The Two faces of Addiction!

“Blogging is addictive, isn’t it?” I was asked by a good friend. That sowed the seed in my mind for writing something about it. But I intend to generalize the term “addiction” and transcend it across, well pretty much anything you could get addicted to.

Etymologically speaking, Addicts are slaves given to Roman soldiers to reward them for performance in battle. Eventually, a person who was a slave to anything became known as an addict. I did not really know this until I looked it up a while back! But nevertheless, a nice piece of trivia.

So, Is there a distinct starting point for getting addicted to something?

Well, the answer is NO, and that’s the beauty of it. You randomly start off doing something that makes you feel good or happy and just strive to sustain that happiness you derive out of doing whatever it is that you’re doing without realizing that you’re progressively getting addicted to it. And one fine day, the realization dawns on you that you cannot live without it anymore. Sounds familiar?

Addiction can be attributed to pretty much anything that you do passionately, it doesn’t always have to be about the “bad stuff”. Unfortunately, the word has been stereotyped and misconstrued as a synonym for either alcohol or substance abuse. Think about it! You utter the word “Addict” to someone and their immediate response is to ask you “Alcohol or drugs?” Our neural pathways have been trained to the extent of eliciting involuntary responses for a select set of words, very much similar to Ian Pavlov’s “Classical Conditioning theory”, where the brain of a dog was conditioned to expect food at the sound of a bell.

Addiction can even be argued at a very basic level. If someone asks you to black out your brain temporarily and stop thinking about anything at all for the next few minutes, will you be able to do it? Impossible! “The more you try not to think about something, the more you end up thinking about it over and over again!” So, is thinking an addiction? No way. The more constructively you think, the better! In a similar way, we can argue if we’re addicted to some of the most primitive and elemental things that we do on a regular basis. It’s just my perception that whatever we get addicted to over a period of time, good or bad, integrates with us and when the addiction reaches it’s tipping point or maybe even before that, it starts defining us in some way, again good or bad. So choose well and get addicted wisely 🙂

I’ve attempted to show the bright side of the word “addiction”, but there’s an amazing movie “Requiem for a dream” in case you wish to see the ill effects of drug/substance addiction.