hi roadrunnerbeepbeep!

i like your name. i personally think anything can be an addiction. Humans have a basic need to cope with their reality and part of that coping is altering how we feel when flooded with negative emotions. If you think about it you may find that the majority of people deal with negative emotions in an unhealthy way. The healthiest way to deal with negative emotions is to accept them, feel them, and then let them pass. But, that is not innate to our nature as humans. We don't want to feel negative emotions so we choose to escape from them or alter them into something that is pleasurable. Most addicts will use the more common substances, being drugs and alcohol. Others will turn to behavioral addictions such as sex or codependency. In any case, at the first moment that the negative experience is altered into something that is pleasurable, the brain records that and asks for more. The brain chooses to protect us from unpleasurable experiences and seeks to promote pleasurable experiences.

We learn from birth to alter our emotions. For example, we cry because we are uncomfortable, maybe hungry, maybe tired, maybe dirty, who knows. But then here comes mommy and daddy doing anything they can think of doing to get us not to cry. They are teaching us to quell our emotions. They want to alter our reaction to a negative situation by pacifying us with the nearest remedy to them. Why not just let a child cry, after checking the obvious of course, thereby teaching them that negative feelings are okay. By the school age the need to alter the negative experiences we have is ingrained in us and the pattern can rarely be broken.

If we find one replacement we choose does not work, or stops working, we simply choose another replacement. Hence, why you hear about so many people switching addictions. I believe that is why you see so many in AA drinking coffee all throughout the meeting and then smoking afterwards. Caffeine and nicotine can be powerful drugs too.

So, lets talk about food for a minute. Have you ever stopped to consider all the times you were rewarded as a kid? How many of those rewards were using food? Seriously, when you look at how you reward yourself now, is it using food? For instance, I had such a good workout I'm going to get myself a smoothie. Or, I got the job, let's celebrate with dinner! Then there's birthday cake, wedding cake, christmas fruit cake (yuck). Where do the food rewards end? I can tell you where they end. They end with the a lot of people stuck in the over/undereating cycle of food addiction. I struggle to come up with rewards that are not based on food.

With all that said, it is no wonder we are a society that lives in the realm of addiction and fantasy. We want what we can't have. Or we are not willing to accept the necessary steps to get what it is that we want so we bypass the uncomfortable steps that are necessary to get from a to b. I perceive this world to be a world that seeks instant gratification.

Just my perception. What say you?