Addiction is something I am all to familiar with, I have a family history of family members being addicted to drugs and alcohol. So I have grown up around it which I think has kept me away from these negative substances. A thing that stood out to me was the different types of addictions that are not correlated to drug use. I was not aware that things such as compulsive buying addictions actually occured. Chapter six states that “Compulsive buying is estimated to affect 6 percent of the U.S. population, mostly women”(Donatelle, 2019, p.138). This surprised me because 6% is a lot of the population when you really think about it. This addiction takes over there lives they shut out family members and friends to prioritize all there time around shopping and spending money. This in turn can lead to depression and the feeling of loneliness because this addiction shuts people out. Also they are codependent on these materialistic things which consumes all of there money so they are broke and all they have to show for it is clothing or designer bags that are only depreciated in value the more they are worn. The video on Pearson really caught my attention because the females that were being interviewed didn’t even realize they had a problem until they really took a step back and looked at what little they had in life.
Another topic I wanted to talk about was something that I think everyone suffers from in a sense which is Exercise addiction. Exercise addiction is described as “use exercise compulsively to try to meet needs—for nurturance, intimacy, self-esteem, and self-competency—that an object or activity cannot truly meet”(Donatelle, 2019, p.139). We all have a image that we want to look like from the social media posting unrealistic pictures that aren’t achievable without the use of steroids or photoshop. This causes us to obsess over how we look constantly checking the scale constantly looking in the mirror to see if we have gained progress. This is something that I need to work on myself I obsess over eating the specific amount of food through tracking and weighing my food to get the perfect macronutrients and also obsess over training in the gym. This is something I need to work on as I sometimes see myself focusing more on my body growth rather than my financial and educational growth.
The last topic I food interesting was something that ties into the last topic discussed which is addiction over anabolic steroids. “When users stop using steroids, they can experience psychological withdrawal and sometimes severe depression, in some cases leading to suicide attempts”(Donatelle, 2019, p.147). This ties in with exercise addiction. People are obsessed with the way they look so they do drastic measures like anabolic steroids. This leads to many problems especially when you chose to get off of it, your body issues become next level and you become dependent on how your body looks on steroids and can’t live without that look.
Overall I found this chapter to be very interesting and beneficial for people who are struggling from any type of addiction whether it is drug related or not. This past week has been a good week I have had a very successful week with tracking calories and my gym sessions have been really focused and driven to get to the goal I want.
