When Exercise Becomes an Addiction: A Psychoanalytic View
Sport is usually seen as something positive. It strengthens the body, reduces stress, and can bring joy. But what happens when exercise stops being healthy and turns into an addiction? When the gym, the run, or the next training session dominates life so much that everything else fades into the background?
From a psychoanalytic point of view, this kind of compulsive exercise is not just about fitness. It can also tell us a story about the inner world and how a person is dealing with anxiety, emptiness, and desire.
The Body as a Battlefield
Sigmund Freud already emphasized that the body is never just biological—it is also a place of unconscious wishes and conflicts. When someone trains excessively, the body often becomes a battlefield:
A fight against feelings of weakness or vulnerability.
An attempt to control anxieties by controlling muscles, weight, or endurance.
A way of transforming inner conflicts into something concrete and visible on the body.
What looks like “discipline” from the outside may, on the inside, be a fight against a fear of collapse.
Repetition and Compulsion
Addiction is marked by repetition: doing the same thing again and again, even if it harms. In psychoanalysis, this is called the compulsion to repeat (Freud, 1920). With sports addiction, the person may feel driven to train daily, pushing beyond exhaustion, even ignoring injuries.
Behind this repetition lies the hope of mastering something unmasterable—often early anxieties, feelings of inadequacy, or inner emptiness. The treadmill or the weights become places where these feelings are symbolically managed, but never fully resolved.
Narcissism and the Ideal Self
Sport also touches on questions of self-image. The mirror in the gym is not only there to check posture. For many, it becomes a stage for the struggle with the ideal self: the perfect, flawless body that promises love, recognition, and safety.
The addiction to exercise can thus be understood as a way of chasing this unreachable image. The stronger the inner doubt, the harder the person trains. The body becomes a kind of armor that hides inner fragility.
Sport as a “Drug”
Like other addictions, sport can function as a drug. After training, the body releases endorphins, giving a natural “high.” But psychoanalytically, the drug effect is also symbolic: it numbs feelings, distracts from loneliness, regulates depression or anxiety. The risk is that sport stops being a choice and becomes a necessity—a way to avoid confronting painful emotions.
How Psychoanalysis Can Help
The goal is not to stop exercising altogether. Sport can and should remain part of life. But psychoanalysis helps explore the deeper meanings:
What drives me to push myself so hard?
What do I avoid feeling when I train?
What fears emerge if I miss a workout?
In the analytic process, the addiction is no longer seen only as a problem, but as a message from the unconscious. Listening to this message can open new ways of dealing with anxiety and self-doubt—without having to punish the body in the process.