It’s been a calm week. Your work is manageable, your relationships are stable, and for once, there’s no crisis demanding your immediate attention. But instead of feeling relieved, you feel… itchy. Restless. Almost uncomfortable. Without consciously deciding to, you find yourself picking a fight with your partner about something trivial, or catastrophizing about a work email that probably means nothing, or suddenly remembering every friendship slight from the past six months and spiraling into emotional turmoil.
Within an hour, you’re back in familiar territory: heart racing, mind spinning, drama unfolding. And here’s the strangest part—underneath all the stress and overwhelm, there’s a whisper of something that feels almost like relief. Like you can finally breathe again.
If this sounds familiar, you might be dealing with something that flies under the radar in most conversations about mental health: chaos addiction. And before you think, “That doesn’t apply to me—I hate chaos,” I need you to know that most people who are addicted to chaos have no idea that’s what’s happening.
The Hidden Epidemic Nobody’s Talking About
Chaos addiction isn’t recognized as a formal diagnosis in the DSM-5, but that doesn’t make it any less real or damaging. Clinical psychologist Dr. Scott Lyons, who has studied this phenomenon extensively, describes it as an addiction to intensity, crisis, and drama—a pattern where the nervous system becomes so accustomed to high-stress states that calm actually feels threatening.
In his groundbreaking 2023 book “Addicted to Drama: Healing Dependency on Crisis and Chaos in Yourself and Others,” Lyons explains that for people addicted to chaos, intensity becomes their way of coping. Their life becomes a constant cycle of crisis, and chronically high levels of stress feel more normal than peace ever could.
Here’s what makes this particularly insidious: chaos addiction often masquerades as other things. It might look like “being passionate” or “having high standards” or “caring deeply.” You might genuinely believe you’re just unlucky, that life keeps throwing problems at you, that other people keep creating drama. The possibility that you might be unconsciously seeking out or creating the chaos rarely crosses your mind.
Dr. Keith Lee, who wrote about his own experiences with chaos addiction in his 2007 book “Addicted to Chaos: The Journey From Extreme to Serene,” describes our culture as one where the extreme has become the norm. According to research compiled by psychologist Mark Griffiths, when people become seduced into believing that intensity equals being alive, the mind becomes wired for drama and the soul becomes starved of meaningful purpose.
The Neuroscience Behind the Need for Chaos
Understanding why anyone would be addicted to something so destructive requires understanding how stress affects the brain. When you experience stress or excitement, your body releases a cocktail of neurochemicals—primarily dopamine, cortisol, and adrenaline.
In 2004, researchers at McGill University conducted a groundbreaking study using PET imaging to examine how psychological stress triggers dopamine release in the brain. What they discovered was revelatory: stressful events caused significant dopamine release in the ventral striatum, the brain’s primary reward center. The magnitude of this dopamine release correlated directly with cortisol response levels.
Here’s where it gets fascinating: dopamine isn’t just about pleasure—it’s about motivation, anticipation, and the drive to seek. When your brain learns that chaos reliably produces dopamine, it starts craving that chaos the same way someone might crave sugar or caffeine.
A 2005 study published in Neuropsychopharmacology found that people with higher cortisol responses to stress also reported more positive subjective responses to amphetamine—suggesting that individuals whose stress systems are more reactive may be particularly vulnerable to addiction patterns, including addiction to stress itself.
But here’s the plot twist: this only works up to a point. Research published in 2019 in eLife shows that chronic exposure to psychosocial adversity actually dampens dopamine production. People who’ve experienced long-term stress have impaired ability to produce the dopamine levels needed for healthy coping. So they need increasingly intense situations to get that same neurochemical hit—exactly like tolerance to a drug.
Think about that for a moment. Your nervous system can literally become addicted to its own stress response, needing more and more intensity to feel “normal,” while simultaneously becoming less capable of producing the feel-good chemicals that make life enjoyable.
The Roots: Why Some People Become Wired for Chaos
Chaos addiction rarely appears out of nowhere. For most people, it has deep roots in their developmental history.
Research on attachment and substance use disorders consistently shows that insecure attachment patterns—particularly disorganized attachment—are strongly linked to addiction behaviors of all kinds, including behavioral addictions. A comprehensive 2019 review found that all studies confirmed a link between insecure attachment and addiction, with longitudinal research showing insecure attachment to be a clear risk factor.
Here’s how this typically plays out: Children who grow up in chaotic, unpredictable, or traumatic environments learn that chaos is normal. Their developing brains wire themselves to expect and even seek out high-intensity situations because that’s what feels familiar. As one online article exploring this pattern notes, if you grew up in chaos or unpredictability, you may feel comfortable—or at least less anxious—around emotional turmoil, even when it’s objectively harmful.
A 2019 study on attachment style, childhood trauma, and addiction found that traumatic experiences create chaos in all fields of life. Alexithymia (difficulty identifying emotions) and dissociation often overlap in handling stressful situations, and both trace back to insecure attachment styles and early childhood trauma.
Additionally, when primary caregivers were sources of both comfort and fear—a pattern called disorganized attachment—children never learn to consistently regulate their emotions. According to research compiled by Flatirons Recovery, people with disorganized attachment styles typically develop from significant childhood trauma, and when these individuals can’t form fulfilling relationships, they may turn to various forms of addiction to fill that void. Though addiction leads to more chaos, it paradoxically feels like a consistent, stabilizing force in their life.
The National Governors Association’s resource guide on trauma and addiction notes that two-thirds of all people with addiction have previously experienced some type of physical or sexual trauma during childhood. The connection between childhood adversity and addiction occurs through impacts on brain development, with stress and trauma literally reshaping how the developing brain processes threats, rewards, and emotional regulation.
The 7 Signs You’re Addicted to Chaos
1. Peace Feels Wrong (Or Even Dangerous)
You know that feeling when everything in your life is going well, and instead of enjoying it, you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop? That’s not just anxiety—it might be your nervous system desperately seeking the chaos it’s learned to depend on.
What this looks like:
- When things are calm, you feel anxious, bored, or oddly empty
- You find yourself creating problems where none exist—picking fights, catastrophizing minor issues, or manufacturing crises
- Relaxation feels impossible; even on vacation, you can’t stop checking work emails or creating to-do lists
- You describe yourself as “thriving under pressure” but falling apart when there’s downtime
- You feel most like yourself when you’re in the middle of managing multiple crises
The deeper pattern: As Dr. Scott Lyons notes in his research, people addicted to drama may never be able to relax without an internal alarm going off, sending them spiraling back toward chaos. Their nervous system has learned that calm equals vulnerability, that peace means you’re exposed to potential threats. So the system creates urgency even when none exists—because that urgency feels safer than stillness.
This isn’t about being dramatic or attention-seeking. It’s about a fundamental mismatch between your current circumstances and what your nervous system expects. Your brain has been trained that survival requires constant vigilance and crisis management. When there’s no crisis to manage, it creates one.
2. Your Life Feels Like a Never-Ending Series of Emergencies
Take a step back and look at the past six months of your life. Does it feel like you’re constantly dealing with one urgent situation after another? Do you find yourself saying things like “It’s always something” or “Why can’t things just be easier?”
What this looks like:
- You rarely go more than a week or two without some kind of crisis
- Friends notice that you always seem to be in the middle of something dramatic
- You’re exhausted from constantly putting out fires, but the fires never seem to stop
- When one crisis resolves, another mysteriously appears almost immediately
- You attract or create situations that require urgent attention and dramatic responses
The trap: From your perspective, you’re not creating this chaos—it’s happening to you. Life feels genuinely hard and unfair. As Lyons observes, from the inside perspective, the world feels like it’s conspiring against you. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: when crisis is constant, you’re likely playing some role in perpetuating it, even unconsciously.
This doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or that nothing genuinely difficult ever happens to you. But it does mean examining your patterns honestly. Are you choosing partners who are emotionally unavailable and then experiencing the inevitable relationship drama? Are you consistently overcommitting yourself and then dealing with the predictable stress? Are you putting off important tasks until they become emergencies?
Sometimes people who are addicted to chaos genuinely create the storms. Other times, they simply have an uncanny ability to find them and then jump in with both feet, convinced they’re helping when they’re actually feeding the cycle.
3. You’re Weirdly Energized by Crisis (But Depleted by Stability)
Notice how you feel when there’s a genuine emergency versus how you feel during ordinary, peaceful times. People addicted to chaos often snap into hyperfocus during crisis but feel scattered and purposeless during calm periods.
What this looks like:
- You’re at your most productive and focused when dealing with urgent problems
- During emergencies, you feel weirdly alive, capable, and clear-headed
- You volunteer to help with other people’s crises, even when you’re already overwhelmed
- Routine tasks feel unbearably boring; you need the “rush” of high-stakes situations to feel engaged
- You’ve noticed that you tend to make your best decisions under pressure (or so you tell yourself)
The biochemical reality: Remember that dopamine research from earlier? This is it in action. Your brain has learned that chaos equals dopamine release. Crisis situations trigger your stress response, which floods your system with cortisol and adrenaline. For someone with a chaos-adapted nervous system, this feels energizing rather than overwhelming—at least initially.
But here’s the cost: you’re essentially running on your body’s emergency fuel all the time. According to research on cortisol and addiction patterns, this creates a feedback loop where you need increasingly intense situations to get the same neurochemical effect. Meanwhile, your ability to feel satisfaction, peace, or contentment during normal circumstances deteriorates.
You might think of yourself as someone who “performs well under pressure,” but what you’re actually doing is requiring pressure to perform at all. That’s not a strength—it’s a dependency.
4. Your Relationships Are Consistently Turbulent
Look at your relationship history—romantic partnerships, friendships, family dynamics, even workplace relationships. Is there a pattern of intensity, conflict, and drama? Do your relationships tend to be all-consuming and volatile rather than stable and nourishing?
What this looks like:
- Your romantic relationships have explosive highs and devastating lows, with little middle ground
- You’re attracted to emotionally unavailable, unpredictable, or chaotic people
- Stable, healthy relationships feel boring; you lose interest when things get too calm
- You have a history of dramatic friendship breakups or family conflicts
- People describe you (or your life) as “a lot” or “exhausting,” even if they care about you
The attachment connection: This pattern often traces directly back to early attachment experiences. Research shows that people with fearful-avoidant or disorganized attachment styles—which typically develop from childhood trauma—struggle with erratic behavior in relationships, oscillating between seeking intimacy and pushing it away.
Dr. Lyons calls this “drama bonding”—when the only moments you feel in sync and validated are when the conditions around you are as chaotic as you feel internally. Crisis forms a false sense of belonging because shared intensity feels like connection.
But here’s what’s actually happening: you’re not connecting through shared values, mutual respect, or genuine intimacy. You’re bonding through shared crisis, which feels intense but isn’t sustainable or healthy. When the crisis inevitably resolves or the intensity fades, the relationship falls apart because there was never anything else holding it together.
5. You Self-Sabotage When Things Are Going Well
This one’s particularly painful to recognize. Just when everything starts coming together—the relationship is stable, the job is going well, your health is improving—you do something that undermines your own progress.
What this looks like:
- You start fights right before important events or celebrations
- When a relationship gets serious and stable, you suddenly pull away or create distance
- You procrastinate on important opportunities until they pass or become crises
- Success makes you uncomfortable; you find ways to introduce complications or problems
- You can identify patterns of “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” in various areas of your life
The uncomfortable truth: This isn’t about being your own worst enemy or lacking willpower. It’s your nervous system’s way of returning to what feels familiar. Research on childhood trauma and addiction shows that people who experienced chaos or trauma during development often unconsciously sabotage stability because stability feels foreign and therefore threatening.
Think about it: if your childhood was chaotic, your developing brain learned that chaos is what comes next. Success, stability, and peace don’t fit that template. So when things start going well, your nervous system sounds an alarm: “This is wrong. This isn’t how things work. Danger must be coming.” And in an attempt to regain control and return to familiar territory, you create the very chaos your system expects.
You’re not weak or broken. You’re responding to deeply ingrained patterns that once helped you survive but now prevent you from thriving.
6. You Have Trouble Being Present and Still
When was the last time you just… sat? No phone, no TV, no productive activity, no problem to solve. Just existing in the moment without doing anything.
If that question makes you uncomfortable or you can’t remember the last time you did that, pay attention.
What this looks like:
- You always need to be doing something; stillness feels intolerable
- You have multiple projects, commitments, or problems happening simultaneously
- When there’s nothing urgent demanding your attention, you feel anxious or empty
- You scroll social media, watch TV, or engage in other numbing behaviors compulsively
- Meditation, quiet time, or rest feel impossible or make you more agitated
The avoidance pattern: This is often about avoiding what comes up when things get quiet. When you stop managing external chaos, internal chaos surfaces—unprocessed emotions, uncomfortable thoughts, old wounds that never healed. Staying busy and keeping multiple fires burning is a way of avoiding that internal experience.
Research on stress and dopamine shows that people exposed to chronic adversity develop altered stress response systems. For some, this manifests as an inability to rest because their nervous system can’t distinguish between “safe downtime” and “dangerous vulnerability.”
Additionally, if you’ve been running on stress hormones for years, your body literally doesn’t know how to function in a state of rest. The withdrawal from constant cortisol and adrenaline can feel awful at first—similar to coming off any addictive substance.
7. You Use Chaos to Feel Alive (or Numb Pain)
This is perhaps the most telling sign, though it’s often the hardest to see in yourself. Do you need drama, intensity, or crisis to feel engaged with life? Or conversely, do you use chaos as a way to avoid dealing with deeper pain?
What this looks like:
- You describe life without crisis as “boring” or “meaningless”
- You feel most like yourself when you’re dealing with intense situations
- You jump from one crisis to another, rarely pausing between them
- People close to you have suggested that you seem to seek out or create drama
- When asked to describe peaceful times, you struggle—or realize you can’t remember any
The dual function: Chaos serves two seemingly opposite purposes. For some people, it’s the only thing that makes them feel alive—intensity equals existence. For others, it’s a way to avoid feeling at all—stay busy enough with external chaos, and you don’t have to face internal pain.
Research on trauma and substance use shows that people who experienced childhood trauma often initiate substance use (or in this case, chaos-seeking behaviors) to self-medicate painful experiences. The effects enable them to temporarily suppress negative memories, cope with difficult emotions, and find a kind of intense focus that feels like peace compared to the internal turmoil they’re avoiding.
Dr. Lyons puts it perfectly: for those addicted to drama, the drama is often how they survive—or think they do. The chaos becomes the medicine to feel alive in relation to the numbing of the internal and external world around them.
When Chaos Addiction Becomes Dangerous
Not everyone who relates to these patterns has a full-blown chaos addiction. Most of us have moments where we’re drawn to intensity or struggle with stillness. The concern is when these behaviors become your primary operating system—when you literally can’t function without crisis.
Untreated chaos addiction leads to:
Physical health deterioration: Chronic stress wreaks havoc on every system in your body. According to research compiled by the American Psychological Association, chronic stress is linked to heart disease, digestive problems, immune suppression, chronic pain, and accelerated aging.
Relationship destruction: Eventually, even people who love you can’t sustain the constant intensity. You burn through relationships and leave a trail of exhausted, hurt people in your wake.
Career instability: Chaos addiction often manifests as workplace drama, inability to handle routine work, and conflict with colleagues or supervisors.
Mental health crisis: The link between stress addiction and conditions like anxiety, depression, and PTSD is well-documented. The constant flood of stress hormones alters brain chemistry in ways that make emotional regulation increasingly difficult.
Generational transmission: Perhaps most heartbreaking, research shows that trauma and chaos patterns get passed down. Parents struggling with chaos addiction often create chaotic environments for their children, perpetuating the cycle.
Breaking Free: Rewiring Your Nervous System for Peace
Here’s the hopeful news: chaos addiction can be healed. Your nervous system is remarkably adaptable—the same neuroplasticity that allowed it to wire itself for chaos can help rewire it for peace.
Recognize the pattern without judgment: The first step is simply seeing it. Notice when you’re creating or seeking chaos. Notice how calm feels in your body. This isn’t about shame—it’s about awareness.
Start with tiny doses of stillness: If five minutes of meditation feels impossible, try one minute. Then two. Gradually expose your nervous system to calm states so it can learn that peace isn’t dangerous.
Work with a trauma-informed therapist: Chaos addiction almost always has trauma roots. Therapies like EMDR, somatic experiencing, or internal family systems can help process the underlying wounds driving the chaos-seeking behavior.
Practice grounding techniques: When you feel that pull toward chaos or the discomfort of calm, use grounding exercises to stay present. Feel your feet on the floor. Notice five things you can see. Take slow, deliberate breaths.
Build a tolerance for positive emotions: Research on addiction recovery shows that many people struggle with positive emotions as much as negative ones. Practice sitting with contentment, peace, and joy without immediately creating a problem or crisis.
Find healthy sources of dopamine: Exercise, creative pursuits, meaningful work, and genuine connection all trigger dopamine release without the destructive patterns of chaos addiction.
Address the root cause: Work on healing attachment wounds, processing childhood trauma, and developing secure relationships. Often, chaos addiction dissolves when the underlying need for intensity as survival strategy is addressed.
A Different Kind of Aliveness
One of the most profound shifts in healing from chaos addiction is discovering that there are different kinds of aliveness. The intense, adrenalized, crisis-fueled state you’ve known isn’t the only way to feel engaged with life.
There’s an aliveness in presence. In connection. In creating rather than reacting. In choosing rather than being driven by compulsion. In feeling your emotions fully rather than using chaos to avoid or amplify them.
It doesn’t feel the same as that familiar adrenaline rush. At first, it might feel boring or even scary. Your nervous system will protest, will insist that without the intensity, you’re not really living.
But as you heal, you’ll discover something remarkable: Peace doesn’t have to mean numbness. Stability doesn’t have to mean boredom. Contentment is its own kind of aliveness—subtler than crisis, but infinitely more sustainable.
You can be fully engaged with life without needing it to be constantly dramatic. You can feel deeply without needing constant crisis to validate those feelings. You can be interesting, complex, and fully alive while also being at peace.
Moving Forward with Compassion
If you recognized yourself in these patterns, take a breath. You’re not broken, and you’re not alone. Chaos addiction is an adaptive response to circumstances that taught you chaos was normal—or even necessary for survival.
The patterns that got you through childhood, that helped you survive trauma or instability, served a purpose. They were your nervous system’s best attempt to keep you functioning in impossible circumstances. There’s no shame in that.
The question now is whether those patterns still serve you. Whether the chaos that once felt like survival now prevents you from truly living. Whether you’re ready to discover what life might look like when you’re not constantly bracing for or creating the next crisis.
Healing is possible. Your nervous system can learn new patterns. Peace can become as familiar as chaos once was. But it requires acknowledging the pattern, committing to the work, and being patient with yourself as your system learns a completely different way of being.
The journey from chaos to calm isn’t about erasing your intensity or passion. It’s about channeling it in ways that nourish rather than deplete you. It’s about learning that you can be your full, complex, feeling self without needing your life to be a constant emergency.
You deserve peace. Not the kind of peace that feels like numbness or disconnection, but the kind that comes from a nervous system that finally feels safe enough to rest. The kind that comes from relationships built on trust rather than crisis. The kind that comes from living rather than just surviving.
And that peace? It’s available to you. Even if right now, it feels impossible to imagine.
Do any of these patterns feel familiar? Have you noticed yourself seeking out or creating chaos without realizing it? Share your thoughts in the comments—sometimes recognizing these patterns in ourselves helps others see them too.
If this article resonated with you, please share it with someone who might need to read it. Chaos addiction thrives in the shadows, in the belief that “this is just how I am” or “this is just how life is.” Awareness is the first step toward freedom.