Irresistible

Behavioral addictions are addictions that function without the aid of substances, such as alcohol or drugs, and “arise when a person can’t resist a behavior, which, despite addressing a deep psychological need in the short-term, produces significant harm in the long-term” (20). Alter argues that behavioral addictions can be just as damaging and powerful as substance addictions. 

One of Alter’s solutions to behavioral addiction is to remove one’s triggers or temptations from one’s immediate environment, which he refers to as a central tenant behind behavioral architecture: “The missing piece in the treatment puzzle is to redesign your environment so temptations are as close to absent as possible. That’s the idea behind the technique of behavioral architecture” (273).

Binge-watching is a symptom of falling victim to cliffhangers, and it results when one’s stopping rules have been eroded: “Sixty-one percent of […] people reported some degree of binge-watching, which most respondents defined as ‘watching between two and six episodes of a TV show in one sitting’” (211).  

Alter defines compulsion to distinguish it from addiction: “Compulsions are behaviors a person can’t stop enacting” (20).  

Digital amnesia is presented as just one of many negative consequences of an addiction to technology: “Relying too heavily on tech […] leads to a phenomenon known as digital amnesia. In two surveys, thousands of U.S. and European adults struggled to remember a raft of important phone numbers” (242).

Dopamine plays an important role in many of the studies Alter cites throughout the book: “Dopamine is produced by a number of brain regions, and it produces a wide variety of effects. It controls motion (hence the tremors in Parkinson’s patients) and plays a major role in shaping how people respond to rewards and pleasure” (82). As Alter states here, it is integral to the brain’s response to pleasure and therefore crucial to understanding addiction. 

In the final chapter of the book, Alter presents gamification as a solution to some of the challenges of behavioral addiction: “What DDB did for Volkswagen and Breen did for FreeRice is known as gamification: taking a non-game experience and turning it into a game” (298). By harnessing the addictive properties of games for a greater good, a person might accomplish beneficial actions, such as contributing to charity while also having fun. 

Alter identifies goal-setting and goal-culture as a primary ingredient to behavioral addiction in Chapter 4: “All of this matters now more than ever because there’s good reason to believe we’re living through an unprecedented age of goal culture—a period underscored by addictive perfectionism, self-assessment, more time at work, and less time at play” (106-7).  

In contrast to healthy difficulty, many gadgets and apps try to make themselves as easy to use as possible. This in turn can make them addictive and harmful: “This is the idea that struggling with a mental puzzle—trying to remember a phone number or deciding what to do on a long Sunday afternoon—inoculates you against future mental hardships just as vaccinations inoculate you against illness” (241). 

Inbox Zero is just one example of the kind of unattainable goal one strives for when caught in the cycle of goal-pursuit: “Many of us pursue the unforgiving goal of Inbox Zero, which requires you to process and file away every single unread email as soon as it arrives” (110).

The kind of feedback characterized by juice contributes to a game’s extreme addictiveness: “Juice refers to the layer of surface feedback that sits above the game’s rules. It isn’t essential to the game, but it’s essential to the game’s success” (137).

Karoshi is cited in Chapter 7 as an example of the harm that can come from unchecked escalation: “Since the late 1960s, but especially in the past two decades, Japanese workers have whispered about karoshi, literally ‘death from overworking.’ The term applies to workers, particularly mid- and high-level executives who struggle to leave work behind at the end of the day” (186).

This term is paired with “the zone of proximal development” in Chapter 7 to characterize an addictive state of engagement: “You enter a ludic loop when, each time you enjoy the brief thrill of solving one element of a puzzle, a new and incomplete piece presents itself” (177).

Motivational interviewing is proposed by Alter as one of several techniques to assist young people in escaping their behavioral addictions: “Where Alcoholics Anonymous suggests that addicts are helpless to overcome their addictions, motivational interviewing rests on the idea that people are more likely to stick to their goals if they’re both intrinsically motivated and feel empowered to succeed” (258).

MUDs are offered as a counter-example to the expansive, colorful, and complex worlds of gaming like World of Warcraft. While World of Warcraft utilizes modern and highly addictive technologies, MUDs “are simple text-based role-playing games in which players type commands into the computer and watch as the screen refreshes with feedback and further instructions. Traditional MUDs feature scrolling text and no graphics” (227). 

Like compulsion, Alter defines obsession to provide contrast with the definition of addiction: “Obsessions are thoughts that a person can’t stop having” (20).  

Rylander found that both humans and animals performed soothing repetitive actions to staunch the anxiety associated with addictions: “Some [patients] were driven by an intense pathological curiosity, while others found the act of repetition soothing. Rylander reported what he saw in a journal article, where he labeled the behavior punding, a Swedish word that means blockheadedness or idiocy” (81).  

Alter defines a stopping rule—“a cue that guided customers to stop shopping” (184)—to illustrate the ways that certain devices and tech companies erode a person’s usual boundaries.

Alter discusses substance addiction primarily so that a reader can better understand the nature of behavioral addiction. Though the two kinds of addiction function similarly in the brain, substance addiction is more commonly understood and so serves as an important jumping off point in the discussion on behavioral addiction: “The word “addiction” has only implied substance abuse for two centuries, but hominids have been addicted to substances for thousands of years” (29-30).

Systems are presented as an important antidote to the snares of goal-setting and goal culture: “A system is ‘something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run.’ For a cartoonist, that might be drawing one cartoon per day; for a writer, writing five hundred words per day” (117). 

The Zeigarnik Effect is the idea that “incomplete experiences occupy our minds far more than completed ones” (194). This concept is crucial to understanding the psychological effects of cliffhangers as presented in Chapter 8.