Chapter One: What is Addiction?

    In this chapter, were going to explore exactly what addiction is and why it is
so powerful that it has gripped 1 out of every 10 people in the United
States. We will discuss some of the causes of addiction and how the
experts are defining it based upon the symptoms. This is useful for anyone
who is has wondered if they are addicted to a particular habit and where
the line is drawn to define someone as an addict.

The Definition of Addiction

               What you need to understand about addiction is that the word has several
different definitions. For example, physical addiction is the actual
physiological sensations that your body has when you don’t have the
substance that it is addicted to. Let’s take cigarettes for example; if
someone is addicted to the nicotine in cigarettes and has been smoking for
any length of time, quitting will cause them to experience physiological
sensations like irritability, a desire to eat, jitteriness and most of all, a need
for nicotine.
                 But addiction is also used as a measurement of how much tolerance the
body has built up against a particular substance and an even further form
of physical addiction is the difficulty of an addict to resist the temptation when they receive cues – such as a smoker, even years after they quit,having the urge to smoke because they smelled someone else’s cigarette.

Psychological Addiction
 
                  Psychological addiction is a little bit more complicated. Psychological
addiction can best be defined as the need to fill a hole in someone’s life or
to make up for something else. Emotional addiction happens whether or
not a person has a physical addiction, and in fact, people will often switch
from one addiction to another because they are trying to solve an emotional
problem with something that just doesn’t fill it.

The Bottom Line

                 The bottom line here is that there are no easy definitions for addiction. If

you have a fair idea of what addiction is by reading the information in this
chapter you will be on the same page as most of the psychologists and
experts on addiction that are out there, giving things definitions.
 

                 To put it in the most simple terms possible addiction is: the physical desire

to partake in addictive behavior and the physiological factors that come
with it such as withdrawal symptoms and tolerance or the emotional state where you need to take part in addictive behavior to fill some emotional
need.

               As you go through this book you will learn more about addiction and you
may have a much more personal (and perhaps more accurate) definition
afterward.