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Digital Addiction - The Dark Side of Digitalization

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Digitalization has altered lifestyles with numerous useful effects, but its negative side has also been identified. Read this article to know more.

Written by

Dr. Afsha Mirza

Medically reviewed by

Dr. Ramchandra Lamba

Published At October 31, 2023
Reviewed AtOctober 31, 2023

Introduction

Addiction to digital technology (related devices) is regarded as a worldwide issue, where extreme online action and internet usage direct to incapability to manage time, stamina, and concentration during the day and make nervous sleep habits or sleeplessness during the night. The degree to which dysfunctional sleep has occurred is a development of changed reason, remembrance process, attitude, diet, and different lifestyle patterns or consequences from extra blue-light exposure when glancing at digital appliance screens for prolonged hours during daytime and nighttime. There is also abrupt growth in manifestation denoting technology dependence, such as unhappiness, stress, loneliness, escape from buddies and home, lack of sleep, and temper issues. With obsession, there is growth in happenings, mishaps, and defeats during tasks. It leads to thoughts of suicide as the potentially leading getaway from the numerous damaging consequences of digital technology misuse in young individuals between 15 and 30 years.

What Is Digital Addiction?

In digital obsession, the internet is a medium through which people may access any content they like (fun, social media, shopping, lovemaking). The consequence of the addictive reaction is digitally enabled and immediately open to anyone via smartphone, notepad, laptop, or computer, with no medium required, as is the issue with different kinds of habits to substances or distinct actions not completed online. At a developed phase, digital addiction is associated with a powerful and enduring symptomatic condition at the psychological, mental, and physiological status, engendering functional disability. Reported manifestations possess tension, stress, sadness, eating disorders, sleeplessness, and mindset modifications with suicidal imagination. An assembly of variables, such as socio-cultural elements, physical susceptibilities (hereditary proneness, metabolic disturbances), and psychological characteristics (character traits, negative effect), play a part here. Repeated critical conduct, failure of impulsive power, and digital obsession represent a complicated syndrome that is initiated, nurtured, and supported by the instant availability of the desired scopes via the digital medium.

What Are the Health Effects of Digital Addiction?

  1. Depression in digital addicts is connected to sleep disturbances and sleeplessness related to addictive conduct. Sleeplessness may be both a stimulus and booster and a chronically evolving result of the addiction. It can thus be considered sufficient to regard addiction to internet movements, sleeplessness, and sadness as an entire syndrome. Increased incidences of depression, wakefulness, and suicide paces in teenagers as an immediate effect of internet addiction are identified as the origins of the global problem.

  2. People with common sleep disorders are often found to be skipping work and other significant occasions and making mistakes at work and while driving, suffer from psychological issues, and common health problems, such as eating disorders, obesity, and diabetes.

  3. Digital obsession is a syndrome characterized by the compulsive requirement to expend an excessive portion of time, at daytime and nighttime, on the internet, to a juncture where healthful eating, outdoor workouts with sun exposure, connections, employment, activity, and sleep are harshly compromised. It has a critical impact on sleep-wake rotations, directing to wakefulness and other sleep disturbances, including sleeplessness.

  4. Approximately 65 percent of internet addicts have a more advanced incidence of psychological issues and temper conditions. About 47 % of them reportedly show repeated suicidal ideas (suicidal ideation) in a week. Approximately 23 percent of digital addicts encounter at least one suicide try, and some document a record of several shots in one year. Internet obsession and complicated internet usage consistently impact the sleep-wake rotation, directing to wakefulness.

  5. Addictive conduct features six substance elements of obsession: salience, attitude change, patience, leaving manifestation, dispute, and regression. Any behavior that satisfies all these six bars can be thought an obsession. A common, relapsing brain disorder that results from long consequences of a drug on the brain, directs to obsessive consumption and misuse. Initial drug infusions are associated with the enjoyment and optimistic support they deliver. It causes inhibitory command related to judgment-making, attribution of counted significance, movement, remembrance, habitual responses, compensation, inspiration, reactivity to tension, energy, attitude, and understanding of inner disorders and modifications within the body.

  6. Addictions usually force people to spend more additional periods indoors ingesting the drug, extended hours of digitally intervened online activities, and exposure to blue gadget lights for extended hours in the daytime and at nighttime. This conduct has been associated with a lack of sleep and signs of sadness in students. When people have to wake up early to run to a job or university, decreased sleep duration or restless sleep patterns because of extreme online activities are usually connected with a lack of physical activity.

  7. Several investigations have connected restless sleep due to online actions to unsatisfactory academic performance, impaired understanding, and psychological issues. Electronic media are the origin of blue light and harm individuals’ sleep habits, mainly before bedtime. Consequential associations between digital exposure and lifestyle tested are associated with sleep disturbances and raised energy intake as the main causal connection between digital exposure duration and obesity (increased body fat).

How to Reduce the Negative Consequences Resulting From Digital Addiction?

Behavioral therapy is the best option for violating this complicated chain of interdependent elements. Performing activities on mindfulness practices were found useful in influencing people to connect more deliberately to their surroundings and allow them to burst out of the obsessive circle. Also, mindfulness approaches have been demonstrated useful for relieving sleeplessness associated with arousal and thus could support digital addicts heal revitalizing sleep habits, promoting their recovery to a more beneficial lifestyle.

Conclusion

The young generation today sleeps less than earlier generations, combined in a digital world caused by social needs for closeness and engendering regular sleep, emotional grief, sadness, and occasionally suicide. Sleep disturbance does not occur in a vacuum but results from complicated relations between the body, brain, and surroundings. Digital addiction is an important manifestation within twisted chains of reasons and results that are hard to separate. It has created a new record of worldwide sleep conditions, illustrating an intense public health problem. It further encourages us to identify a worldwide problem fueled by extremely unfavorable conditions. Educational efforts are urgently required to stop additional harm to the most youthful components of the community. The clinical investigation should desire efficacious approaches for treatment. Sleep is harshly distressed in all digital addicts. Measures are needed to enhance sleep quality in online addict individuals, as sleep is very important to provide the brain with the rest it requires.

Dr. Ramchandra Lamba
Dr. Ramchandra Lamba

Psychiatry

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