Can You Become Addicted to Writing?

Can you become addicted to writing? I never thought about it before tonight. But that may have been what happened to me a little more than a year ago.

You see, it all started when I realized I was writing very lengthy comment responses on Facebook. Some of the individual comments were hundreds of words long. I sat and counted the words I wrote in a day by commenting on posts. It was a minimum of approximately 300 words to well into the thousands. I was not happy to realize I was wasting all the energy I could be using to write something more important.

The worst part was that a lot of this was on posts in writing groups. I spent more time writing about writing than actually writing. But rather than sinking into sadness over this revelation, I decided to put a positive spin on it.

Seeing it as a sign that, yes, I in fact can write more per day than I had been, I had just misplaced that energy. However, this led to a problem. I began getting obsessed with making sure that I was putting out new content every day. And this led to me sometimes getting agitated when that didn’t happen.

So that now presents the question. Did I become addicted to writing? Or at least the dopamine high of creating new content every day. Is this bad for someone? Is it hypergraphia? Had I in fact become hooked on phonics?

I had never thought about it as being an addiction. After all, we associate that with substances or things that give us an obvious dopamine rush( adrenaline/ video games).

But once I couldn’t do it due to my workload. I felt the same withdrawal. An insatiable desire to crank out more and more content. Discontent with merely enjoying the process of creating.

This period was a pretty rough patch of my life, as for a lot of my life I had been shy about writing, usually keeping it to myself stored in hidden notebooks. Or lost to time in a million scraps of paper that I wrote things down on but lost at various times in my life. A personal library of Alexandria.

So to suddenly be cut off from one of the things that gave me a sense of pride, productivity, and contribution to society was hard. After all, the year before I had identified and corrected one of the things that plagues many artists and creatives. And had turned that around to something that was exciting and helped me engage with the writing community.

But back to the central question, can one become addicted to writing?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. It doesn’t have the same psycho-chemical properties as most addictions. And it never had the all-consuming time consumption that other non-psycho-chemical addictions do. However, the inability to engage with writing was very distressing.

It was not just distressing on the days when I didn’t have time to write. But it became stressful on the days that I had the time because I would often end up just staring blankly at my screen. My fire had been snuffed out, and I didn’t know what to do. Little did I know there was a big change on the horizon.

It was not long after this period that I would unintentionally have more time off than I had since 2020.

While I spent most of this time recovering, it did have an unintentional upside. After I had a more regular routine, I was able to start writing again. But now, eight months later I have a healthier balance. Rather than feeling the need to write every day, I write as often as I can, and publish it with the same “go for it” attitude I had when I was pushing myself to publish something every day.

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