Alexis Fernandez-Preiksa

An addiction is a compulsive disorder.

OK, where there are intense cravings, it feels like there's like a loss of control over yourself.

And it's something that you keep doing despite it having a really negative side effect and negative consequences.

OK, some behaviors and addictions, it's a bit of a slippery slope because obviously all bad habits do have some sort of a negative consequence.

But we're talking about negative consequences that are relatively immediate and obvious, and yet we still do that thing.

So for example, with a bad habit, nail biting, okay, there might be a negative consequence, but it's not something that necessarily is immediately impacting your life for the worse.

Whereas an addictive behavior where you're feeling like, let's say it's alcohol, like an alcohol or substance addiction, you literally, your relationships might be falling apart.

You are

feeling like absolute shit the next day and the only way to feel better is to get back onto that substance you know there's there's a big difference between something that long term is negatively going to impact my life because I'm actually wasting time I could be more productive all these things versus it really really having a negative impact on your life

where it's extremely detrimental to you, like your relationships and your health, and you can see it happening, but you still continue to engage in this addictive behavior, okay?

So you can't, it feels like you can't simply just withhold from that behavior if you focus on it, even when you're consciously aware of doing that thing.

So if you're consciously aware that you're doing it, and with all the willpower in the world, you can't withhold that behavior, that is an addiction, okay?

So if you're right now thinking, well, I don't know the difference, I don't know where I sit,

the willpower side of things is really going to give you an indicator.

And obviously chemical addictions are often a lot more intense in the brain than a behavioral addiction.

And a lot of the time what we deem to call a behavioral addiction is just a bad habit that we can curb easier than an addiction would be curbable.

Okay, so I think it was important to speak about this because I don't want it to look like I'm trying to give such a simplistic cure to an addiction.

I'm not covering addictions here.

It's very different and the way to go about curbing an addiction, again, is a lot more intense and, again, different.

Some things would overlap, but some things are different and I'm not covering addictions here.