Exercise Addiction

When your commitment to exercise becomes bad for your health.

- Pedro van Gaalen

While exercise is a healthy pursuit and pushing your physical limits to achieve new personal bests is an admirable trait, problems arise when it becomes something else.

When taken to extremes, exercise actually damages our health, often leading to conditions like anaemia, arthritis, heart problems, memory loss, soft tissue and bone injuries, and even infertility. In the worst case scenario, you can even exercise yourself to death.

However, there are many who feel a compulsion to exercise often and to extremes and the thought of taking a day off from training tends to result in anxiety or stress. In most cases, where the desire to become fit and healthy becomes an all-consuming obsession, we can generally start to frame this as exercise addiction.

This psychological state is characterised by a compulsive engagement in any form of physical exercise, despite any potential negative consequences.

However, according to Renee Shearing, a Cape Town-based registered Occupational Therapist and Tension/Trauma Release Exercise and EMDR practitioner, who specialises in dealing with and counselling addictions, eating disorders, stress and trauma, diagnosing a condition such as exercise addiction can be tricky because it is commonly associated with other psychological disorders.

There are, of course, those people who chase the endorphin and serotonin and dopamine rush that comes from exercise, similar to that of some drug and alcohol addicts. The release of these neurotransmitters act on the nervous system to create a sense of pleasure or reward, which exercise addicts may develop a dependency to. This is termed primary exercise addiction, as the physical activity itself is the gratification.