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Comment by bccdee | Hacker News Reader

Screen "addiction" isn't a real thing. Addiction is a specific medical phenomenon, not just any bad habit. Go find me a study in a medical journal that quantifies the physiological effects of smartphone withdrawal.

I do think people spend too much time on social media, but it's not helpful to frame this by analogy to something it simply is not. Bad habits are bad in their own right. We don't need to appropriate medical language to discuss them, and doing so is misleading. You can actually just stop using Instagram Reels. It's nothing like heroin. It's a bad habit, and you can just turn it off.

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https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12401922/

"In contrast[to drug withdrawal], smartphone dependence is driven by digital stimuli and psychological-behavioral mechanisms, with almost no physical dependence; withdrawal mainly causes psychological discomfort (such as restlessness) without severe physical reactions. Its health risks are mostly indirect (like vision loss, sleep disorders), and withdrawal can generally be improved through behavioral adjustments."

I can find you 10 more but I doubt it would change your outlook.

This is a study finding that physiological smartphone withdrawal doesn't exist. Smartphone dependence is merely "psychological-behavioural," and you can develop a psychologically dependent relationship with anything. Being dependant on your girlfriend doesn't make you "addicted" to her. Please, find 10 more studies—this is making my point for me.

Again, I'm not saying our relationship with smartphones is healthy. I'm saying addiction is a specific thing, and this isn't it. Getting strung out on heroin is not anything like using your phone too much.

Thanks for proving my point! Insomnia and sleep deprivation are highly dependent on both psychological and physiological factors. You want studies for that too? Every addiction stems from some combination of psychology and biology because the the brain factors into everything we do, consciously or sub-consciously. What about addiction to porn, not a real thing I guess?

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