Hooked: How Common Obsessions Can Lead to Depression

Gregory is an intelligent and kind young man in his mid-20s. At age 16, he dropped out of school. He still lives with his mother. Suffering from anxiety and depression, he has worked a smattering of entry-level, part-time jobs…none lasting more than a few months. Gregory’s main preoccupation? Video games. He plays them for hours on end, every day and into the wee hours of the morning. It would be easy to dismiss Gregory — whose name has been changed here to protect his identity — as just another lazy, unmotivated poster boy for Gen Z. But the fact is, you may be more similar to Gregory than you think. As experts are increasingly learning, today’s easy access to over-stimulating behaviors — such as gaming, gambling, shopping, sexting, texting, Facebooking, and surfing the Web — provide near-constant enticement. And frequently giving in to those temptations can lead to obsession, addiction, anxiety, and depression, says psychiatrist Anna Lembke, MD, author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dopamine-Nation-Finding-Balance-Indulgence-ebook/dp/B08KPKHVXQ/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence</a>. “Whether it’s sugar or shopping, voyeuring or vaping, social media posts or The Washington Post, we all engage in behaviors we wish we didn’t, or to an extent we regret,” Lembke <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dopamine-Nation-Finding-Balance-Indulgence/dp/152474672X" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">writes</a>. By engaging in too much pleasure, we’re becoming “more unhappy, more anxious, more depressed, more irritable, and less able to take joy in the things that used to give us joy.” <a href="https://medium.com/wise-well/hooked-how-common-obsessions-can-lead-to-depression-2f74aa5bdd36">Read More</a>