Are You Addicted to Exercise?
"No days off" is a slogan, a t-shirt, and a diagnostic criterion, depending on who's reading it.
Exercise addiction is not an official diagnosis. It isn't in the DSM-5. It didn't make the ICD-11 either, where the World Health Organization built an entire category for addictive behaviors and then let exactly two things in: gambling and gaming. Shopping didn't make it. Work didn't make it. Neither did exercise.
That absence doesn't mean the behavior isn't real. It means the field has spent fifty years unable to agree on what to call it, and in the meantime the culture went ahead and decided it was aspirational.
Is exercise addiction a real diagnosis?
No, and the disagreement starts with the name. Researchers use exercise addiction, exercise dependence, compulsive exercise, and obligatory exercise, often for things that look identical from the outside. Excessive exercise does appear in the DSM-5, but only as a symptom of an eating disorder. On its own it has no code and no criteria.
What it has instead is a borrowed checklist. The psychologist Mark Griffiths proposed six components that run across behavioral addictions, and exercise can tick every one of them.
So can training for a hundred-mile race. That's the whole problem.
Ask a marathoner in peak build whether she gets anxious when she can't run, whether she's trained through an injury, whether running is the most important thing in her day. You'll get yes, yes, and absolutely yes. Ask someone whose life is coming apart and you get the same three answers. Most screening tools cannot tell them apart.
Where did the idea of exercise addiction come from?
Somewhere stranger than you'd guess.
In 1970 a psychiatrist set out to study what rest does to habitual exercisers. He never published, because he physically could not recruit enough of them willing to stop for thirty days, even for money.
Six years later, in the middle of America's first running boom, another psychiatrist published a book called Positive Addiction, arguing that some addictions are good for you and running is the best example. The founding case study is a professional baseball player who compulsively swung a bat 600 times a night. If he only got through 300, he couldn't sleep, so he'd get up in the dark and finish the count.
The author looked at that man and saw self-actualization. He also thought clinical depression was basically a choice.
The counterargument came in 1979, and then in 1983 a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine noticed that obsessive male runners looked, psychologically, a great deal like the women being treated for anorexia. Same perfectionism. Same need for control. Same habit of treating the body as a project requiring discipline.
That connection was real. It also created a problem we're still living in.
Why compulsive exercise gets applause instead of concern
Nobody prints a gambling addiction on a shirt. "No days off" is a slogan people sell for a profit.
Someone binge eating knows the behavior isn't healthy. Someone doing a ninety-minute max effort session on almost no food gets called an inspiration, and Netflix makes a documentary about them. Compulsive exercise is a disorder that gets to dress up as a virtue, which makes it one of the most dangerous eating disorder behaviors and one of the easiest to miss.
The gender of it still holds. When a woman reorganizes her life around workouts, the culture reads vanity, or illness. When a man does the identical thing, it reads as discipline, and we hand him a podcast and ideally a supplement line.
What are the signs of exercise addiction?
Throw out the numbers first. There's no weekly mileage, no session count, and no hourly threshold that marks the line. Two people can do identical training and have completely different relationships to it. If you came looking for a number to check yourself against, that impulse to quantify is worth noticing on its own.
What actually carries information:
Withdrawal that goes past disappointment. Real anxiety, irritability, guilt, restlessness on a rest day. If one missed session reshapes your whole day, look at that.
Training through your body's stop signs. Continuing when injured, sick, exhausted, or after a clinician told you to stop, because not training feels worse than the damage does.
The plan stops bending. Life produces weddings and funerals and deadlines. When a disrupted plan feels less like an inconvenience and more like an emergency, the problem isn't that you train hard.
Exercise is the only tool. Movement genuinely helps mood. If it's the only thing that regulates you, the toolbox is one tool deep.
Secrecy. Hiding volume, fudging what you actually did, not counting the walks, getting defensive when someone asks a gentle question. Your bones count that mileage whether or not you log it.
The question was never how much you exercise. It's whether you're still the one deciding.
If you want one gut check: forget the volume and ask what happens when you can't train. A forced week off that's annoying means you're fine. A forced week off that feels like a crisis is the thing to look at.
In the episode we give you four ways to tell dedication from compulsion, what the prevalence research actually shows once you look at the confidence intervals, and what to do if you recognize yourself. Kylee walks through what this looks like in her practice: the athletes who won't report an injury because they're afraid of losing their training, the cross-training math, the walks that quietly don't get counted.
Rest is not a reward you unlock after suffering enough to deserve it.
- 00:00 Welcome to the podcast that does take days off
- 01:09 Addiction, dependence, or compulsion: does the word matter?
- 05:52 Why nobody in the field agrees on a name
- 07:00 Not in the DSM-5, not in the ICD-11
- 09:00 The six-part checklist researchers actually use
- 10:54 Why "addiction" may be the wrong frame
- 13:04 What happens if we don't take it seriously
- 13:43 Strava, praise, and a disorder dressed up as a virtue
- 16:43 What Kylee sees in practice
- 18:05 Earning your food
- 18:32 Chasing a high versus escaping a low
- 22:26 What brain imaging does and doesn't show
- 25:48 1970: the sleep study nobody would sign up for
- 27:29 1976: Positive Addiction and the man who swung a bat 600 times a night
- 32:27 Can a behavior be an addiction at all?
- 35:21 1979 and 1983: negative addiction and the anorexia analogue
- 36:50 The gender problem this created
- 38:57 How common is it, really?
- 40:46 Who is actually at higher risk
- 42:43 What it looks like day to day
- 44:02 The identity question
- 49:04 Warning signs worth taking seriously
- 52:35 The balloon analogy
- 54:27 Four ways to tell dedication from compulsion
- 56:44 What to do next
- 59:35 How to talk to someone you love
- 62:41 Why our culture celebrates this
- 64:53 Takeaways
- Why "exercise addiction," "exercise dependence," and "compulsive exercise" are not interchangeable, and which one the research actually uses
- Why exercise addiction is absent from both the DSM-5 and the ICD-11, where gambling and gaming are the only recognized behavioral addictions
- Mark Griffiths' six criteria for behavioral addiction, and why exercise can tick every box
- Why screening questionnaires cannot separate a hard-training athlete from someone in real trouble, since both answer the same way
- The problem with an abstinence-based treatment model applied to a body that has to move
- How exercise flips from positive reinforcement to negative reinforcement, and why escaping a low has no ceiling the way chasing a high does
- What the neuroimaging literature actually contains: eight studies total, seven of them a single snapshot in time
- Frederick Baekeland's 1970 sleep study, which collapsed because he could not pay habitual exercisers to stop for thirty days
- William Glasser's Positive Addiction (1976), the bat-swinging baseball player at its center, and what Glasser also believed about clinical depression
- William Morgan's "negative addiction" in runners (1979) as the counterargument
- Alayne Yates' 1983 New England Journal of Medicine paper, and the gendered vocabulary problem it created
- What the prevalence meta-analyses report: roughly 5 to 8 percent across subgroups, with confidence intervals wide enough to drive a truck through
- The overlap with eating disorders, where the odds run about three and a half times higher
- Perfectionism, anxiety, and why endurance and aesthetic sports concentrate the risk
- Warning signs that have nothing to do with volume: withdrawal, rigidity, secrecy, and training through your body's stop signs
- Four heuristics for telling dedication from compulsion: choice, flexibility, cost, and reason
- What to do if you recognize yourself, and how to talk to a friend without making them defend the behavior harder
Baekeland, F. (1970). Exercise deprivation: Sleep and psychological reactions. Archives of General Psychiatry, 22(4), 365–369. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.1970.01740280077014
Billieux, J., Schimmenti, A., Khazaal, Y., Maurage, P., & Heeren, A. (2015). Are we overpathologizing everyday life? A tenable blueprint for behavioral addiction research. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 4(3), 119–123. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.4.2015.009
Glasser, W. (1976). Positive addiction. Harper & Row.
Griffiths, M. (2005). A "components" model of addiction within a biopsychosocial framework. Journal of Substance Use, 10(4), 191–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/14659890500114359
Morgan, W. P. (1979). Negative addiction in runners. The Physician and Sportsmedicine, 7(2), 55–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913847.1979.11948436
Pirwani, N., & Szabo, A. (2025). Exercise addiction: A systematic review of neuroimaging evidence. Current Addiction Reports, 12(1), Article 76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40429-025-00693-0
Trott, M., Jackson, S. E., Firth, J., Fisher, A., Johnstone, J., Mistry, A., Stubbs, B., & Smith, L. (2020). Exercise addiction prevalence and correlates in the absence of eating disorder symptomology: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Addiction Medicine, 14(6), e321–e329. https://doi.org/10.1097/ADM.0000000000000664
Trott, M., Jackson, S. E., Firth, J., Jacob, L., Grabovac, I., Mistry, A., Stubbs, B., & Smith, L. (2021). A comparative meta-analysis of the prevalence of exercise addiction in adults with and without indicated eating disorders. Eating and Weight Disorders, 26(1), 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40519-019-00842-1
Yates, A., Leehey, K., & Shisslak, C. M. (1983). Running—An analogue of anorexia? The New England Journal of Medicine, 308(5), 251–255. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM198302033080504
ZOË: Welcome to Your Diet Sucks, the podcast that does take days off. I'm Zoë Rom. And I'm Kylee Van Horn. So, Kylee, what do you know or think or have with exercise addiction? Are you insinuating that I have?
KYLEE: No. No. What do you have with exercise?
ZOË: No, I actually, I mean, I do feel out of, I guess to just start this episode off with radical vulnerability, I feel like there's definitely been times in my life where my relationship with exercise has been not good. And because of the world that I live in and the person I am, I've definitely had people in both my personal and professional life who, from the outside, it seemed like their relationship with exercise was also not good, and you're not one of them.
KYLEE: Oh, okay, that's- So-
ZOË: So I guess that's good to know you've been an athlete basically your whole life. You also work with a lot of athletes and I guess a lot of the clients you work with are folks who are investigating their relationship or need to investigate their relationship with exercise.
KYLEE: I usually call it exercise addiction for some reason, but I call it exercise dependence, like this idea that it's like a compulsion to exercise, even if you know that it may be not helpful for you from a mentor physical health perspective.
ZOË: Yeah, it's tough. I think for me, I definitely struggled with this when I was in college right around and before I got treatment for my ED or eating disorder. I would go to the gym every single day for multiple hours a day, no days off. It didn't matter if I felt sick or if something hurt or if I didn't want to. Like the idea of not working out was intolerable and unacceptable to me. I'm like-
KYLEE: Yeah. And I see that with athletes, athletes that I run coach too, that are injured. And they're like, well, how much cross training can I do? And they just want to max out the cross training. And I'm like, maybe this is a sign. We need to, we need to just take a step back. Your body needs a little bit of a decompression. It's really complicated because a lot of people use exercise to control their body frame.
ZOË: Yes. As well, like their body weight. Exercise is also a good thing, right? It's not something like gambling, where it's pretty much not great. There are benefits. It is a wonderful positive part of people's lives. So I think sitting sort of with that tension, and I think for me, ultimately kind of maybe somewhat counter-intuitively what helped me navigate out of exercise dependency, though it's always something I'm trying to be like... Clear-eyed and open and honest about with myself and people in my life because I don't, essentially my psychology hasn't changed, but the crutches that I use to either numb or navigate that have thankfully changed. I'm still gonna be me, I'm gonna seek control, I'm going to try to seek to make myself. Feel better or differently, but now I can do that with breathing and checking in with myself, journaling rather than like therapy, rather than I need to go do body combat or I will die. So I get it, I have been there and honestly what helped me sort of get away from that is running because I wanted to train and get better and because I actually fell in love with the process of getting better at running and getting faster and being able to do more. My objective became not just trying to burn as many calories as possible, or trying to run away from my feelings. Became like, well, I actually wanna run the 100-mile race. And in order to do that, it actually does require a lot of intentional and concerted rest.
KYLEE: But that's also the challenging part too, because some people might look at you and be like, Zoë, you're running 80 miles a week or you ran a hundred mile a week. Is that healthy? Like, people look at that because it's more of an extreme thing, I guess. And they're like, oh, that person, like, I don't know about them.
ZOË: It's funny and we'll talk about this because the when I got diagnosed with my eating disorder I was training to run a half marathon and I was probably running 30 miles whatever your training volume is beautiful It's all perspective, but I was getting really injured really sick really burnt out and really not progressing running 20 to 30 miles a week and I just felt like dog shit all the time and my relationship with exercise was not good. I was also doing like body pump, body combat. I taught some spin classes. Like I was just doing way too much. But I guess the tension here is like, I'm probably objectively on paper actually doing more exercise, but I can rest. And I also have to and need to, just the physical demands that I'm putting on my body trying to train for a 100 mile race and. You know, running 180, 100 mile weeks, you just have to rest. And now I've really come to enjoy the positive feeling of stretching and growing myself and improving my capacity and chasing goals rather than just trying to drown out my demons in the gym. I guess, objectively, I am exercising more now, but the relationship I have with it is totally different. I feel like that's an important point.
KYLEE: Differentiator for people. We also shouldn't judge someone else without knowing more about their story. If we're looking at a friend and they're training and they are doing 70 miles a week, that doesn't necessarily mean they have exercise dependency.
ZOË: Totally, it's always about what's going on on the inside. So I'm excited to dive into this today. So just to sort of give the lay of the land, we're going to dive in to what exercise addiction is. If addiction is even what it is, if that's even the right name or framework here, where the idea came from, what it looks like in people's lives, how it works in the brain and in the body, and when you should be worried about yourself or maybe even loved one and what you can do about that.
KYLEE: Yeah, I want to start with the actual word itself, because I kind of led with that anyway. When people say exercise addiction versus exercise dependence versus compulsive exercise, they kind of use it interchangeably. So are they actually the same thing? And does it really matter what we use or is that- You
ZOË: Yeah, so I think it does. I wanted to make this episode using the language of exercise addiction because colloquially, that's what people use and that's sort of the term that most people are going to relate to and understand. I don't like that term because, and we'll talk about why, but I wanted actually use the term that would invite as many people. Into our conversation as possible, which is why I framed the episode that way, which is sort of, I mean, bait and switch makes it sound like cynical, but, you know, if we called it a nuanced conversation about exercise dependence, no one's gonna tune in. So I do think that there are limitations to using that word, and I did use it also on purpose. So... One of the things I think is really interesting is that nobody in the field has actually ever agreed on one name, because you will see addiction, dependence, compulsive exercise, obligatory exercise, describing things that look pretty same on the surface, but they all mean slightly different things depending on who wrote the paper or what context it's being used in. So I do think that disagreement is both interesting and important, and it sort of shapes. A lot of the things downstream of that, right, down to how many people we think actually have this. So, I think the thing to know going in is that there is no official diagnosis. It's not in the DSM-5, which is that manual that U.S. Doctors use to diagnose mental health conditions. If it's in there, it's legit, in a way, in quotations, but also it connotes a sort of understanding by the psychological brass. And it's like. We have this thing pinned down enough that we know what it is and who fits into that bucket, and this one doesn't, but that also doesn't mean it's unhelpful. We talked about how orthorexia is not in the DSM-5, but I do still think it's a helpful term. I don't think all helpful terms have to be a diagnosis, and I don't think not being a diagnosis means it's not a helpful terms. So excessive exercise does show up in there, but as a subsection, as symptoms of an eating disorder like anorexia, but on its own, there's no code or criteria.
KYLEE: Which is interest. I feel like it doesn't have to be connected to having an eating disorder. Correct.
ZOË: Yeah, and we'll talk about that relationship early on, because it is actually maybe more of a situationship, but it exists. It's also not in the ICD-11, which is the World Health Organization's international version of the same thing. And when they built out this whole category for addictive behaviors, exactly two behaviors actually made that cut, gambling and gaming. Right? Wow. Thank you so much. Wow, okay. Exercise didn't neither did shopping, sex, or work, which is the Zoë trifecta. Researchers like to use the word addiction anyway, and for pretty good reason, because there's a six-part checklist from a psychologist named Mark Griffiths that gets applied across behavioral addictions. And exercise can tick every single one of those boxes. It can become the most important thing in your life. You use it to manage your mood. You need more of it over time to get the same effect. You get anxious and irritable without it. It starts costing you relationships, work, or your health. And you keep going back after you've tried to cut down. Hmm.
KYLEE: Maybe I have been there. Really? No, no, I'm just making a joke.
ZOË: But I have experienced a lot of those things. Because I hear them and I'm like, absolutely, like I've been there, it cuts way too close to the bone. Again, thankfully now I'm, like, woo, okay. But you know, it sort of shows that the line between a serious hobby and a genuine problem isn't just like how many times a week you go to the gym. It's what happens around the exercise. Because someone who is deeply committed and who breaks an ankle and is disappointed and a little maybe bored and irritable for six weeks is one thing, but. Somebody with exercise addiction is genuinely distressed and will totally spin out by the same injury and a striking number of them will find a way to train anyway on that broken ankle. Oh, I've seen that. Oh yeah, same. Oh yeah. We're like, as soon as like- An injury strikes. As soon as an injury strikes, someone's like, well, how many hours a day can I spend on the bicycle? And I'm like- Let's maybe think and talk about the patterns that led us to this place where you have an overuse injury, which means there's a part of your body that got overused, and the goal isn't to just get a different overuse injuries somewhere else, like just because it's above the waist, like doesn't make it not an overuse. Right?
KYLEE: So do you think it's bad to call it an addiction, or?
ZOË: I think it's complicated, because the screening tools can't reliably separate a healthy, hard-training athlete from somebody in real trouble. Because if you asked a marathoner in peak training whether they get anxious when they can't run, whether they train through injuries, whether exercise is the most important thing in their day right now, you might hear yes, yes, and absolutely yes. A person whose life is falling apart would answer those same questions in the exact Same way. So you can get these identical answers across completely different situations. And a lot of these questionnaires can't spot the difference. I also think the word does sort of drag a treatment model and a good bit of cultural baggage behind it that isn't always helpful. Because addiction usually points towards abstinence. You can quit drinking. You can't quit having a body that needs to move. And for most people receiving treatment or navigating this as part of like ED treatment, the expectation and outcome isn't never exercise again. It's like, okay, let's find a way to do this where your whole personality doesn't become being on the elliptical for hours and hours a day. Which is good for you. Right, right, like it's not like gambling where it's like, yeah, there's no upside to gambling.
KYLEE: You could win a bunch of money, Zoë!
ZOË: Exactly. It's a tax on people who don't understand math. There's also a version of that understanding of this that decontextualizes it from the culture because if exercise addiction is like more of a personal defect, the sort of outdated understanding of addiction, then it makes it more that something is wrong with the individual. Like something about you is fundamentally broken, but we don't need to examine this larger culture that continues to over-incentivize. Controlling uncontrollable bodies, particularly bodies of female people, gender nonconforming people, people of color, and over-incentivizing productivity, which I think both of these things can play into. So it makes it seem like you, Kylee, are the problem, and then the culture gets to walk away totally unscathed.
KYLEE: Then on the flip side though, if we don't take it seriously at all, what kind of danger do we have there?
ZOË: People get hurt. Overuse injuries that never heal because the person simply won't rest them. Stress fractures can keep going on and on. And for anyone who's also restricting food and there is significant overlap between these things, compulsive exercise is one of the most dangerous symptoms there is and can also be one of easiest to miss. Because again, we can't tell from what someone looks like or purely from how they're behaving. What function this behavior is serving in their lives.
KYLEE: I think part of the problem too is that I'll see this on Strava, I feel like people will get a lot of praise for doing a lot of training or attention or something. They'll go out of their way to do something really big and make sure that it's on Strava so that people know that it happened and maybe they'll get praised for that, but-
ZOË: Totally. And unless you're Michael Jordan, you're not bragging about your gambling addiction. Yeah. You're right. We have this whole culture built around it that sort of, at minimum, gives it a permission slip and a permission structure. And sometimes at like its most nefarious is like, this is good and cool, you know? No days off. Jillian Michaels. So it can also become an eating disorder behavior that sort flies under the radar because it's one that gets cultural approval and basically applause. Someone who is binging and purging knows that they're engaged in behavior that is not healthy. Someone doing a 90-minute max effort session on almost no food gets told that they are an inspiration and Netflix will make infinite documentaries about them. There's so many times I'm watching an athlete documentary where someone's describing a behavior early on and their parents are describing, like, Oh, well, little Timmy used to just go. Run laps around the house until midnight every night. And he's so dedicated. I'm like, your child is ill. Just because he became an Olympian doesn't mean he's not ill.
KYLEE: Let me do a hundred mile ultra with no calories. That's not a red flag at all. Yeah, exactly. Everyone's like, so.
ZOË: We love that. So it's sort of like a disorder dressed up as a virtue. So I think that in a lot of people is one of these ways it can go unnoticed. And then again, if it's already serving this positive function interiorly, helping someone feel better about themselves, helping them control emotions, and there's any amount of positive validation on the outside, kind of the same with weight loss. It allows people to trick themselves into thinking what they're doing is good for even longer and not interrogating what's happening on the inside. So I think like where I, Zoë, come down on the word addiction is that it's imperfect and not actually what you see as much in the research. Again, did wanna use it in this episode because it's the one that I think speaks to a lot of people, but. The one I tend to use is exercise dependence, and we'll talk a little bit about those delineations in just a second, but the whole idea of, oh, well, XYZ athlete is just really dedicated is a super dangerous mistake, and our culture just continues to make it. I will mostly say compulsive exercise because that tends to describe what's actually happening without anyone pretending there's an official diagnosis or sort of overstating the neurochemical underpinnings of what's going on here too. But I'd be curious, what do you see in practice with clients that makes you want to probe deeper when someone mentions a tough relationship with exercise?
KYLEE: I mean, I see it in nutrition practice, but I actually see it in coaching. I have people that are like, they won't want to tell me if anything's wrong, because they don't want me to take their exercise away, you know, or injury comes up and they like completely lose it because they're like, well, I need to cross train. Like I got to make sure I'm doing this much cross training so that it equals the amount of running I was supposed to do. And then it's, well, how much biking do I need to do to make that it equal the amount of running so that I don't lose fitness? And it's kind of that you can tell that it's really stressful and anxiety inducing for people.
ZOË: Yeah, I think whenever you notice that there's a huge emotional charge around dialing down training volume, the purpose of training is to get better. So you want to remove any amount of training that doesn't meet that purpose. Cuz then at that point, it's just like vanity training, which is a risk. And so when people are always insisting on adding more and more and more or in changing their training in ways that have nothing to do with the primary outcome of getting better. That's usually when I'm like, okay, like let's talk about this. Always trying to do doubles, always trying to squeeze in all these auxiliary exercise classes and yoga's and hikes and walks, and especially the need to track and quantify it, putting all the things in whatever tracking mechanism they have.
KYLEE: Yeah. And then the other one that I see the compulsion to do more exercise to earn your food and to also
ZOË: control body weight. Whenever training volume or movement is tied to permission around food, that's always problematic. That's a problematic relationship with food and exercise.
KYLEE: I think it would be interesting to look at the psychology here. Do we know what's going on in people's lives?
ZOË: Yeah, we should start with the thing that makes this harder to talk about versus other addictions, which is that exercise is genuinely positive. Movement really can help with things like depression, anxiety, sleep, blood pressure. Almost anything you can name, exercise, is a net benefit to that. That's not hype, and it's one of the reasons why you can't just tell somebody to always, like, do less. I'm not comfortable telling anyone, well, never walk again. Again. You know? Sit in a chair for the rest of your life. Exactly. It's like, done. You're welcome. I am a genius. But I think that's also why the compulsion gets this perfect cultural cover, because the single healthiest piece of advice in the world can sort of double as this camouflage for the one case where it's gone wrong. And again, we live, especially in the United States, in this really extreme culture where nobody has any chill about anything. And it can both be true that there's a lot of people in our world who should move and exercise more. There's also a lot other people who have zero self-awareness about their problematic relationship to exercise. I think that the mechanism that's actually really interesting here goes back to the towards versus away dynamic here. So at the start, exercise is what psychologists call positive reinforcement. You do it, you feel good, you want to do it more to get more of the good feeling. Somewhere in that sort of slide towards compulsion, that flips into negative reinforcement, which is when you're doing something to escape a bad feeling instead of pursuing a good one. So the guilt and anxiety that you might feel, the like feeling bad about yourself, or that lack of control you feel when you don't exercise starts to be the motivation. The flip is that chasing a high has a ceiling, like there's a limit to how much you can do and still feel good, but escaping a low really doesn't because that low will always be there, waiting, ready to chase you back out the door to your next body combat class. And this is the same machinery that we see with eating disorders, essentially, which is a big part of why these things are often holding hands. The research on food restriction keeps finding that one of the reasons the behavior sticks around is less because of any result it produces and more because of the anxiety relief that comes from feeling in control, right? Like it's not about the scale, it's about how you look, it's about how it makes you feel, which is why... It can get so extreme. And so the ritual itself actually becomes the reward and separate from whatever it's nominally for. So compulsive exercise works just like that. At some point, the workout stops being about fitness and starts being about the small, reliable hit of relief you get from having done it, not from having to sit with the feeling that shows up if you don't.
KYLEE: And I definitely, I'll have people that struggle with that too, that they are like, well, I don't want to skip a workout because that, I don't like sitting with that feeling of not doing my workout, you know.
ZOË: I get that, I'm a perfectionist. I hate missing around, and I hate not nailing a workout. If you give me a box to check, every fiber of my being wants to check the box. Box.
KYLEE: That's the hard part, right, is a lot of us that like checking those boxes, it makes us good at what we're doing in life sometimes, but then on the other hand, sometimes that leads to other problems.
ZOË: Right, it's always making sure that you have it and it doesn't have you.
KYLEE: The brain itself, though, when people say that exercise rewires you or hijacks you like a drug, what does the actual neurobiology show?
ZOË: Yeah, that's such a good question, so I feel like that's something our culture always gets wrong with the like
KYLEE: high jacks your brain. All of these things like that. Sugar high jack the brain. Exactly.
ZOË: Exactly, like we love anything that hijacks or rewires, you know, but there is a reward circuit involved, so I do want to walk us through it. So that reward circuit runs on dopamine along a pathway from a little midbrain structure called the VTA out to a region called the nucleus accumbens.
KYLEE: The VTA never heard- I know.
ZOË: I've never heard of that. I know, right? Okay. Right?
KYLEE: I'm learning something here. Exactly.
ZOË: A pile of letters for us to all memorize. I feel like I had just fully internalized what the HPA axis is, but now there's the Now you have this to talk about at a party. Exactly. God forbid I corner you at the punch bowl for the worst fucking night of your life. So it's basically the same circuit that's implicated in a lot of other addictions that we know about. But it is also involved in super-chill things like eating lunch, checking your phone. Which checking your own phone could also be sort of... Less chill, yes. Just because it involves dopamine doesn't make it inherently bad, but if it involves dopamine, depending on what the behavior is, we should maybe be more intentional about it. So, compulsive exercise does appear to lean on that circuitry. But a 2025 systematic review actually went looking for specific brain imaging studies of exercise addiction specifically, and it found eight. Oh. Total. That's it? Yes. Seven of those eight studies were single snapshots, so like one scan of a brain at one moment in time. That means they physically cannot tell you whether the brain differences drove the compulsion or if the compulsion ended up shaping the brain. And the review actually outright says that likely it runs in both directions. So when somebody tells you that exercise hijacks your reward system like a drug, the more honest version of that is that the regions involved overlap. The direction of cause and effect isn't fully established in the literature, and the entire human-imaging literature on this could fill up a single three-ring binder So saying that your brain lights up and is rewired, hijacked, diagnosable addiction are totally different things. You know, we've talked about the runner's high and how endocannabinoids work, but I think that it's just important to like, again, say that like, this does not make exercise a drug. Your body is making a feel-good chemical when you move, which is your body just doing its job correctly. So there is this built-in reward for doing a thing that humans evolved to do. The chemical aspect here isn't the problem. The problem is the point where the only way that you can feel okay, not even good, like you're not even trying to feel good anymore. You're just okay. You're trying to not feel bad, and that's to go get more of it. And the anxiety of not getting it starts making your decisions for you. So a neurotransmitter existing isn't a secure diagnosis, but if it were, lunch could also potentially be a controlled substance.
KYLEE: Okay.
ZOË: So that's why I like to tread lightly with the nomenclature here. Mm-hmm. Okay.
KYLEE: So, where does this idea even come from, then? 1970S. Yes, kind of.
ZOË: Yes, kind of by accident. A psychiatrist named Frederick Baekeland was trying to study sleep, so his plan was to pay habitual exercisers to stop working out for a month so that he could measure what happened to them when they rested. He was never able to publish this study because he physically could not recruit enough dedicated exercisors who were willing to quit for 30 days, even for science, even for money. So, yeah, all of the people that he ended up talking to would rather just forfeit the cash than take time off extra.
KYLEE: Time off exercise. So he's like, yep, we're late here right now. I'm like, well, how much money? How much money.
ZOË: Yeah, how much money? The handful that he did manage to enroll did end up sleeping worse, got more anxious. This is like what really threw me in the 1970s of it all, it's just almost unbearable. Half of them reported more sexual tension. Oh, wow. Okay. So this is the very first appearance of exercise addiction in the scientific literature. And it's not a theory that somebody set out to improve. It's sort of like this auxiliary outcome of a study that couldn't recruit enough people because the subjects didn't want to stop exercising long enough to do the study. Wow. And if you stop exercising, you might experience more sexual tension. Okay. Which I'm like, I guess did you like finally get horny enough? I know, that's what I was thinking. A sex pest at your place of work? Like, God forbid you're around me when I'm resting.
KYLEE: So when did that idea really take off then?
ZOË: In 1976, America was really in the middle of its first big running boom, where just millions of people suddenly decided that jogging was the coolest thing ever. This psychiatrist named William Glasser publishes a book called Positive Addiction, which I know I'm like all of my extremely curly hairs are standing up on. I feel like there's a ton of not-so-sexual tension in this room right now. His argument was that some addictions are, hot take, actually so good for you and so cool and chill, and running is like the coolest example of this ever. Direct quote, better to, or his idea was that it was better to be hooked on running than on alcohol. Wow. Yeah, which is a take. This is not to diminish substance use, like multiple things can be shitty. It's 2026, a lot of things straight up suck, it's fine, welcome. But when you see what dependence on exercise does in the lives of individuals, it's not that awesome. No. Chasing a thing to its furthest logical conclusion is just always gonna be bad. Some things like alcohol or cocaine just have more obvious rock bottoms to people on the outside. But I think the part that makes this really bad is that the origin story that Glasser tells for this whole concept is about a professional baseball player who compulsively swung a bat 600 times a night.
KYLEE: Wait, is this, this is a real thing?
ZOË: Yes, this is a real thing, so far that we can tell, yes. If he only got through 300, he couldn't sleep, so he would get up in the middle of the night, go down to his basement, and finish the count. Huh. Okay. So, that's the correct response. The incorrect response, which was Glasser's, was to look at a man who literally could not rest until he completed this batshit ritual, and he called it positive addiction because it helped this guy's career. Oh no. Yeah That, to me, is absolutely not health. That's like textbook compulsion. The founding example of positive addiction is like a description of someone that you would absolutely tell to check into a facility. If you look at that and you're like, wow, what cool dedication. Seek help, help is available. And his actual criteria were about as loose as that. So something non-competitive that you do for an hour a day that you can do alone, if you believe it has value, and if you feel that you're improving, even if only you can measure it, and that you could do without criticizing yourself, these are not clinical descriptors. That is not a unbiased threshold. That's just like the description of a nice hobby. All of the sort of lines that he drew in the sand were totally on vibes, and many of them could be flipped on their head to be like. Yeah, homie, that is obviously not good. If you had a guy come over to spend the night and he had to go to your basement to swing a baseball bat, at two in the morning, that man is not coming over again. So I think the big caveat here also is that the psychiatrist was low-key not a believer in mental illness. He thought most of it, including depression, was basically a choice and that you should just choose differently. There are still people that think that, but... Yeah, there are. And many of them are also writing really terrible books, please stop. So this man who had basically told a generation that exercise addiction was actually like a super cool form of self-actualization, also thought that clinical depression was just a decision that you could yeet out of at any time if you found the willpower. So I think that should tell you about how much weight this concept should hold. It never earns scientific acceptance, thank— God in the addiction literature, positive addiction mostly got treated as an oxymoron and like laughed out of the room. But you do have to picture the moment to understand, I guess you have to understand 1970 and American culture and all of these things to understand why it still was pretty sticky and salient for folks. Because exercise is and has always been sold as a path to a better, more self-actualized version of yourself. And Glasser hands this entire culture permission to describe itself as... Beautifully, productively healed. I feel like that phrase has done about 50 years of hardcore damage because once addicted to exercise reads as aspirational, it becomes almost impossible to say those words as a warning, but have that actually register with anyone? So thankfully the science has moved on from positive addiction as a category a long-ass time ago, but the culture, unfortunately, has never gotten the memo. I If you could be addicted to something cool, like exercise or work, like that'd be great, you know?
KYLEE: If we zoom out, can a behavior even be an addiction at all?
ZOË: Yes and no. So if we look at the settled part here, some behaviors do clear this diagnostic bar. Like I said, gambling is in the DSM-5. Gambling and gaming are both in the ICD-11, so there is a category here and a behavior can be an addiction, but the fight is mostly about which other behaviors qualify. So the worry that a lot of the critics have here is something they call the confirmatory approach? Which is when you take the checklist that's built for drug addiction, the salience and the tolerance and the withdrawal and the rest of it, you point at basically any behavior a person does a lot and you can find things that on the surface look like addiction. Anything that you love and if you just tilt your head and like squint, you can probably see it. So the method more or less guarantees a result from the jump. A group of researchers read by Joël Billieux laid this out in a 2015 paper with an incredible title, Are We Over-Pathologizing Everyday Life? And their argument is that this approach can manufacture an endless supply of brand new disorders just by recycling drug addiction criteria into ordinary behavior. And people absolutely ran with this idea. So there are published proposals for addiction to dancing, addiction to work. Addiction to shopping, to sex, and even to tanning, which is, I guess, the opposite of the Zoë trifecta, like, I'll be damned before you shove me into a glowing coffin. And I think for exercise, there's an additional layer, which whether exercise addiction is even its own condition, or if it's just a symptom of something else, usually an eating disorder, because a big share of it does travel with EDs. So. There's one camp that sort of argues that most compulsive exercise is secondary, which means it's just the side dish of an eating disorder rather than a standalone addiction, and that primary exercise addiction, the kind that shows up all on its own, is rare and probably overdiagnosed, which I think is interesting because Anecdotally, most people that I know that struggle with one are weird about the other. It's almost like refreshing, like if you, to meet someone who is just like, oh, you're only weird about exercise, but you're like super chill with food. The other, there's another camp that says it clearly can stand alone, and this is a little more unsettled and uncertain in the literature, but. I think where I land on this is that the vocabulary war is not as important as like how this plays out in people's lives and that arguing about whether the dictionary technically permits the use of the word addiction can sort of be a way of like getting around the more important cultural conversations that we need to have.
KYLEE: So when does the dark side actually get described? Or the darker side, I should say.
ZOË: Yeah, so three years after Positive Addictions was published in 1979, a researcher named William Morgan wrote about what he called Negative Addiction. Oh, wow. How creative. Which, like, makes a little more sense, you know? In runners, which is exercise that has stopped being optional and how people will experience withdrawal when they can't do it, which saying withdrawal in my Arkansas Accent. I feel like I'm, like, getting all rural-ger up in here. With-drawal? Oh my god. With-drawal? So people feel bad when they can't do it. And life keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller until training basically sucks all the oxygen out of someone's life and personality. So in 1983, Alan Yates and two of his colleagues published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. With the title, which is roughly, running, an analog of anorexia, because they had noticed that a certain kind of obsessive male runner looked, psychologically, a lot like the women they were treating for anorexia, which was like this fascinating thing of, these men I have this lady disease. Wow. Could it be the same thing? Wow. But they're so fit. So, they noticed that they had the same perfectionism, the same need for control, the same anxiety, and the same essentially habit of treating their bodies as a project that needed to be disciplined. And their argument was that both were running on the same underlying machinery, which permanently sort of connected compulsive exercise to eating disorders in the research. So that connection did turn out to be extremely well established and important. But I do think, and others have argued, the paper also overreached because running is basically male, anorexia is obviously real problematic. So again, while these things overlap, compulsive exercise can and does exist on its own, and it's not just boy anorexia. They didn't realize that men weren't unwell because, you know, that's just dudes getting to the gym being cool, right? Like, no. They're disciplined. They're just disciplined. And... So I think that it's, again, really important to notice that out of this foundational myth, the fucked-up phoenix that rose out of the ashes has a really troubling gender component because The field went looking for anorexia's psychology and was absolutely shocked to find it in obsessive male runners. You and I looking at each other across this desk were like, this is the least shocking thing I've ever read. So the anorexia analog framing was kind of a way to make men's version of this legible at all by borrowing vocabulary that had previously just been assigned to women. And I think the other half of it that is still true right now is that when a woman reorganizes her life around workouts, the culture will just immediately read it as vanity or like a clear indicator of an eating disorder. But when a dude does the same thing, it reads as discipline and we give him like infinite podcasts and like ideally a supplement line. So it's the same behavior, but it reaches totally opposite verdicts that are sorted by how that gender reads to our culture. Because it comes back. So keep your eye trained on this because I think this continues to be a pattern in how this shows up.
KYLEE: How common is this? Do we even know? Cause I feel like this would be really hard to-
ZOË: Yeah, so many of the questionnaires are so subjective that it's really hard to put an at-all-accurate number on this. Published figures run from under 1% of the general population. To north of 40% in certain groups of committed exercisers. Certain groups? Certain groups. Yes. You will get there. Oh, okay. Yes. You're like, not like endurance athletes. We're so cool. So that's not sloppy research. That's just what you get when the field hasn't totally agreed on what the thing is or even the best way to measure it. So I think the more solid figure comes from a 2020 meta-analysis, which is a study that pools a bunch of existing studies and then looks for the signal across all of them. So a team led by Mike Trott combined 13 of these studies totaling about 3,600 people total across the studies. And that came out to be about 6% of people at risk of exercise addiction overall, closer to 8% among general exercisers. And at about 5% among amateur competitive athletes and students. So I think the key component here worth thinking about is the at-risk part, because nobody in these studies ever gets an actual diagnosis. They filled out a questionnaire and scored above a specific cutoff that someone chose. So even the good number is measuring red flags, not confirmed cases. That capability in the research, I think, goes to show just the squirreliness of the numbers around prevalence and why it's so hard to pin down. You can lie on those things too. Do people lie when they're filling out questionnaires? Ask the fucking Lily. Like, 100% we know this.
KYLEE: So who's actually at a higher risk then?
ZOË: Yeah, so I think it's important to note here that people can be healthy and active at any size, so this is not about weight loss as a goal. The thing at risk here is your relationship with movement and not that number on the scale. So the strongest, most consistent finding in the entire field is that overlap with eating disorders. That 2020 meta-analysis did find that exercise addiction showed up more than three and a half times as often in people with an indicated eating disorder, as in people without one. Do you have an eating disorder or disordered eating or weird relationship with food? Oftentimes this is sort of the like, BOGO of that, of like, buy one, get one free. After that, another really strong indicator is personality. Perfectionism and high anxiety often surface as being really strong indicators, so the type of person who needs everything under control and comes apart a little bit when things aren't under control tends to be a driver here. Endurance and esthetic sports also happen to select for exactly those people. It's us. Because that means the sport themselves might also be concentrating the risk, which I think is important to think about as well. This obviously shows up in lifters, cyclists, group fitness regulars, and in people who've never run a step in their life and never will. Might even be less likely to show up or get flagged as a problem. Cause if you're just like going to random group fitness classes all the time, you might just look like a health nut. Like I was re-watching Parks and Rec not that long ago. And like, I remember just really loving the Chris Traeger character years ago, and now when I watch it, I'm like, Is no one else pointing out this man is straight-up exercise addicted and maybe, like, shouldn't be running the city of Pawnee because he's exercising constantly? Like, this man, is like, clearly a-
KYLEE: Well
KYLEE: Mm-hmm
KYLEE: I feel like people listening are going to want to know if this is them or somebody that they love. Like, what does it actually look like day to day?
ZOË: Yeah, so I think the first thing I would do is throw out any number that you have, right?
KYLEE: Oh, you mean like mileage or time or something? Exactly.
ZOË: Yeah, there's no weekly mileage, no number of sessions, no specific, like, exercise threshold that tips you from healthy into disordered. And if you're the type of person who is looking to see that if you check a neat box for this, congrats! That desire to control and quantify might actually be a sign that you might want to investigate this in yourself. Because two people can be doing the exact same amount of exercise, and for one of it could be a healthy and positive part of their life, and for the other it could be a cage and a curse, so the volume is not an informative thing on its own. So I think the question that's actually helpful here and gives you useful information is how do you feel and what happens when you can't exercise? And right behind that is what is the exercise costing you elsewhere in your life? I'd be curious to hear how you talk about this with your clients. What do you look at? What are you pointing to and thinking about in these circumstances?
KYLEE: I like to ask people what would happen if you weren't exercising. Like what other identities do you have in your life? And I think that can be challenging for some people because they don't maybe have a lot outside of the exercise. And the hard part is, right, like exercise in a way does give that kind of like dopamine hit in a ways.
ZOË: In a way. I'm not just obsessed with exercise. I also love training. I also like movement. I like going to the gym. I like getting swole, and I like getting fast, so I actually have a really robust identity. Yeah. When you think about it.
KYLEE: And it's hard because even if people try other things, they're like, oh, I'm gonna like expand my interests and I'm going to try to paint or read or do comedy or something. Yeah. They're like.
ZOË: For instance, if someone used to have a weird relationship with exercise, but then they hypothetically got really into comedy, that happens all the time. You're constantly seeing people who love to exercise getting really hooked on it, Aw.
KYLEE: It's a pipeline. It might not provide the same level of satisfaction or happiness even. And then that's kind of the, like, I'll get, I might get pushback from people on that, but it's like, but it is not the same. And maybe it's not meant to be the same, you know?
ZOË: Yeah, actually, I mean, I joke, but again, at times in my life where my relationship, the exercise has been less cool, what I would do is just funnel all of my weird zoey-ness into work, which is also not great, and was totally just a way of me getting around any actual hard emotional conversation or having to take a challenging look at my life and the decisions I was making in the context of my life. But... Like genuinely comedy was the first thing that outside of exercise like gave me all the positive stuff without the downsides. Cause I would have to work really hard to do so much improv that my life started to fall apart and that my body started breaking down. Sorry, just that vision is. We always joke like on our improv group cause we all love improv. We're like, we could stop at any time. We could, we can all stop if we wanted to just, you know, we just, we couldn't, we could totally stop anytime. But it connects you to a community. It gives you an identity. It's a creative practice. There is the same sort of like ontology of like I like having something to be improving at. And it does speak to my brain in a very specific way that running does as well where it makes me be present and in the moment. Exercise can be a form of escape in ways that I think are problematic, whereas comedy, you can't escape yourself. Your comedy will be bad if you are not looking at yourself in a clear way, because if you get up in front of a crowd of people and lie at them, it will not be very funny. Having no self-awareness is the best way to shut down an open mic ever.
KYLEE: So the identity question is something I will ask people. I'm not saying I have any, like a clear answer on like, how many identities should you have or like, how many-
ZOË: anyone that gives you an answer of like, here's how many human identities you should have to be a fulfilled person. They're trying to sell you something. Get out of there.
KYLEE: Also, the question of, I do always kind of wonder if you're doing a hundred mile a week, are you willing to push yourself on the fueling side of things, right?
ZOË: So, I always think it's curious and a question I've asked is like, would you still do this if you knew it wouldn't change your body composition? Yeah, yeah. And once TJ and I were running together and someone yelled out of their moving vehicle, running won't change you face, which is extremely funny and mean. Wow. But it's also like it assumes that we were running to change anything about ourselves. Yeah. And also I guess that someone involved's face needed changing. Oh, no. Um... Fascinating. As someone that also does have a chipped front tooth from running, it absolutely can change your face. Challenge accepted. But, yeah, again, I always think it's, like, helpful to ask people, like if nothing about your body would change, what would your volume look like? Mm-hmm.
KYLEE: Can you take rest days? Can you go slower on your easy day? Like even stuff like that, like a down week to allow your body to adjust. Can you do that without?
ZOË: Some amount of itchiness, I think, is a good indicator. Like, we're just keeping an eye on this. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
KYLEE: Yeah, and I will actually challenge people to be like, well, if you're on vacation, could you actually take a step back from exercise?
ZOË: Exercise?
KYLEE: Like, what would that look like? Would that make you feel really uncomfortable? Yeah. So, just some things to think about. But, so, if somebody's wondering what this looks like, then what should we tell people to look for?
ZOË: Yeah, I think all of those questions you mentioned are really great and serve exactly that purpose. But I think one of the things to keep an eye trained on is that if you experience withdrawal that goes well past disappointment, so real anxiety, noticeable irritability, guilt, restlessness on a rest day, logging a bunch of walks on your Strava that are strong enough that the feeling is running you instead of the other way around. If one missed workout or one not perfectly executed workout, if that impacts your day, that's worth thinking about.
KYLEE: If that impacts your eating, that's also something to think about.
ZOË: Yes, and this is why you co-host the pod. Also, training through your body's stop signs, like if you keep going to the gym when you're injured, sick, exhausted, or after a doctor or any other medical professional told you to stop or do less or slow down, because not training feels worse than the damage does, like whenever you see people just continuing to run on and through an injury. And I think that this is one of the signposts that matters most, because it... Is just a really clear indicator that the drive has started overriding basic self-protection. If the workout always beats the friend's birthday, the family thing, the deadline, the sleep every single time, because when exercise stops flexing around your life and stops being something you fit in and starts being something you have to fit yourself and your whole life into, that's a problem. Mm-hm, rigidity and the loss of choice under it too. It has to be this workout this long, this hard, in this exact window, or somehow it doesn't count, or it counts less, or it doesn' give me the feeling I'm looking for. When your plan is no longer able to bend, the problem isn't that you're training hard. It's that somewhere along the way it stopped giving you the flexibility to decide, which is also not how actual training works. When people are so. Rigid, it no longer is about, I want to get better at this thing, because actual like good elite athletes when they feel exhausted, when they know the training isn't going to be productive, they stop or do less. So also think it's important if exercise becomes the only tool you have. So we know that movement can be helpful for your mood and mental health, which is true and great and all of that's healthy. But if it's the only thing that helps you regulate and you have no other means That's not good, right? Like if you have no meditation, journaling, dog petting, when it becomes the whole toolbox, not good. And another big one I think is secrecy, a shiftiness. There's definitely a version of this where people like publish all of their effed up behavior and it gets like applause and kudos and that's not great. But also when you notice you have to like conceal how much you are doing. Well that's the walk.
KYLEE: Well, that's the walking thing that I'm saying. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I'm not even in full in the know on the walking. This could be a nutrition client or an athlete I coach. And you're not, quote, counting it towards energy needs. Like, this is a problem.
ZOË: Yeah, like, spoiler alert, your bones and muscle do count that shit, whether or not you log it. Yeah. So if you are hiding your volume and fudging what you actually did, if you know enough to know that it's fucked up and you're not telling your coach and your friends about it, and you get defensive, if someone asks a gentle question about it that is very good information, because secrecy is often a symptom in addiction, and it can turn up here as well.
KYLEE: I think the hard part about this, a lot of us do wanna train hard for something, for like some specific goal that we have. Figuring out what the line is between, well, I wanna train for this goal and I have a problem. I think some things to ask yourself in the sense of one of my mentors, which was on our podcast, Leslie. Shout out Leslie, listen to our religion episode. Shout out Leslie, listen to our religion episode.
ZOË: It's not a super popular one, but I do think it's a banger. It's the one that we got the most emails of this episode changed my life.
KYLEE: But she has this analogy of, think of yourself going up into the air with a set of balloons. And if you only have one balloon and that gets popped, then what's going to happen? You know? You wanna be...
ZOË: You want to be the house from up.
KYLEE: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I love that analogy. So what happens if the balloon goes down? Then what's going to happen to you? I think another thing to think about in this situation is are you treating this as a should do set of rules? Or I could do this. It's an aligned choice. That's something I really want to achieve for myself. I think that's a really kind of nice way to frame it and tease it out for yourself as well. And then what if, what would your day or life look like if you didn't have this in your
ZOË: Like if life loses all structure and meaning when you're not training for a marathon, that's problematic.
KYLEE: Petting Bowie and doing comedy.
ZOË: For you. Very normal behaviors for an adult woman who is absolutely thriving. And knitting.
KYLEE: And knitting at the same time. And knitting, yes.
ZOË: Such an unhinged person. If you put how I am on paper, you would look at that and be like, that's not a real person. That's an insane person. That's like the worst Myers-Briggs result I have ever seen.
KYLEE: Are there certain things that separate dedication from compulsion that might be helpful for people to know?
ZOË: So, I think that this is the crux of the whole thing, because I think there's four things that you can look at that really – and again, this is not the be-all end-all. These are four frameworks for heuristics. I am not diagnosing anyone. It's not a pre-scription. Exactly. If you're this deep in a podcast about exercise addiction, something I think everyone should always be curious about. I think one is choice is whether you can call it a rest day and mean it. Dedication is a decision that you can continue to keep making, like how do I feel? What do I do because of that? Compulsion is a decisions that got made for you at some point and has stopped handing over the steering wheel a long, long time ago.
KYLEE: Mm-hmm.
ZOË: Another one is flexibility and what happens when the plan breaks, because dedicated people adapt. Life happens. There's a wedding. There's the funeral. They will move the work out. They're fine. They're over it by dinner. Compulsion is a lot more brittle, and so when their plan gets disrupted, it feels less like an inconvenience and more like an emotional emergency.
KYLEE: Oh, I get this. Text from my ass.
ZOË: Yeah. Yes. Emergency texts. And then cost, or what direction everything is moving in, because dedication can add to your life. Energy, community, capability, positive work towards a goal, compulsion starts to subtract. It can subtract from your relationships, your health, your sleep, your actual enjoyment of the activity. And it will keep subtracting while you keep going anyway. I think reason is another one, or what you're running toward or potentially away from, because dedication moves towards something. Maybe it's towards a race or a skill or the actual pleasure of doing Zumba. Compulsion is mostly moving away from something like that dread or the guilt or anxiety that shows up when you stop. So if you want one gut check instead of four, Here's one, forget how much you exercise, and ask what happens when you can't. A forced week off that's annoying means you're fine. A forced-week off that feels like a crisis is the thing to be concerned about.
KYLEE: Say it is yourself or someone that you love, what do you actually do next? Yeah.
ZOË: And I think the first thing you should do, which matters a whole lot, the goal here is not quitting. The goal is to not say, well, you have a weird- You can't ever exercise. Yeah, you're done. No, that's not the goal. So you're not trying to stop moving your body. You are trying to make sure that it stays something that you are choosing and not something that is choosing you. So getting to a place where you run the schedule. So if it is you, I think you can run a small experiment. Take a single planned rest day and just watch what your head does with it. Not as a punishment, as information. If the anxiety that comes up is loud, that's not a failure, that is data, and it's exactly the kind of data worth carrying into a conversation with a professional. And if you're someone who heard that experiment, you're like, well, absolutely no, I will never do that. Also good information. Like, say.
KYLEE: Your coach puts a recovery day on a schedule and it's like, I don't know, eight miles or something. And you're actually feeling super overwhelmed and exhausted or tired. I'm challenging a couple of people to actually either cut that in half or take an unplanned rest day. And so it is something like that I'll actually have as a goal for people to do that.
ZOË: I know I always do pat myself again, because it's a journey. I always congratulate myself when I have one of those decision points, and I feel myself making the decision, so I get it. And I think it's also important to find the right kind of help, because the wrong kind of health will just make this worse, and I think you see this as a coach and as a dietitian. There is a particular type of person who, when they're struggling with this, is like, well, if I hire a coach, then I'm training and that makes it okay and not disordered or not, you know, like compulsive. And no, just because you're paying my mortgage doesn't mean that like it's chill. Yeah. You know, because it's all about what's happening on the inside. So this, I think, sits right at that inflection point between mental health and eating disorders and the general just train less coach. Well, a coach is just not prepared and equipped. Is beyond their scope of practice to address the underlying cause here, right? Exactly. So what you want is actually an eating disorder informed therapist or dietician or a sports medicine person who can actually, who understands this and has specific training and not just looking at the injury in front of them. And if you keep sailing into your PT's office with like obvious overuse injuries and they don't stop to ask you questions, that's a problem. That is a red flag. That's a red flags. So if you don't know where to start, I think the National Alliance for Eating Disorders has a helpline that can point you towards ED-informed providers. So that's a good front door.
KYLEE: What about if it's a friend though? Some people, I feel like in the Patreon, people ask us about this, like, how do you actually start a conversation with someone like this? Because it can be a little intimidating.
ZOË: Yeah, and I think that A, like take the pressure off your, like, unless you are a NEDA-informed ED expert, then it's just simply not your job to solve anything. It's your job, to be a friend. So if someone has ever tells you a little bit proudly, if I ran on a broken bone, it's like, okay, that's not actually cool, man. That's not the flex you think it is. When you have that reaction of like every instinct in your body saying like, that not good, it is time to stop, that instinct can backfire because coming in hot makes them just defend the behavior. Praising it also does the same thing, which is the trap that a lot of people will walk straight into of when someone's like, I've been super tired and over trained and I just kept going. And it's like... Yeah. Yeah. So what actually tends to work in these situations is describing what you see and obviously not diagnosing because you're just.
KYLEE: Mm-hmm. Zoë-
ZOË: Zoë, a woman who knits and does improv at a medium level, something like you seem really stressed lately when you can't train and I'm worried about you, how are you feeling? Will get you a lot further, explaining how you feel and asking questions will always get you further than like, you have a problem, this isn't good. And you're a person who loves them, you're not a judge handing down a verdict unless you're literally a NEDA informed specialist, don't do that. So make sure you do not compliment their discipline. Like, gosh, I wish I had your willpower. Not gonna be helpful in these circumstances. I've definitely been in groups of athletes where one person will proudly announce a problematic behavior and someone who maybe hasn't thought super deeply about this stuff will be like, awesome. I wish could run on a stress fracture.
KYLEE: Uh, nope.
ZOË: Uh, nope, it is not your job to become the enforcer, it's not your job to change anything, it just your job to say like maybe the loving, true, slightly awkward thing and to just listen and be, hold their hand when it comes to finding someone who's better equipped than you.
KYLEE: In practice, as far as the downsides that I have seen, I mean, this can really ruin people's lives. I mean I've seen people where they give up everything like socially so that they can go on their walks or get in their steps or get more exercise or they're in conjunction with an eating disorder, they're not able to keep up with the feeling because they're exercising so much as well that then it just causes this-
ZOË: down the exercise to increase the fueling that they need to do to sustain the exercise. That's a great sign that it has no longer become about the exercise
KYLEE: your body completely starts breaking. You're not a medical zebra. You have, there is a problem there and it is causing damage, which could potentially be irreversible in the future, health-wise. Yikes. Why do you think that this is something that is something in our culture that people celebrate? And I see all these downsides. Some people celebrate this, which is-
ZOË: Right, like to us, I always come back to that David Goggins thing of him, like, finishing the Moab 240 after having to go to the hospital or, like finishing Leadville on a broken femur. We know those stories because they were handed to us culturally by someone who was like, look at this cool man who did a cool thing. And then I hear them and I am like... Oh my God, this is a five alarm fire. Like you just showed me a picture of Hannibal Lecter. I am very concerned. So there's the strange asymmetry when you actually look at it, right? But when you see the gym addict shirt, it's a flex that people actually like trot out on a first date. No days off is a slogan that people will print on things and sell for a profit. It is an ideology people opt into, but it is also the vocabulary of pathology turned in.
KYLEE: Into athleisure. Yeah, that brings to mind the run streaks. Yes. Oh my God. This person hasn't taken a rest day in 10 years. I'm like, what? And they ran through the stomach bug.
ZOË: I'm like, okay, this is insane. Yeah, I can't with anything written about a run streak. And I look at it and I'm, like, I feel like you're showing me an al-Qaeda beheading video, but you're acting like it's slots in a bucket. There's definitely.
KYLEE: There's definitely stories written on like runners all the time and it's always like look at this
ZOË: Look at this cool person who's totally doing it for normal reasons and not to fill the gaping void inside of them with really mid-running. It always looks like a car from the outside to me, like, not good. You know, and I think that, again, like we see it with the like, obsessed, can't stop, it's my therapy, beast mode. It could be like a cute Instagram caption or a symptom at the same time, but... I think it just traces back to that idea of positive addiction and our culture's obsession with this puritanical of work is always good, regardless of even if the outcome is bad. Work in and of itself becomes the virtue, and I think that we need to flip it on its head and be like, let's actually look at the outcome and how this functions on the inside, rather than just being like, hashtag grindcore, love it, hashtag hustle.
KYLEE: Can't stop, won't stop. To kind of wrap this up, what are things that people should walk away from the episode with? Well, maybe stop walking and sit.
ZOË: Down. Don't get a treadmill test. I think the question isn't how much you exercise. It's if you're the one still deciding whether or not you're going to exercise or if the exercise is deciding for you. So compulsion is when that choice is made for you And for a lot of people listening, that just isn't you. And that's awesome. There can be a lot gradations here. I would firmly say that I am in a better place, but it's something I keep an eye on and I think about, I talk about. And I have conversations about whenever I'm injured, need to do less like I was this past year. And surprise, surprise, I'm still okay. And I didn't have to like start a totally new comedy career because of it. So that's positive. And if it is you, I think it's important to know that you're not weak or broken. You took a message that our culture has been screaming at you for decades, that your worth is something you have to earn through work or through work on your body, and that you maybe believed it a little too completely or the way that that collided with your specific psychology lit a fire that's kind of hard to put out. It's not a character flaw. The perfect storm of a specific psychology meeting a specific cultural moment. And rest is not a reward that you have to unlock after you've suffered enough to deserve it. Rest isn't a punishment. Exercise also should not be a punishment or a permission structure. All of these should just be like chill, neutral parts of being a person. Be cool, be cool. So on that note, I think it's time for us to take a rest day and feel absolutely nothing about it.
