Addictive habits and behaviors reduce the work efficiency and productivity of the people worldwide. Around millions suffer from addictions, either substance abuse or behavioral ones at least once.
While substance abuse takes into account the compulsion to consume alcohol, nicotine, and drugs, behavioral addiction is an altogether different thing. Addictions that revolve around the person’s behavior, like eating way too much or using the internet for the whole day, come under behavioral addictive habits.
You are likely to undergo harm from behavior-related toxic habits as well. Keep reading to know more about the behavioral and substance addictions that occur significantly all over the globe.
Some Most Common Behavioral Addictions
1. Substance Abuse
When you think of addiction, mostly alcohol consumption, smoking, and drug abuse creep up. However, addiction is broadly divided into two categories, namely the substance and behavioral addiction.
Substance abuse is simply the consumption of any substance in excessive amounts that harms your body considerably. It might involve drinking alcohol above your saturation point. This causes confusion, motor instability, disruption of thought process, and slurred speech.
Other than this, some people are chain smokers and abuse nicotine regularly. You might come across drug abusers who consume weed, over-the-counter prescription drugs, or other harmful substances to betterment the body.
In case you suffer from such addictive behaviors, make sure to check the Salt Lake City meeting list and take adequate help from the same.
Types
Alcohol Abuse leads to bodily deformities and malfunctioning. Alcohol intoxication causes difficulty speaking, confusion, headache, difficulty walking, gait instability, and self-awareness reduction.
Drug Abuse revolves around excessive consumption of psychedelic substances, over-the-counter medications, and even prescription drugs.
Nicotine Abuse or Cigarette smoking is highly prevalent and leads to excessive destruction of the body.
2. Internet Addiction
Here’s another addiction that almost everybody suffers from nowadays. Social media occupies a major role in our lives. However, some people habitually scroll through their social media feed and upload unnecessary pictures all day long.
You might also spend the entire day and night watching endless streams that harm your body significantly. This affects your ability to interact with loved ones in real life. You are also likely to lose interest in professional life or family once you become addicted to the internet.
Not only the professional and personal life, but social media addiction affects your body as well. It leads to conscious worry, agitation, confusion, and dilemma in your mind.
3. Gambling
Psychiatrists regard gambling as one of the addictive disorders that are similar to alcohol or drug addiction. Gambling instills mental trauma and damage in the same manner as alcohol addiction does.
It affects the specific areas of your brain concerning the emotions and degenerates the same. Also, you are likely to undergo degeneration of the ventral striatum and prefrontal cortex.
This disrupts the person’s ability to judge and understand that addictive habits are harmful. Even when you realize how pessimistic the addiction is, there isn’t much you can do about it.
As far as the treatment is concerned, it requires psychiatric therapy and some prescription drugs the same as the one given in drug abuse.
Variations
National Lottery and scratch cards are the primary sources of gambling disorders. Most of the people suffer from addictions related to lottery rewards and attractive prizes that they might win using scratch cards.
Horse Racing is a popular sport that suffers excessive gambling and money exchange challenges. Many people who are habitual of horse racing gambling are the past winners of these illegal rewards.
Casino Gambling is yet another popular gambling activity that you might become addicted to. What makes it worse is the compulsion to put your entire savings on a single casino challenge and to lose it all once.
4. Gaming Addiction
Most youngsters these days play video games all day long. The majority of the gaming addicts are out-of-control gamers who are unable to stop once they start playing.
Gaming addiction affects your professional life as well as health aspects. Psychiatry association includes this addiction in DSM-5 of the psychiatry disorders classification. It leads to withdrawal symptoms, loss of interest in life, Inability to get away from the gaming laptop or device, and reduced concern about family welfare.
While the association is yet to finish proper research on this addiction, it still regards the same to be highly unhealthy for your body.
5. Eating Addiction
Around 2% of US adults suffer from binge-eating disorders that make them consume more calories than required. Other disorders like Anorexia nervosa, Bulimia nervosa, and compulsive eating disorder greatly affect the eating habits of the person.
It affects your mental as well as physical health and leads to some drastic effects. Some symptoms include an uncontrolled desire to eat, eating until you feel sick, replacing work and crucial activities with eating, obesity, and excessive guilt. The eating disorders come under DSM-5 of the psychiatry classification.
You might go for controlled behavioral trials for the correction of such behavioral addictions that affect your life.
6. Caffeine Addiction
In case you can’t function the entire day without drinking your dose of coffee, keep reading. Coffee or caffeine addiction comes under the DSM-5 of psychiatric disorders.
While some amount of caffeine per day is normal, you must not exceed the daily dose. Consider yourself as a caffeine addict if you consume more than 500 milligrams of caffeine per day.
It leads to considerable changes in your behaviors and induces some symptoms as well. You might suffer from excessive irritability, restlessness, headache, irritability, lethargy, sleeplessness, anxiety, constipation, and nausea.
Other than this, an increase in heart rate and muscular cramps is also possible due to caffeine’s excessive consumption.
7. Sexual Intercourse Addiction
Experts state that around 3 to 5% of the adults suffer from sexual addiction at least once in their lifetime. Such addictive behaviors might manifest as multiple sexual partners, affairs even after being in a committed relationship, compulsive masturbation, and exhibitionism.
Some people also take refuge in voyeurism to satisfy their sexual desires. Such addictive patterns of behavior lead to excessive infection, anxiety, restlessness, confusion, and indecisiveness in the person. Also, they might use sexual intercourse as an escape to life problems and professional frustrations.
Final Verdict
Addictions, in any form, lead to significant harm and deteriorate your body. Broadly, addictions might be due to substance abuse or behavioral addictions. While the former deals with excessive consumption of a particular substance, the latter talks about repetitive behaviors.
Apart from substance abuse, people also suffer from other addictions like food addiction, excess of sexual intercourse, gaming addiction, gambling, and social media addiction.
