Just one more click. One more page of Texts From Last night. One more post on Reddit. It all can’t hurt, right?
Actually, it can. It’s called novelty addiction, and it can take control of your life.
“There are harms absolutely, I mean, there are the physical harms, but there’s also critically the psychological harms,” said Kim Hellemans, a Carleton psychology professor and addiction and mental illness expert.
What is novelty addiction?
Novelty addiction, according to Hellemans, is dependent on the release of chemicals in the brain when exposed to new experiences.
“When particularly novel stimuli and salient . . . occur it causes a release of dopamine in critical brain regions, ” she said. Dopamine is thought of as a kind of learning signal, according to Hellemans.
New stimuli continually pop up, and your brain releases dopamine. But after that the brain wants to find more new stimuli, to release more dopamine. In this way, novelty addiction works like any other addiction.
“Not everybody develops an addiction, but in some people that are vulnerable that signal might be especially strong,” Hellemans said.
According to Hellemans, addiction may have something to do with how people’s brains are ‘wired’, how much stress and trauma you had as a child, how you dealt with it sets up your brain, and how it will function in your later years.
The website YourBrainOnPorn.com says that an addiction changes and rewires your brain even more. After constant stimulation the neurons in your brain get tired and effectively start to ignore the stimuli. An example of this is how you don’t realize you can feel your tongue in your mouth until someone mentions it.
According to the website, your brain makes the addicted activity take more precedence over other activities, and Hellemans agrees. She said that humans are comparative creatures, and that they both consciously and unconsciously compare activities and what is more pleasurable to them. This is where the levels of dopamine released during an activity is important.
A major harm, Hellemans said, is diminished role functioning. This is when people don’t show up for a job, or for school, or they begin to neglect their duties in order to satisfy their addiction.
What is novelty?
One problem with discussing novelty addiction is that it can refer to many subjects. “Anything that’s going to be new and salient and strong and interesting, then the brain is going to release that lovely pulse of dopamine,” Hellemans said.
Jessie Moorman, a Carleton graduate student specializing in how online communication and relationships affect the well being of people, conducted a study of a very common addiction: Facebook.
She noted that the information shared online was not always positive information, and that more and more people were attempting to solve conflict online rather than in person.
“It’s a real issue for younger individuals, these interactions that they’re having online and the fact that they’re solely focusing on one thing for energy and their friendship and their interactions could potentially be detrimental,” Moorman said.
Moorman explained that young people, who have almost always used Facebook are mostly at risk. People who have had Facebook as not just an important part of socializing, but an integral part.
One Iranian study found that almost 25 per cent of male university students and less than 10 per cent of female students were addicted to some form of the Internet or another.
Gender also plays a role in addiction, according to Moorman. For example, males tend to be addicted to video games more than females.
Hellemans said that gender differences play a role in addiction, especially in terms of what the addictive substance is.
Not all activities are equal either, according to Hellemans. Activities such as checking email, chatting online, and browsing Facebook are actually shown to have decreased depressive symptoms in individuals. However, some activities have the opposite effect such as shopping, playing games, or doing research, as they increase depressive symptoms.
How to kick the habit
The solution to this problem is very simple: moderation. If you feel you’re wasting too much time on the computer, or procrastinating from work take steps to organize yourself.
“So what we’re doing on the Internet is really critical. The message is it’s OK to be on there, it looks like if you’re socializing and you’re using social media that’s actually OK It’s when you’re creating a new [world] and you’re isolating yourself off from the world that you live in, that’s what’s bad.”
