Addiction is not always drinking, smoking, social media or pornography. Work could be an addiction, reading could be an addiction, you could be addicted to travelling and so on. Everything has a potential of becoming an addiction. The word potency refers to how easily you could become addicted to something. Sure potency is high for smoking or watching pornography but these activities are also ubiquitously known to be harmful or unhealthy. Everyone knows the adverse effect they have on physical or mental health. There are other things you can get addicted to which are seemingly normal or even healthy activity. Reading for example is a “good” activity. So is exercising or travelling. But when they start serving the purpose of escape, that’s when you need to be careful. You may be turning to these activity in order to numb yourself, from feeling of anxiety or overwhelm. The reason why I call these insidious because they are hard to identify and thus get in control. There is no evident “unhealthiness” attached to these activities, which was the case for smoking for example. You don’t feel guilty or bad doing it, on the contrary it gives you positive feeling of accomplishment, progress or excitement. No body in your vicinity points it out to you. But nonetheless these serve the exact same purpose of escape, running away and avoidance. You may be procrastinating doing a more important task by exercising or reading.
We need awareness to identify such an activity in our life and get in under control. Asking ourself if we can say no to it without feeling very guilty.