Do I have an addictive personality?

Why do I reach for it when nothing is wrong?

The pull rarely turns up in a crisis. It turns up in a gap.

Clients arrive expecting to tell me about a disaster and instead tell me about a Tuesday. The washing is on, the messages are answered, there is half an hour before anything needs them, and that is the moment the hand moves. Nothing is wrong. That is the whole difficulty. An unoccupied stretch can feel worse than a problem, because a problem at least tells you what to do with yourself.

What rises in that gap is usually not boredom in the ordinary sense. It is a low, flat discomfort with no story attached to it, and it becomes audible as soon as nothing else is loud enough to cover it. You notice it in the body before you notice it as a thought: a restlessness in the legs, a slight holding of the breath, a pressure behind the eyes that wants somewhere to go. Then something in you reaches for the one thing that reliably changes the inside of the next 10 minutes. That it works is not a failure of willpower. It is the reason the habit is still here.

Is an addictive personality a real thing?

The phrase points at something real. What it points at is not one personality.

People keep using the term because they recognise themselves in it, and the recognition is worth taking seriously. Where it misleads is in the shape it suggests: one type of person, fully formed, who will take to anything going. When the traits involved are measured directly, they do not collapse into a single type.¹ In two student samples of roughly 1,300 and 1,000 people, difficulty holding attention went with both problematic internet use and smoking, while other traits went with only one of the two: sensation seeking with smoking, and the urge to act under unpleasant feeling with problematic internet use. Both samples were undergraduates in one country, and the design compared people at a single point in time, so it maps a pattern rather than establishing what causes what.

That matches what I see in the room. What travels across behaviours is rarely a taste for excess. It is more often a particular difficulty staying with an uncomfortable state for longer than a minute or two, and that difficulty attaches itself to whatever is nearest and most reliable. Which is why the same person can be unmoved by alcohol and entirely caught by their phone, or the reverse.

The label also does something to you, which is the part worth watching. Held lightly, it gives you a thread to follow. Held as an identity, it quietly settles the question, and once the question is settled there is nothing left to be curious about.

What am I actually trying to change when I reach?

Ask what the first two minutes give you, not what the whole evening costs. The cost is already obvious to you, which is why asking about it has never once stopped you.

When clients slow the moment down, the feeling just before the reach is almost never the one they expected. Four come up repeatedly.

• Flatness. Not sadness. A grey evenness in which nothing is especially wrong and nothing is especially alive.
• Irritation with no target. A scratchiness that would like someone to blame and cannot find anyone.
• Shame left over from the day. A small humiliation you decided not to think about, still sitting in the chest.
• Being unaccompanied. Alone in a way that other people being in the flat does not touch.

Each of those states is hard to stay inside without company, and the habit is excellent company. It arrives on time, asks nothing, and changes the feeling within minutes. Seen that way, the behaviour stops looking like a character flaw and starts looking like a solution with an unacceptable invoice attached. That is a more useful thing to work with, because a solution can be replaced and a flaw cannot.

Why does stopping feel like a loss?

Because something is being given up, and it worked.

This is the part people are embarrassed to say out loud, and it is the part that decides whether a decision holds. Clients who announce a clean break and say nothing about what they will miss tend to be back inside three weeks with a sense of personal failure that was never warranted. Nothing failed except the plan, which asked them to surrender a dependable comfort and feel nothing about it.

There is often a second loss sitting behind the first. The habit has been carrying something: a way of ending the day, the only half hour that belonged to you, the one place nobody wanted anything from you. Take it away and that need does not politely disappear. It comes back looking for a new address. Working out what the habit has been protecting is slower than willpower and considerably more durable, and it is the part of the work I would not skip.

What can I do with this, and when is more than self-management needed?

Start by watching rather than stopping. A fortnight of honest observation will tell you more than a month of resolve.

Notice the hour, the room and the feeling in the minute before you reach, and write down only those three things. Most people find the pattern is narrower than they feared and sits in two or three recurring moments rather than everywhere. When one of those moments arrives, try staying in the discomfort for a couple of minutes with some curiosity rather than gritted teeth, and see what it is made of. Say it to one person who will not make a project out of it. If the pull reliably follows success rather than strain, that is worth knowing about yourself, and it changes which evenings need planning.

Self-management is the wrong instrument in some situations, and recognising that early is not a defeat. Where the behaviour is still escalating despite real effort, where it involves money, or where other people are being affected by it, these are circumstances for sustained work with a psychotherapist and not for a private plan. The same is true where a substance is involved and stopping changes how your body feels, which belongs in face-to-face support rather than in anything you read. And where the thing underneath turns out to be old, there is usually relief in finding that the habit was the most sensible answer available at the time, and that better answers exist now.

If you would like to look at your own pattern with me, a session or a free 30-minute call is a reasonable place to begin. My work with individuals is described on the psychotherapy in Copenhagen page.

Questions people ask

Do I need a diagnosis before I come to therapy?

No, and most people who come to me about a habit do not have one. A clear description of what you do, when you do it and what it changes is enough to work with.

Will you ask me to stop before we start?

No. Stopping as a condition of being allowed to look usually guarantees that you stop looking instead. We begin with what the behaviour is doing for you, and what you choose to change follows from that.

What kind of therapy helps with a habit I cannot explain?

A form of therapy that goes after the feeling the habit manages, rather than only the behaviour itself. My own training is in psychosynthesis, and in practice that means paying attention to the part of you that reaches as well as the part that disapproves.

How long before anything shifts?

I cannot give you a timeline, and anyone who does is guessing. What I can say is that understanding what the reaching is for tends to come earlier than a change in the behaviour, and that it arrives at a different pace for different people.

Can I come if no substance is involved at all?

Yes, and a good deal of this work involves no substance whatsoever. Scrolling, spending, working, gambling and checking all run on the same mechanism: a behaviour that changes a feeling fast enough to be worth the cost.

Sources

1. Profiles of Impulsivity in Problematic Internet Users and Cigarette Smokers. Frontiers in Psychology, 2019.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.