Addictive Behaviours

[Marc]

"Addiction" is such a loaded word. I enjoy eating a smoothie every morning and if I ever forget it can sometimes effect how I feel the rest of the day. The smoothie is undoubtably very healthy for me and I'm addicted to it. Same goes for eating, drinking, masturbating, playing video games, reading novels, meditating, and journaling. I go through gaming phases and this is the first time I didn't fight it and now the desire has waned a bit. Maybe having a clear definition of addiction would be helpful: "physically and mentally dependent on a particular substance, and unable to stop taking it without incurring adverse effects." If I stopped taking my smoothie every morning I would have a harder time with my BM's and also be losing quite a bit of nutrition. When we get out of judging behaviors as "addiction" we can then begin to see a bigger picture and start analyzing the behaviors instead of fighting them and judging them as somehow "bad" [aka "unhealthy"]. Calling something an addiction is judging it as bad instead of accepting it.

I was watching a documentary about a community of people addicted to morphine and they had a field full of plants that they made it from. They were a happy community and functional. The problems didn't come from the morphine itself but rather, the lack of it is what caused unruly behavior. I personally don't care to be dependent on drugs, but I am dependent certain food stuffs, electricity, water and an abundance of literature. As long as it doesn't harm others, there is no problem with dependency on substances. When it does hurt others though... that is another whole topic of discussion.