“We get addicted to drinking or smoking by doing it repeatedly. Why don’t we get similarly addicted to studying?”

Question: When we do some activity repeatedly, like drinking or taking drugs, we get addicted to it. But as students, we study for 20, 15, 20 years, why do we never get addicted to studying?

Answer Addiction or even for that matter, it’s milder version attachment, is not just a result of repetition. Repetition is one important factor in forming the impressions inside our mind, which impel us to do that same thing again.

But while the mind is sometimes compared to a software, say a computer browser, where the sites we have visited come as auto-completes, but the mind is much more sophisticated than just a software, the history record, the history in a browser does not reflect how enthusiastic we were about visiting a particular site, whereas the mind’s impressions record that. So to understand the strength of the impressions formed in the mind, we need to consider three factors. I prefer the acronym FIT for this, frequency, intensity and time duration.

How often we do something is important, how long we do a thing is important, but probably the most important thing in forming impressions in the mind is how much is our interest, how much is our involvement at the level of emotions, at the level of absorption, basically how much is the intensity, how much are our, how much is our, how much are our emotions and desires involved in the activity. So, because activities such as drinking or doing drugs give us a quick dopamine hit and some of them are designed to give us that quick intoxicating or even irresistible pleasure. However, because of that, the problem that happens is our getting intensely involved in it is much more probable, we could say even inevitable and that is how addiction happens, attachment and addiction happens for these activities, whereas with respect to studying, it doesn’t happen because we do it because we need to do it.

It’s not because we like to do it, let alone love doing it. So because we don’t get so emotionally involved, that’s why the impressions that are formed are not that strong. Of course, there are people who love to read and they can get addicted to reading also.

Generally, the word addiction is used for strong or compulsive behavioural patterns that are destructive. So we may not use the word reading addiction generally speaking, but the principle is that along with how long or how often we do it, it’s how intensely we do it which is a critical component in determining the strength of the impressions formed.