What is the 12 step understanding of how a behavioral addiction develops?
With the behavioral addictions, there are usually strong emotions involved. Whether that’s fear, whether that’s excitement, or whether that’s anxiety. And that brings about certain kinds of releases of chemicals within the body that affect the brain’s functioning and affect your experience. By engaging in a repeated activity over and over where there is that kind of strong emotional response, you can become very addicted to that high that you get basically from your own body chemicals.
