I wake up in the comfiest of beds reserved to royalties and high societies of the past, in a climatized room that’s set to exactly 21 degrees Celsius year-round. It’s the early mornings. Instead of going to work on a farm or to hunt for my sustenance, I walk over to a magical cooling box that keeps food fresh for weeks on end. Opening it, I find an assortment of meats, fruits, vegetables, and other exotic ingredients from around the world. Oranges from Florida, peaches from Georgia, mangos from Mexico, and so on. The fruits have been cross-bred over the millennia to be extra delectable. There are fresh eggs, poultry, bacon, and bread that somehow stays soft for weeks. However, none suit my liking. I tap my finger a few times on this slab of glass that is straight from the realm of science fiction, and within 20 minutes, a professionally chef-prepared meal arrives at my door. After breakfast, I go to my giant metal horse, except it has the power of 200 horses, to go on about my day. That was just the start of the day.
I am the Sultan of the Middle-East, the emperor of Imperial China, the Daimyo of Japan, the king of Medieval Europe. Not really… But what king from the past would not want to trade place with me, or with anyone else in a modern first-world country for that matter!?
Given this absurd abundance, why are we still so deeply unhappy?
The Problem
The main message of this book by Anna Lembke is quite simple, and I suspect many, especially the older generation, might even find it self-evident.
Our brains have evolved over the millennia in a world of scarcity; however, through the agricultural and industrial revolution, that world has transformed into a place of overwhelming abundance. To quote Dr. Tom Finucane:
We are like cacti in the rain forest
And like cacti adapted to an arid climate, we are drowning in dopamine…
Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting… The increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering. The smartphone is the modern day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it is coming son to a website near you.
If you are anything like me, you know the feeling of wasting hours upon hours on YouTube, Reddit, gaming, and Instagram… Despite the overwhelming amount of amusing content, eventually everything becomes dull. So I “up the dosage”. I start gaming and watching YouTube at the same time, all the while chomping on flavor-powder-coated potato chips. We know it’s vapid and a waste of time. Yet we let technologies further encroach into our lives until its inseparable. Can iPads really be a replacement for babysitters? Is it healthy to be giving kids devices at such an early age? Are we inadvertently destroying their dopamine circuits and attention span?
Dr. Anna Lembke is the medical director of Stanford Addiction Medicine. Her academic research, as well as her previous book, was on the topic of drug addiction. Drawing from her research, as well as her wealth of clinical psychiatrist experience, she sheds light on our dopamine addiction and how we can find balance again.
Key Lessons From The Book
6 lessons resonated with me the most:
1.) Relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain leads to pain
Too much pleasure is pain - Post Malone
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter first discovered in the 1950s. It is often viewed as the “happiness chemical”. While there is some truth to that, dopamine actually plays a bigger role in motivation to get a reward than the pleasure of the reward itself. If you are lying in bed feeling unmotivated, it’s likely a dopamine deficit.
Dopamine is released both in anticipation of a reward, as well as during the ingestion of the reward itself
Therefore, it is not accurate to say you are going on a “dopamine fast”, you need a baseline level of dopamine to function. It is more accurate to say you are fasting from an activity or behavior that produces an outsized dopaminergic response that is detrimental to a leveled balance (also known as “homeostasis”). The hope being that we can regain the ability to experience simple pleasures in life again.
Dopamine is the main way scientist measure the addictive potential of any drug or behavior
Chocolate increases baseline dopamine by 1.5x
Sex increases baseline dopamine by 2x
Nicotine increases baseline dopamine by 2.5x
Cocaine increases baseline dopamine by 3.25x
Amphetamine increases baseline dopamine by at least 10x
Through a process of “neuroadaptation”, repeated exposure to the same stimulus weakens its effect. We develop tolerance to both pleasure and pain. Human adaptability is a double-edged sword.
Every pleasure exacts a price, and the pain that follows is longer lasting and more intense than the pleasure that gave rise to it. With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases.
Around 800 million adults were overweight in 1980. By 2013 that number has risen to 2.1 billion. A clear marker of our culture of over-consumption.
Another contributing factor is our growing amount of leisure time and the ensuing boredom. Rather than embracing the boredom to explore our thoughts or filling it with fulfilling hobbies or productive activities, we are all too eager to reach for our smartphones.
The relentless innovation and capitalistic drive of the modern world also contributes to this epidemic of dopamine addiction
Most jobs nowadays have limited autonomy, modest financial gains, and little sense of common mission. […] What results is a “work hard, play hard” mentality in which compulsive overconsumption becomes the reward at the nd of a day of drudgery
2.) Recovery through abstinence. Reset your brain pathways and enjoy simple pleasures again
The first step to recovery is acknowledging you have a problem. Does your behavior or consumption adversely affect your life? Is it stopping you from achieving your goals? In the context of gaming or YouTube, yes I would rather be reading a book, socialize with friends, or be out exercising or playing tennis.
Interestingly, research show opioid addicts think of the future in shorter time-span (~2 weeks) than healthy control people (~5 years). We are less able to think and plan about our future in an addicted state of mind
The dopamine circuits in our brain needs a reset. It is likely easier to go for abstinence. Don’t give yourself excuses and opportunities to relapse, you are not only fighting your own brain, but also the sophisticated algorithms that tech companies have spent millions of dollars on to keep you hooked
Tech companies also use concepts from psychology, such as implementing infinite scroll features and exploiting what’s called “intermittent reward schedule” to gamify the experiencing like a slot machine. The non-stop scrolling and tapping may also be an exploit of our ancient habits of repetitive motion
Mindfulness can be especially helpful for addicts. Many of us use high-dopamine substances to distract ourselves from our own thoughts.
Pay attention to your thoughts, and do so without judgement! Don’t condemn yourselves - “oh my god I was so embarrassing back then” - doing so distract us from being present.
Stay in observer mode and instead try to figure out why you want to feel that way
After some initial success with your abstinence, try to observe how your life has improved and make note of this! This bit of motivation is crucial for full recovery
3.) Self-binding. Create physical and mental barriers
Abstinence will be an uphill battle. Create both physical and mental barriers to prevent relapse. Examples include deleting apps on your phone, installing website/app blocking features, not bring your phone into the bedroom, and many other strategies.
In the throes of desire, there is no deciding
The compulsion to relapse is often too strong. By creating these tangible barriers, we press the pause button
In the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment, several child were presented with the conundrum of receiving one small reward, or two bigger reward if they can wait 15 minutes. The experiment demonstrated a correlation between a child’s ability to delay gratification and their subsequent educational attainment and other measures of life quality. What is less well known is that several children used strategies of self-binding such as covering their eyes, turning the other way, kicking the desk, and etc.
4.) Embrace pain
Because of the homeostatic mechanism mentioned previously, pressing on the pain side of the balance can actually lead to an improved ability to experience pleasure! For example, that restaurant meal tastes extra delicious after a long day of hiking. Perhaps we need to embrace certain forms of pain to establish a leveled balance
From Andrew Huberman’s podcast episode on Dopamine, it is not advisable to do something difficult solely in anticipation of a reward afterwards. This tends to decrease the desirability of the difficult activity itself. In the context of exercising, your brain naturally increases your baseline dopamine level post work-out, the constant anticipation of some reward afterwards may be detrimental. Instead, embrace the pain and trick your brain into liking it.
Exercise is, in the short-term, toxic to cells, it leads to increased temperature, noxious oxidants, and oxygen and glucose deprivation. However, no one will argue against the long-term benefits of exercising. In fact, exercise has been shown to reduce the likelihood of drug addiction
Despite sounding like pseudo-science at first glance, “cold-water immersion” has been shown in rigorous scientific studies to increase dopamine concentration by as much as 250%. If you are ever feeling unmotivated, maybe try a cold-shower!
5.) Radical honesty
Be honest not only with others but also with yourself about your values and goals.
While truth-telling promotes human attachment, compulsive overconsumption of high-dopamine goods is the antithesis of human attachment. Consuming leads to isolation and indifference, as the drug comes to replace the reward obtained from being in relationships with others.
The author mentions the all-too-familiar struggle of our tendency to embellish stories in the slightest bit in a conversation, either to make ourselves look better, or to make an excuse
6.) Immerse yourself in the world instead of running away from it
Rather than relying on the infinite variety of escapism available to you in the modern world, try to immerse yourself in the world. Stop listening to podcase on hikes or your commute to work. Stop looking at your phone or computer screen while you eat. Be present and enjoy each moment as is.
Walk towards it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to.