The internet is a wondrous thing that we have at our disposal, to be able to search up and connect with anyone or anything on the planet. One of its downsides is that internet/social media use can have the ability to act neurologically similar to gambling, which can have an addictive quality to it. With gambling, pulling a slot lever is an action taken that will be rewarded, but only maybe. This ambiguity is what makes it appealing psychologically, where the reward can come at any moment, with any pull of the lever, but you need to actually pull the lever in the first place to get the reward. Pulling the lever usually comes to some detriment: in the case of gambling, a loss of money, and with video games, a loss of money or time. The synonymous action here would be having a really good performance within a video game, or getting more likes on your latest post on insta compared to your last one. These are both results that are unpredictable in some sense, as they are out of your control, but start with you taking action. They come with the reward of feeling good, but there could always be more of it, there could always be something better with how the result ends up. And thus the addictive nature is there, where maybe you didn’t have the best performance (or had a good game or post but still could do better) and so you’ll just try again in order to get that rush of feeling good, or chasing the high, as drug users call it.
Classical substance abuse disorder patients have many physiological and behavioral signals that tend to characterize the disorder. Many of these same links were found with what several researchers have phrased, “internet abuse”, or “internet usage 
disorder”. For instance, participants that have internet abuse behaviors had higher impulsivity, or in other words, a lower response inhibition. They had a more difficult time inhibiting a natural response to wanting to play a game or browse social media. These participants also had a heightened activation of brain regions that deal with reward response. The responses seen through MRI were positively correlated with self-reported urges to game. The correlation here to drug addicts would be that not only are the same brain regions activated, but these urges are similar to drug users experiencing cravings, which are neurological in nature but manifest to influence behaviors. Another way in which this addictive quality can be seen with chemical changes in the brain is through looking at the dopaminergic system. In drug addicts, the binding capacity for dopamine receptors is diminished, which means that drug users need more of that drug (or higher doses) to feel the same amount of high as they have before. This is also referred to as tolerance. This reduced dopamine capacity was also found in internet abuse participants. In participants that were identified as having gaming related addictions, their binding potential (or ability to feel good while playing their game) was diminished in ways that rivaled an injection of amphetamines, a highly addictive (and psychoactively responsive) drug.
Now that we’ve established that the internet, and specifically certain parts of it, can have the same properties as a substance abuse disorder (or drug addiction), another interesting correlation has been discovered in relation to personality disorders. Drug addiction has been found to positively correlate with a number of personality disorders, such as Antisocial PD and Borderline PD. An observation with both of these PD’s is that they contain the symptom of impulsivity, which as noted above, is present in drug addiction as well. It was found that internet addicts were found to have higher rates of PDs as well, with most of the correlations found in women, like with Borderline, Narcissistic, Avoidant, and Dependant PD, and in men, Narcissistic PD. The main question then that comes up amid these findings is: Does addiction simply correlate with personality disorders (due to behavioral tendencies), or does one cause the other, or do they both have similar neurological bases for developing and so then arise together? Some researchers theorize that substance use disorders and Cluster B PDs may share neurobiological, cognitive, and environmental risk factors that contribute to their individual and joint manifestations. This information cautions even more against obsessive internet use then, as there are even more cognitive abnormalities that can arise. But from this information as well it can be discerned that the environment is also at play to develop both of these, and that personality disorders and internet or substance abuse may arise together. To restate the beginning of this blog, the internet is a wonderful tool, but should be used as such.
