All addiction, at its heart, is addiction to unconsciousness. It doesn’t matter if it’s social media addiction or heroin addiction. The addict is always trying to block out consciousness by covering it in stimulation or numbness. This means the cure to addiction is always more consciousness. But consciousness can’t just be willed into existence. Instead, developing consciousness is closely linked to developing insight. This is because usually the reason we want to hide in unconsciousness is that there’s something we don’t want to be conscious of. Something in our world that contradicts the story we want to tell ourselves about the world. Perhaps we want to believe that we can always avoid pain and only experience pleasure. So we try to push pain into unconsciousness. Or we want to believe that the things we love will last forever. So we try to push any sign of decay or change into unconsciousness. Or there is some story we want to believe about ourselves and who we are. So we try to push anything that contradicts that story into unconsciousness. So the way to overcome our addiction to unconsciousness is to build accurate world models. When we learn to view the world as a place that includes suffering, is impermanent and is free of stable selves, reality starts to match our worldview. With this insight in place, we no longer need to push suffering, impermanence, and things that threaten our sense of self out of consciousness. Consciousness then naturally expands of its own accord.