Many faces of addiction and the dire need to manage it

Bad habits, drugs, self-indulgence and peer pressure are products of the company one keeps. Yet, it is hard to live without friends.

As a youngster, my father always cautioned that friends could hinder success. One minute you’re focused in school the next you’re missing classes getting high, drinking and exposing yourself to other vices. It’s simple actually. Friends have a lot of influence in our lives. They can either build or destroy.

Most people complain about how a friend stole their spouses or how a close friend implicated them in some criminal activity yet they had no idea about it until a knock on the door took them to jail. But despite the misfortunes that friends bring, we still feel the need to be attached to them. Addiction does not only apply to substance abuse, it cuts across the board; friendship, work.

According to an opinion by Mara Tyler on Health line, work addiction is a real mental health condition that often stems from a compulsive need to achieve status and success, or to escape emotional stress.

Work addiction is not as complicated as it sounds. Workaholics are much like drug addicts. They work all the time so as to achieve a sort of ‘highness’. Drug users can vouch that once you feel that high for the first time you’ll want more.

Work addicts don’t realise that they have an addiction especially if they live in a society where power and success are valued. Workaholics tend to spend more time in the office even when not needed. They lose sleep working. Eventually, they tend to ignore their families, putting their work first. Sadly, others don’t even start families or get married. Workaholics find work as some sort of therapy. A hiding place to avoid death or divorce. Work addiction can, however, be cured through therapy.

Another form of addiction mostly affecting children and youth is gaming. In this generation, parents are too busy and they tend to introduce their children to games such as car racing to keep them from disturbing them while they work. With time, it becomes a routine and before long the habit turns into an addiction. You find that children are glued to cell phones, game pads and computers all day.

Even though this has a short term benefit on the parent, it is hazardous to the child. They develop eye problems, obesity from lack of exercise, depression from isolation from other children, neck and head pains (looking at the screen all day can cause the neck to lose its curve). These are just a few effects of addiction.

Behavioral addictions can turn lives into a maze of loneliness with the mind becoming a technological cocoon; your thoughts are no longer private. You air your every move on the internet (through social media). With the introduction of Snapchat we can now monitor our friend’s every move. Many refuse to accept that society is retrograding and we hide behind misconceptions to justify our various tendencies that we seem unable to live without.

Technology is addictive and is a silent serial killer as different applications lie to us that we are social and keeping in touch with the world while we close our doors and let life pass us by. We create illusions where we make social networks such as Facebook and Instagram dictate our position in the social hierarchy and we measure our self-worth through the likes and number of friends we have on these networks, but have we ever really stopped and evaluated ourselves?

Technology, friends, the internet, work are all addictions that we develop unknowingly and over time they begin to rule our lives. We need to be more aware of the long-term effects of all these addictions so that we can live fairly complete lives.

{Lynn Kyalo, Strathmore University}