There’s no such thing as a “good addiction.” By definition, an addiction is something that is damaging to the person afflicted with it, which that person wants to quit but can’t. So first, it has to be harmful, and second, the user has to want to stop. Therefore, by definition, an addiction cannot be beneficial.

Yes, even yoga can become an addiction, when it crosses the line from being a life-enhancing exercise to a harm-inflicting compulsion. The fact that yoga can become addictive is what makes it such an excellent practice for people in recovery from substance use disorders and behavioral disorders. 

Habit substitution is a reliable aid on the road to recovery. Yoga, exercise, and other activities — even fishing — provide some of the dopamine that previously came from consuming substances or engaging in compulsive behaviors. By shifting behavior away from self-harming compulsions toward self-help compulsions, addiction treatment seeks homeostasis — in dopamine and in life.

In a far-reaching review, researchers affiliated with the Department of Neuropsychiatry at the University of Kyoto, in Japan, tried to explore the line between healthy habit formation and addiction. In exploring internet usage and smartphone usage, the research note, “[S]everal routines that are beneficial when undertaken normally may evolve into excessive behaviour and have a negative impact.”

The researchers ask, can neuroimaging studies reveal the “optimal level of habitual behaviours for mental health benefits?” Their study follows a familiar path, beginning with dopamine, leading to deficits in the reward system, leading to reward deficiency syndrome (RDS) which underpins both so-called substance addictions and behavioral addictions. RDS is also involved, according to the authors, in autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

In an interesting twist I have not read before, the researchers refer to the dopamine-related reward system as a “stress regulation” mechanism. Studies with rats show that the dopamine delivery system is associated with motivation and resilience, “which is critical as a background trait for establishing stress coping strategies of individuals,” write the researchers.

Researchers note that resilience is defined as the ability to adapt to acute stress. Dopamine plays a critical role in stress resilience by “preventing exaggerated behavioural and physiological stress reactivity.” Dopamine is associated with “active coping,” learning how to navigate stressful situations, researchers say.

The researchers are able to follow the dopamine through FMRI scans and positron emission tomography (PET) observations from people suffering from gaming addiction, gambling addiction, and internet or smartphone addiction. They also used the same tools to learn if there was a level of internet usage that is beneficial:

[A] structural MRI (voxel-based morphometry) study revealed that online social networking service size, typically represented by the number of online friends, was positively associated with regional brain volumes in healthy individuals.

The researchers found a “positive association between the internet usage and [frontal cortex function] in low-to-moderate users.” The researchers conclude that internet usage:

[…] may help autistic individuals […] by offering a safe place in which they can communicate with others. Therefore, approaches to encourage safe and adequate internet usage should be considered (instead of seeking a way to prohibit it completely), for example, in the context of school education.

These researchers even looked at when exercise becomes excessive exercise, often connected with the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Perhaps not surprisingly, they found that walking was the sports addiction with the least negative mental health consequences. At the other end of the scale, excessive weight lifting and extreme sports were associated with greater appearance anxiety and use of performance-enhancing drugs.

We have only explored the tip of this topic as to when beneficial habits cross the line to become harmful habits. In my next article, I’ll specifically look at when substance use becomes substance abuse. 

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published May 1, 2025.

Sources:

“Life Habits and Mental Health: Behavioural Addiction, Health Benefits of Daily Habits, and the Reward System,” Frontiers in Psychiatry, January 26, 2022.

“Passion and risk of addiction in experienced female yoga practitioners,” Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, November 2022.

“Neurobiological basis for the application of yoga in drug addiction,”  Frontiers in Psychiatry, April 17, 2024.

Image courtesy of Freerange Stock, used under Creative Commons license.