There are any number of things that drive human behavior, from the basic craving of hunger to more complex feelings like anger and compassion to ethical or spiritual motivations such as a sense of duty or altruism. But none of these drivers is as psychologically mystifying—and, to many people, as unsettling—as compulsion.
“Compulsions come from a need so desperate, burning and tortured it makes us feel like a vessel filling with steam, saturating us with a hot urgency that demands relief…But while compulsions bring relief, they bring little enjoyment, and while with one part of our brain we desperately wish to stop them, with another we are desperately afraid of stopping.”
That striking and lovely passage—and I wish I didn't have to abridge it—is from the introduction to Can't. Just. Stop. An Investigation of Compulsions, by Sharon Begley, the senior science writer at STAT, former correspondent at the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, and one of my favorite science writers hands down. While the book doesn't hit shelves until February, I began reading an early copy last night and, with some degree of compulsion, couldn't put it down.
