The 7 Most Common Socially-Acceptable Addictions That Are Ruining Your Life Faster Than Heroin

How many can you tick off the list?

Addiction happens when you can give up any time you want, as long as that time is not today.

Are you an addict? So am I. Almost all of us are addicted to something and sometimes we don’t even know it. All we know is that we want to do it just a little bit more. And we just can’t stop.

We’ve been trained to believe that the only problematic addictions out there are the ones that will make a fool of you and then kill you on the spot.

We fail to see there are so many others killing us softly, ingrained in society’s expectations, pushed on us by peers, friends, family, and especially an industry whose only interest is to take our money, no matter the consequences.

We imagine that the only real addictions are the ones that will send you to the street, turning tricks for hits.

But most of us don’t make it that far. For us, the most severe addictions are the ones that keep us stuck in our own ways, slowly but surely eroding our mental and emotional health, turning us into brain-dead followers of our next fix.

These low-key addictions can ruin our lives much deeper than the big scary kings of addictions: drugs.

And just because they’re not scary, we let them into our lives.

We make them part of our day-to-day routines. Use them to soothe us to sleep or wake us up to a harsh reality. We allow them to become bigger than we could ever handle. And we make them into a lifestyle.

1. Food

Maybe the biggest socially acceptable addiction out there,

food is a $5 trillion industry, while diet and weight loss have grown to be a $71 billion industry, yet according to studies — 95% of diets fail. (CNBC)

However, when you research food addiction, at least 70% of the results you get are musings on whether food really is an addiction or not. This while any food addict out there can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that food addiction runs deep, ruins lives, creates debilitating diseases, and is extremely difficult to get rid of.

And that’s because we are constantly bombarded with everything related to food.

Look around. Everything is about food: how enjoyable it is, how much pleasure you can derive from it, and how to use it to form social connections, or as emotional support when we’re lonely.

Umami, savory, yummy, delicious, and drenched in flavor.

The key message is: get high on food.

And we are. Food is connected to every social event, pushed on you at every gathering, celebrated as the spice of life, and accompanying everything you go through.

And unlike other addictions, food is necessary. Which makes it so difficult to keep under control.

2. Alcohol

Peer pressure is strong on this one.

You’d think everybody knows alcohol is bad for you, but from the way your friends are behaving it might just be the next best thing after money because everybody is pushing it on you.

‘You’re not drinking anything? At least have a glass, it’s my birthday!’, ‘What kind of a person goes out to a club and drinks water all night long?’, ‘Just have a sip, it won’t kill you!’, ‘Are you ill?’

No, and I don’t want to be.

Although I didn’t drink very often to begin with, last year I tried going completely sober for about 2 months. My friends were not happy… The amount of evil eye I got during those 2 months was enough to murder an entire town and drown their crops. In alcohol, if possible.

Lesson learned!

People will try to pressure you into doing whatever it is they’re doing, whether good or bad. If alcohol is the thing that people do when they go out, it’s unacceptable for you to do something else.

While a glass here and there is no big deal, being drunk every Saturday night and spending Sunday in bed severely hungover is damaging to your long-term well-being and such a waste of your free day.

Why be half dead when you can be all the way alive?

3. Caffeine

I swear caffeine is the new designer drug.

‘Don’t talk to me, I haven’t had my coffee yet’, or ‘I need coffee to be able to get out of bed’ have become acceptable parts of a dialogue about…well, a drug that was initially a habit that turned into an addiction and now you’re doing it on automated pilot and imagine you can’t live without.

While it’s true that coffee can also be healthy for you, there can be too much of a good thing. Harvard.edu says that:

Low to moderate doses of caffeine (50–300 mg) may cause increased alertness, energy, and ability to concentrate, while higher doses may have negative effects such as anxiety, restlessness, insomnia, and increased heart rate.

Espresso, for example, typically has 63 mg of caffeine in 1 ounce (the amount in one shot).

I know at least 10 people who drink 5 of those a day. They’re always hyper, always on the edge, sort of fidgety-angry, and use coffee as their life support. If there were coffee IV lines available in the office, they’d be the first to pull one next to their desk and put the needle in.

What’s more concerning is that this popular soft drug is being pushed on people on a massive scale. Never before have I seen so many coffee shops, coffee drinks, coffee T-shirts, logos, brands, flavors, etc.

There’s a huge coffee culture out there that made the pushing of coffee on people not just acceptable, but mainstream and even expected. A culture that has only one beneficiary: coffee makers.

4. Work

One of the most normalized addictions out there, that a lot of people turned into a lifestyle. Those people are called workaholics and are damn proud of themselves and their achievements.

And they usually have major achievements. I don’t know any successful person who isn’t also a workaholic and overachiever.

And while on the one hand, the results on the work front are amazing, on the personal life front… they’re the opposite.

When you put your work before your family, your family suffers. You end up divorced and alone in a huge lonely house with an Olympic size swimming pool that nobody ever swims in. Because there’s nobody there. Not even you, because you’re always at work.

The sad truth is that financial and career success is pushed so far down people’s throats as the only right way to be, that it’s difficult to look at work addiction for what it really is: an addiction.

It’s difficult to say no to it when you know it might bring you just the things you’ve been dreaming about.

5. Exercise

Boy, I wish this was my addiction. I bet many of us do, right?

Sadly, though, just as many of us hate exercise.

Just like work, exercise is a socially accepted addiction because it promises to deliver realities that we want to experience.

Work presumably makes you rich, exercise makes you hot.

At least according to current standards. Nobody wanted to look like a piece of overinflated meat back in the 70s.

If you overdo it, however, exercise is bad for you in a myriad of ways: heart problems, osteoporosis, immune disease, inflammation, etc.

Extreme exercise ruins everything that moderate exercise fixes.

Not to mention the toll it takes on your mental health and your life in general: waking up at 6 am to snort some protein powder and go for a 10-mile run through a radioactive blizzard can’t be good for anyone.

6. Social media

My newfound addiction to social media is what prompted this article. Last night I spent an hour watching people on Instagram reels burst open huge balloons with a variety of tools, the funniest one being when they started throwing screws at them.

Yeah, I know. It was stupid. And hilarious. I laughed until my stomach hurt and then couldn’t fall asleep for one more hour.

That gave me the time to reflect on my life and I noticed I did the same thing with the reels every night for the past month…

And even when I wanted to stop and do something more productive I couldn’t I just couldn’t. Even when the reels were not that great or entertaining anymore. I just couldn’t put the phone down.

All I wanted to do was Watch. More. Reels.

7. Porn

This one is bound to upset some people.

I wrote about it before and I was labeled some sort of Karen who doesn’t understand people’s need for the magic of fake sexual performance and has nothing better to do than shame people who use porn. Wrong.

As somebody who watches (and studies) porn on a somewhat regular basis, and also someone who used to work on the fringes of the sex industry, I’m here to tell you again: porn addiction is one of the most destructive things you can do to yourself and your love life, if you have one.

Lives are ruined by it. It usually happens to men, but women are not exempt.

Porn is not something to be taken lightly. It’s a form of entertainment that can quickly turn into an addiction, just because it’s so damn pleasurable. It releases so much dopamine in the user that you can’t say no. And you don’t want to say no.

Porn addiction ruins every natural human, romantic, intimate, and sexual connection you might have with someone.

It will also turn you into an aggressive zombie who consumes its own brain by feeding it more and more fake sex, performed by people whose only interest is to keep you hooked on it.

Social acceptability and normalization of some addictions that seem harmless make them all the more dangerous.

On the big scale of things, addiction is addiction no matter what the object of your desire is. Some will break you slower, others faster, but they will all make you lose your money, your head, and your health.

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