Are you addicted to stress? Here are the signs.
“Nothing is harder to do than nothing.”
— Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing
I’ll answer you off the top: it’s certainly possible. You can be addicted to stress.
As well as any other emotional state—and frankly, I’d wager that the entire corporate world runs on it.
Without such an addiction fueling a solid percentage of the work force, would ‘shareholder value’ really motivate people to kill themselves for a job?
Literally. The World Health Organization found that in 2016, more than 745,000 people died from overwork.
That’s because people working more than 55 hours per week face an estimated 35% higher risk of stroke, and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease.
You might have plenty of conscious motivations to work as hard as you do: a need to keep on top of trends, the pace of innovation, competition.
But are long hours truly leading to your best work? Or could a less conscious driver—like addiction—have you glued to the screen?
First, let’s define addiction.
The traditional definition of addiction classifies it as a chronic disease.
But as someone who has deeply studied the subconscious mind—and helped people transcend addictive behaviors—I believe in a different definition.
Addiction is a habit. This is the view of neuroscientist Dr. Marc Lewis, who in his book The Biology of Desire, says that:
Addiction is learned via the motivated repetition of the same thoughts and behaviors, like any habit.
But it’s learned more deeply and quickly than most habits because of the level of desire present.
It’s the repetition that changes the brain’s wiring—not the substance. And it’s the intensity of desire that makes an addictive habit so compelling.
So is stress addictive?
Perhaps you’ve been putting work before your health for, oh, as long as you can remember.
Well, what’s more desirable?
Getting up at dawn to sit in stillness and meditate? Dragging yourself into the dark to work out your cold muscles in the gym?
Or would you rather have a nice coffee in bed and light up your brain with a cascade of digital notifications?
Life, unfortunately, seems to have been designed in such a way where beneficial habits require a sacrifice of short-term comfort for long-term gains.
And while we often equate stress with discomfort, that’s not entirely the case. Cortisol and adrenaline can be thrilling.
Think of sky divers and motorcycle enthusiasts.
Besides, there are many other desirable pay-offs from a stress or work addiction: validation, respect, a sense of security… to name a few.
In a world of layoffs and uncertainty, replying quickly to a customer can offer a very desirable sense of security indeed.
Whether that security is real is another matter.
Signs that you’re addicted to stress
Addiction feels like not having a choice.
Here are some common symptoms of stress or work addiction:
You’re always wanting to check your phone. You set it on the table and peak every few minutes even at a social dinner.
You may find it impossible to sit still or truly rest. Reading a nice fiction book isn’t productive enough, and you take days to get into a vacation.
Your mind is always turning on problems at work—no matter the hour, and no matter the setting. At yoga, in bed at night, etc.
You feel most engaged in tense situations: arguments over Slack, pending deadlines, etc.
You lose touch with your body’s signals and ignore your need to eat, pee, sleep, etc.
You feel phantom urgency. Even when there is nothing urgent, you feel like you should be doing something.
You’re irritated by people who aren’t in work mode. If someone isn’t as snappy or ‘with it’ as you, they’re a nuisance.
You lack motivation for anything but work. Your substance of choice—work—is your only source of dopamine (e.g. motivation and meaning).
Sound familiar? Like I said, I think this addiction is ubiquitous. I don’t think we’d have the work culture we do without it—and I myself used to suffer from it.
This is where the habit model of addiction becomes important.
Because what is learned can be unlearned.
How to break a stress addiction
The most pivotal part of breaking any addiction is knowing that you can change.
One of the great failures of 12-step programs is their ideology that addicts *are* addicts, and should pray to God for relief.
But you are not your habits. Nor are you sick.
(Alcoholics Anonymous, for what it’s worth, has a 5-10% success rate.)
Dr. Lewis found that a sense of empowerment was the uniting thread amongst the thousands of former addicts whose stories of recovery he has heard.
Meanwhile, one statistically rigorous study found that the ONLY characteristic that predicted relapse after an outpatient treatment for alcohol dependence was the participant’s level of belief in the disease model of addiction.
“in a statistically rigorous … study, Miller and colleagues found that the only pretreatment characteristic that predicted relapse, six months after concluding outpatient treatment for alcohol dependence, was ‘the extent to which clients endorsed disease model beliefs before entering treatment.’” (Dr. Marc Lewis, “Biology of Desire,” page 10) **
A sense of autonomy leads to change—and the neuroscience backs it.
Any habit is a matter of your neural conditioning: a neural network that has been re-enforced, again and again, by your behavior. But it’s also malleable.
YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR BRAIN TO CHANGE YOUR HABITS
No matter how practiced the habit, how old you are, or what you’ve experienced in life… your brain has neuroplasticity, and can be rewired through two things:
Subconscious rewiring, which is what I do with my clients
Different choices
To support yourself in making different choices, think in terms of identity. What kind of person do you want to be?
Deciding to stop a habit because it’s bad for you, or because you want a certain outcome, is less powerful than deciding who you want to be.
I’ve not read Atomic Habits, but I know that James Clear differentiates between outcome-based changes, process-based changes and identity-based changes.
Imagine your phone dings with a request that makes you tense. You sit on your hands and force yourself to pause—because you’ve decided you want to give more thoughtful responses. This takes enormous restraint.
On the other hand, imagine yourself to be a calm, in command leader. Someone who is unbothered by the myriad things that go wrong in a day. As you’re existing in a state of calm, secure and unbothered, the phone dings
You’re less likely to even notice the ding—because your belief system and state of being has you anchored in a reality where every little ding is not important.
Working with your identity is the most proactive approach to change.
Want to upgrade your identity?
Here are a few questions you can reflect on to shift from someone who is reactive, addled by stress or out of control and into a calm, clear leader:
What kind of person am I being? (With stress or work ruling my life)
Who would I be without this habit?
What kind of leader / business owner / etc. would I be proud to be?
Now, this is where hypnosis comes very much in handy. Reflecting on your identity is helpful—but it’s still coming from the conscious level.
Your subconscious mind rules 95% of your actions and beliefs. When you work on that level, it’s much easier to wire in this identity and live it.
To learn more about hypnosis, check out this blog post: “So what IS somatic hypnosis—and how does it work?”
