Smartphones provide a nearly endless stream of potential dopamine: a ‘positive social interaction’, or something resembling it, is always but a swipe away. As a result, we’re often mindlessly reaching for our phones without really knowing why and, if we cannot find our phone, we may feel a pang of anxiety.When we sit down to work, our brains don’t... See more

At first, it was excruciating. The reflex to check, to post, to be seen was so deeply embedded that my hands kept reaching for my phone's app store like some desperate, lovesick Victorian heroine reaching for a lover who had long since stopped writing. Except my lover wasn’t a person, it was the feed . The infinite scroll, the algorithmic drip-feed... See more

But how about patients addicted to food? Or smartphones? Drugs that can’t be stopped altogether? The question of how to moderate is becoming an increasingly important one in modern-day life, because of the sheer ubiquity of high-dopamine goods, making us all more vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption, even when not meeting clinical criteria for

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