Screen addicts: How smartphones have made us more dependant on dopamine

Are we hooked on the dopamine hit we get every time we look at our phones? A US professor says our dependency on this see-saw brain chemical is unbalancing our lives 

Picture: iStock 

Dr Anna Lembke does not hold back when it comes to describing the impact of the smartphone on society, describing it as “the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7”.

As a professor of psychiatry and medical director of the addiction medicine clinic at Stanford University, Lembke knows all about the impact of addiction, and was one of the first in the US medical community to sound the alarm regarding the country’s opioid epidemic, publishing a book on the subject in 2016.