The best part of being pregnant was my epidural. The thick spread of warmth, like a weighted blanket knit out of maple syrup, made me swoon in my hospital bed. “This feels so good,” I remember moaning to my husband. Within minutes of feeling my muscles slacken from the shot, I panicked. What if the rush subsided? It had been more than nine months since I had a glass of wine, since I felt a reprieve from my reality. What if this drug-induced euphoric parachute failed and I plummeted back to reality with a thud?
“I’m worried that I’m not numb enough,” I lied to the nurse 15 minutes later. “It still hurts.” She nodded and another needle went into my spine. This one hit me harder and within seconds, I couldn’t even wiggle my toes. I became a statue: Venus de Milo Giving Birth. I confessed to the nurse that I hadn’t really needed the epidural chaser. She shrugged, like I wasn’t the first woman to fake it for more fentanyl, and snapped, “Well, I guess you learned your lesson.”
My epidural overdose taught me nothing I didn’t already know. I am an addict, a compulsive pleasure-seeker. Thankfully, my appetite has never included heroin or dangerous sex. I use the label “addict” broadly — these are habits and behaviors that derail my health and overall well-being without running the risk of completely ruining my or anyone else’s life. Basically, I overdo something if it feels good. It’s been this way since I was a child. My addiction then was sugar. I lost babysitting gigs because I devoured every sweet in the house, even gold boxes of Godiva hidden away on high shelves, after the kids went to bed. When I was 11, one mom called my house to ream me out for eating her wedding keepsake, a handful of pastel Jordan almonds in a tulle pouch. Forty-five years later, I can still remember crunching those stale sugar-coated nuts and knowing I would never babysit for that family again.
At 15, I subbed out sweets for cigarettes and binge-drinking. My Irish father came from a long line of boozers who bragged about blackouts and drunken brawls. For years, when we’d travel upstate to the stately Sagamore Hotel in Lake George, New York, for annual family reunions, we were always the screeching clan who overtook the bar and later stumbled back to our hotel rooms. One time, instead of calling out a cousin with an obvious drinking problem, I remember someone saying, “Oh, Timmy just can’t handle his cups lately.” That meant, in my mind, that abusing alcohol was just a phase, even a whim. You could hide it away in the back of a closet like a pair of jeans that didn’t fit anymore. When I moved to New York in my mid-20s to work as a financial reporter, I decided to stop drinking because I wanted a fresh start. I didn’t want to be the person who slunk into the office after a happy hour with no recollection of leaving the bar. I took up running, which quickly became an obsession of its own. The upbeat thrum of endorphins replaced the buzz of inebriation. When I craved a glass of red wine so fiercely that I tasted tannins on my tongue, I literally dashed out of my Upper West Side brownstone and ran to the Central Park reservoir. I jogged in circles until I got drunk on my own hormones.
My sobriety didn’t last more than a year. I slipped when my newly divorced dad came to visit me in New York and told me he was dating again — and having sex. I joined him in a glass of wine over dinner on the Upper West Side. A bottle later, I met up with friends downtown and the rest is a blur. For a while, I had a pattern: drink a lot, then stop completely, rinse, repeat. It was never a casual relationship.
This constant quitting one thing only to latch on to another got me wondering: Am I forever destined to obsess? Can’t I just like something? And if not, how can I align with my brain on dependencies that won’t kill me?
Now, decades later, I’ve learned I’m not the only one who cycles through fixations. One friend trawls The RealReal every couple of hours everyday to check out new arrivals. Another sheepishly admits she can’t start her morning without scanning the Daily Mail when she first wakes up. On the “Skincare Addiction” sub-Reddit, women cop to needing therapy for their serum obsessions to 4.5 million redditors. Most everyone I talk to is “obsessed” with something or someone. Indeed, we can’t just fucking like something.
Here’s why: “We’re pretty much all addicts,” says psychiatrist Anna Lembke, who wrote Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence and believes our relentless drive for pleasure is primal, driven by an inherited sense of scarcity. We once sought out dopamine stimuli like food and warm shelter for survival. But now, we live in a world of abundance. Our brains just haven’t caught up.
“Our modern-day ecosystem is conspiring against us in that we now have these lives that are largely constructed around our next reward,” she tells me. And Lembke is not talking strictly about opioids or alcohol — or epidurals or candy: “We can get addicted to behaviors, just as we can get addicted to substances. I really see no difference between the two.” Meaning, for some, slathering on a glycolic acid is as satisfying as popping an opioid.
Technically, addiction is defined as a chronic or lifelong condition that makes us take a substance or engage in a behavior despite negative or harmful consequences, like drinking and driving or blowing your life savings at baccarat. (Pathological gambling is the only non-substance addiction listed in the official textbook of mental disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association.) More than 17 percent of Americans, ages 12 and older, battled a substance use disorder in the past year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — that’s almost 50 million people. But what about the dopamine chasers who don’t forfeit their lungs or liver?
The people who convince themselves that “Tonight, I will not peek at a screen,” only to fiendishly tap through Instagram Stories and doomscroll down TikTok until they finally pass out. How many times have you, in a retail fog, ordered something via Amazon Prime and completely forgotten about it until you find a box at your front door? These habits may seem benign in comparison to substance addiction, but the stages are exactly the same within your brain: binge/intoxication, withdrawal/negative affect, preoccupation/anticipation.
The APA doesn’t have enough peer-reviewed evidence to categorize these behaviors as disorders. (Mostly because they can’t get rats to engage with social media or shop for half-price bath mats in experiments.) Compulsive exercising and eating are omitted for the same reason. These behaviors aren’t as catastrophic as, say, cirrhosis. You can’t shop or scroll yourself to death. Still, dozens of rehab facilities offer social-media detox programs for teens. One-third of millennials and Gen-Zers self-describe as addicted to shopping. Even “news addiction” is now a thing. A recent study in the journal Health Communication found that CNN junkies and the like are more apt to suffer from stress, anxiety, and poor health.
Whether you get off on dispatches from Rachel Maddow or chunks of Ecuadorian dark chocolate or watching one Get Ready With Me after another, the bottom line is this: We’re all chasing gratification. And if you’re like me, you’ve become an unapologetic hedonist. “I just need to quickly check my texts to make sure my daughter is okay,” you whisper to yourself. An hour later, you’re watching a pygmy hippo frolic in a fountain.
Clearly, we all just want to feel good — “life is hard, I deserve a cigarette,” I repeat to myself like a mantra on the drive over to the convenience store — but now, all the time. And while the medical community debates whether addiction is strictly a brain disease or a more nuanced disorder, pleasure-seeking isn’t passed down through DNA. It feels more like a societal tumor, enabled by algorithms and DoorDash and overnight delivery. Is there anything then — my binge-drinking, my smoking, my kettle-corn addiction — that I can just blame on my ancestors from County Cork? “There is this idea that certain people just have an innate vulnerability to get addicted. If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” says Lembke. She does suspect though that behavioral compulsions can actually trigger a predilection for addiction in our DNA.
So maybe I am just biologically doomed to replace one obsession with another. In May 2023, I decided to quit drinking for good. I’d “quit” at least a dozen times since that dry run in my 20s without fully committing. This time was different. One minute, I was toasting a friend’s new job over dinner with a bottle of wine. Two hours later, I was sprawled on my kitchen floor with the start of a black eye. I don’t recall anything, but I suspect I slipped and hit my brow bone on the counter when I attacked the snack cabinet like a grizzly bear at a campsite. The next day, I wore huge sunglasses to an event at my teen daughter’s school. No one knew I was hungover, but I couldn’t rationalize drinking anymore. The pain outweighed the pleasure.
Getting sober was the best life decision I ever made. My sobriety has profoundly affected how I socialize with my husband, my daughter, my mom, my friends, even myself. I don’t criticize myself anymore. I also have no excuse for being a jerk. Alcohol was my adult version of “the dog ate my homework.” Still, I’m not sure why I was able to quit. I didn’t seek out a 12-step program. My older longtime-alcoholic brother, Robert, died before he turned 50. Maybe I’m still sober because his sad demise haunts me whenever someone says, “Hey, can I get you a drink?” Still, my resolve hasn’t killed my hardwired craving for dopamine.
Within a few months, I started buying the occasional pack of American Spirits to reward myself for not buying wine. Within six months of becoming a “sometimes” smoker again, I found myself nibbling on cannabis gummies to deaden my daily anxiety and to get a lift. That weekly reward also spiraled into a hardwired habit. I upped my THC dosage along the way.
Lembke is optimistic about how we will address our collective addiction and its sidecar: a mental-health crisis. “We, as a species, are incredibly adaptable,” she says. “We’re survivors and we’re going to figure it out.” I wish I could agree. In my mind, we will always be reward-driven and deficit in our decision-making — especially with everything on demand. But I’m okay with being an addict, a lab rat furiously pushing a lever. For me, adapting means accepting my tendencies and leaning into the least harmful habits. I will quit edibles. I will stub out my last cigarette. But not before I find another obsession. Maybe I’ll try microdosing. Or learn to surf.
Maybe not right away though. Last week, I threw out my last tin of edibles. Then I smoked a cigarette to congratulate myself.
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