Everyday Addictions: Why You Can't Stop (And How Your Brain Can Learn To)

You told yourself you’d only check your phone for a minute. That was forty-five minutes ago. Now you’re lying in bed, thumb still scrolling, eyes burning, and you feel worse than when you picked it up. You know this. You knew it last night too. And the night before that.

Or maybe it’s not your phone. Maybe it’s the thing you’ve been putting off for three weeks — the email you need to send, the project you need to start, the conversation you need to have. Every time you think about it, something tightens in your chest, and suddenly you’re reorganizing your desk drawer or deep-cleaning the kitchen or falling into a YouTube rabbit hole about a topic you’ll never think about again.

You’ve tried the apps. The screen-time limits. The accountability partner. The habit tracker. The “just put your phone in another room” advice. And maybe it worked for a day or two. Then life got stressful, and you were right back where you started.

If that sounds familiar, I want you to know something: there is nothing wrong with you. Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The problem isn’t your character. It’s your brain’s ancient survival software running in a world it was never built for - a world that gets more complicated and overwhelming every year.

I’m an addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist. I’ve spent over twenty years studying why people get stuck in behavioral loops they can’t break — from heroin to cigarettes to overeating to anxiety itself. And here’s what I’ve learned: the same brain mechanism that drives a heroin addiction is driving your doomscrolling. The same reward-based learning that keeps someone reaching for a cigarette is what keeps you procrastinating on that report. I call these everyday addictions, and they are far more common — and far more treatable — than most people realize.

What Makes Something an “Everyday Addiction”?

Let’s start with the definition of addiction that is taught to all medical students: continued use despite adverse consequences.

Read that again. Continued use despite adverse consequences. Notice it doesn’t say anything about substances. It doesn’t mention needles or bottles or smoke. It simply means you keep doing something even though it’s hurting you.

Now apply that definition honestly to your own life. Continued scrolling despite sleep deprivation. Continued procrastination despite mounting deadlines and anxiety and unopened mail. Continued stress eating despite feeling terrible afterward. Continued binge-watching Netflix despite the growing pile of things that actually matter to you.

These behaviors follow the exact same neurological pattern as substance addiction. Your brain doesn’t care whether the reward comes from a nicotine molecule or a push notification. Dopamine is dopamine. A habit loop is a habit loop. The mechanism is identical. The only difference is that nobody stages an intervention for your TikTok or Instagram habit.

I didn’t fully appreciate this until I started looking beyond the clinic. After years of treating patients addicted to cocaine, alcohol, and heroin in my private clinic, I started asking myself a question: if the brain mechanism behind addiction is the same, shouldn’t we be seeing this pattern everywhere? So I started paying attention. I asked friends and colleagues about their habits. And I found addiction everywhere. Continued tweeting despite adverse consequences. Continued shopping despite adverse consequences. Continued worrying despite adverse consequences.

Eckhart Tolle once said that one of the greatest addictions is the addiction to thinking. I’d add: one of the most overlooked addictions is the addiction to avoidance.

The Hidden Engine: Why Most Everyday Addictions Are Anxiety in Disguise

Here’s the piece that most habit-change advice misses entirely, and it’s the reason most of that advice doesn’t work: the vast majority of everyday addictions are anxiety responses.

Think about it. When do you reach for your phone? Usually when you’re uncomfortable. Bored. Anxious. Restless. When do you procrastinate? When the task triggers some form of anxiety — fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear that you’re not good enough. When do you stress eat? When you feel anxious and your brain is desperate for relief.

The behavior is the symptom. Anxiety is the disease.

Let me show you what I mean with a patient I’ll call Dave. Dave weighed over 400 pounds when he came to see me. He knew he was eating himself to death. He’d tried every diet. He had willpower — this was a guy who ran a successful business. But every evening, the same thing happened: he’d feel anxious about work, drive to a fast food restaurant, and eat until the anxiety temporarily faded.

I didn’t put Dave on a diet. Instead, I had him map his habit loops. Every time he felt the urge to eat, I asked him to notice what was happening right before the urge. The answer, every single time, was anxiety. Anxiety about a deal. Anxiety about an employee. Anxiety about money. The food wasn’t the problem. The food was his brain’s attempt to solve the anxiety problem.

Once Dave could see the loop — anxiety triggers urge, urge triggers eating, eating triggers brief relief followed by more anxiety — something shifted. He didn’t need a meal plan. He needed to address the anxiety. Dave lost 14 pounds in two weeks. Not by restricting food. By mapping the anxiety that was driving him to eat.

Here’s how the anxiety loop works for common everyday addictions:

Procrastination = anxiety about the task (fear of failure, perfectionism, overwhelm) triggers avoidance behavior, avoidance provides temporary relief, relief reinforces avoidance as a “solution.” Your brain learns: when anxious about work, avoid work. Reward: anxiety drops momentarily. Cost: it comes back worse, plus now you’re behind.

Doomscrolling = free-floating anxiety or restlessness triggers information-seeking behavior. This is deprivation curiosity gone haywire — that restless, need-to-know itch that social media is engineered to exploit. You scroll seeking relief from uncertainty. You never find it because the feed never ends.

Compulsive phone checking = low-grade anxiety or boredom triggers the urge to check. Your phone delivers intermittent reinforcement — sometimes there’s something interesting, sometimes there isn’t — which is the exact reinforcement schedule that makes slot machines addictive. Your phone is a slot machine that lives in your pocket.

Stress eating = anxiety triggers the urge to eat, eating delivers a momentary dopamine hit and calms the nervous system briefly, the relief reinforces the loop. Then guilt and physical discomfort create more anxiety, and the cycle starts again.

Notice the pattern. The “reward” in every case is temporary escape from discomfort. That’s it. You’re not getting nourishment from the scrolling. You’re not getting genuine relaxation from the avoidance. You’re getting a few minutes of numbness before the anxiety comes back, usually louder.

Why Willpower Doesn’t Work (And It’s Not Your Fault)

If you’ve ever white-knuckled your way through a screen-free evening, only to find yourself doom-scrolling at midnight, you already know that willpower has limits. But it’s worse than that. The science shows that willpower as we understood it may not even exist.

For decades, psychologists promoted a theory called “ego depletion” — the idea that willpower is like a muscle that gets tired with use. It was one of the most cited findings in psychology. Then in 2016, a 23-lab replication study tried to reproduce the foundational ego depletion experiments. The result? They couldn’t. The effect essentially vanished.

But even if willpower were a real resource, there’s a more fundamental problem: it depends on your prefrontal cortex, the rational, planning, executive-function part of your brain. And the prefrontal cortex is the first region to go offline when you’re stressed or anxious. This is basic neuroscience. When your amygdala fires up with a stress response, it literally hijacks the PFC. The part of your brain you need to exercise willpower shuts down precisely when you need it most.

This is why you can make a perfectly rational plan at 9 AM — “I’m going to work on that report, I’m not going to check social media, I’m going to eat a healthy lunch” — and by 3 PM, when stress has accumulated and your PFC is running on fumes, you find yourself doing the exact opposite. That isn’t weakness. That’s neuroscience.

This is also why environment design strategies — “put your phone in another room,” “don’t keep snacks in the house,” “use website blockers” — work for simple habits but fail for anxiety-driven ones. You can remove every cookie from your kitchen, but you can’t remove the anxiety that’s driving you to seek comfort. And a brain in anxiety mode is creative. It will find a substitute. This is the substitution trap: you stop scrolling and start snacking. You stop snacking and start shopping. You stop shopping and start worrying. The behavior changes but the underlying loop remains untouched because nobody addressed the root cause - anxiety itself.

Habit trackers have the same blind spot. They track the behavior beautifully — check marks, streaks, percentages. But they don’t track the emotional trigger. And if you don’t understand what’s driving the behavior, all you’re doing is putting a bandage on a wound you haven’t cleaned.

How Your Brain Builds an Everyday Addiction: Reward-Based Learning

To change something, you need to understand how it works. So let me walk you through the mechanism — what neuroscientists call reward-based learning — in plain English.

Your brain evolved one job above all others: keep you alive. And the primary way it does this is through a simple learning system. See food, eat food, feel good, remember what you ate and where you found it. Trigger, behavior, reward. Repeat. This system is so fundamental that scientists can observe it in sea slugs — organisms with only 20,000 neurons. (Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for this discovery.)

This system runs on dopamine. When you do something that your brain codes as rewarding, dopamine neurons fire and essentially stamp that experience with a “do this again” label. Over time, the behavior becomes automatic. You don’t decide to reach for your phone when you’re anxious. Your brain does it for you, below the level of conscious awareness.

Now here’s where it gets interesting for everyday addictions. Your brain doesn’t just learn from survival rewards like food and water. It learns from anything that provides relief from discomfort. Including the momentary distraction of a social media feed. Including the brief numbness of a procrastination binge. Including the temporary comfort of stress eating.

Three features of modern life supercharge this learning system:

Intermittent Reinforcement: Your Phone Is a Slot Machine

The most addictive type of reinforcement isn’t constant reward. It’s unpredictable reward. Casinos figured this out long ago — slot machines are tuned to pay out just often enough to keep you playing, even though on average you always lose. Your phone works the same way. Every notification, every new email, every social media refresh delivers an unpredictable reward. Sometimes it’s interesting. Sometimes it’s nothing. That randomness is what keeps your dopamine system hooked. If you got the same notification at the same time every day, your brain would habituate and stop caring. It’s the unpredictability that makes it addictive.

Immediate Availability: No Friction, No Thinking

Two hundred years ago, if you wanted a pair of shoes, you hitched a horse to a wagon, rode to town, talked to someone at a general store, went home, waited two weeks, and rode back. That process gave your brain time to cool down. The excitement could pass. You could evaluate whether you actually needed the shoes. Today? Two clicks and they arrive tomorrow. Every craving can be satisfied instantly. Stressed? Cupcakes are a delivery app away. Bored? Infinite content awaits. Anxious? Cute animal videos, one tap away. Author Anna Kornbluth calls this a “culture of immediacy” - the modern world has eliminated the friction that once gave our rational brains time to come back online.

Habituation: The Hedonic Treadmill

Your brain adapts to rewards. The first scroll through social media is interesting. By the fiftieth, you need more novel, more stimulating content to get the same dopamine hit. This is why you keep scrolling even when the content has stopped being interesting. Your brain is chasing a reward it calibrated to hours ago. You need more and cuter puppies to get the same fix. This habituation drives escalation — longer scrolling sessions, more extreme content, more frequent checking. The same pattern that drives substance tolerance drives your TikTok habit.

The Three Gears: A Neuroscience-Based Path Out

Here’s the good news: the same reward-based learning system that built these habits can unlearn them. You don’t need more willpower. You need to work with your brain’s learning system instead of against it.

In my clinical research and in my books Unwinding Anxiety and The Craving Mind, I’ve laid out a framework I call the Three Gears. This isn’t theory — it’s backed by clinical trials showing 5x the quit rates for smoking compared to the gold standard treatment, a 40% reduction in craving-related eating, and a 67% reduction in anxiety (which, as we’ve discussed, is the engine behind most everyday addictions).

First Gear: Map Your Habit Loops

You can’t change what you can’t see. The first step is simply noticing your loops as they happen. Not judging them. Not trying to stop them. Just mapping them with curiosity.

The format is simple: Trigger → Behavior → Result.

Try this right now. Think of the last time you procrastinated. What was the trigger? Not just “I had work to do,” but what were you feeling? Anxious about the task? Overwhelmed? Afraid it wouldn’t be good enough? That feeling is the trigger.

Then what did you do? Check your phone? Clean something? Open a browser tab? That’s the behavior.

And how did you feel afterward? Be honest — did the procrastination actually make you feel better? Or did you feel a brief moment of relief followed by guilt, more anxiety, and now less time to complete the task? That’s the result.

Do this for a week. Every time you catch yourself in an everyday addiction loop, just note: trigger, behavior, result. You’ll start seeing patterns you never noticed before. Most people discover that 80% of their habit loops share the same trigger: some flavor of anxiety or discomfort.

Second Gear: Become Disenchanted

This is the gear that does the heavy lifting, and it’s the one most approaches skip entirely.

Once you can see your habit loops, the next step is to pay very close attention to what you actually get from the behavior. Not what your brain promises you’ll get. What you actually get.

I discovered this in my smoking cessation research. We didn’t tell smokers to quit. We told them to smoke — but to pay very careful attention while doing it. To really notice the taste, the smell, the sensation. One participant came back and described the experience with a phrase I’ll never forget: it smelled like stinky cheese and tasted like chemicals. And then she said a single word that changed everything: YUCK.

That was the moment of disenchantment. Her brain wasn’t being told that smoking was bad — she already knew that. Instead, her brain was getting updated reward information. It was recalculating the actual value of the behavior based on present-moment experience rather than a memory of how good it used to feel.

You can do this with any everyday addiction. The next time you’ve been scrolling for twenty minutes, pause and honestly check in. How does your body feel? Are you more relaxed than when you started, or more wired? Has the anxiety decreased or increased? What did you actually gain from those twenty minutes? Most people, when they honestly ask themselves this question, discover the answer is: not much. The behavior doesn’t deliver what it promises.

This isn’t about shaming yourself. It’s about letting your brain do what it does naturally — update its predictions based on new information. When your brain realizes that scrolling doesn’t actually reduce anxiety, that procrastinating doesn’t actually make the task easier, that stress eating doesn’t actually provide comfort — the habit starts to lose its grip. Not because you forced it. Because the reward value dropped.

Third Gear: The Bigger Better Offer

Old habits don’t disappear into a vacuum. Your brain needs something to replace them with. But — and this is critical — you can’t just swap one distraction for another. Remember the substitution trap? Replacing scrolling with snacking doesn’t help because you haven’t addressed the underlying trigger.

The Bigger Better Offer (BBO) that actually works isn’t another behavior. It’s a quality of mind: curiosity.

Here’s how it works in practice. You feel the urge to check your phone. Instead of acting on it or trying to suppress it, you get curious about the urge itself. What does this craving actually feel like in my body? Where do I feel it? Is it in my chest? My hands? What happens if I just notice it without acting on it?

This shifts you from autopilot to awareness. From reacting to observing. And here’s the neuroscience kicker: curiosity is intrinsically rewarding. It feels good to be curious. It literally activates reward circuits in the brain. So you’re not gritting your teeth through the craving. You’re replacing a shallow, fleeting reward (the scroll) with a deeper, more satisfying one (genuine curious awareness). Your brain prefers it because it’s a better deal.

I think of it as shifting from “Oh no, here’s the urge again” to “Ohhh, interesting — what does this urge feel like right now?” That tiny shift — from “Oh no!” to “Ohhh?” — is what my research shows makes the difference.

The Evidence: This Approach Works

I’m a scientist, so I don’t ask you to take anything on faith. Here’s what the clinical data shows:

Smoking cessation: In a randomized controlled trial, our mindfulness-based approach produced quit rates 5 times higher than the gold standard treatment (the American Lung Association’s Freedom From Smoking program).

Emotional eating: A 40% reduction in craving-related eating using the same map-your-loops, get-disenchanted, find-the-BBO framework.

Chronic Anxiety: A 67% reduction in anxiety scores — which matters enormously for everyday addictions because, as I’ve been arguing throughout this article, anxiety is the engine driving most of these behaviors.

And then there’s Dave, who I mentioned earlier. He didn’t go on a diet. He mapped his anxiety-to-food habit loops, got disenchanted with the actual reward of fast food bingeing (it didn’t actually fix the anxiety), and started getting curious about the anxiety itself instead of running from it. Fourteen pounds in two weeks, without targeting food at all.

The lesson from all of this data is straightforward: when you address the mechanism — reward-based learning — the behavior changes. And when the underlying trigger is anxiety, addressing the anxiety has an outsized effect on every habit loop it fuels.

Putting It Into Practice: Your First Week

Here’s a concrete way to start, beginning today:

Days 1-3: Map. Pick one everyday addiction — whichever one bothers you most. Every time you catch yourself doing it (or about to do it), write down: What was I feeling right before? What did I do? How do I feel now? Don’t try to change anything. Just observe and record.

Days 4-5: Get curious about the “reward.” Before you act on the urge, ask yourself: what am I actually getting from this? Then go ahead and do the behavior if you want to — but pay very close attention while you do it. Notice what it actually delivers versus what your brain told you it would deliver.

Days 6-7: Try the curiosity BBO. When the urge arises, try this: instead of acting on it, get curious about the urge itself for thirty seconds. Notice the physical sensation of the craving. Where is it in your body? What does it feel like? Does it change as you watch it? You might be surprised to find that the urge peaks and fades on its own within a couple of minutes — something you never noticed because you always acted on it immediately.

This isn’t a seven-day cure. It’s the beginning of a fundamental shift in how you relate to your habits. You’re not fighting them. You’re understanding them. And understanding is far more powerful than force.

When the Underlying Anxiety Needs More Attention

For some people, mapping habit loops and practicing curiosity is enough to break free from an everyday addiction. The loop loses its power once you can see it clearly.

But for many people — especially those whose everyday addictions are deeply driven by anxiety — the habit loops are just the surface. The anxiety underneath keeps generating new triggers, new urges, new loops. You break the scrolling habit and the anxiety shifts to worry spirals. You stop the stress eating and the anxiety shows up as insomnia.

If that sounds like you, it means the anxiety itself has become a habit — and it needs its own attention. This is the focus of my Going Beyond Anxiety program, where we work directly with anxiety as a habit loop in a community setting with live guidance. Because here’s what two decades of research have taught me: anxiety follows the exact same reward-based learning pattern as every other habit. Worry feels productive, so your brain does more of it. Avoidance feels safe, so your brain does more of it. These “rewards” are illusory, just like the reward of a forty-five-minute scroll session. And they respond to the same Three Gears approach.

My book Unwinding Anxiety walks through this in detail. And you can watch my TED talk on breaking bad habits for a quick overview of the foundational framework that applies to all of these patterns.

You’re Not Broken — Your Brain Just Needs an Update

If you’ve been beating yourself up for your everyday addictions — if you’ve told yourself you’re lazy, undisciplined, weak, or broken — I want to be very clear: you are none of those things. You are a human being with a brain that evolved for a world that no longer exists, living in an environment specifically engineered to exploit your ancient reward-learning system.

The fact that you can’t willpower your way out of doomscrolling is not a character flaw. It’s the same reason you can’t willpower your way out of flinching when someone throws a ball at your face. These are deep, automatic brain processes. Judging yourself for them is like judging yourself for having a heartbeat.

But here’s what you can do: you can learn how these processes work. You can map your loops. You can get disenchanted with habits that aren’t serving you. You can discover that curiosity — genuine, open, interested curiosity about your own experience — is a more rewarding alternative than anything your phone or your pantry has to offer.

That’s not willpower. That’s wisdom. And your brain is built for it.

If you’re ready to start working with the anxiety underneath your everyday addictions, the Going Beyond Anxiety program gives you the tools, the community, and the live support to do exactly that. Because you don’t need another productivity hack. You need to address what’s actually driving the behavior. And now you know what that is.

Onward.