Member-only story
Your Phone Addiction Is a Codependent Relationship
A simple framework for changing any negative behavior
I’ve been hooked on every vice you can imagine: booze, cocaine, junk food, porn, sex, cigarettes. You name it, and I’ve indulged in it to excess. I’ve also — at least temporarily — quit all those vices. But one of the toughest things I’ve ever tried to quit was something most of us don’t think of as a vice at all: Instagram.
Before I became a life coach, I was an editor at a well-known men’s fashion magazine, and as such, I was a heavy user. I regularly took photos of clothes and posted them, then @’d myself to the company’s audience of several million followers. Every time the likes piled up, I got really, really high. Nearly all of us have experienced how powerful that warm rush of dopamine is — the feeling when a photo we’ve sent into the digital ether returns decorated with comments, encouragements, heart emojis.
Instagram hits us right smack in the deepest recesses of our egos. So even though we’ve known, or at least had a feeling, that our ever-growing reliance on our smartphones over the last decade has become problematic — even when there are rehab centers that specialize in social media addiction, even when Netflix’s hit The Social Dilemma includes a mea culpa from the guy who created the “Like” button, even…
