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"Are you addicted to technology? I'm certainly not. In my first sitting reading Adam Alter's Irresistible, an investigation into why we can't stop scrolling and clicking and surfing online, I only paused to check my phone four times. Because someone might have emailed me. Or texted me. One time I stopped to download an app Alter mentioned (research) and the final time I had to check the shares on my play brokerage app, Best Brokers (let's call this one "business")."

" People have been addicted to substances for thousands of years, but for the past two decades, we've also been hooked on technologies, like Instagram, Netflix, Facebook, Fitbit, Twitter, and email-platforms we've adopted because we assume they'll make our lives better. These inventions have profound upsides, but their appeal isn't an accident. Technology companies and marketers have teams of engineers and researchers devoted to keeping us engaged. They know how to push our buttons, and how to coax us into using their products for hours, days, and weeks on end."

"People have been addicted to substances for thousands of years, but for the past two decades, we've also been hooked on technologies, like Instagram, Netflix, Facebook, Fitbit, Twitter, and email-platforms we've adopted because we assume they'll make our lives better. These inventions have profound upsides, but their appeal isn't an accident. Technology companies and marketers have teams of engineers and researchers devoted to keeping us engaged. They know how to push our buttons, and how to coax us into using their products for hours, days, and weeks on end. Tracing addiction through history, Alter shows that we're only just beginning to understand the epidemic of behavioral addiction gripping society. He takes us inside the human brain at the very moment we score points on a smartphone game, or see that someone has liked a photo we've posted on Instagram. But more than that, Alter heads the problem off at the pass, letting us know what we can do to step away from the screen. He lays out the options we have to address this problem before it truly consumes us. After all, who among us hasn't struggled to ignore the ding of a new email, the next episode in a TV series, or the desire to play a game just one more time?"

"It happened almost every night around 10 p.m. I'd plan to spend 30 seconds setting my iPhone alarm and then get into bed to read (a paper book). But after I set the alarm, some other part of my consciousness would guide my fingers towards other apps as if I was navigating a Ouija board. I'd check Instagram. And Twitter. One last sweep of my email accounts and any other app that could possibly be checked (is looking at Venmo really necessary?), and then I'd navigate to Facebook and Twitter on my Safari browser (I took the apps off my phone so I'd spend less time on them-#fail). An hour later, I'd emerge from my possessed state a bleary-eyed zombie. What had I been doing for the last hour? Where was my self control?"

"A lot of us must be wondering if we're hooked on our tech: Searches for "phone addiction" have risen steadily in the past five years, according to Google Trends, and "social media addiction" trails it closely. "