“For all the definitions that have been written by the hundreds of addiction specialists and doctors, addiction is still mysterious and baffling. In many cases it’s hard to tell if someone is an addict or just a passionate amateur.” — Susan Cheever

“What Are We Talking About When we Talk About Addiction?” This is not always so clear.

Part of the problem is the lack of precision in our language. We use the term “addiction” in different ways. Maybe it would be helpful to create subcategories, so we can think of it more clearly.

In his great book “The Globalization of Addiction,” addiction researcher Bruce Alexander does exactly that. In the book, he outlines four types of addiction, giving them the (unhelpful) names “addiction 1” “addiction 2” “addiction 3” and “addiction 4.”

I’m going to give them different names, which might help clarify the distinctions.

1. Chemical Addiction

The first of Alexander’s categories of addiction is the traditional view: “An overwhelming involvement with alcohol or drugs.” This is the most common understanding of the word, with its focus limited to chemical dependence — drug addiction and/or alcoholism.

The keyword here is “overwhelming.” This word is important — it's not simply involvement with alcohol or drugs, but overwhelming involvement. This is when drugs are a significant (and destructive) part of one’s life. 

Estimates vary today about how prevalent chemical addiction is in our society. Current research suggests that somewhere between 5–10% of Americans are addicted to alcohol in this way, and about 5–8% are addicted to illegal drugs. This means that 12–15% of Americans suffer this kind of addiction — ie. chemical addiction.

2. Chemical Use/Abuse

This usage of the term addiction is more controversial. It refers to the ongoing use of “harmful” substances of any kind. The challenge here is that the line between what constitutes the “use” and “abuse” of a substance can be very hard to determine.

When does a recreational drug user become an addict? At what point does someone’s participation with a drug become “overwhelming?” In the minds of many people, some drugs are so destructive to users’ well-being that it’s best to treat even their occasional use as an addiction.

3. Behavioral Addiction

Behavioral addiction is “overwhelming involvement in something that affects one’s life negatively.” This obviously applies to the abuse of alcohol and other drugs (“chemical addiction”), but this use of “addiction” is more broad. The focus here is on processes or behaviors: things like food, sex, gambling, video gaming … things that take control of a person’s life and become destructive for them.

The argument could be made that this type of addiction is still chemically-based. For example, in sex addiction, a person gets addicted to the chemical reaction that takes place in the brain during a sexual experience.

This is the case with food, gambling, shopping, video games, work, and so on. But the key here is the broad understanding of the sources or objects of addiction. In this understanding, object of the addiction is not a chemical, it is an activity or behavior.

A term that is growing in popularity today — “soft addiction” — makes this even more confusing. Judith Wright is the author of Soft Addictions: There Must Be More Than This. Here’s how she describes them:

“Soft addictions are those seemingly harmless habits like watching too much television, over-shopping, surfing the Internet, gossiping — the things we overdo but we don’t realize it.…It’s when they become habitual and we’re just going through the motions that they become a problem. These bad habits keep us from living a greater life of meaning and satisfaction that we really deserve.”

Soft addictions are coping strategies that everyone engages in to some extent. And, of course, anything we do habitually changes our brain chemistry. Using social media, eating chocolate, shopping, etc … all these things stimulate the reward pathways in our brain.

But “soft addictions” and “behavioral addictions” are not the same.

When addiction experts like Bruce Alexander talk about “behavioral addictions” they’re talking about things that produce “supernormal” stimuli.

A supernormal stimulus is an artificial or exaggerated version of a stimulus that elicits a stronger response than the stimulus it evolved from. For example, think of how a “normal” stimulus — like the pleasure our paleolithic ancestors got when they tasted sweetness from a berry — is exaggerated when we use highly refined sugar, and then combine that in an artificial way with salt and fat — to make Reese's peanut butter chocolate-covered donuts. (Don’t ask how I know about Reese's peanut butter chocolate-covered donuts.)

Behavioral addictions are the result of supernormal stimuli, leading to the release of a cascade of “feel-good” neurochemicals and hormones — resulting from things like video gambling, internet pornography, and certain ultra-processed foods.

4. Positive Addiction

A positive addiction is “a strong dedication to a pursuit or cause that is helpful and constructive … but may become so absorbing that other aspects of life are neglected.” This goes back to the way the term “addiction” was used in the 1800s and 1900s. In the 1884 Oxford English dictionary, it was defined as “the giving over of oneself to some pursuit.”

Positive addictions might include things like being really into fitness or some sport, or being hyper devoted to a certain cause, or to our work. The activity or focus of attention is actually good and healthy, but it may be that our involvement with it gets to be so great that we are neglecting other things in life.

A positive addiction may seem similar to a behavioral addiction; the difference is whether or not the object is a good and worthy pursuit, and whether or not its pursuit is destructive to us.

Think of the difference, for example, between someone “addicted” to pornography and someone “addicted” to running.

The lack of consensus on what addiction really is makes it difficult to help those who suffer from it. I feel that the most helpful and most accurate way of looking at addiction is the third definition, an overwhelming involvement in something that is destructive. That could be a drug or some process or activity. This still leaves room for confusion and disagreement about what constitutes “overwhelming” involvement, but at least it gets us started.

What do you think?