Addiction can come in many forms beyond drugs and alcohol. ‘Behavioral addictions’ is the common term to describe the various forms of repetitive adverse behavior that cannot be stopped by an act of willpower. Addictions to videogames, gambling, food, money, work, relationships or sex, are the new epidemic. These conditions are no less serious than substance addictions. They have detrimental consequences to the person’s life, involve similar chemical processes and response to treatment.

Serenity offers everything you need to know about behavioral addictions: how to recognize and understand them, how they develop and why. Moreover, you will learn how it feels to be addicted, from the many first-person testimonies of people in recovery. Loving a partner, a parent or a child who is addicted is a tough job. How can you know if you are helping or enabling them? What are the boundaries that distinguish love from relationship addiction?

Today, many parents and teachers struggle to come to terms with their kids’ behavior that they don't understand. How much social media, videogames, exercising or dieting is too much? Why are some people unable to stop it, despite serious consequences? Is it just their lack of willpower, or has the line to addiction been crossed? How can anyone be addicted to something everybody does, like using computers, eating, spending, working, having relationships? Am I addicted? How can I recover? How can I prevent the passing of the disease to my children?

Recovery from behavioral addictions is a transformative personal journey. Addiction has affected all walks of life. To recover, one must turn one’s life around in all its dimensions, so a state-of-the-art personalized recovery plan is required to start on the path of recovery. The guidelines to make such a plan, guaranteed to work, will be given in Serenity.

More often than not, addicts suffer from more than one behavioral or substance addictions, coexisting and reinforcing each other (like tobacco, caffeine and work addictions). The dysregulated neural pathways will return to the baseline after a period of abstinence, under the condition that all addictive behaviors be stopped. If we leave even one of such ‘pleasure shortcuts’ open, there is danger that the problems might resurface there. Rather than just browsing through the pages, the reader will be engaged to interact by doing the exercises at the ends of chapters. The core message is: “You can do something about it!”