I’m working on not looking at my phone in the in-betweens.

You could say I’m a bit addicted to it, and it’s not doing my mental health or productivity any favors.

One of the most glaring red flags was the time when, first thing in the morning, my youngest son (he’s four) reached across my bed stand to get my phone for me, as if it were the water I needed to drink.

So, I’m being more mindful about filling my head with whatever an algorithm throws up for me, more intentional about the content I consume.

It’s scary how numbed out we are so much of the time, thanks to the endless hit of scrolling always available to us. And I don’t use that term lightly. It’s more like a drug than most of us know.

As I watched this TED Talk over lunch instead of tapping that tempting little gateway to Instagram, it dawned on me that the reason addicts shoot up even in the face of complete ruin is the same reason we continue to gaze into our screens while the world cries out for us to look up and wake up.

Addiction is not an illness born in a vacuum—it’s a symptom of something much deeper, a deficiency in the most fundamental piece of our humanity.

Whether you’ve lived through it yourself, love an addict, or believe you’ll never be touched by addiction, this is an absolute must-watch. Because addiction just isn’t what we think it is: