I’ve always been curious about addiction.

The way I tend to look at most things in my life, I’ve wondered why some people get so deeply hooked… whether it’s food, alcohol, drugs, gambling, hoarding, smoking, or porn. What is it that pulls someone past moderation and into dependency?

Over the years, that curiosity hasn’t been abstract. I’ve attended AA meetings supporting friends, and sat in on Al-Anon meetings meant for families and supporters of addicts. I’ve studied the twelve steps and read a revealing book called When Your Gravity Fails, by Ji.

That book has stayed on my shelf and becomes an important reference, because it framed addiction less as a moral failing and more as a loss of internal center. A kind of gravity collapse. Ji writes from his own recovery, using the twelve-step framework not just to stop drinking, but to rebuild a spiritual way of living. Alcohol was the doorway, but identity was the work.

What struck me most was the idea that recovery isn’t about removing the substance alone, but about restoring something inside that no longer needs an external regulator.

I’ve read other work along similar lines, including Recover to Live, which reinforces a simple but uncomfortable truth: any addiction, regardless of form, is ultimately a solo journey. You can have support. You can have community. You can have guidance. But you have to want it. No one can do that part for you.

That idea has shaped how I’ve managed my own life.

I’ve always held a quiet internal line:

nothing… no thing… gets to have power over me.

It’s not a grand philosophy. It’s practical. It’s also something my granny used to say, in her own way: too much of one thing is good for nothing.

Whenever I noticed something starting to edge toward control… coffee, tea, alcohol, sugar, chocolate… anything that felt like it was overpowering my choice, I took a hiatus. Forty sometimes even one hundred days. No negotiation. Not because the thing was “bad,” but because I needed to know that I was still deciding.

For a long time, work never entered that equation.

Only recently did I start paying attention to the “-holism” hiding in plain sight. Workaholism. I’d seen it. I’d even named it casually. But I’d never placed work in the same category as addiction. Work felt different. It was necessary, often praised and rewarded.

And yet, the more I sat with it, the clearer it became that work too can function as an addiction. Not because work is harmful in itself, but because it can become the thing we use to regulate ourselves: to avoid stillness, outrun uncertainty, secure worth and quiet anxiety.

That’s when the earlier threads began to connect.

Addiction isn’t defined by the object.
It’s defined by the relationship.

Whether it’s alcohol, sugar, control, or productivity, the question is the same:

What is this doing for me that I don’t yet know how to do for myself?

And like every other addiction, no amount of external pressure creates change. Which brings me back to something Dale Carnegie once said, in a gentler context, but just as true here: a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.

Work doesn’t become an addiction because someone tells you it is. It becomes one when you’re ready to see what role it’s playing in your life…
and decide whether that role still belongs to it.

This is where alignment comes in.

Because regardless of what the addiction is, the questions underneath it are always the same.

1. Why this?
2. Why now?
3. What role is it playing?

Addiction isn’t random. It’s functional.

Whether it’s a substance or work, something is being used for comfort, regulation or relief. We often use that something, to avoid seeing something, or sitting with something, that feels too big, too painful, or too destabilizing to face directly.

I’m not trying to simplify addiction. It’s complex, layered, physiological, psychological, emotional, and relational. But I do want to make sense of it enough so we can see what’s happening when it takes hold.

Because when we reach for the thing, whether that thing is alcohol or productivity, what we’re really doing is pushing our system out of equilibrium. We are changing the chemistry and our nervous system responds with temporary relief giving us a sense of control or escape.

And here’s what we need to be most aware and mindful of…

That chemical shift feels better, faster, and more reliable than the slow, uncomfortable work of changing the habit or addressing what’s underneath it. So the thing gets reinforced, becomes dominant and the system learns that this is how we cope.

Which is why wanting change matters so much.

Backsliding is part of the process, not proof of failure and support is necessary, but never sufficient on its own.

Alignment doesn’t mean the urge disappears. It means you start to recognize what’s happening in real time. You notice when something external is being used to compensate for something internal that’s out of sync.

And this is why work addiction is particularly dangerous.

Because work doesn’t carry shame. It carries praise.

Work addiction hides in plain sight. It looks like commitment, like leadership and being indispensable. Nobody think there’s a need to stage an intervention when you’re productive. Nobody worries when you’re always busy, in fact, the more you put in at work, the more you’re rewarded.

And all the while, you may be quietly eroding.

You can be functioning, achieving and delivering and still be profoundly misaligned.

Using work as a place to hide is seductive precisely because it’s legitimate.

It gives you cover. It gives you language. It gives you applause. And it allows you to avoid the harder work of asking: What am I not willing to feel? What am I not willing to face?

Alignment asks a different kind of honesty.

Not “What should I stop doing?”
But “What am I using this for?”

Because until that question is answered, the object can change, but the pattern remains. And work, when it becomes an addiction, is one of the hardest patterns to see…not because it’s harmless, but because it looks so much like success.

I don’t believe in work–life balance.

Balance assumes a scale you can keep even, as if the problem is hours, or allocation, or discipline. In my experience, the issue isn’t balance. It’s misalignment.

When something is aligned, it doesn’t require constant correction. It holds. When it isn’t, the strain shows up somewhere else.

Misalignment rarely announces itself directly. It leaks.

It shows up in the structures around you that are quietly falling apart. Relationships thinning. Health signals you keep postponing. Sleep that never quite restores. Irritability that doesn’t match the situation. A constant low-level urgency that never resolves.

And often, misalignment travels with companions.

Addictions don’t arrive alone. They cluster. Work, sugar, alcohol, scrolling, control, over-functioning… different objects, same function. Each one compensating for something that’s out of sync internally.

This is why focusing on the object alone rarely works.

If you remove the thing without addressing the misalignment underneath it, something else rushes in to take its place. The system still wants regulation. It still wants relief. It will find another way.

Alignment work isn’t about stripping things away. It’s about restoring coherence. Bringing values, identity, energy, and responsibility back into relationship with each other so they’re no longer at war.

From that place, work stops being something you hide behind; your effort stops being a numbing agent and productivity stops being proof of worth.

You don’t need balance when you have alignment. You need honesty.

Because the question is never just, “What am I doing too much of?”
It’s “What is no longer holding together in my life… and what am I using to compensate for that?”

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Where do you see signs of misalignment in your life right now… and what habits or behaviors might be quietly propping up what’s starting to fall apart?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer, possibility thinker, musician, Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, and MCODE Legacy Coach. I help leaders and soul-driven professionals decode the deeper patterns shaping their business, work, identities, and results especially when it look like a performance issue but it’s really misalignment in disguise.

If something in your life or business feels off and you can’t quite name it, message me. Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to see what’s really going on.