What is behavioural addiction?
Researchers use one term for activities from gambling to heavy internet use. Three papers show where the evidence is firm and where the definition is still argued over.
Answer to the question
What is behavioural addiction?
Behavioural addiction is the term for repeated activities without a substance, such as gambling or heavy internet use, that researchers study with the vocabulary of addiction. Researchers disagree about how far the label should stretch, and the evidence is strongest for gambling and internet addiction.
Key takeaways
- A 2010 review by four researchers described non-substance behaviours that bring short-term rewards and are repeated despite known harms, and compared them with substance addictions.
- That review judged the evidence strongest for gambling and internet addiction, and too limited to classify other proposed behavioural addictions.
- A 2017 proposal by ten researchers, Joël Billieux among them, offered a definition with exclusion criteria to avoid treating ordinary behaviour as pathological.
- In 2015 Billieux and colleagues argued that framing behaviours such as gambling, sex and internet use as addictions can oversimplify a person's psychological functioning.
- The papers define and classify. They do not report outcomes for individuals, and they do not advise anyone about their own behaviour.
Researchers use the phrase behavioural addiction for repeated activities, such as gambling or heavy internet use, that they study with the vocabulary of addiction without a substance involved. They agree that some people find certain activities hard to stop and disagree about how far the label should stretch. Our view is that the category has a core where the evidence is strongest and an edge where it is thin, and the argument is about where one gives way to the other.
Born as a classification question
A review by four researchers set out the starting idea. Some behaviours that involve no substance bring short-term rewards, and people keep repeating them despite known harms and with reduced self-control. The authors noted that such problems had been described in two ways: as part of an impulsive-compulsive spectrum, or as behavioural addictions.
The review was written with a practical question in mind. The fifth edition of the DSM, the diagnostic manual, was being prepared, and the authors compared behavioural addictions with substance addictions to inform how the behaviours should be classified.
So the term began as a classification question rather than a popular label. It asked whether activities without a substance belong in the same family as the ones with one.
The 2010 review reported that behavioural addictions resemble substance addictions in many respects, among them how the problems progress, their symptoms, tolerance, shared genetic factors and brain mechanisms. On that basis it supported a proposed category that would group substance and non-substance addictions together.
It also graded the evidence. The case was strongest for gambling and for internet addiction, and the authors judged the data too limited to classify other proposed behavioural addictions. For a reader meeting the term in the wild, that grading is the most useful single fact in the paper, because it means behavioural addiction names a ranked list of candidates rather than a set of equally established ones. A claim that a particular activity is a behavioural addiction needs its own evidence, and the label alone does not supply it.
Resemblance is also a matter of degree. The review's wording, many respects, leaves room for differences between the two kinds of addiction.
The case for a narrower definition
Ten researchers, Joël Billieux among them, published a proposal in the journal Addiction in 2017. They observed that after the DSM-5 revised its category of addictive disorders, research increasingly labelled many common behaviours and leisure activities as possible behavioural addictions. Their response was a definition with exclusion criteria, written to avoid treating ordinary behaviour as pathological.
Exclusion criteria draw the outer edge of a category. Repetition, reward and difficulty stopping are features that many enjoyable activities share, so a definition built only from them can take in a great deal of ordinary life. Naming what does not count keeps the category tied to the cases it was made for.
The authors also invited other researchers to extend the definition through an open framework. The proposal was offered as something to build on.
A 2015 paper by Billieux and five colleagues described one person's heavy mobile phone use twice. The first description was symptom-based and drew on the addiction model. The second was process-based and followed the person's own psychological processes. The authors argued that the process-based description captured more, and that framing behaviours such as gambling, sex and internet use as addictions can oversimplify a person's psychological functioning.
The phone case has its own article, Is phone addiction real?, which sets the scales and the competing labels side by side.
At the broad end of the range sits Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation. The book applies the addiction frame to a wide run of everyday behaviours, among them food, shopping, gambling and gaming, and it defines addiction by continued compulsive use despite harm to self or others. Because that definition rests on a pattern rather than a substance, it can be carried from one behaviour to the next. The 2017 proposal sits at the other end, where the definition is built to exclude. The two answer the same question about where the category stops, from opposite directions.
The vocabulary used across these papers is gathered below.
| Term | How it is used in these papers |
|---|---|
| Behavioural addiction | A repeated activity without a substance, studied with the vocabulary and methods of addiction research (behavioral addiction in US spelling) |
| Impulsive-compulsive spectrum | An alternative grouping for the same problems, named in the 2010 review |
| Exclusion criteria | Conditions that rule an ordinary behaviour out of the category, proposed in 2017 |
| Symptom-based approach | Describing heavy use by matching it to the features of an addiction model |
| Process-based approach | Describing heavy use through the psychological processes of the individual |
Our position on the umbrella term
Behavioural addiction works as an umbrella term for research on repeated, hard-to-stop activities, and it works best when it says which activity is meant. The evidence the papers describe is graded: strongest for gambling and internet addiction in the 2010 review, thinner for the rest.
The definitional proposals matter for the same reason. A category with no outer edge cannot be tested, and a category with an edge can be argued over with evidence. Our position is that the umbrella is useful as a description of a research field and that each activity under it carries its own burden of proof.
Design writing uses a different vocabulary for repeated use. The habit loop describes how a cue, a routine and a reward become automatic, and the Hook Model describes how products are built around a trigger, an action, a variable reward and an investment. Each has its own article, What is a habit loop? and What is the Hook Model?
These frameworks describe how repetition forms or how products invite it. They do not decide whether a repeated behaviour counts as an addiction, which is the question the research above is arguing about.
Habit language asks how a pattern forms. Addiction language asks whether a pattern falls inside a defined boundary, and that second question is still being worked out in the literature, where the 2017 authors offered their definition as a starting point for further work and invited other scientists in the field to extend it.
Common questions
What is behavioural addiction?
Researchers use the term for repeated activities without a substance, such as gambling or heavy internet use, that are studied with the vocabulary of addiction. Whether a given activity belongs in the category is debated.
Which behaviours does the research support most?
A 2010 review judged the evidence strongest for gambling and internet addiction and too limited to classify other proposed behavioural addictions.
Why do some researchers argue for a narrower definition?
A 2017 proposal observed that many common behaviours and leisure activities were being labelled as possible behavioural addictions, and offered exclusion criteria to avoid treating ordinary behaviour as pathological.
Does this article give advice about anyone's behaviour?
No. It describes how researchers define and debate the term. It makes no clinical claims and does not assess any individual.
Sources
Lembke, A. Dopamine Nation. Seed book; vault hub Books/Dopamine Nation.
Grant, J. E., Potenza, M. N., Weinstein, A., & Gorelick, D. A. (2010). “Introduction to behavioral addictions.” The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 36(5), 233-241. doi:10.3109/00952990.2010.491884 https://doi.org/10.3109/00952990.2010.491884
Kardefelt-Winther, D., Heeren, A., Schimmenti, A., van Rooij, A., Maurage, P., Carras, M., Edman, J., Blaszczynski, A., Khazaal, Y., & Billieux, J. (2017). “How can we conceptualize behavioural addiction without pathologizing common behaviours?” Addiction, 112(10), 1709-1715. doi:10.1111/add.13763 https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13763
Billieux, J., Philippot, P., Schmid, C., Maurage, P., De Mol, J., & Van der Linden, M. (2015). “Is dysfunctional use of the mobile phone a behavioural addiction? Confronting symptom-based versus process-based approaches.” Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 22(5), 460-468. doi:10.1002/cpp.1910 https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.1910