There’s lots of talk about work-life balance to keep you from becoming a workaholic. But, what if your life is out of balance the other way? You shop online, go to malls, watch the shopping channel and buy, buy, buy.

A night out with the boys turns into every night. If you can’t go to the local roller derby events, you find a live-streaming channel for global events. You binge binge-watching on all your subscription channels.

Anything that’s done in excess becomes a distracting addiction. And that bad habit keeps you from doing something meaningful in your life.

It doesn’t matter how enjoyable the activity is when you’re spending most of your waking hours doing it. It’s not working for you. You may be surprised how many typical late-night activities are not associated with life-long joy. It’s part of the culture we live in. Just watch the television commercials to see what many of us do. Your life is out of balance. Tell Yourself the truth. The truth is, you have made a lifestyle choice to live in an endless cave. In that cave, you are out of touch with meaningful life.

• Sexual addiction – The majority of people enjoy sex, whether they are single, married, partnered, or polyamorous. Those who spend too many hours each day focused on sexual matters neglect other vital aspects of life. A person’s compulsive sexual behavior is often related to mental health issues (loss or insecurity).
• Gambling addiction – For participants, gambling triggers a dopamine rush since the end goal is money. The gamblers often continue to gamble in hopes of winning more, only to lose everything and go into debt. Gambling can be dangerous, especially at casinos run by the mafia.
• Internet addiction – As the internet has become commonplace, it has been common since the late ’90s and early ’00s. There are many resources available on the internet (music, videos, information, pictures, people). For people obsessed with a given topic, this can make the internet addictive.
• Social media addiction – In the late 2010s, when social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram began popping up, social media addiction became an extension of internet addiction. Those who regularly follow Twitter flame talks or ponder whether they like “likes” on Instagram spend a lot of time engaged. On Facebook, others go down endless rabbit holes.
• Food addiction – We eat every day, but some people continue eating on a full stomach. For some, it’s about pleasing their taste buds. Others eat for psychological reasons (grief, depression). Your body has limits, and fullness exists for a reason. Food addiction is particularly harmful when it involves junk food and sugary, fatty foods.
• Porn addiction – Pornography will always be debated as to whether it is healthy. In general, all of us agree that porn consumption should not be a round-the-clock routine. For some people, porn compensates for shyness, isolation, and difficulty finding a partner. When self-improvement is the answer to their problem, they neglect hygiene and responsibilities.
• Exercise addiction – An exercise program is healthy, but some people overdo it for the wrong reasons. Human bodies aren’t designed to be extremely ripped, veiny, and rock hard. Many gym workers are motivated by vanity, insecurity, and an obsession with looking like a superhero, thinking anything less makes them inferior.
• Shopping addiction – Many people find shopping thrilling because it represents abundance and ownership: having something you want whenever you want it. People shop beyond their means and grab items they don’t have time to use or appreciate, all for the dopamine rush.
• Kleptomania – The fact that everyone loves freebies partially explains the problem with internet addiction. Freebies can be acquired in the wild by some who violate the law. Shoplifting is partly motivated by the thrill of escaping with illegal activities. Later or later, the perpetrators are caught. They often have severe and lasting consequences.

Addiction can lead to unhealthy and dangerous behavior. This type of behavior addiction may turn into destructive and criminal activities. Despite this, behavioral addiction does not bode well for an individual’s mental health. Behavioral addiction includes the following consequences:

 

Behavior can have a slippery slope in some situations. In the course of porn addiction, a person might become lonely and isolated, then start catfishing, harassing, or stalking online.

You may like shopping or going to the gym, but if those activities are excessive, you need to name your addiction and claim it as a block in your life.

If it’s an addictive behavior, you do it in a repetitive, habitual, and kind of a numbing way.

And if it’s something done with joy for limited amounts of time, it’s not addictive behavior but a pastime. For example, someone has a model train set, and every week or two on the weekend, they play with it for an hour or two. That’s something of joy.

But when it becomes a daily thing, and it’s habitual, and it’s no longer giving a real feeling of joy and satisfaction, then there’s a sign. It’s a sign that your activity is addictive.

So, two ways to evaluate whether your behavior is addictive are:

1. How often the activity is being done
2. The nature of joy that’s being received by the activity

If you feel that any activity in your life meets those two criteria—frequent and joyless—it’s time to claim your addiction and start working toward a more meaningful life.

An addiction is not a meaningful behavior. Once you have identified your addictive behavior, the next step is to really look at your core self. That core is your relationship with self and the relationship with others. Because we can say most addictive behavior is a result of an insufficient loving relationship with the self and insufficient loving relationships and quality relationships with other people.

Loving yourself and others is the way out of addiction. When you care about yourself, the need for addictive behavior goes away.

Bruce K. Alexander who conducted the revolutionary Rat Park studies on socialization and addiction said, “Addicts are not bad people.”

The answer is in socialization. Caring for yourself and feeling cared for provides balance that eliminates the need for behavior addiction as well as substance addiction.

For more on how addiction works and what actions can reverse addiction, watch Bruce Alexander speaking about his studies.

We now know that people who have healthy relationships with themselves and healthy relationships with other people that are loving and functional avoid the vast majority of addictive behaviors.

First of all, you have choices about your behavioral addictions:
1. Give up.
2. Keep doing what you are doing. That will still keep you from a meaningful life.
3. Shift the paradigm to caring. That means changing your assumptions about yourself.

The third option consists of assumptions and action steps that lead you toward a meaningful, fulfilling life.

The important step is to heal your inner relationship with self and improve your relationship with other people.

That’s done best in contact both with community resources like men’s groups, women groups, any support group that has some kind of a facilitator.

You want a professionally facilitated group. It can be nonprofit like a church, and can be low-cost or even free depending on your community. but some kind of functional group. A group format provides a welcoming and supportive environment where you experience acceptance.

 

Group settings put in touch with other people. And those people understand your challenges. You all support each other in making change.

Another method for change is in a one-on-one setting, with a mentor or therapist to work on your relationship with self.

Two traditional therapies work to get to your core so you can achieve personal balance and leave addictive behavior behind.

 

You can improve if you commit to treatment and make it a goal to conquer behavioral addiction.

I think therapy is an interesting process, but it tends to be a slow and introspective process for things like your relationship with self.

I believe in an action-based process. That is why I believe mentoring gives faster results.

Therapy may be worthwhile for many people at some point, but I find it a much slower process. It is challenging because it doesn’t give results very quickly.

Because of therapy’s slow process, it leads too many people to give up too soon which is why I prefer mentoring.

The action-based mentorship approach gives us results in a shorter time frame. Also, mentoring shows people that when you work with the right person and you have a great relationship with that person, you can really achieve amazing results with yourself in just a few weeks…and that is powerful.

I’d love to chat with you about how mentoring can help you lead a meaningful life. You’ll learn how to evaluate where you are now and how to take incremental action steps to leave behind addictive behaviors. Then you will engage in life to its fullest.

Everything at elevanation is based on empirical data and actual results. So you can get the maximum benefit in the minimum time.

Schedule your free action call to do something meaningful in your life. We’ll help you leave those behaviors for something much, much better.