Drugs. Alcohol. TikTok. Internet games. Sex. An Ex. Chocolate. Slot machines. Shopping. Can these stimuli be addictive? The idea of being addicted to a process or behavior is very controversial.

Can any behavior be addictive? The answer is probably “yes,” depending on the person. Having said that, in our book, Why Can’t I Stop?, we selected the behaviors that we and others see as having the ...

Nearly half of young people in a recent study displayed strongly addictive use of mobile phones, a trend that the study results suggest raised the risk of suicidal behaviors. Researchers looked at ...

Addiction is one of the most intensely studied conditions in modern medicine, yet even with high‑resolution brain scans and ...

An estimated 77% of Americans are engaging in addictive behaviors to cope with mental health issues — often in spite of efforts to find effective clinical therapies. The GeneSight Mental Health ...

Adolescents with an internet addiction undergo changes in the brain that could lead to additional addictive behaviour and tendencies, finds a new study by UCL researchers. The findings, published in ...

How do they keep us addicted? They rely on dopamine—the “reward hormone.” Like Pavlov’s dogs, we anticipate a reward when we hear something associated with it, like a notification sound, and respond ...

Like drug addiction, greed hijacks the brain's reward system. In healthcare, this pathological pursuit of profit has life-or-death consequences.