Adam Alter: Tech Addiction or Healthy Obsession?

How do you know if you're addicted to your phone? Or maybe your favorite game, app, text, snapchat, Instagram, Facebook or online shopping?

Is it even possible to be truly addicted to these things? You know, like on the level of drugs? Or are we all just being a bit too alarmist?

Where is the line between a healthy obsession that adds to your life and an addiction to tech that can own and potentially destroy you?

Today's guest, NYU professor, Adam Alter, gives us a massive reality check. He breaks down the different between passions, obsessions and straight-up addictions, splits apart chemical and behavioral addictions and shows how technology is being specifically designed to get and keep us hooked.

Alter also offers some powerful tools to better understand when technology is owning us, rather than the other way around, then show how to reclaim the power in the relationship.

His new book, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, is a powerful look at how we interact with technology and how it is being designed to create relentless behavioral addiction that can become nearly impossible to break.

For more on Adam's "back story," be sure to check out our 2013 conversation on how hidden influences control your life.

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