's amateurish origami creation, but 23 cents- more than four times as much- for their own (equally amateurish) origami creation. When asked to bid on the origami creations of experts, which were objectively far more impressive, they bid only 27 cent- a mere 4-cent premium for a vastly superior product.

PART 10 NIPPING ADDICTIONS AT BIRTH

In contrast to the scary, crazy, and clueless parents are those who are "Approachable, Calm, Informed, and Realistic." They understand that social media is a part of the real world. Sometimes their children will be upset, but overreaction makes the problem worse. These parents take the time to understand how their kids interact with social networking platforms. They ask non-judgmental questions of their kids and do their own research. They also impose boundaries, creating the sort of sustainable relationship with tech promoted at reSTART. The family engages in meaningful offline conversations, and at certain points in the day, everyone is offline together. Some of these ideals might seem obvious in the abstract, but they're not always easy to achieve in the heat of the moment.

PART 12 GAMIFICATION

In late 2009, Swedish ad agency DBB Stockholm launched an online campaign for Volkswagen. Volkswgen was releasing a new eco-friendly car that was designed to make driving more fun, so DBB named the campaign 'The Fun Theory'. "Fun can change people's behavior for the better," one executive explained, so perhaps a dose of fun would nudge drivers to try the new car. To generate buzz, DDB launched a series of clever experiments around Stockholm. Each one turned an otherwise mundane behavior into a game. The first experiment took place at central Stockholm's Odenplan metro station. Surveillance footage showed that commuters were lazy by default, piling onto the crowded escalator rather than taking the empty staircase. The problem, DDB explained, is that stairs aren't fun. So, late one evening, a team of workers converted the staircase into an electronic piano. Each stair became a piano key that played a loud tone in response to pressure. In the morning, commuters approached Odenplan's exit as they usually did. At first, most took the escalator, but a few happened to take the stairs, unintentionally composing brief melodies as they left the station. Other commuters took note, and soon the stairs were more popular than the escalator. According to the video, "66 percent more people than normal chose the stairs over the escalator." People flock when you turn a mundane experience into a game.

PART 4: GOALS

In moderation, personal goal-setting makes intuitive sense, because it tells you how to spend your limited time and energy. But today, goals visit themselves upon us, uninvited. Sign up for a social media account, and soon you'll seek followers and likes. Create an email account, and you'll forever chase an empty inbox. Wear a fitness watch, and you'll need to walk a certain number of steps each day. Play Candy Crush and you'll need to break your existing high score. If your pursuit happens to be governed by time or numbers, goals will come in the form of round numbers and social comparisons. You may find you want to run faster and earn more than other people, and to beat certain natural mile-stones. Running a marathon in 4:01 will seem like a failure, as will earning $99,500. These goals pile up, and they fuel addictive pursuits that bring failure or, perhaps worse, repeated success that spawns one new ambitious goal after another.

PART 9 SOCIAL INTERACTION

In the 1950's and 1970's, in a famous series of experiments, kittens were confined to a very dark room until they were five months old. Once a day, half were removed from the room and placed in a cylinder covered with horizontal black and white stripes. The other half were placed in a similar cylinder, this once covered with vertical black and white stripes. So, half the kittens saw only vertical lines, and half saw only horizontal lines. When the kittens were allowed to roam a normal room, they were very confused. All of them, regardless of whether they'd been exposed to horizontal or vertical lines, struggled to judge how far away they were from physical objects. They bumped into table legs, failed to jump back when the experimenter acted like he was about to tap their faces, and couldn't follow moving objects unless they made a noise. (If you've seen how avidly cats follow laser pointers, you know how strange it is when a cat ignores a rolling ball.) When the experimenters examined the kittens' brains for activity, they found that the kittens reared in vertical environments showed no activity at all in response to horizontal lines, while those reared in horizontal environments did not respond to vertical lines. The visual cortex inside these poor kittens heads had been pickled forever, and even exposing them to normal environments for the rest of their lives did nothing to reverse many of the effects of their stunted early lives.

Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply

In the 1960's, we swam through waters with only a few hooks: cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs that were expensive and generally inaccessible. In the 2010's, those same waters are littered with hooks. There's the Facebook hook. The Instagram hook. The porn hook. The email hook. The online shopping hook. And so on. The list is long-- far longer than it's ever been in human history, and we're only just learning the power of these hooks.

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

In the 1970's, a psychologist named Stanton Peele published LOVE AND ADDICTION, explaining that the very healthy attachment we feel toward people we love can also be destructive. This same attachment could be directed toward a bottle of vodka, a syringe of heroin, or an evening a the casino. They're impostors because they sooth psychological discomfort in the same way that social support makes hardship easier- but they soon replace short-term pleasure with protracted pain. The capacity for love is the result of millenia of evolution. This makes people well-designed to raise offspring and to shepherd their genes into the next generation- but also susceptible to addiction.

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

In their book, THE TRUTH ABOUT ADDICTION AND RECOVERY (1991) Peele and Brodsky asked, "Can one be addicted to gambling, shopping, exercise, sex or love in the same sense that one is addicted to alcohol or drugs?" Their answer was YES- that "any activity, involvement, or sensation that a person finds sufficiently consuming can become an addiction... addiction can be understood only in terms of the overall experience it produces for a person... and how these fit in with the person's life situation and needs." ***Peele and Brodsky were also quick to dismiss the idea that any pleasurable, endorphin-producing activity was an addiction. "Endorphins don't make people run until their feet bleed or eat until they puke," they argued. Just because runners experience a "high" doesn't make them addicts. They refused to call gambling, shopping, and exercise compulsions "diseases," but they allowed that those activities were capable of inspiring addictive behaviors.

Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply

It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply. This is unsettling. Why are the world's greatest public technocrats also its greatest private technophobes? Can you imagine the outcry if religious leaders refused to let their children practice religion?

PART 9 SOCIAL INTERACTION

It's easy to see why Zuckerberg chose to acquire Instagram. He had the insight that people are endlessly driven to compare themselves to others. We take photos to capture memories that we'll revisit privately, but primarily to share those memories with others. What makes Facebook and Instagram so addictive is that every activity you post either does-- or doesn't-- attract LIKES, REGRAMS, and comments. If one photo turns out to be a dud, there's always next time. It's endlessly renewable because it's as unpredictable as people's lives are themselves.

PART 5: FEEDBACK

It's expensive, however, to keep dozens of luck ambassadors on the floor, not to mention paying a team of data analysts to identify frustrated gamblers. One man, a casino consultant named John Acres, proposed a creative solution that skirted the relevant laws. Schull explained Acres' technique. "As you play, a tiny portion of what you lose goes into a pot which counts as the marketing bonus pot. An algorithm within the machine senses your pain points, and knows ahead of time what the next outcome will be." Normally the algorithm sits by and lets the machine dish out a randomly drawn outcome. When the player reaches a pain point, though, it intervenes. "If the machine sees that, oh, that outcome sucks," Schull said, "instead of BAR, BAR, CHERRY, it goes 'chink' and nudges the third reel so that it displays BAR- a jackpot outcome of three BARs." Those winnings are taken from the "marketing bonus pot" that grew in size while the player continued to lose. Instead of relying on a human luck ambassador, the machine plays that role itself. Schull has seen many dastardly tactics in her time investigating casinos, but this one she calls "shocking." When she asked Acres how this wasn't a complete violation of laws in place to protect people from precisely this," he replied, "Well, laws are made to be broken."

PART 4: GOALS

It's hard not to wonder whether major life goals are by their nature a major source of frustration. Either you endure the anti-climax of succeeding, or you endure the disappointment of failing. All of this matters now more than ever because there's good reason to believe we're living through an unprecedented age of goal culture- a period underscored by addictive perfectionism, self-assessment, more time at work, and less time at play. Despite all the drawbacks of goal-setting, the practice has increased in the past several decades. What is it about the world today that makes goal pursuit so alluring?

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

Just as drugs trigger dopamine production, so do behavioral cues. When a gaming addict fires up his laptop, his dopamine levels spike; when an exercise addict laces her running shoes, her dopamine levels spike. From there, these behavioral addicts look a lot like drug addicts. Addictions aren't driven by substances or behaviors, but by the idea, learned across time, that they protect addicts from psychological distress. The truth about addiction challenges many of our institutions. It isn't the body falling in unrequited love with a dangerous drug, but rather the mind learning to associate any substance or behavior with relief from psychological pain. In fact, addiction isn't about falling in love; all addicts WANT the object of their addiction, but many of them don't LIKE it at all. Addiction persists even after its appeal wanes, leaving intact the desire for gaming, tidying up obsessively, or self-administering a shock long after the pleasure has gone. (Isaac Vaisberg, Andrew Lawrence's Parkinson's patients, and Rat No. 34).

PART 11 HABITS AND ARCHITECTURE

Just as we tend to befriend strangers who are nearby, we're also drawn to whatever temptation happens to be within arm's reach. Many remedies for behavioral addiction involve creating psychological or physical distance between the user and the behavioral trigger. A dutch design studio called Heldergroen has rigged its office furniture to automatically rise to the ceiling at six o'clock every evening. The desks, tables, and computers are connected to strong steel cables that wind upward through a pulley system driven by a powerful motor. After sic, the space becomes a yoga studio or a dance floor. German car manufacturer Daimler has a similar email management policy. The company's one hundred thousand employees can set incoming emails to delete automatically when they're on vacation. A so-called 'mail on holiday' assistant automatically emails the sender to explain that the email wasn't delivered, and suggests another Daimler employee who will step in if the email is urgent. Workers come back from their vacations to an inbox that looks exactly as it did when they left several weeks ago.

PART 4: GOALS

Katherine Schreiber, an expert on exercise addiction, explained that "focusing on numbers divorces you from being in tune with your body. Exercising becomes mindless, which is 'the goal' of addiction."

PART 5: FEEDBACK

Like kids who push elevator buttons to see them light up, gamers are motivated by the sense that they're having an effect on the world. Remove that and you'll lose them. The game Candy Crush Saga is a prime example. At its peak in 2013, the game generated more than $600,000 in revenue per day. To date, its developer, King, has earned around $2.5 billion from the game. Somewhere between half a billion and a billion people have downloaded Candy Crush Saga. Most of the players are women, which is unusual for a blockbuster. It's hard to understand the game's colossal success when you see how straightforward it is. It wasn't the rules that made the game a success-- it was JUICE. Juice refers to the layer of surface feedback that sits above the game's rules. It isn't essential to the game, but it's essential to the game's success. Without juice, the same game loses its charm. Think of candies replaced by gray bricks and none of the reinforcing sights and sounds that make the game fun. When you form a line in Candy Crush Saga, a reinforcing sound plays, the score associated with that line flashes brightly, and sometimes you hear words of praise.

PART 5: FEEDBACK

Lobstermania, like many modern video slots, is full of reinforcing feedback. In the background the bouncy B-52's song "Rock Lobster" plays over and over whenever you spin. It's replaced by silence after losing spins and by louder, bouncier versions of the song after wins. Lights flash and bells ding just the same whether the spin represents a true win or a loss disguised as a win. The students sweated more when they won than when they lost- but they sweated just as much when their losses were disguised as wins as when those wins were genuine. This is what makes modern slot machines- and modern casinos- so dangerous. Like the little boy who hit every button in my elevator, adults never really grow out of the thrill of attractive lights and sounds. If our brains convince us that we're sinning even when we're actually losing, how are we supposed to muster the self-control to stop playing?

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

Maia Szalavitz, a writer who focuses on addiction, explains that no one else can turn you into an addict. "Pain patients cannot be 'made addicted' by their doctors," Szalavitz says. "In order to develop an addiction, you have to repeatedly take the drug for emotional relief to the point where it feels as though you can't live without it... it can only happen when you start taking doses early or take extra when you feel a need to deal with issues other than pain. Until your brain learns that the drug is critical to your emotional stability, addiction cannot be established." Addiction isn't just a physical response; it's how you respond to that physical experience psychologically. To underscore the point, Szalavitz turns to heroin, the most addictive illicit drug. "To put it bluntly, if I kidnap you, tie you down, and shoot you up with heroin for two months, I can create physical dependence and withdrawal symptoms- but only if you go out and use after I free you will you actually become an addict."

PART 12 GAMIFICATION

Many adults fold in the face of temptation, so you can imagine how children struggle to do the right thing. Adults make wise decisions at least some of the time because they're able to look into the distant future. Children, on the other hand, make decisions that suit them right now. There is no long view where children are concerned, so a chocolate cake is all temptation and no downside. But children love games as much as adults do, so gamification endows children with a dose of self-control. Take the case of dental hygiene. Kids have better things to do than brushing their teeth, particularly just before bedtime. Enter Philips Sonicare, which released a gamified toothbrush in August 2015. The toothbrush is designed to encourage kids to brush for a full two minutes. It has a small screen that displays a character called a Sparkly. Kids earn points for brushing each quadrant of teeth, and those points feed the Sparkly. The Sparkly proved so endearing that kids couldn't get enough of the toothbrush. In an interview, a veteran at the company said, "Because kids love the game and they interacted so much with the app they didn't go to bed right away." The app had to be altered so the updated Sparkly falls over with exhaustion after brushing ends.

PART 7 ESCALATION

Mikhail Kulagin, Pajitnov's (the inventor of Tetris) friend and fellow programmer said, "Tetris is a game with a very strong negative motivation. You never see what you have done very well, and your mistakes are seen on the screen. And you always want to correct them. What hits your eyes are your ugly mistakes. And that drives you to fix them all the time." The game allows you the brief thrill of seeing your completed lines flash before they disappear, leaving only your mistakes.

PART 6 PROGRESS

Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros. appealed to novices, of course, but also contained buried treasure for more experienced players. The game's first level contained a secret tunnel that gave experts a shortcut to the end of the level via an underground chamber filled with coins. The tunnel allowed them to skip Miyamoto's in-game tutorial, and it also rewarded their persistence by playing a string of "ding" sounds as Mario grabbed the underground coins. Because Miyamoto hid some of its charms from all but the game's most devoted fans, many early fans continue to return to Super Mario three decades after its release.

PART 1: WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

Most people spend between one and four hours on their phones each day- and many far longer. This isn't a minority issue. If, as guidelines suggest, we should spend less than an hour on our phones each day, 88 percent of Holesh's (founder of Moment) users were overusing. Overall average daily smartphone screentime averaged 3 hours They were spending a quarter of their waking lives on their phones- more time than any other daily activity, except sleeping. Each month almost one hundred hours was lost to checking email, texting, playing games, surfing the web, reading articles, checking bank balances, and so on. Over the average lifetime, that amounts to a staggering ELEVEN YEARS! On average they were also picking up their phones about three times an hour. This sort of overuse is so prevalent that researchers have coined the term "nomophobia" to describe the fear of being without mobile phone contact. ("no-mobile-phobia).

PART 4: GOALS

Numbers pave the road to obsession. "When it comes to exercise, everything can be measured," says Leslie Sim, an expert on exercise addiction. "How many calories you burn; how many laps you run; how fast you go; how many reps you do; how many paces you take. And if you went, say, two miles yesterday, you don't want to go less than that today. It becomes fairly compulsive." "Counting steps and calories doesn't actually help us lose weight; it just makes us more compulsive. We become less intuitive about our physical activity and eating." Even if you're tired, and feel you need to rest, you'll continue walking or running till you reach your arbitrary numerical goal.

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

Since your brain fundamentally reacts the same way to any pleasurable event, there has to be another ingredient- otherwise we'd all develop crippling ice cream addictions from an early age. The missing ingredient is the SITUATION that surrounds that rise in dopamine. The substance or behavior itself isn't addictive until we learn to use it as a salve for our psychological troubles. If you're anxious or depressed, for example, you might learn that heroin, food, or gambling lessen your pain. If you're lonely, you might turn on an immersive video game that encourages you to build new social networks.

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

Stanton Peele linked love and addiction in the 1970's, arguing that love drove addiction when it was misdirected and turned toward dangerous targets. Peele was also arguing that addiction went beyond illegal drugs. That had been the position of scientists for decades, so much so that few of them were willing to accept that nicotine was addictive. Since smoking was legal, by their logic, its component parts couldn't possibly be addictive. The term "addiction" had become so stigmatized that it was reserved for a small, closed set of substances. But the term wasn't sacred to Peele. He pointed out that many smokers leaned on nicotine in the same way that heroin addicts relied on heroin as a psychological crutch, although heroin was more obviously damaging in the short-term. Peele's perspective was heretical in the 1970's, but the medical world caught up in the 1980's and 1990's. Peele also recognized that any destructive crutch could become a source of addiction. A bored white-collar worker who turned to gambling for the thrill he lacked in the real world could develop a gambling addiction.

PART 11 HABITS AND ARCHITECTURE

The first principle of behavioral architecture, then, is very simple: whatever's nearby will have a bigger impact on your mental life than whatever is farther away. Surround yourself with temptation and you'll be tempted; remove temptation from arm's reach and you'll find hidden reserves of willpower. Proximity is so powerful that it even drives which strangers you'll befriend.

PART 1: WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

Still, it's important to use the term "behavioral addiction" carefully. A label can encourage people to see a disorder everywhere: Shy kids were suddenly labeled "Asperger's sufferers" when the term became popular; people with volatile emotions were similarly labeled "bipolar." Allen Frances, a psychiatrist and expert on addiction is concerned about the term "behavioral addiction." "If 35 percent of people suffer from a disorder, then it's just a part of human nature," he says. "Medicalizing behavioral addiction is a mistake. What we should be doing is what they do in Taiwan and Korea. There they see behavioral addiction as a social issue rather than a medical issue." I agree.

PART 4: GOALS

Streaks uncover the major flaw with goal pursuit: you spend far more time pursuing the goal than you do enjoying the fruits of your success. Even if you succeed, success is brief.

PART 6 PROGRESS

Super Mario Bros. hooks newcomers because there are no barriers to playing the game. You can know absolutely nothing about the Nintendo console and still enjoy yourself from the very first minute. There's no need to read motivation-sapping manuals or grind through educational tutorials before you begin. Instead, you're learning by doing, and enjoying the sense of mastery that comes from acquiring knowledge through experience. The first few seconds of gameplay are brilliantly designed to simultaneously do two very difficult things: teach, and preserve the illusion that nothing is being taught at all.

PART 5: FEEDBACK

Tech writer Stuart Dredge noted that we're already struggling to focus our attention on friends and family. If idle smartphones and tablets draw us away from real-world interactions, how will we fare in the face of VR devices? Steven Kotler wrote for FORBES that VR would become "legal heroin; our next hard drug." There's every reason to believe Kotler. When it matures, VR will allow us to spend time with anyone in any location doing whatever we like for as long as we like. That sort of boundless pleasure sounds wonderful, but it has the capacity to render face-to-face interactions obsolete. Why live in the real world with real, flawed people when you can live in a perfect world that feels just as real?

PART 10 NIPPING ADDICTIONS AT BIRTH

The answer to these problems is not to medicalize moderate forms of addiction, but to alter the structure of how we live, both at a societal level and more narrowly, as we construct our day-to-day lives. It's far easier to prevent people from developing addictions in the first place than it is to correct existing bad habits, so these changes should begin not with adults, but with young kids. Parents have always taught their children how to eat, when to sleep, and how to interact with other people, but parenting today is incomplete without lessons on how to interact with technology, and for how long each day.

PART 5: FEEDBACK

The best part of any gamble may be the millisecond before the outcome reveals itself. This is the moment of maximum tension, when gamblers are primed to see a winning outcome. We know this from a clever experiment that two psychologists published in 2006. Emily Balcetis and Dave Dunning told a group of Cornell undergrads that they were participating in a juice taste test. Some of them would be lucky enough to try freshly squeezed orange juice, but others would drink a "gelatinous, chunky, green, foul-smelling, somewhat viscous concoction labeled as an 'organic veggie smoothie.'" As the students inspected each beverage, the experimenter explained that a computer would randomly assign them to drink a tall glass of one or the other. Half the students were told that the computer would present a number if they were assigned to drink the appealing orange juice (and a letter if they were assigned to drink the sludge), while the other half were told the reverse, that the letter spelled salvation and the number spelled doom. The students sat at the computer and waited, a lot like the gamblers waiting for a slot machine to display its outcome. A couple of seconds later the computer displayed a figure that is neither a number nor a letter, but instead is an ambiguous hybrid of the number 13 and the capital letter B. Eighty-six percent of them rejoiced. the computer had come through with a win! The students were so intent on seeing what they hoped to see that their brains resolved the ambiguous figure in their favor. This phenomenon, called motivated perception, happens automatically all the time.

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

The depths of addiction are no fun at all, which is another way of saying that addicts crave a hit without LIKING the experience. Stanton Peele likened addiction to misguided love. Falling in love with the wrong person is a classic case of wanting without liking. Loving the wrong person is so common that we have stereotypes for the "buy who's no good" and the "femme fatale." We know they're no good for us, but we can't help wanting them.

Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply

The people who create and refine tech, games, and interactive experiences are very good at what they do. They run thousands of tests with millions of users to learn which tweaks work and which ones don't - which background colors, fonts, and audio tones maximize engagement and minimize frustration. As an experience evolves, it becomes an irresistible, weaponized version of the experience it once was. In 2004, Facebook was fun; in 2016, it's addictive.

PART 4: GOALS

The rich are never happy; no matter how much they earn, there is always someone who earns more. As ridiculous as it may sound, even billionaires are poor next to multibillionaires, so they, too, feel the sting of relative deprivation.

PART 7 ESCALATION

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 addiction: where substance addictions are nakedly destructive, many behavioral addictions are quietly destructive acts wrapped in cloaks of creation. The illusion of progress will sustain you as you achieve high scores or acquire more followers or spend more time at work, and so you'll struggle ever harder to shake the need to continue.

PART 5: FEEDBACK

The sort of feedback that ties the game to the real world is called mapping. "Mapping is sort of visceral," says Foddy. "For example, you should always use the space bar sparingly. It's a loud, clattery key on the computer, so it shouldn't be used for something mundane, like walking. It's better saved for declarative actions that aren't quite as common, like jumping. Your aim is to match sensations in the physical realm to those in the digital realm.

PART 11 HABITS AND ARCHITECTURE

There is one subtle psychological lever that seems to hasten habit formation: the language you use to describe your behavior. Suppose you were trying to avoid using Facebook. Each time you're tempted, you can either tell yourself "I can't use Facebook," or you can tell yourself "I don't use Facebook." They sound similar, and the difference may seem trivial, but it isn't. "I can't" wrests control from you and gives it to an unnamed outside agent. It's disempowering. You're the child in an invisible relationship, forced not to do something you'd like to do, and, like children, most people are drawn to whatever they're not allowed to do. In contrast, "I don't" is an empowering declaration that this isn't something you do. It gives the power to you and signals that you're a particular kind of person-- the kind of person who, on principle, doesn't use Facebook.

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

There's a modern-day malady that affects 2/3 of all adults. Its symptoms include: heart disease, lung disease, kidney disease, appetite suppression, poor weight control, weakened immune functioning, lowered resistance to disease, higher pain sensitivity, slowed reaction times, mood fluctuations, depressed brain functioning, depression, obesity, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer. That malady is chronic sleep deprivation, which is rising in the wake of smartphones, e-readers, and other light-emitting devices. Sleep deprivation is behavioral addiction's partner- the consequence of persistent over-engagement.

PART 11 HABITS AND ARCHITECTURE

These devices are engineered to remain with us at all times-- that's one of their key selling points-- so it's easy to allow them to pierce the boundaries between the tech-on and tech-off components of our lives.

PART 3 THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION

To Peele, the term "Behavioral Addiction" was heretical, because it implied there was a meaningful difference between behavioral and substance addictions, a distinction he argues doesn't exist because 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." That's how he defined it decades ago, and that's how he sees it today. The "experience is everything about the context: the anticipation of the event, and the behavior of carefully lining up the needle, the charred spoon, and the lighter. Even heroin makes its way to the body via a chain of behaviors that themselves become part of an addiction. If even heroin addiction is to some extent "behavioral," you can see why Peele avoided the term altogether.

PART 4: GOALS

Today, records and goals are everywhere, and anyone can participate in the act of record-setting-- a symptom of the age of information. The Guinness World Records homepage features a button labeled 'Set a Record'. Follow the link and you'll see the smiling faces and medaled chests of recent record-setters. Gunner Garfors and Adrian Butterworth visited five continents in one calendar day. Hiroyuki Yoshida and Sandra Smith got married 130 meters underwater. Steve Chalke has raised millions of pounds for charity while running marathons, more than anyone else in history. And so on. It's never been so easy to concoct a goal- and, much to our detriment, we're coaxed along that complicated path by devices that are meant to make our lives easier.

Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply

We tend to think of addiction as something inherent in certain people- those we label as ADDICTS. Heroin ADDICTS in vacant row houses. Chain smoking nicotine ADDICTS. Pill-popping prescription-drug ADDICTS. The label implies that they're different from the rest of humanity... In truth, addiction is produced largely by environment and circumstance. Steve Jobs knew this. He kept the iPad from his kids because, for all the advantages that made them unlikely substance addicts, he knew they were susceptible to the iPad's charms. These entrepreneurs recognize that the tools they promote-- engineered to be irresistible-- will ensnare users indiscriminately. There isn't a bright line between addicts and the rest of us. We're all one product or experience away from developing our own addictions.

PART 5: FEEDBACK

What makes motivated perception so important for addiction is that it shaped how we perceive negative feedback. Gamblers hate to win all the time- but even more than that, they hate losing all the time. If hapless gamblers and gamers and Instagram users saw the world as it really is, they'd see that they lose more of the time. They'd recognize that a string of losses usually foretells more losses, rather than an approaching jackpot, and that the figure above is just as likely to be a letter as it is a number. To make matters worse, many games and gambling experiences are designed to get your hopes up by displaying near wins. There's a pretty good chance that gamblers today will play again tomorrow and the next day, because to them, gambling isn't a loss: it's an "almost win".

EPILOGUE

What we do know is that the number of immersive and addictive experiences is rising at an accelerating rate, so we need to understand how, why, and when people first develop and then escape behavioral addictions. On the lofty end of the spectrum, our health, happiness, and well-being depend on it-- and right here, down to earth, so does our ability to look one another in the eyes to form genuine emotional connections.

PART 1: WHAT IS BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION AND WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

When, in 1918, a flu pandemic killed seventy-five million people, no one suggested that a flu diagnosis was meaningless. The issue demanded attention precisely because it affected so many people, and the same is true of behavioral addiction. Smartphones and email are hard to resist- because they're both part of the fabric of society and promote psychologically compelling experiences- and there will be other addictive experiences in the coming decades. We shouldn't use a watered-down term to describe them; we should acknowledge how serious they are, how much harm they're doing to our collective well-being, and how much attention they deserve. The evidence so far is concerning, and trends suggest we're wading deeper into dangerous waters.

PART 9 SOCIAL INTERACTION

Why did Hipstamatic falter while Instagram continues to grow? The answer lies in two critical decisions that Systrom and Krieger made before they released the app. The first was to make the app free to download. That got users in the door, and it explains in part why so many users downloaded the app early on: there was no risk of spending on a dud, so at worst they could delete the app a couple of days later. But many apps are free, and they still fail miserably. It was the pair's second decision that made the difference: Instagram users posted their photos on a dedicated social network tied to the app. (Hipstamatic users could upload their photos on Facebook, but Hipstamatic wasn't itself a stand-alone social network)

PART 11 HABITS AND ARCHITECTURE

You must acknowledge that you're a different person when you're tempted to check your email or work late. You may be an adult now, but this future version of you is more like a child. The best way to wrest control from your childish future self is to act while you're still an adult-- to design a world that coaxes, cajoles, or even compels your future-self to do the right thing. An alarm clock called SnuzNLuz illustrates this idea beautifully. SnuzNLuz is wirelessly connected to your bank account. Every time you hit the snooze button, it automatically deducts a preset sum and donates it to a charity you abhor. Support the Democratic Party? Hit snooze and you'll donate ten dollars to the G.O.P. Support the Republican Party, and you'll donate to the Democratic Party. These donations are your present self's way of keeping your future self in line.

Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply

a second psychologist told me... "Social media has completely shaped the brains of the younger people I work with. One thing I am often mindful of in a session is this: I could be five or ten minutes into a conversation with a young person about the argument they have had with their friend or girlfriend, when I remember to ask whether this happened by text, phone, on social media, or face-to-face. More often the answer is, 'text or social media.' Yet in their telling of the story, this isn't apparent to me. It sounds like what I would consider a 'real,' face-to-face conversation. I always stop in my tracks and reflect. This person doesn't differentiate various modes of communication the way I do... the result is a landscape filled with disconnection and addiction.

PART 10 NIPPING ADDICTIONS AT BIRTH

iPads make the job of parenting much easier. They provide renewable entertainment to kids who like watching videos or playing games, so they're a miracle for overworked and under-rested parents. But they also set dangerous precedents that are difficult for kids to shake as they mature.