Are Your Habits Obsessive, Compulsive, Or Addictive?

Everyone performs habitual actions, such as looking both ways before crossing the road, but when our habitual behavior loses rationality and upsets our day to day existence and ability to function, it can be called compulsive.

What is compulsive behavior?

Compulsive actions afford relief from underlying anxieties. The compulsive behavior neutralizes the anxiety. The urge to alleviate or dispel the anxiety, fear or distress is what lies behind the compulsion. The anxiety can be due to obsessions: for example, perpetual fear of germs and infection manifests itself in ritual, compulsive washing. Compulsive behavior can also be triggered unknowingly like biting one's nails unawares. Compulsions that are commonplace can be counting, cleaning, adjusting and looking at things more than once to ensure peace of mind. If the compulsions get out of control like when you check that the gate is secured numerous times when leaving the house, the behavior becomes time-consuming, disrupts normal daily routine, and may have become an anxiety disorder.

What is an obsession?

Using the term loosely, it may be that my obsession is going to the gym as often as I can, but if the reason is to take part in a sports event, my going to the gym is motivated by a beneficial mental process.

If my incentive for working out is for emotional reasons, as a distraction to emotional conflict, and I can't stop thinking about exercising and get upset and distressed if I can't work out, then I probably have an obsession. The obsessive thought has to be alleviated by attending the gym, which is now a compulsive act. The compulsion is the expression of the obsessive fixation, allowing an interval of relief from the anxiety, stress or fear.

What is an addiction?

Addiction characteristically is thought of as drug dependence demonstrated by difficulty in quitting despite physiological damage. Tolerance to the substance and abstinence syndrome are two signs of addiction. Addiction is a biopsychosocial compulsion typically driven by pleasure-seeking. Actually, neurobiologists maintain that any process that turns on the brain's pleasure centers can be termed addictive. For this reason, addiction includes compulsive overexercising and gambling. Though not addictions in the traditional sense, and sometimes classed as impulse-control disorders, withdrawal effects can appear if the compulsion cannot be performed.

Compulsions and addictions show similarities since they both comprise misuse of the pleasure centers in the brain. The compulsions are shortcuts to alleviating the feelings of anxiety. Each of us is susceptible to addiction that can be fired by psychological and environmental factors. Therapists deal with cases differently, but to be effective any treatment needs to broach the basic reasons for the anxiety that is behind the compulsive behavior.