You are not safe: Being "very online" is killing us

You wake up, and so do your devices. You’re tracking your sleep with a wearable, your phone sleeps next to you, you’re getting the news, private messages, and looking at photos of your friend’s vacation before you even leave your bedroom. Most of us never escape technology. It’s only going to get worse.

I was having trouble sleeping the other day. I was on Twitter from the moment I woke up to the moment I crawled into bed, and I realized I was having trouble turning my brain off because it was still on Twitter. I was thinking about the conversations I had had online that day and what certain people thought about me. I had Twitter-induced anxiety. I know many others have dealt with this problem.

Twitter hasn’t been all bad for me. It’s helped my career, and I’ve made friends through the website, but the more I thought about this issue I was dealing with, the more I wondered if I was making a deal with the devil.

11 hours: The average amount of time per day we 

spend consuming media content.

People are increasingly finding it difficult to log off, and that’s no accident. Our technology is designed to be addictive, to such an extreme degree that they spawned apps to keep you from using apps. Our brains produce dopamine — the chemical that makes you happy — when you get a like on Instagram or Facebook. This is very similar to how the brain responds to an addictive drug. The infinite scroll we see on social media tricks us into staying on the app for hours, because we’re not given time to consider if we should log off. There are many ways in which our apps have been designed to keep us logged on and wanting more.

Dr. Doreen Dodgen-Magee, a psychologist and author of Deviced! Balancing Life and Technology in a Digital World, tells Inverse that tech addiction plays out much like any other type of addiction.

“As the stimulation found in the digital domain becomes increasingly enticing, we need more of it to attain the same level of satisfaction that we once had with less,” Dodgen-Magee says. “This is similar to other patterns of addiction.”

Children are being exposed to these apps earlier and earlier. My two-year-old niece has already figured out how to use a touch screen. When you’re exposed to these addictive apps at such a young age, there’s little hope you’ll find a way to break that addiction later in life. According to Nielsen, the average adult spends roughly 11 hours per day consuming media content. That number could go up as more people who grew up with the iPad (release date: April 2010) reach adulthood.