When is it considered an addiction?

Hi cynic,

You are absolutely right. Too much internet surfing may affect on your health. May be it can disturb your mental health. Today's generation spend their most of time on this thing. You should stay away from internet. Walk with your friends, talk to your family members. Just divert your mind, day by day decrease surfing. Put control on your mind when you go for surfing. Just don't do any things in your life, without it you can't live.

cynic wrote:5:41am and still on.. I feel out of control.

Can you tell me what you surf online? do you play a lot of games or you are doing social networking? I think there should some reason for it, and you should try to find out why you are doing so much internet surfing.

Hey cynic,

It is very dangerous for you. Try to control net surfing. Try to reduce 15 mins every four days. May be this could help you. try to reduce internet surfing as you want. Do this step by step. Otherwise, if you go for instant decreasing, you may be fall in ill. because it seems serious and strong addiction to net.

There's nothing intrinsically bad about spending a lot of time on the internet. The internet after all is an interactive medium, and not passive like the cinema or television or a one-sided conversation with a talk-a-holic.

Carve out a number of pre-scheduled blocks of fifteen minutes per day that you will spend away from the computer: for showers, meal breaks, jump-roping, a telephone call to a friend or relative, or even just standing outside in the sunlight to get some vitamin D.

This is pretty easy to do and will give you a foothold for spending more time away from the computer when you have other things you want or need to do.

All i know, is that with anything, it is considered an addiction if it's too much, it's the only thing you do all day, and it makes you unable to function your day to day activities.

You get headache if you can't access net, instead of staying too much online.
Nah

Really, when you don't have time to do something else. If you're blocked away and it bothers you a lot. Constantly. You wake up earlier to stay online, and stay up all night long.

The lay-term "addiction" used to have a fairly narrow commonly accepted definition that was roughly equivalent to "physiological dependence" they key indicator of which were physical withdrawal symptoms and the necessity for an ever increasing dose to generate the same effect. This definition worked well for substances such as alcohol / opiates / benzodiazepines but did not work as well for other substances and compulsive behaviours where the withdrawal symptoms were less physiological. Nicotine withdrawal for example does not include delirium tremens (DTs / uncontrollable muscular spasms) that is very evident with alcohol / opiate withdrawal.

So, over a period of time the word "addiction" has been controversially expanded to include excessive food consumption, internet use, exercise, pornography viewing, masturbation, sexual relationships, game playing and a variety of chemical substances including sugar and some carbonated drinks.

The common factor between what might appear to be highly unrelated behaviours / substances is some form of reward even if this is simply the release of the brain's feel-good chemicals ie endorphins. This over time leads to a compulsive desire to consume the substance or undertake the behaviour either at a consistent level or on an increasingly frequent basis in order to avoid psychological or physiological withdrawal symptoms even if they are not severe.

However, the word "addition" is a lay-term defined by general consensus, it is not a medical term. Therefore in some ways it means whatever we as a society want it to mean and right now the definition is pretty broad.