At a glance
A process addiction forms around a behaviour because of the feeling it reliably changes, not because of the substance it lacks. You keep saying you will stop and then find yourself already doing it. This article helps you see what the behaviour is steadying, and what changes once you know.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The reaching comes before the wanting. Clients often describe finding themselves already doing it, and noticing only afterwards what they were moving away from.
- The behaviour is rarely the whole problem. Clients who remove one frequently find another waiting, which tells me the appetite was never about the object.
- Shame does most of the damage. Clients lose more to the hiding than to the behaviour, because the hiding takes the relationships with it.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
What is the addiction to, if there is no substance?
You are attached to a reliable change in your own state, rather than to the thing that delivers it.
You are not addicted to a screen, a shop, a bet or a body. You are attached to a fast, dependable shift in how you feel, one that arrives on time, asks nothing of you and costs nothing at the moment of taking it. That is a serious offer when the feeling you are leaving is dread, boredom, loneliness or the flat grey hour between finishing work and the evening starting.
Which is why the particular behaviour matters less than people expect it to. Clients who remove one often find another already waiting, and the substitution tells you something useful: the appetite was never really about the object.
Why does the reaching arrive before I decide?
The reaching tends to arrive before the wanting, which is why willpower feels so beside the point.
You do not usually decide to do it. You notice having started. By then the feeling you were moving away from has gone quiet, which is the whole purpose of the manoeuvre and also the reason you cannot name what set it off. Three moments come up again and again in my room.
- In the gap. Twenty minutes with nothing in them, where a feeling would otherwise have time to surface.
- Just after something good. Success unsettles people more than they expect, and the reach steadies it.
- During an argument, or in the hour after one. The feeling has nowhere to go, so it goes somewhere.
Does the word help me, or trap me?
The word earns its place if it makes the pattern visible, and does harm if it becomes a sentence you are serving.
Plenty of people arrive certain that naming it will fix them, and leave disappointed. Others refuse the word because they have watched someone carry it for 30 years. Both are reading the same thing: a label can describe a pattern or it can replace a person, and which of those happens depends almost entirely on what is done with it afterwards.
There is something in the evidence worth holding against the gloom. In a five-year study following 4,121 adults, most of those reporting problematic over-involvement reported it with one behaviour only, and in only one of the five years; severity across the group fell over time.1 The response rate was low, at 21.3%, and the authors describe their findings as preliminary, so I would not build a prognosis out of it. It does sit awkwardly against the idea that these patterns can only worsen on their own, which is the idea most people walk in carrying.
What is it regulating?
Something is being regulated, and until you know what, stopping asks you to give up a working arrangement in exchange for nothing.
This is the question I would stay with longest. Not what you do, or how often, but what the half hour before it looks like. What was happening in your body. What you were about to feel and did not. Most people can answer that within a few sessions, and the answer is usually smaller and older than they expected.
The treatment thinking I find most useful does not organise itself around the behaviour at all. It works on what sits underneath several of them at once: motivation, acting on feeling before thought, what you expect the behaviour to do for you, and how thin your support has become.2 That is a proposed model rather than a settled finding, and the people who set it out say so plainly. It matches what I see, though, which is that clients who reach the thing underneath are not left policing the behaviour for the rest of their lives.
What can I do this week?
Start by watching rather than by stopping, since you cannot interrupt a pattern you have not yet seen in full.
- Record the half hour before. Not the behaviour. The half hour before it, which is where the information actually is.
- Name the feeling you were leaving. Dread, boredom and loneliness look identical from the outside and each asks for something different.
- Change one condition rather than the behaviour. Move the phone, take another route home, eat before you go. The friction tells you how automatic it has become.
- Tell one person. Hiding it reliably costs more than the behaviour does, because the hiding takes the relationships with it.
These are not enough on their own in several situations, and I would rather be clear about that than leave you feeling you have failed at them. Where money, work or someone else’s safety is already affected, the exposure gets handled before any of this is useful. Where a substance is running alongside the behaviour, that changes the picture and the order of the work. And where the behaviour is holding together something that would otherwise come apart, removing it without knowing what it carried tends to produce a replacement within weeks.
If you want to look at what the half hour before is made of, you can book a video session from wherever you are, or begin with a free 30-minute call.
Questions people ask
Is this a real addiction, or am I exaggerating?
You do not need to settle that question before coming. What matters clinically is whether the behaviour is costing you something you mind losing, and whether you have stopped being able to choose it freely.
Do I have to give it up completely?
Not as a condition of starting, and I would be wary of any plan that begins there. For some behaviours stopping outright is the only workable route, and for others the aim is to get the choice back, which is something to work out together.
Does this work by video?
It does, and for something people hide, the distance often makes it easier to say out loud the first time. The work itself is about the half hour before, which you bring with you wherever the session happens.
Will talking about it make me want it more?
It usually does the opposite, because most of the pull is held in place by not looking at it. The first few sessions tend to feel uncomfortable rather than tempting.
What if I have tried to stop before and it did not hold?
That is the common history rather than the exception, and it tells us the attempt was aimed at the wrong level. Stopping without knowing what the behaviour was carrying rarely holds, which is information rather than failure.
If you want to understand what the behaviour is steadying rather than simply fight it, online psychotherapy is where that work happens.
You may also find these helpful
Sources
- Natural course of behavioral addictions: a 5-year longitudinal study, BMC Psychiatry, 2015
- Component Model of Addiction Treatment: A Pragmatic Transdiagnostic Treatment Model of Behavioral and Substance Addictions, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2018
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
