015b – addiction + short posts

I want to understand what addiction is. In my previous few posts I mention how some activities might make us feel good in a potentially illusive way. Obvious examples that come to mind – mindless social media content consumption, video games that aren’t truly challenging or fun anymore but simply dopamine releases. (I’ve felt this when I was going through an online Catan addiction phase.)

I want to check whether that’s true. Are some activities simply dopamine releases? And even if they are, at what point is that okay and what point do they become addictions? I want to find this out so I can review my current addictions and maybe do something about them.

So a quick skim of some seemingly trustable sources suggests that substances or behaviors are addictive if they’re interfering with sleep or real life, taking too much time or in general creating negative feelings if withheld from the consumer. So I can say for sure that I was addicted to Catan since I remember getting pretty sad and “bored” when I wouldn’t find good company to play it with.

Now if I had to do a quick listing of what I think my current addictions are, I’d probably go with these: 

• Sugar (since I get “real cravings” quite often, throughout the day)
  
  
• Hot water showers (since I cannot imagine changing this without a ton of mental and physical effort)
  
  
• Social media + engagement (Twitter is the platform I’m most “addicted” to, for the last couple months, I think)
  
  
• Writing (or “publishing”) (I’m a little worried about this since I do find myself being distracted from work due to this, almost as if I’m chasing a “high”. I “dislike research” but I’m also doing quick skims and reads, barely enough to be able to reference them, barely enough to get something out everyday)
  
  • I did a quick “can writing addiction be a thing” and it looks like it’s almost a laughable idea? So, uh, probably my anxious little mind scaring me off of everything.
    
    
• Caffeine – I don’t think I’m as addicted as I used to be until a few months ago, but I know for sure there’s something here since I keep saying that I’m only addicted to the thought / idea of a “tasty beverage” but I haven’t yet found anything without caffeine that works well enough.  

I think these are mostly it. I don’t think I need to be working on any of these at the moment, since I am currently working on reducing some of my “constraints”. Most of them are related to body dysmorphia and exposure therapy, and it makes sense that I come back to that now that I’ve decided to value my time again. 

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I don’t think short essays should be this short. I feel like this was barely anything worth putting out into public, but I know I have space for a short post so I’ll probably end up doing it anyway. I think, so far, I’ve been posting mostly “notes”y writing, and that’s fine since that’s what I started with. But I think it might be nice to consider investing a bit more time in connecting notes, ideas, observations and maybe making stories out of them? Or maybe starting to think about the value in it for a reader? I know I’m cheating (a lot) by adding information that’s not truly relevant to the topic I originally started writing about, but I also think that’s okay since that’s probably a sign of something else. I think the information I’m receiving here is that I don’t fully believe in a “purely quantitative” goal. I just borrowed a goal that someone else had for themselves since it felt like a nice goal to follow. But if I’m still not feeling good enough about “just putting some words” on a page then it definitely means that I need to reevaluate why I’m following this goal.

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References: 

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]