05-26-2026IMPACT COUNCIL

Addiction, anxiety, and the attention economy

How outsmarting nicotine also means addressing youth mental health

[Photo: Getty Images]

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Conversations about youth mental health and addiction are often treated as separate issues—different experts, different headlines, different policy conversations. But for today’s young people, these challenges are deeply intertwined. The same forces driving rising levels of anxiety, stress, and social comparison are also shaping their risk for substance use. 

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the rapid shift to phone-based childhood fundamentally changed the developmental environment for young people. Attention, reward, identity formation, and peer validation have been rewired by digital platforms engineered to maximize engagement. The result has been a sharp rise in anxiety, depression, loneliness and emotional fragility among adolescents and young adults.

THE PROBLEM WITH NICOTINE

These are the same behavioral........

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