Counting your steps is unlikely to destroy your life, but a lot of people do suffer serious harms due to behaviours like compulsive exercise and orthorexia. Obsessive-compulsive behaviour around exercise often overlaps with anorexia nervosa, which has the highest risk of mortality of any mental disorder (~5% at 10 years). There is a surprisingly fine line between compulsive health tracking and a life-threatening eating disorder.

here’s an interesting account of someone’s advice that they devised after having and recovering from an eating disorder.

i don’t know enough to endorse all their medical claims, but you can get a sense of their experience.

you can see that for them and others, an addiction-like compulsion to exercise (including literally counting steps) was a big part of it.

https://sites.google.com/view/the-no-nonsense-guide/guide

Addictions do not have to be life destroying. Plenty of people are addicted to various things but are fully functional and live fulfilled lives.

It’s a bit unfair to ask whether OP wants words to have any meaning when it seems you’re a bit fuzzy on the definition of “addiction” yourself.

> Addictions do not have to be life destroying. Plenty of people are addicted to various things but are fully functional and live fulfilled lives. It’s a bit unfair to ask whether OP wants words to have any meaning when it seems you’re a bit fuzzy on the definition of “addiction” yourself.

Wikipedia: Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behaviour that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction

Wikipedia isn't really an authority on words, specifically, though. If one goes to Merriam-Webster, an actual dictionary, one sees:

> a: exhibiting a compulsive, chronic, physiological or psychological need for a habit-forming substance, behavior, or activity

> b: strongly inclined to do, use, or indulge in something repeatedly

If one looks at the Oxford English Dictionary, one sees:

> a state of dependence produced either by the habitual taking of drugs or by regularly engaging in certain behaviours (e.g. gambling).

No specific requirement for negative consequences, just a habit.

> No specific requirement for negative consequences, just a habit.

If addiction is not a psychological or physical dependency with harmful or destructive consequences, what should we call those that do?

The American Psychiatric Association has this to say about addiction, which tells me they view addiction as something worth fixing and hence is harmful: https://www.psychiatry.org/getmedia/e25c07ae-7333-4466-9add-...

No, I'm not fuzzy on the definition of addiction. If a behavior has little negative effects, then it's not an addiction.

Most mildly addictive drugs don't have that many negative effects.

It can be a negative effect like "I decided to skip work to do the drug instead and lost my job"

I dunno how else to say that not having negative effects doesn't mean one isn't addicted to something. It simply isn't a requirement.

> It simply isn't a requirement.

A third of the diagnostic criteria for substance addiction are about negative effects in the person's life. Perhaps it's not strictly a requirement but often it's only a question of time.

I don’t think that’s correct.

Others have linked to various respectable dictionaries that support my definition.

> Can you show us a single example of someone who destroyed their life because they couldn't stop counting their steps?

‘I Am Obsessed With Taking 100,000 Steps A Day,’ Woman Says https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkhD0Lo-fxk