Book: The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love - Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits

I read Judson Brewer's The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love - Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits to see what it can bring to the improvement of teaching and learning - although this is not its focal point.
Brewer clearly connects addiction and its perceived rewards to the human condition and our way of (non)thinking, charts his life's course as an example of how meditation can move a person away from addictive behavior to mindfulness and joyful immersion into meaningful activities such as learning and working. He shows addiction with its cycle of trigger, behavior, reward in situations that we would easily recognize - smoking, drinking, eating, drug use, but then maps the same cycle onto the use of social media, emotions, and other human behaviors. His solution is meditation, reflection, mindfulness to move towards a different kind of good feeling, based in Buddhist teachings. 

How can we use this in teaching and learning?  One of the key points he made is that full immersion into a topic comes from curiosity.  We need to find ways in our teaching to enable students to recognize the trigger of curiosity, use the appropriate behavior or immersion into the content to get the reward of feeling good about the learning.  We also need to make them more fully aware that the other triggers of social media lead to a lesser reward and addiction.
Using our mobile devices in class to feed our curiosity is one way of dealing with it; however, it may be useful to suggest to students to turn off notifications for that time period.  Changing that function may be enough to allow students to focus on course content without the distraction of getting sounds and buzzes from their various communication tools.
Giving students data about the downside of distraction, the myth of effective multitasking may make it also easier for students to put the mobile device distractions aside.
Some faculty decide that no devices are permissible in class, but that puts some students at a learning disadvantage. It may be more effective to have device-free thinking and discussion periods where no one needs to have a device for note taking.
What we have seen in our workshops is that marking clearly a time for break when it is ok to check email, social media and other communication channels helps faculty to stay focused during the remainder of the workshop - I am wondering if a similar strategy would work for students as well.