On the pitfalls of conceptualizing excessive physical exercise as an addictive disorder: Commentary on Dinardi et al. (2021)

Damien Brevers; Pierre Maurage; Taylor Kohut; José C Perales; Joël Billieux

doi:10.1556/2006.2022.00001

On the pitfalls of conceptualizing excessive physical exercise as an addictive disorder: Commentary on Dinardi et al. (2021)

J Behav Addict. 2022 Mar 1;11(2):234-239. doi: 10.1556/2006.2022.00001. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Damien Brevers^{1

2}, Pierre Maurage¹, Taylor Kohut¹, José C Perales³, Joël Billieux^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ 1 Psychological Sciences Research Institute, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
² 2 Institute for Health and Behaviour, Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.
³ 3 Mind, Brain, and Behavior Research Center (CIMCYC), Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Granada, Granada, Spain.
⁴ 4 Institute of Psychology, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
⁵ 5 Centre for Excessive Gambling, Addiction Medicine, Lausanne University Hospitals (CHUV), Lausanne, Switzerland.

Abstract

This commentary challenges some of the proposals made in the opinion paper entitled "The expanded interactional model of exercise addiction" by Dinardi, Egorov, and Szabo (2021). We first question the usefulness of the (expanded) interactional model of exercise addiction to determine the psychological processes underlying distress and functional impairment in excessive physical exercise. We then consider the authors' use of the Self-Determination Theory to model exercise addiction, which risks the misclassification of strenuous, but adaptive, patterns of physical exercise as exercise addiction. We finally address broader concerns regarding the idea that maladaptive exercising could be conceptualized as an addictive disorder.

Keywords: addiction-based approach; debate; physical exercise; process-based approach; self-determination theory.