What you need to know about internet addiction | Dr. Kimberly Young | TEDxBuffalo

foreign hello well I started studying internet addiction in 1995 shortly after a friend of mine's husband was addicted to AOL chat rooms he was spending 40 50 60 hours a week at a time when it was still 2.95 cents an hour create a financial burden but their marriage ended in divorce when he started meeting women in online chat rooms now it made me wonder if people could get addicted to the internet in the same way we talk about drugs alcohol and sex so I posted a small survey online I took the same clinical criteria that

one would use to Define pathological gambling and they just substituted the word internet and I just wanted to see what I would find well back when I probably had two email a month I had over 50 emails all from people telling me how they lost their jobs and their marriages students across the country having problems with the very tool that they were being encouraged to use so I expanded my survey and by 1996 I had presented the first study on internet addiction at the American Psychological Association and by 1998 I wrote continent the first book

to identify internet addiction as a new disorder now Aldous was met with great controversy and skepticism which I understood look it was new it was before the.com Bubble Burst but I'm here to say 20 years later this is now considered a rapidly New Field there's been thousands of Internet uh research topics on internet addiction it's now not only just looking at it but looking at treatment protocols looking at risk factors there's hundreds of inpatient treatment centers looking at this as a real Disorder so here I am today to talk a little bit about what is

internet addiction what are some of the ways people get hooked and how can we better manage technology in our day-to-day lives now one of the first questions I'm often asked is how much time is too much and that'd be like trying to diagnose alcoholism by counting the number of drinks one consumes you know 10 drinks a week is okay but 11 or more is a problem we really can't quantify addictions that way what we're really doing is trying especially with the ubiquitous nature of the internet what we really want to do is look at a

set of behaviors so let's see you know the first one here you have somebody texting while driving but that's really only part of the pathology what we often see are people preoccupied with their cell phones and their digital devices ask yourself how many times do you check your smartphone during the day I know people that check their Facebook 50 times a day I know that they check their Twitter feed 50 times a day their email 50 times a day I've worked with people that have gotten into three four five car accidents texting while driving and

thank God they didn't kill themselves or others but they can't seem to stop the compulsive Behavior here is an internet cafe from China in China Korea and Taiwan internet addiction is most problematic and most prevalent here you're looking at people that might spend 8 10 12 hours every day gaming now when you talk about symptoms here you're talking about you know how long they spend on the internet consequences because of behavior losing sleep losing poor nutrition losing interest in other activities just to be on the game now in America it's considered more of a silent

addiction you know you're not seeing a lot of these internet cafes here it's happening in your homes in people's bedrooms and there are Gamers that we treat that you know they can't they fail school because they can't stop gaming or they live back at home at their parents because they can't hold a job because they can't stop gaming we also treat What I Call Facebook moms here we are Facebook moms and um yeah you know do you know anybody that plays Candy Crush Saga um Farmville or a number of games but now I'm talking about

people that also you know forget to pick up their kids at school forget to feed them dinner or they forget to you know put them to bed they're so consumed by the behavior we also treat men addicted to internet pornography and if they're doing this in their job there we go if they're doing this at work then they risk getting fired if they do this at home they risk getting divorced with we also treat uh just I'm sorry I'm clicking and there we go we also treat people who are addicted to internet gambling and they're

spending money they don't have on Virtual casinos and oftentimes this isn't the same person who might go to Atlantic City or Vegas but it's usually a younger tech savvy male dominated set of teenagers and college students foreign with any element of addiction is an element of Escape what you're really looking at are people that can create these online lives through the computer that they like better than their own so here with a lot of Gamers these are Virtual Worlds or communities so these Gamers can create an avatar or character and live in a virtual world

with other Gamers okay and there's usually battles and goals within the game to achieve but now you might have somebody who's in real life has low self-esteem is you know socially very awkward but yet in the game they become a great warrior and now they've earned respect they've earned power and dominance and recognition from the other Gamers and this is very important to understand because that's really part of the psychology of what we're saying is more the addiction here's a screenshot from second life this is more of a virtual community and within Second Life what

happens is that you have um you know residents as they call them and it's more just a virtual community where you can hang out you can go shopping you can go have a job you can go to take college classes so you live you hang out and it's like a game but it gives the example that I'm trying to make about these Virtual Worlds so first off you create an avatar where I can be anybody I want to be okay I could be a tall blonde I could be a short redhead I could be older

thinner taller younger I could be a man and that's the wish fulfillment I can create in my virtual Second Life something I can't do in my real life and that's very important now in order to actually buy things in Second Life it's free to set up your avatar but then American currency gets exchanged into Linden dollars Linden Labs owns second life so there's currency to buy clothes to buy a car to buy a home to buy furnishing things in this virtual community so that's very important actually economists study this I mean millions of people use

this and they look at consumer Behavior now clinically I see it on the downside of it where people spend and invest an awful lot in their virtual world so for example I worked with a 55 year old legal secretary and in her real life she had a very modest home modest cars modest clothes she had embezzled four hundred thousand dollars from the law firm she worked for all to support her second life Avatar again in a real life very modest living in her second life she was a great baroness she had diamonds and you know

jewelry and Furs and she had exotic cars and exotic homes and she had this sort of wish fulfillment of status and power that she could not achieve in her own life so what do we do about all this does treatment recovery mean going cold turkey and the answer is no this isn't like treating uh using an absence model like you would for drugs or alcohol it's really more about a food addiction and it's looking at moderated controlled positive use of this technology so the kind of terms that we often use then with clients are digital

diet and digital nutrition so a digital diet you're talking about a restriction in the number of hours very much like you would the Restriction of the number of calories one consumes so instead of checking Facebook 50 times a day you check it once a day instead of checking Twitter 50 times a day maybe three times a day instead of email 50 times a day maybe only three times so it's very prescribed very controlled use of the internet now with digital nutrition it's actually about what you click on so if you're the gamer who can't you

know go to school and is failing out and living back at home with his parents because you can't hold a job maybe you need to abstain from gaming but you can still use the internet for very practical things maybe you need to research a paper for school or you need your email for work or you need to make Airline reservations or hotel reservations so there's really about product of use of the internet and it's sort of the difference between you know eating your a bag of potato chips or maybe eating fruits and vegetables okay so

it's really again not villainizing technology but really trying to say how is this promoted in our own daily lives now here's a photograph of a family sitting around the dinner table and they're all on their technology this might even be your own home right I argue that we're all a bit too connected and and you know we live in a lot of electronic noise that we don't even think about you know how many times do you go out to dinner and you see the couple next door to you and they're just looking at their their

screens and they're not talking to each other how many times you go to the mall and you see a group of teenagers and they're just texting and talking and not talking all right we do we live with kind of all this noise in our day-to-day lives so what can you do to better manage technology every day well first I got three tips first check your checking you know how many times do you check your smartphone each day the next time you feel the need to check it stop you you know be more present with the

person around you you know is it really that important to keep checking that cell phone all the time I mean look I'm a victim of this too every week I go to meetings and the first thing everybody at the meeting puts their smartphones on the table and and a few minutes into the meeting what does somebody do you know somebody's checking their email somebody's texting you're not really being present as much as we'd like to think we can multitask we can't you know we don't do that very well and research says so this kind of

leads to the second Point set time limits set some boundaries in your day-to-day life if you're a parent how many times are you checking your smartphone in front of your children and what kind of behavior is that modeling you know if you're a couple leave leave the cell phones at home and go out to dinner actually talk people are like wow really I challenge everyone to take a 48 hour digital talks in your own life maybe it's Friday night you plug the phone on the charger and you don't look at it again to Monday morning

or take any two days and people go well no I need to check my phone I can what are you saying that's ludicrous but you know what I guarantee you you will feel better you know what you're going to have Renewed Energy and renewed time because you don't really realize how much you start to check it we've learned to live without boredom or idle time in our environment because we just kind of fill it now with technology and so anytime you're bored you you look down and oh did somebody text me probably it's not that

important but I guarantee you you'll feel a lot differently about it and this leads to the next and final Point disconnect to reconnect have Tech free family time every night maybe the dinner table there's no devices maybe even one hour after dinner you say no media no television no video games no nothing people go what do we do well I don't know maybe you'll talk to each other you know think about that you know when I was younger we used to take Sunday drives all the time and it was our kind of family time think

about the Sunday drive today where you know somebody's wearing the iPod somebody's playing a DVD player somebody's texting somebody's gaming on their phone no leave it at home really kind of focus in on each other I guarantee you you're going to feel much better and have more quality relationships it's not a permanent thing it's just temporary pieces in your day-to-day life that'll really improve your relationships now one of the more alarming things now is the children as young as two three and four years old now have access to technology actually there's a picture there of

the iPad uh bouncy seat okay and over here is an eye potty chair so yeah no kidding huh so what happens now is you have um toddlers that now we've put technology right into their their devices like their electronic toys and some people would say well that's harmless isn't that oh no big deal no the question is now shifted from how much time is too much to how young is too young because new research is already starting to show great concerns new social science research is concerned that kids are more isolated in front of computers

so what happens is they're just sitting there isolated in front of screens and they're not getting out playing with other kids they're not learning how to collaborate and work together in teams we're also starting to see with Neuroscience research reading deficits with young children because the more time they're spending scrolling on the internet think about this it's scanning it's skimming it's scrolling it's not reading all right I mean they might be reading information but it's not the same skill set as if you have a child reading a book it requires much more attention and concentration

skills that they're not getting the more screen time they have the less time they're able or less able to read books because what's happening is it's much more of a line by line page-by-page linear process there's even new research concerned about childhood obesity and kids are just sedentary now they're not getting out moving around and playing because they're sedentary in front of screens so what do we do about some of these big picture issues and there is a lot of you know concern I think of late there we go and one of the things that

um I was very honored this picture is me at excuse me this picture is of myself and I was the keynote speaker at the first International Congress on internet addiction disorders held in Milan Italy last year and this was really a big honor but not only just to see myself in this role and where it's come but when I started off I said this has been a rapidly evolving field I mean there were delegates from a multitude of countries all talking about National and government initiatives that they were doing to deal with the prevention and

treatment of internet addiction while America was seen as lagging behind we have no government intervention and this was really a good big concern I mean just by comparison Korea alone had over 500 inpatient units or hospitals treating internet addiction Korea also had prevention programs in every single school system in their country again we didn't really do that much and I remember thinking a great deal about this when I you know was flying back saying what can we be doing what are some of the things we can be doing right in our own community and schools

so I came up with this idea of being screen smart and one of the issues really was that you know technology is a gift and how we use it we can use it rather wisely so being screen smart is really kind of taking on the food role and saying let's make smarter wiser choices so for example could you be you know doing screenings in our schools to identify those kids that are most at risk could we be offering Prevention classes to young children so they learn at an early age how to use the technology more

responsibly could we be training teachers to look at you know assessing kids look for warning signs and risk factors and even intervening with them since they're on the front lines could we be talking directly to parents about some of these concerns for example I came up with the 3 6 9 12 parenting guidelines so at each developmental age at age three at age 6 9 and 12. parents really need different technology you know rules and I think kids have different technology needs so I think collectively if we start looking about this as it being screen

smart I think overall in looking at how we manage our technology in our day-to-day lives we'll all have more balanced way of using technology without being consumed by it so thank you