How do I go from participating in a behavior to developing a behavioral addiction to it?

How do I go from participating in a behavior to developing a behavioral addiction to it?

Marc Kern (Addiction Expert, Director of Addiction Alternatives) gives expert video advice on: How is a behavioral addiction similar to a substance behavioral addiction?; What is an "addictive personality"?; What can be done about an addictive personality? and more...

Virtually everybody has addictions. It's normal to have habits, and people engage into these habits all the time. And we actually need habits to survive, otherwise we would wake up every day and say, "Well, how do I tie my shoe?" We have to habituate. So people go into these activities pretty much like they go into any new activity: they learn it, it works, they do it again. Now, what evolves over the course of time is they learn to lean on that one methodology, that one coping skill, all too much. There is sort of a back end that addiction has, where you can't extricate, you cannot unravel yourself, and a force called tolerance starts to act, where you need more and more of the same thing to get the same outcome. So there is a snowballing effect, where you're locked in and you can't do anything to go forward.