The relationship between our behavior and health is often believed to be linear. We know, for instance, that drinking water, wearing sunscreen, sleeping enough and exercising all boost our well-being. So we assume that the more we engage in these behaviors, the healthier we’ll be.
Many of us, however, fail to realize that even the healthiest behaviors can become harmful if we overindulge in them.
Take sleeping: Getting the recommended seven to eight hours of sleep each night reduces our risk for diabetes, heart disease and infections (to name just a few). But oversleeping has been linked to a host of medical problems, including obesity, psychiatric issues and increased mortality.
As another example, cardiovascular disease is lower in countries where red wine is consumed in moderation. This means one glass a day for women and two glasses a day for men. However, repeatedly consuming five or more alcoholic drinks a day would indicate a pattern of binge drinking or addiction, and this excessive drinking increases our risk of developing more than 60 diseases.
Extending this same conceptualization of addiction to exercise reveals that excessive physical activity may be detrimental to one’s physical, psychological and social health. For example, the physical tolls of excessive exercise include heart abnormalities, fractures and broken bones, muscle tears and ligament strains, and even kidney failure in some extreme cases.
On the psychological side, irritability, anxiety, depression, fatigue and mood swings result. The extreme amount of time exercise addicts spend working out often isolates them from family, friends and coworkers. Happiness, not to mention productivity at work and interpersonal relationships, often suffers as a consequence.
Consider the following quote from Ben Carter, one of several exercise addicts featured in ” The Truth About Exercise Addiction.” Carter ultimately lost a job and long-term girlfriend due to his compulsion to run, lift and obsess over how many calories he burned and how many miles he logged each day.
“If I was unable to work out or delayed, I would get all the classic symptoms of panic. I would be short of breath, have palpitations and get shaky and dizzy. My thoughts would be racing: How can I get out of this situation and get my work out in? If I miss the workout, I will lose fitness, lose muscle mass, put on weight, lose all the gains I had worked so hard to achieve. If I skipped a workout, I was lazy, slothful, disgusting. I would be so disappointed in myself that I just couldn’t sit with the feelings, and I always ended up giving in and working out anyway, no matter how horrible I felt about it. If anyone got in my way of working out, or if a friend or family member asked me to do a favor when I had a run or session planned I just said no. I was intolerant of anything that kept me from it.”
Whether you’re addicted to exercise depends on how your daily workouts affect your mental and physical health, your social life and your ability to function in every day endeavors. Some people who go to the gym every day are irrefutably addicted. Others appear to be free of addiction, considering they make time for other activities and aren’t obsessive about their routines.
Though exercise addiction still awaits inclusion in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders — as do many other behavioral addictions, which cause their sufferers debilitating levels of dysfunction — many advances have been made toward better identifying its symptoms. Ongoing research continues to be conducted, and mental health professionals are becoming increasingly cognizant of an all-too-easy-to-mask issue that plagues a select segment of the population.
Exercise may be great for us, but when it becomes addictive it stops benefiting our physical, psychological and social health. So while we may assume that more of a healthy behavior is always better, there’s a wisdom to remembering that everything, even exercise, should be approached with moderation.
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Is Exercise Addiction Really So Bad? originally appeared on usnews.com
