Understand Your Feelings

Passion or Addiction: 6 Ways to Understand Your Feelings

Sometimes being infatuated with someone is excessive, destructive, and all-consuming. Any passion ? in work, hobbies, relationships ? has a dark and light side. How to distinguish healthy passion from obsession and cope with addiction? Find out the ways here to understand your feelings.

Passion is a necessary attribute of a full and successful life. So it is generally accepted. Harmonious passion is a healthy variation in senior dating: it energizes and motivates. Obsession, on the contrary, harms a person. It makes you feel melancholy, tension, and guilt. Both love passion and passion for any activity can develop into an obsession. How to recognize addiction and get rid of it?

1. Determine whether your passion is harmonious

Signs of a healthy passion:

  • You get joy and satisfaction from what you do;
  • You can prioritize: when you can do what you love, and when you need to pay attention to other things;
  • You can break away from your favorite activity at any time and devote time to family, work, and friends.

2. Do not follow your feelings

If you suspect that passion is becoming an obsession, try not to get emotional. As soon as you feel a strong urge to do what you love ? go for a run, play the guitar, write your fifth blog post of the day, or call a partner for the twentieth time ? stop and think. When you start to analyze, desire weakens, and you learn to control your emotions.

3. Assess the sacrifices you make

By indulging in passion, you steal time from other activities and hobbies. 2-3 hours a day may seem like a small waste of time, but in the long run, this is already hundreds of hours that can get in the way of your career, business, and relationships. Therefore, do not forget to estimate the possible losses.

4. Get rid of the circumstances provoking your passion

Harmonious passion brings pleasure, while obsession is always associated with fear. We go for a run because we are afraid of gaining excess weight, we write several posts a day, fearing that we will lose subscribers, we play the guitar frenziedly so that the teacher who said that we have no talent turns out to be wrong. It is easy to turn passion into an obsession if your self-esteem and identity depend on it. Remember, your passion is just what you do, not yourself.

5. Take a break from time to time

To prevent passion from turning into an addiction, take a break from it so you can keep it under control. If during the set time of ?fasting? your heart rate does not increase, sweating does not arise, and obsessive thoughts do not come to mind, then your passion is harmonious.

6. Create a set of alternative activities

To avoid addiction, come up with options that can replace your passion. If you love to spend all your time with your partner, diversify this activity. Volleyball, cycling, swimming, and hiking in the woods with friends are good options. When you see that there are many opportunities in life, you do not run the risk of becoming addicted to one activity or person.