Exercise addiction spotlight
The Guardian published a deep feature warning that exercise addiction can look like training through injury, prioritizing workouts over relationships, and extreme emotional highs and lows — and that mental‑health support should be part of the response. The article frames addiction as a spectrum that demands awareness, not shame (theguardian.com).
The Guardian feature includes first‑hand accounts from writer Margo Steines and endurance athlete Luke Tyburski, who describe secrecy, training through pain and emotional “highs and lows,” and the piece notes the condition is not formally listed in DSM‑5/ICD diagnostic manuals. (newspub.live) Epidemiological studies show wide variation in risk: surveys of leisure exercisers report prevalences between about 3% and 42% depending on sport and measurement tool, while one national sample of elite athletes found 7.6% at risk on the Exercise Addiction Inventory. (frontiersin.org) Specialist commentary in the British Journal of Sports Medicine this month calls for reframing exercise addiction as a behavioural spectrum that requires clinical awareness rather than moralising, and outlines the need for integrated mental‑health responses. (bjsm.bmj.com) UK clinical guidance on related disorders recommends collaborative care that manages physical and mental comorbidities in people who over‑exercise—NICE eating‑disorders guidance and the Safe Exercise at Every Stage (SEES) framework both provide protocols for supervising activity during treatment. (elft.nhs.uk) Evidence‑based treatment options cited across recent literature include group cognitive‑behavioural programmes such as LEAP for compulsive exercise and emerging clinical pathways linking exercise dependence with anxiety, depression and other mental‑health conditions. (otforeatingdisorders.co.uk)
