Virtology GlobalAn initiative of Instituto Virtudes · Brazil
Work without a break, a workout that can never be skipped, a purchase that “looks gorgeous,” a procedure that “took years off.” Some compulsions earn praise instead of worry. From the outside, they look like virtue. What separates one from the other is the engine.
English edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.
If people praise you for exactly what has been consuming you, this article is for you. The dedication that does not stop even on Sunday. The workout that can never be skipped, not even with a painful knee. The purchase that “looks gorgeous.” The procedure that “took years off.” You hear “so dedicated,” “so disciplined,” “such good taste,” and inside you feel something that does not match the compliment: a tiredness that does not go away, an emptiness that keeps coming back, a fear of stopping you cannot explain.
Eduardo Casarotto, the creator of Virtology, devotes a chapter of his book O Que Nos Prende (What Holds Us) to these compulsions. And he opens the question with a simple comparison:
Before going on, an important caveat. Working hard, training, looking after your appearance and buying what you need are good things. Nobody here is telling you to stop. And dedication is not addiction. A major review by Clark and colleagues, from 2016, showed that work addiction goes together with perfectionism and with the hurried, competitive personality type, but not with conscientiousness, the trait of people who are organized and responsible (Clark and colleagues, 2016). Being dedicated and being addicted are different things. What this article looks for is the point where one turns into the other. And pride, which will come up a lot, is not a flaw some people have. It is a system every human brain has, mine included.
Casarotto tells of a birthday party in a family he had been accompanying. The man whose birthday it was had stopped drinking, and when it was time for the cake everyone made a point of saying how much he had changed. Now he got up before dawn to run. He had opened a second shop. He had lost weight. They toasted with juice. Later, in the kitchen, his wife said quietly: “Doctor, he stopped drinking. But he still isn’t at home.”
His chair at the dinner table was still empty, just as it had been when he was at the bar. He had swapped the glass for the spreadsheet and the running shoes. And everyone applauded.
That, according to Casarotto, is what makes these compulsions the hardest to treat: the person is praised for the symptom. When she shops too much, her friends compliment the outfit. When he trains too much, he gains followers. When she has one more surgery, everyone says she looks gorgeous. Nobody is suspicious of something that earns real applause.
With drinking, the raised glass imitates applause: it is the toast, the “you won, and we are watching.” With work, the gym, the designer bag and the operated body, the applause is not an imitation. It is real applause. The symbol has become literal.
In Virtology, pride is a system in the brain, the SNO, the Pride Neurofunctional System (the Portuguese acronym is kept in the English editions). It arose to make sure we had a place in the group. For our ancestors, being left out meant not surviving, and the brain kept that fear. That is why the SNO compares you with others all the time, without asking permission. I explained this system in Pride is not what you think.
Praise acts directly on this system, and it acts on the body. The anterior insula, a region folded inside the brain at the level of the temples, turns a rise in position into a sensation: warmth in the chest, the chest swelling, the shiver of triumph. And the reward circuit, which carries dopamine from the middle of the brain to the nucleus accumbens, deep in the brain below the forehead, does not record only pleasure. It also records approval and recognition. Every “so dedicated” is noted there as the right path.
Casarotto gives these compulsions a name: pride dressed as virtue. Pride has learned to disguise itself as dedication, discipline, good taste and self-care. Among the 23 defense mechanisms Virtology describes, one explains a great deal of this: sublimation, which takes an impulse that cannot come out one way and lets it come out another, accepted and even admired. It produces real, good things. But as long as it works as a defense, it channels without resolving, and it becomes a channel that cannot stop, because stopping would mean meeting the original conflict again. And it can harden into what Casarotto calls the armor of the tireless producer, the mask of the achiever who does not know how to rest. Once hardened, it becomes perfectionism and compulsive work, “the victorious defense that enslaves the victor.”
On the outside, the dedicated person and the compulsive person both get up early, meet deadlines and deliver a lot. The difference lies in what drives each of them. One works out of purpose. The other works so as not to feel, or to be seen.
Virtology describes the Three Waves of Work. In the first, I work to survive: I do it because I need to eat. In the second, I work for power and competition: I do it to win, to be more than others. In the third, I work out of purpose: I do it because it is my contribution to the world. Casarotto says the work addict is stuck in the second wave. He works for the audience. The position has become identity, and success has become proof of worth. From outside it looks like a mission. Inside, it is the hunger for importance and for competition, disguised as purpose.
Science has measured how big this is. In a representative sample of 1,124 workers in Norway, Andreassen and colleagues found 8.3% with work addiction (Andreassen and colleagues, 2014). And Clark’s review showed that this addiction is linked to burnout, stress, conflict between work and personal life, and poorer physical and mental health.
The path has the same three stages as every addiction. The entry door usually comes early: the child who was only seen when they got good grades, and who learned they were worth what they did. The peak is the first big recognition, the promotion, the project delivered in front of everyone. And the escalation is predictable. More hours. The phone at the dinner table. Work messages answered in the middle of the night. Holidays that never happen.
And there is withdrawal. Casarotto describes a person who dreaded weekends with no schedule, who could not simply be at home doing nothing. For the work addict, the free Saturday is the crisis.
Virtology maps 51 human needs, and looking through them you can see what compulsive work pays for. It pays, in excess, the need for Accomplishment, Achievement, Bringing Plans to Fruition, and Legacy. And it also pays Importance, Competition, Trust and Credibility, Security and Control. At the same time, it blocks others: Family Bonds and Friendship, Fun, Whole-Person Restoration and Regeneration, Introspection. Casarotto sums it up in one sentence: the person knows the work, but not the engine behind the work. That is why, he writes, emptiness tends to arrive precisely at the top. Whoever got there on the wave of power discovers that it does not give meaning. And what do they do when they discover it? They work more. I wrote more about the waves of work in Do you work to survive, to prove, or to be?.
Bodily Movement is one of the 51 needs, and missing a workout is not, on its own, a sign of anything. A day without training is not a diagnostic test, and nobody needs to interrupt a recommended activity to prove they are in control.
But the closeness to food shows up early. A study of 1,665 gym-goers found a risk of exercise dependence in 30.7% of them. Among those with signs of an eating disorder, the figure rose to 60.2%. Among those without, it stayed at 24.7% (Trott and colleagues, 2020). Where food is at war, training tends to be in excess.
The Evolution Band shows the engine. Virtology describes seven bands, the degrees of maturity with which each person lives each area of life. When you ask someone how much they actually exercise, the answer changes with the band. In a more primitive band, Sensation, the answer is: “I do a lot, so I’ll be desired.” In Predevelopment: “I have the discipline to keep healthy and look good.” That is discipline on display. In Feeling, a more mature band: “I only do it to keep my body healthy.” Someone in Feeling does not train less out of laziness. They train for the right reason. The body serves purpose, not the audience.
Compulsive exercise usually pays for Bodily Movement in excess, Aesthetics, Competition, which is the time, the weight, the app ranking, and Control, because the body is sometimes the only territory a person feels they control. And it pays Importance all the time. Casarotto writes that addiction to the body inflates three needs: Aesthetics in the shop window, Comfort in neglect, and Importance in both.
With appearance, the pattern becomes even clearer. About the person who has surgery after surgery to reach an ideal standard, Casarotto writes that the Lack is one of self-esteem or of accepting one’s own image, and that the search for physical perfection serves to obtain approval and importance. And, writing about eating disorders, he leaves a sentence that applies here in full: the body is the screen onto which a conflict that is not about the body is projected.
Psychiatry has a name for the most serious form of this, body dysmorphic disorder: the person sees a defect in their own body that others do not see, or see as much smaller, and suffers greatly because of it. In a study of 200 people with this disorder, 31% had sought cosmetic procedures and 21% had had them. Only 2% of those procedures improved the condition in the long term, and some created new worries about appearance (Crerand, Menard and Phillips, 2010). Fix the nose, and the problem moves to the chin. Fix the chin, and it moves to the belly.
And Brazil is at the center of this. According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, in 2024 the country performed about 2.3 million cosmetic surgeries, the highest number in the world (ISAPS, 2025).
None of this means that all plastic surgery is illness. It is not. The problem is never the object. It is the place it occupies. When a person needs the next change in order to be able to look at themselves, the object has already taken the place of the person.
Shopping follows the same logic, and I have already written about it in Why you spend when you feel bad. Here, just one detail the book highlights. The peak of shopping lies in the moment of buying, not of having. It is the cart, the “complete purchase” button, the bag in your hand as you leave the shop. That is why the item stays in the wardrobe with its tag on. It was never the goal. The goal was the instant of buying. It is wanting without liking in pure form: the brain wants more and more of something it likes less and less. Casarotto goes so far as to say that shopping and betting are cousins.
If you put the four compulsions side by side, a pattern appears. Each one receives a compliment, pays for a need and leaves someone out:
Casarotto teaches a subtle sign for telling health from symptom: what the behavior does to other people. A compulsion always leaves someone out. In the applauded compulsions, very often, the one left out is the person themselves. Their Self, the deep self, which gradually loses its place among the schedule, the workout and the mirror.
So how do you tell? The goal is not to give up the object. It is to change the engine. And the engine shows up in the answers to some questions. The first are the four Casarotto calls the cigar questions: pleasure or relief, who you do it for, what happens when nobody sees, since when. I go through them one by one in Nobody smokes just nicotine, and they work just the same for the job title, the workout, the shopping bag and the mirror.
For the applauded compulsions, he adds two questions that go straight to identity. They do not diagnose anything, but they help a great deal:
There is one more sign that tends to mislead. Casarotto writes that where suffering appears in the face of good news, it is worth looking for the display window: a whole life resting on a single focus. The hard-won retirement that turns into depression. The goal reached that turns into emptiness. I wrote about this in The perfect display and the life behind it.
When your relationship with work, exercise, appearance or shopping causes suffering and harm, the first step is a health assessment. Virtology comes in alongside it, never in its place. And it does not propose dismantling the work. Casarotto writes that virtological work keeps the work and treats the origin, until the person produces out of purpose rather than out of escape. The shop can go on. The training can go on. What changes is the engine.
And the engine is changed with virtues, in the order of the Pyramid. Humility comes first, because it is what removes pride’s disguise. Casarotto sums up Humility in one sentence:
The position, the bag, the running time, the new face. Do you need it to be worth something? If you do, that is where Humility works. And Selflessness goes with Humility from the start, as a pair, in small practices: setting aside time for your child, listening to a friend all the way to the end, taking part in a shared task without needing to lead it.
The rest of the Treatment Foundation comes along. Acceptance of the body you have, of limits, of ageing, of the position that never came. Forgiveness, of yourself and of whoever only noticed the child when she got good grades. Responsibility for the debt, for your health and for your family, without hiding. The State of Certainty, because behind a great deal of compulsive work lies the fear of failure and of insecurity. Perseverance, for the ordinary pace that earns no applause. And Individuation, which is decisive here but comes after Humility, not before. Casarotto warns that individuating without dealing with pride means swapping the audience outside for an audience inside that applauds.
Only then comes Development. The combination Virtology indicates for addiction and compulsion adds three virtues from this level to the Foundation: Truth, Gentleness and Patience. Truth, which first requires Humility and Responsibility, undoes the hidden instalment and the lie about the price. Patience, which depends on Humility and Selflessness, sustains the result that takes time and does not make a good photo. Gentleness only holds once Humility, Acceptance, Selflessness, Responsibility and Individuation have some ground under them, and it begins with yourself: the perfectionist speaks to himself with tyranny, and the tyranny inside is the other face of the applause outside.
For the applauded compulsions, Casarotto also highlights the Pursuit of Improvement, which depends on Humility, Forgiveness and Perseverance. And it has to be the real one, the kind that works on the weakness instead of hiding it under strength. The work addict and the compulsive athlete seem to be always improving, but they are hiding weakness under strength. The real Pursuit of Improvement looks at what hurts: the loneliness, the marriage that is not going well, the emptiness of the first minute of silence. And, for anyone stuck in the workout or the mirror, Care for the Body, which depends on Humility, Acceptance and Individuation. Without Humility, the body becomes a shop window. Without Acceptance, the body is rejected. Without Individuation, the body is whatever the group approves of.
The Top of the Pyramid, with Love of Neighbor and Helping Others, remains the horizon: you reach it after the whole path below. The relationship with work matures when it stops being a trophy or a burden and becomes service. The body stops being a shop window and becomes an instrument for serving. Whoever is serving does not need an audience.
The aim is not to stop anything. It is to find out what the applause is paying for.
For those who live close to someone like this, Casarotto makes a clear request: do not applaud the symptom, applaud the person. Instead of “so dedicated, working until midnight,” say “I missed you at dinner.” Instead of “what a body,” say “it’s good to have you here.” And if he stopped drinking and threw himself into work or the gym, stop saying “at least it isn’t drugs.” If the engine has not changed, it is the same person at another station of the same cycle. The children are watching, and they learn what matters from what the family applauds.
Praise does not need to disappear from your life. It just stops being the fuel. When a person no longer needs the audience to be worth something, they can keep working, training and taking care of themselves, now as a whole person, and with time to spare for being at home.
Some situations call for health care before any reflection. Training while injured, training to make up for what you ate, going without food to fit into clothes, vomiting or using laxatives can be signs of an eating disorder: please see a health service. Before one more cosmetic procedure, especially if you have already had others and are still dissatisfied, talk to a mental health professional. If shopping has turned into debt, do not hide it: talk to your family and seek financial advice. If exhaustion has reached your body, with insomnia, constant tension or chest pain, see a doctor. And if the thought appears that life is not worth living, contact your local emergency services or a crisis line right away.
Continue with SNO and SNE: two systems at the root of neurosis, Pride is not what you think, or the 12-Step guided trail.
Looking for a certified Virtologist, information about the training, or a partnership outside Brazil? Write to the international director for your region.
Write to Isabella Becker · EMEA →Write to Ana Karolina Cejudo · Americas →Want the whole framework, for yourself or to help others as a professional? Start with the short course, or take the full training with Dr. Eduardo Casarotto.
The Institute’s Professional Formation with Dr. Eduardo Casarotto is the complete training: the entire framework, the clinical method and the certification to practice.
Explore the Professional Formation →Translated and edited from the Portuguese essay.