Addiction is a Subject Related to Habits
After reading the article written by Gretchen Rubin, I rather think that addiction is a subject related to habit. In the article, Rubin mentioned a list of factors which was put forth by Mark Griffiths. Apart from the question of “what’s a true addiction?”, the list provides a way to think about whether a certain habit is making it harder to live a life that reflects our values and contributes to our long-term happiness. According to this definition, a behavioral addiction is marked by salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, conflicts and relapse. However, the assay would not be clear enough if it isn’t represent with an example, so I would discuss the six aspect along with my mother’s habit on playing app games.
My mother brought herself an Iphone during summer vacation, and that is also when she started to gain the habits of playing app games such as candy crush. This behavior had become the important activity in her daily life (salience), for she spent thirty minutes to an hour on playing games after having breakfast, lunch and dinner, sometimes even before going to sleep as if she is following a prescription given by the doctor. Basically, I think the most interesting part during the observation of mom is that it is pretty easy to predict whether she is winning or losing in the game, for the behavior of playing game changes her mood by providing a rush of excitement or sense of calm or a shout of remorse (mood modification). None the less, since the difficulties of the game advanced eventually level by level, it is quite hard to go on to the next level as easy as turning one’s hand over on level one when you had the same limitation of life chance, which is five lives per chance. So mom began to purchase “life “ in the online store, and that represents the stage when more and more behavior is needed t get the mood boost (tolerance). However, what happens when she fail to pass the level even with the purchase of extra lives? Well, mom would be depressed and put down her phone to take a break, but after finishing all of the housework, she would return once again back to her wonderland, and that is how the behavior returns after being given up (relapse)
There are still two aspect I had not talked about, which is withdrawal symptoms – a person feels lousy or irritable when unable to engage in the behavior, and conflict – the behavior causes conflicts with other people, interferes with other activities, or causes a person to feel a loss of control. Though this list might seemed a little too underestimate the problems of addiction, I think with our self-knowledge, and being in control of ourselves, addiction would not need to be seemed as a matter so seriously.
