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This week on Jacob Hawley: On Love I’m looking into the topic of sex addiction.

What鈥檚 the difference between an addiction and a bad habit?"

It’s a very modern phenomenon - some people see it as a legitimate mental illness, that can cause the sufferer untold amounts of problems. Some people see it as a condition that was made up to excuse bad behaviour and misdemeanors.

And it raises the question - nowadays, what does addiction actually mean? What’s the difference between an addiction, and a bad habit?

Because, let's face it, all of us have things we turn to more often than we’d like to. I’ve got plenty of my own vices - the phone I’ve written half of this article on would be one of them. For the first time recently I hit a high of 5 hours screen time. I’m not proud of this, especially as I now have a very young child I should definitely be focusing my attention on.

‘My girlfriend kept telling me to get off my phone’, I’ll say to them, in a frenzy of guilt and shame. ‘And all I could do was tweet about it! It got 12 likes!’

And yet I can’t help but wonder if there’s really much of a difference between this and what people might consider a ‘proper’ addiction. I should add that I am making this current podcast series, Jacob Hawley: On Love, on the back of my previous podcast titled Jacob Hawley: On Drugs (yes, we gave up on the pun quite quickly), a series very much informed by my own previous ‘habits’.

The strange difference is, despite those habits seeming much uglier when I describe them to people, they never came anywhere close to causing me as much grief as my phone does (I have checked twitter 9000 times whilst trying to write this article).

Obviously this isn’t the case for everyone but my phone is much more of a problem to me than drink or drugs ever were. And it isn’t just my phone, I have various more family-friendly vices nowadays. If I were to quit my latte habit, for example, I’d be crippled by headaches and fatigue.

So where does that leave sex?

Chemically, we know that sex and masturbation cause our brain to release dopamine, a pleasure hormone that, crucially, doesn’t always leave us feeling satisfied, thus leading us to crave and chase it.

But the main difference with sex is that we have to encounter another human being to acquire it. Even when we’re talking about masturbation, we are often also talking about an addiction to pornography that then informs how we behave when we do have sexual encounters with other people.

Think about the language around the different addictions. Someone who has a drink or drug problem is often described as engaging in ‘substance abuse’, something that is troubling, but ultimately self-destructive. Often, with sex addicts, we are talking about people who engage in person abuse.

My main problem with the label of ‘sex addiction’ is that it is so often used as an excuse for doing something horrendous. In 2017, amidst the ‘MeToo’ scandal, serial offender Harvey Weinsteen checked in to a European rehab clinic for sex addiction.

Was he really a sex addict? Who knows. Does it absolve him of the things he did, even if he was a sex addict? Absolutely not.

Regardless of what someone is addicted to, while we can show empathy and support for their condition, they should also take responsibility for their misdemeanors. Alcoholics aren’t excused for the crimes they commit when they’re drunk. Just as sex addicts shouldn’t be excused for the atrocities they might commit whilst suffering from their condition.

Even phone addicts like myself should not be pardoned for the tweets that they send. Even if they do get 12 likes.

Listen to this week’s episode of Jacob Hawley: On Love where we hear from Paula Hall from the Laurel Centre and counsellor Owen Redahan about the causes of sex addiction and how they work with patients to help them recover from it. YouTuber Courtney Daniella Boateng and musician Triple 0 speak of their experiences with addiction and compulsion and Dr David Ley talked to us about ‘The Myth of Sex Addiction’ and how we can frame addiction.

Jacob Hawley is a comedian and the presenter and creator of 麻豆约拍 Sounds’s award-winning podcast Jacob Hawley: On Drugs. The second series Jacob Hawley: On Love is out now.

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