Sport becomes a compulsion and no one is watching. Because there is no help available, the person affected tries to overcome the addiction alone.
Exhaustion hits Adrian Badertscher one July morning. Just one more quick jog before work, he tells himself. Badertscher, then 32 years old and an amateur athlete, wants to go jogging on Bern’s local mountain, Gurten, through dense and steep forest. Like he does almost every day.
Badertscher is a fast runner. He usually manages ten kilometers in less than forty minutes. But this morning everything is different. His body is rebelling, his legs are resisting his head. He can only walk slowly. The physical emptiness is suddenly greater than his sense of being driven.
Badertscher seeks professional help. The doctors diagnose exhaustion depression. Burnout. He is given four months’ sick leave, after which he reduces his workload and learns strategies to better deal with the pressure at work. But the tension remains and he feels bad. He suspects that his real problem is something else.
Only years later will he find out the reason for his exhaustion. It wasn’t work that drove him to burnout.
It was his addiction to movement.
Sports addiction is hardly researched
For years, sport was a compulsion for Badertscher; a day without exercise felt like a waste. If he ran a kilometer slower than four minutes in a tempo run, he doubted his self-worth. At some point he lost the feeling for his body. He jogged and cycled in snow, rain, heat, when he was exhausted and tired. Instead of alcohol, he numbed his inner restlessness with sport, his personal drug.
Adrian Badertscher (35) feels alone with his sports addiction.
Sports scientist Flora Colledge researches sports addiction at the University of Lucerne; she prefers to speak of exercise addiction. She says: “Basically, the more athletic we are, the healthier we are.” Sport has been proven to strengthen the body and mind. Studies have shown, for example, that it can prevent and alleviate depression. However, sports addicts have developed an obsessive relationship with sport; physical activity is the focus of their lives. This is how sport becomes a problem.
There is little research into sports addiction and it is not yet recognized as an official disease by the World Health Organization (WHO). Colledge is convinced that sports addiction is a behavioral addiction, just like gambling addiction or computer game addiction. She says: “People addicted to exercise see sport as the only solution to stressful situations and continue despite the negative consequences. That is what constitutes an addiction.”
Colledge is concerned with primary exercise addiction, behavioral addiction. She estimates that there are 1,200 people in Switzerland who suffer from it and cannot get professional help anywhere. Although people with eating disorders also exercise excessively, their main motivation is weight loss, and their main problem is disordered eating behavior. These people are cared for in eating disorder clinics.
Movement determines self-esteem
Badertscher is one of the few people affected who speak publicly about their sports addiction. He finds it difficult to make himself heard, to be taken seriously – and to understand his own illness. When Badertscher talks about his sports addiction, he sometimes pauses for minutes, struggling to find the right words. His memory is blurred. He says: “I felt like I was being controlled remotely. I was no longer in control of myself.”
He finds it difficult to say exactly when the addiction started. He says he slipped into it slowly. Ten years ago he started doing more sport. He jogged several times a week, rode his racing bike and mountain bike, and went on ski tours. He became fitter, slimmer, and more muscular. Sport gave him a feeling of control. He wanted more of it.
Badertscher did the most sport in 2018, up to fifteen hours a week. Back then, exercise fit into his everyday life and was still something he enjoyed. He says: “It’s not the amount of sport that matters, but the motivation. You can only do one hour of sport a day and still feel compelled to do it.”
Sports scientist Colledge confirms this. She has specialized in extreme triathlons and completes the Ironman distance with additional difficulties such as high altitudes or cold. And yet, she says, she is not addicted to sports: “I train towards a goal and allow myself days to rest. Sports addicts don’t do that.”
Badertscher trained alone, without a goal in mind. During the pandemic, he commuted from Bern to Chur every day. The days were long, but Badertscher couldn’t do without sport. He sometimes got up at 4:30 a.m., went for a half-hour run, did a short strength training session, then caught the train. Or caught up on the exercise in the evening.
The sport that had once grounded him became a stress factor. Badertscher could no longer relax. At work he thought about sport, he was nervous and tense. The desire for the addictive substance dominated his thoughts. Experts refer to this as the so-called addiction pressure.
At that time, Badertscher was just functioning; lightness and joy had disappeared from his life. Looking back, he speaks of “complete exhaustion”, a “hamster wheel” from which he could not escape. Those around him worried about him, but at the same time were overwhelmed. He could not enter into a relationship; he felt too driven.
Relapses occur again and again
Three years have passed since that July morning when exhaustion tore Badertscher out of the vortex of addiction. It is one of the last summer days of the year. Badertscher is walking through the Gurtenwald forest, where he used to spend a large part of his free time.
He is tanned, wears sports glasses and a South American talisman dangles around his neck. He seems thoughtful but relaxed. The distance from his old life is doing him good. He dared to make a fresh start in the winter, quit his job as a business IT specialist and moved to the Bernese Oberland. Now he lives off his savings. He is trying to overcome his addiction to sports – a difficult and lonely path.
Badertscher is grateful for the psychological support he received along the way. But his actual issue, sports addiction, was never discussed in the sessions. A blind spot in the health system. He says: “We learn to perform, but when do we learn to take good care of ourselves?”
Sports scientist Colledge says: “People addicted to exercise receive little support. Only when exercise addiction is recognized as a mental disorder will there be treatment options for them.” With her basic research, she wants to improve the data available. And thus make the disease more visible.
Badertscher helps himself. He has devoured German-language specialist literature on the subject of sports addiction and personal development, and started a blog and a podcast. At some point he wants to coach other sufferers. But for now he is trying to understand how he became addicted.
He now knows that he wanted to compensate for his low self-esteem with sport. He says: “I defined my self-worth by the speed at which I ran.” Badertscher attributes his fixation on performance to his childhood. He grew up on a farm in Emmental, and as a young boy he helped out on the farm. He was shown that hard work brings praise and recognition. He never learned to take care of himself. Badertscher says: “An addiction is always also a longing.”
In his mid-30s, Badertscher now has to learn what self-love means. He has discovered hobbies where performance is secondary. He meditates, bakes bread, plays volleyball once a week, and goes hiking. He sleeps more and takes time to do nothing. Structures and breaks help him find the right amount of exercise. He allows himself up to five hours of endurance training per week, and performance can take priority during this time frame. When he’s skiing or mountain biking, he usually doesn’t look at the clock anymore.
His goal is to eventually lead a normal everyday life again and to find a good way to deal with his addiction. He says he will probably never get back a carefree relationship with exercise. There are always relapses. Recently he caught himself compensating for the need to exercise with hour-long walks. And when he is out in the mountains, he sometimes compares the speed of his ascent with previous runs. “That is not productive,” he says.
Because he knows: He used to be faster, but today he is more balanced.