Shankar Vedantam

So two questions here, Ana.

The first is, what's the difference between passion and an addiction?

And the second idea here is, if you see all the people around you working 90-hour weeks to get ahead in their careers, how do you try and get ahead in your career without it becoming an obsession?

You know, given the fact that the term addiction has a negative connotation, Ana, I'm worried that in some ways people may use the term really as a way of marking people whose behavior that they don't agree with.

So, for example...

I am not a triathlete.

And so I can look at someone running triathlons and say, look, this person is obsessed.

It borders on an addiction.

They really should be scaling back and exercising much more moderately.

How do we come up with definitions of addiction that don't just devolve into name calling, especially when it comes to people who are our opponents or people who we might disagree with?

Is it the case that we can say if the person with the problem recognizes they have a problem, that makes it a good candidate for it to be an addiction?

Although as I'm saying this, I'm realizing, of course, one of the things that addiction does is rob us of insight.

Hmm.

We received a large number of responses from listeners who wanted to know about the relationship between ADHD and addiction.

This question comes from Stacy in Zurich, Switzerland.

Fascinating.

What's the connection between ADHD and addiction, Anna?

Many listeners voiced concerns about kids and the amount of time they spend on cell phones and other devices.

We received this question from Giselle in Chicago, Illinois.

What do you think, Anna?