I think it's down to evolutionary biology that homo sapiens have developed these means of self-medicating: shopping, alcohol, smoking, drugs, hoarding, OCDs of all kinds, sex/fetishes, gambling, exercising, EATING (ahem), not eating, television, the Internet/video games, etc.
Life for humans is hard physically, psychologically, emotionally, interpersonally. Sometimes too hard. I believe that over hundreds of thousands of years humans have learned to do over and over what works to feel better for a while and it helped early man have the will to survive another day and now the capacity for addiction is baked into our DNA. So much of the human experience is beyond our control that the urge to self-medicate through behaviors we can control serves a purpose.
Of course there are lots of people who aren't addicted to anything in the clinical sense. Maybe they never came face to face with the necessary triggers. Maybe they are just in the right place physically, psychologically, emotionally, and interpersonally. If that's the case, then they probably had very good, emotionally healthy, and nonaddicted parents. In my observation, people in the grip of addiction often had bad or inadequate parents (and bad or inadequate parenting comes in many forms), parents who themselves were addicts, or a bad childhood situation of some kind.
Because of this deep-seated need to self-medicate, I would guess most people don't conquer addictions so much as replace them with different addictions. Like when a shopaholic becomes a super saver. Maybe the woman in the article can learn to transfer the rush of shopping to the rush of saving.
" I think it's down to evolutionary biology that homo sapiens have developed these means of self-medicating: shopping, alcohol, smoking, drugs, hoarding, OCDs of all kinds, sex/fetishes, gambling, exercising, EATING (ahem), not eating, television, the Internet/video games, etc."
How could you leave out working