Case Study 1 — Jordan: The Compulsive Edge

Recognition

Jordan read the chapter on a Sunday afternoon in late April, sitting at the kitchen table while Dev worked in the next room.

He read the description of the sensitization-tolerance paradox — intensified wanting with diminished liking — and had a moment of recognition that was more personal than he expected.

Not about substances. He had never had a problematic relationship with alcohol or drugs. A glass of wine with dinner, occasionally two on a difficult week. Nothing that had ever been a concern.

But the work. The checking. The after-dinner return to the laptop that had started as a five-minute scan and had, over several years of escalation, become a 45-minute ritual that he could name and observe and still, without the structural constraint of the 9:30 PM email cutoff (which had itself required considerable effort to maintain), could not reliably choose against.

He had been thinking of it, since the habit chapter, as an anxiety management pattern — the email-checking as anxiety regulation, not procrastination. The chapter on addiction offered an additional frame: the relief was operant conditioning. The more he checked and received relief, the more strongly the checking behavior was reinforced, and the more powerfully the not-checking state produced distress.

Not addiction. But the same mechanism.

He read the following sentence twice: What distinguishes all compulsive behavior from chosen behavior is not the content but the relationship to the behavior — whether the person feels pulled toward it by something that bypasses deliberation, and whether stopping requires more effort than the original valuation of the behavior would predict.

He had thought about that for a long time.

The Work as Function

He brought it to Dr. Nalini.

"I've been thinking about the compulsive behavior material. Not as a self-diagnosis. More as a framework for understanding something I've been observing."

Dr. Nalini: "What have you been observing?"

"The work behavior has features that I'm finding harder to dismiss. The tolerance thing — I needed more reassurance over time, not less. The checking that started as a few minutes became longer. The stopping difficulty — when I'm in the building mood of a problem or a preparation, stopping requires effort out of proportion to what you'd expect if it were just a chosen activity."

"What do you think it's managing?"

Jordan paused. "Multiple things. The anxiety we've been working on — the preparedness anxiety, the threat-monitoring. But also something I haven't fully named."

"Say more."

"The work has been, for a long time, where I have felt most real. Most clearly myself. Most capable." A pause. "Dev once said I had my emotional life at work and my professional life everywhere else. Which is — not quite right, but it pointed at something. If I'm not working, I'm not sure what I am."

Dr. Nalini: "So the work isn't only anxiety management. It's also identity maintenance."

"Yes."

"And the intensity of the pulling toward it — the compulsive quality — is, in part, about how much is stored there?"

"I think so. If working is where I feel most myself, then not working is an identity threat. And identity threats activate the same anxiety system as other threats."

"So the work behavior has at least three functions: anxiety relief (specific task anxiety), identity maintenance (I exist when I work), and possibly something else?"

Jordan thought. "Structure," he said. "Without work, I don't know what the shape of time is. There's something frightening about unstructured time that I've been managing by filling it."

The Sunday Morning Experiment

Dr. Nalini assigned an experiment.

One Sunday per month, Jordan was to spend the morning with no work-related activity: no email, no Slack, no planning documents, no strategic thinking that could be named as work. Just: present to whatever was there without the organizing structure of professional activity.

Jordan agreed to try it.

The first Sunday, he lasted 35 minutes before finding himself mentally drafting a section of the Q3 analysis that was due the following Thursday. He caught himself, noted it in his journal, and redirected to the newspaper. Lasted another 20 minutes before the mental planning resumed.

He noted it in his journal: The planning is not optional. It arises without my intending it. The mind goes there the way a tongue goes to a loose tooth — compelled, not chosen.

The second Sunday was harder. Dev was out for most of the morning, visiting a friend. Jordan was alone in the apartment with no structure and no immediate social context. The pull toward work was intense enough that he recognized it as the functional equivalent of a craving: a specific, directional pull that was not simply preference but a signal from a system that had been trained to seek this particular relief.

He didn't open the laptop. He sat with the discomfort for approximately 25 minutes, which was the longest he had ever deliberately maintained that kind of attentional disorientation. Then he went for a run.

Afterward, he felt something he noted with some surprise: the disorientation had resolved. Not into clarity about what to do with the morning — just into the morning.

He wrote: The craving-equivalent passes if I don't act on it. That's the exposure logic. The same thing that works for the anxiety works here: the response to the signal, not the signal itself, is the problem.

The Rivera Conversation

In May, Rivera came to Jordan with a pattern she had noticed in herself.

She was, she said, spending increasing amounts of time checking the analytics dashboard. Not because she needed the numbers — she had a good intuitive feel for the metrics — but because looking at the dashboard produced a brief reassurance that the work was real and it was going well. And then the reassurance faded, and she checked again.

"I don't know when I started doing this," she said. "Somewhere in the last six months it became... a lot of times per day."

Jordan recognized the description immediately. "What does it feel like when you don't check?"

"Anxious. Like something might be going wrong that I'd be the last to know about."

"That's the loop. The checking relieves the anxiety. The relief reinforces the checking. The checking becomes the way you manage uncertainty, which means the uncertainty itself becomes more threatening because the only tool you have for it is the checking."

Rivera: "How do you know this so specifically?"

"I've been working on my own version of it." He described the email-checking pattern. The Sunday morning experiment. The exposure logic from the therapy.

Rivera was quiet for a moment. "You've been in therapy?"

"Since February. CBT, mostly. For the anxiety that's been driving some of the same patterns you're describing."

A long pause. Rivera: "I didn't know."

"I'm not sure it's the kind of thing people announce."

"I've been thinking about it for two years. For the relationship anxiety stuff, mostly. Also for — I don't know. The perfectionism. The ways my standards stop being standards and start being a weapon."

Jordan: "The first appointment is the hardest part."

"You kept going?"

"I made an appointment, canceled it twice, and then went. It's been worth it."

What Jordan Understood

The chapter's contribution to Jordan's ongoing work was a framework for the compulsive dimension of patterns he had already been addressing from different angles.

The anxiety work addressed the threat-monitoring and catastrophizing. The habit work addressed the behavioral structure — the wind-down ritual, the calendar blocking, the environment design. The physical health chapter had addressed the allostatic load and the exercise structure. The meaning chapter had raised the question of what was underneath the drive, at the values level.

The addiction chapter completed something: it named the experience of being pulled by a mechanism that didn't fully respect deliberation. Not addiction — not the neurobiological transformation of chronic substance use — but the same reinforcement logic operating at a lower intensity in a domain (work, achievement, performance) where the culture enthusiastically encouraged it.

He wrote in his learning journal:

There are three things I have been using work to manage: 1. Task-specific anxiety (the thing Dr. Nalini and I are working on directly) 2. Identity — I exist when I'm productive; I don't know what I am without that frame 3. Unstructured time — emptiness that I have not developed the tolerance for

The exposure logic applies to all three. The way through is through. But the way through identity and unstructured time is slower and more disorienting than any of the professional exposures. Those I can measure. These I can only sit with.

Dev said recently: "I want more of you in the apartment." I think they mean what I mean when I say "available." Present in a way that isn't structured by work. I don't know how to be that person yet. I think I am beginning to learn.

Discussion Questions

1. Jordan identifies three functions that work serves in his life: anxiety relief, identity maintenance, and management of unstructured time. The chapter distinguishes addiction from compulsive behavior that falls short of clinical criteria. How does the same reinforcement mechanism produce different levels of impairment in different people and contexts?

2. The Sunday morning experiment produced a "craving-equivalent" that Jordan chose not to act on. He observed that the disorientation resolved without acting. How does this illustrate the inhibitory learning principle from Chapter 32's exposure work, and why is completing the discomfort (rather than exiting via work) essential to the experiment's value?

3. Jordan described the pull toward work as "compelled, not chosen." The chapter distinguishes compulsion (behavior driven by a mechanism that bypasses deliberation) from choice (deliberate, values-aligned action). In Jordan's case, how might the distinction between chosen work and compelled work inform how he structures his professional time?

4. Rivera's analytics dashboard checking follows the same reinforcement pattern as Jordan's email checking — yet both are high-performing professionals in demanding roles. The chapter notes that culture enthusiastically encourages work-based compulsive behavior in ways it does not encourage substance use. What are the costs of this cultural endorsement?

5. Jordan tells Dev: "I want more of you in the apartment. I don't know how to be that person yet." The chapter's connection-as-medicine insight applies here. How might developing the capacity to be present without structure — to exist in relationship rather than in function — be both a recovery goal and a relational one?