Passion And Obsession: When Does What You Love Become Excessive?

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Are you passionate about anything? Is there anything you absolutely love doing so much you get excited just thinking about doing it? Passion is something that is inherent to the human condition, and arguably necessary for our survival. This is because if you don't have anything in life that you're passionate about, it's likely you're not super happy with your life – and there’s a reason for this! Being so enthralled in an activity or something that you do can be therapeutic and increase your sense of well-being among having many other positive effects. 

You may be thinking, is passion really something that has to do with the brain? Well I'm glad you potentially asked! There is a newly budding field of psychology known as positive psychology. This is the psychology of positivity in terms of the effects positivity has on the brain processes and our behavior. This includes the kinds of things like positive thinking, mindfulness, being thankful for what we have, and all that stuff that gives you the good feels. I know it may sound like nonsense and not based in science but there's actually a lot of evidence supporting the idea that changing your thought processes can cause actual changes in your disposition and behavior. 

An article by Robert Vallerand published by the Canadian Psychology journal in 2008 entitled, On the Psychology of Passion: In Search of What Makes People's Lives Worth Living denotes that we do things, particularly things we are passionate about, in order to fulfill basic psychological needs. These are the need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. This makes sense if you think about it though right? We as a species possess a need to feel like we have a sense of control over our lives, can interact with our environments effectively, and feel connected with other people. 

These three principles are really indicative of who we are as a people. If you think about everything you do in life and why you do it, often times it will boil down to one of these three things. Why do I get up and go to work every day? Well I need money to do things, and the more money I have the more effectively I feel I can interact with my environment. Why am I on social media regularly? It makes me feel connected with a lot more people. Finally, with regards to passion, why do I write this blog every week? I felt like I wasn’t using my brain enough at my job, so I wanted to nourish my critical thinking abilities (kind of like food… brain food… hmm that’s pretty catchy...). We usually enjoy doing things we're good at. So when we do something we're good at, we feel like we have a much better amount of control over our lives. 

Back to the Vallerand study, with respects to passion he finds there are actually two different kinds of passion: harmonious passion and obsessive passion. Obsessive passion is when you become so engrossed in an activity you're passionate about you internalize it onto your identity in a controlled fashion. Usually this control is due to some kind of pressure, social or otherwise, that almost coerces you to continue in the activity. You know how people become ridiculous health nuts? Even if the health consequences are positive, a person is still engaging in obsessive passion because literally their entire life becomes eating unreasonably healthy food, going to the gym, and spending most of their free time talking about or thinking about healthy eating and working out. 

In contrast, harmonious passion is when you internalize something onto your identity in an autonomous way. The difference is with harmonious passion you know that you have control over whether or not you participate in the activity and choose to incorporate it into your life every day. Instead of overtaking the entirety of one's life, it can exist and interact with all other aspects of a person's life harmoniously. So someone who is really passionate about making music can still go to work every day, go to the grocery store, spend time with family, but then come home and play music for a few hours. If it was obsessive passion, the person would often feel the compulsion to engage in making music instead of doing all of those other things. When we're obsessed with something, that thing cannot interact with any other aspect of our life harmoniously. 

This study finds that what we are passionate about and the way we are passionate about it can have actual effects on our health. When we engage in harmonious passion, it can have a positive impact on our health and when we engage in obsessive passion it can have a negative impact on our health. A person who loves running will have amazing health benefits from the activity itself, but also feel a greater sense of well-being and autonomy from engaging in an activity they love. A person who is obsessed with running however will be compelled to run even in dangerous conditions like rain or snow. The study shows that when we're obsessed with something we're more likely to engage in risky behaviors in order to do the thing we're obsessed with.

The same sort of interaction exists with our personal relationships. Being harmoniously passionate about something can be a very attractive quality to someone and can show your partner you have something that makes life worth living outside of them. Also because it's harmonious, you're not neglecting your significant other in order to do the thing, making them feel like they're important to you and thus, significant. However being obsessed with something can have a significantly detrimental effect on their satisfaction with the relationship as you're choosing to engage in an activity instead of engaging in the relationship. Interestingly enough, this is actually also true if what you're obsessed with is the other person. Having obsessive passion towards a significant other can make them feel smothered and like they can't have autonomy in their own lives, substantially decreasing satisfaction. Not to mention it can be extremely off-putting to have someone only think and talk about you in all other aspects of their life to the point where they’re impeded from engaging in those other parts of life.

Passion is ultimately something that makes life worth living. It’s something we prefer to do so much that it becomes a part of our identity. Self-determination theory suggests that we strive and choose to do things that make us feel autonomous, competent, and related to others. There’s harmonious passion which is feeling passionate about something that can interact harmoniously with all other aspects of your life and obsessive passion which is when what you’re passionate about takes the place of other things and often infringes on other aspects of your life. Harmonious passion can have amazing effects on your life and literally give your life purpose, whereas obsessive passion, while still providing purpose, damages most if not all other aspects of your life. So go find that thing that you absolutely love doing that you’re good at and that brings you closer to other people, because that is what makes the daily struggles of life worth it.