Text messaging can help save your life, too.

There has been no end of bad press for the scourge of text messaging. You can hardly listen to the news or read a newspaper without stumbling upon some other negative consequence of texting. There are clearly some issues with text messaging, from the danger while driving to the inordinate amount of time some people spend doing it. So, finally, texting has found a little bit of positive news in a pair of studies out recently. Text messaging helps smokers break the habit:

"Text messaging may be an ideal delivery mechanism for tailored interventions because it is low-cost, most people already possess the existing hardware and the messages can be delivered near-instantaneously into real world situations," said the study, which is scheduled to appear this week in Health Psychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association.

There is so much value in getting therapy out of the office and this study highlights why it is key. Behavior change needs to occur in your context, not in the context of a therapy room. We like immediate gratification and if there's some way to help with that immediacy, treatment is going to be much more likely to be successful.

Addiction is addiction

Slate asks: Exercise and drug use: What do they have in common?

There's another, slightly more disturbing theory for why exercise helps stave off relapse—that working out helps people (and rats) resist drugs because of its similarity to those drugs. Have you ever felt irritable after skipping a yoga class or two? Or a little depressed and lethargic when you don't have time for the gym? These might be construed as withdrawal symptoms—the eventual outcome of an activity or habit that mimics, in some important ways, the effects of morphine and cigarettes and dope.

It's an interesting question. I've worked with women who have had extreme cases of exercise addiction and I've also worked with many people with substance use histories. If I were to read transcripts of our discussions with one or another of these types of clients, and the transcripts were scrubbed of the words "exercise" and "drugs", I'd be hard pressed to tell who was talking about what. The addictions are scarily similar.

Give this article a read and follow-up on some of the links therein. There is a raft of research on exercise addiction and its harmful effects on the body and the mind. As with many things, it's all in moderation.