There's No Such Thing as an Addictive Personality

I'm willing to bet that most people have used the phrase "I just have an addictive personality" at some point in their life. Probably as a teenager, after guiltily buying their fourth mocha frappuccino of the week.

But the trite phrase that gets casually thrown around to deflect shame over indulging in a vice is not only a misnomer, it's a potentially harmful one at that.

As this new SciShow episode goes into, having an addictive personality isn't really possible, and it's definitely not a psychiatric disorder. However, if you're going to keep using the phrase, you should know that it generally refers to three psychological factors: addiction, personality, and disorders.

Addiction is defined by a person's inability to consistently abstain, exert control over cravings, and recognize their problems, according to the American Society of Addiction Medicine. It's a disease that stimulates the reward centers in someone's brain, and over time, damages their health, work, or relationships, the video adds.

There are many types of addictions, such as food, drug, alcohol, and even sex addiction. But when someone's body becomes chemically dependent on a stimulant, for example, heroin, doctors refer to this as a substance use disorder. When a person stops using that substance, their body will go through withdrawal symptoms.

The disorder used to be referred to as "substance abuse" or "substance dependence," but recently diagnosticians elected to change the name and instead define a sufferer's level of abuse as mild, moderate, or severe.

Addictive behavior, however, isn't necessarily connected to chemical dependency, the video explains.

People can exhibit addictive behaviors, such as binge shopping, without being chemically dependent on any sort of substance. This type of behavior is defined as a psychological disorder. Often people can become addicted to more than one thing, and move from one addictive behavior to the next, the narrator says.

The exact causes of addiction still haven't been identified. There's a lot of evidence to support that addiction can be influenced by both genetics and environmental factors like trauma stemming from abuse, but many of these people might also never struggle with addiction, the video notes.

Personality, while a pretty nebulous term in the field of psychology, is generally defined as a person's distinctive characteristic patterns of thinking, according to the American Psychological Association. There are too many theories to count for how, exactly, personality works. But, as the narrator describes, there are three that help to explain why an addictive personality isn't actually a thing.

Psychodynamic theory addresses the clash between pleasure-seeking and constraint (the id and the superego, in Freudian terms). According to this theory, addiction would serve as a defense against helplessness, trauma, or other emotions that influence us. The social-cognitive perspective, on the other hand, points out that people around us influence our behaviors, so our personalities and social preferences play off each other. Want to kick your alcoholism? Then don't go to bars, this theory would say. Finally, trait theory suggests we all have fixed traits that predict our normal behavior, but only to a limit.

So the supposed definition of an addictive personality really relies on the erroneous belief that certain personality traits make someone vulnerable to addiction. The truth is, those traits don't exist. You don't smoke because your personality drives you to, you smoke because of one or more biological or external factors that have made you susceptible to the disease addiction.

You can thank the National Research Council for introducing the term "addictive personality" sometime in the early 1980s when they published a book that included a chapter about the types of "personality factors" that might relate to addiction. However, the narrator clarifies, the author of the chapter, psychology professor Dr. Alan Lang, actually concluded: "There is no single, unique personality entity that is a necessary and sufficient condition for substance abuse."

So if you hear someone say, "I have an addictive personality," and you're feeling like being a pedant about it, go ahead and tell them this: Addiction is not a personality disorder. Personality disorders can occur without addictions, and addictions can occur without personality disorders. Personality traits don't have a cause-and-effect connection to addiction, and they're certainly not predictive of it. What you're probably referring to is the influence of one or more genetic or external stressors that have made you a likely candidate for addiction.

Or you could just, you know, let it go.