![]() When our balance is tilted to the pain side, we crave our drug just to feel normal (a level balance) The simple solution is to keep eating, or playing, or watching, or reading. Whether it’s reaching for a second potato chip or clicking the link for another round of video games, it’s natural to want to re-create those good feelings or try not to let them fade away. We’ve all experienced craving in the aftermath of pleasure. Or as the old saying goes, ‘What goes up must come down’. That cost is an “after-reaction” that is opposite in value to the stimulus. In the 1970s, social scientists Richard Solomon and John Corbit called this reciprocal relationship between pleasure and pain the opponent-process theory: “Any prolonged or repeated departures from hedonic or affective neutrality…have a cost”. Once the balance is level, it keeps going, tipping an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. These self-regulating mechanisms do not require conscious thought or an act of will. Hence, every time the balance tips toward pleasure, powerful self-regulating mechanisms kick into action to bring it level again. It does not want to be tipped for very long to one side or another. “Dopamine Nation: Finding balance in the age of indulgence” is published by Headline (United Kingdom) and Penguin Random House (United States)īut here’s the important thing about the balance: it wants to remain level, that is, in equilibrium. The more our balance tips, and the faster it tips, the more pleasure we feel. When we experience pleasure, dopamine is released in our reward pathway and the balance tips to the side of pleasure. When nothing is on the balance, it’s level with the ground. Imagine our brains contain a balance – a scale with a fulcrum in the center. ![]() The following edited excerpt examines the abundance of high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli in the modern world, and how this has affected our tolerance for pain and threshold for pleasure. Get it in your inbox every Monday.In Dopamine Nation, psychiatrist and author Dr Anna Lembke writes about “finding balance in the age of indulgence”. ![]() Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. It requires us to start acting and stop reacting because regardless of the cause of our pain “if you don’t change your behaviour, you’re not going to change your life.” The paradox is that to feel good in the long term requires us to lean into discomfort and pain and resist the many pleasures that surround us. I really wanted people to understand from a neuroscience lens why that doesn’t work.” “This is so deeply embedded in our reflexive response to suffering in the modern age. We believe that if we’re uncomfortable or unhappy or if we’re in any kind of distress we need to make ourselves more comfortable and to seek out something to take away our struggles. Lembke adds that “there’s a fundamental misunderstanding” about how to live a life that minimises our suffering. Though we can’t stop eating or being online for 30 days, we can avoid daily use of certain foods for instance, have days away from our digital devices (over the weekend, for instance) and try to condense the amount of time we spend on them to discrete periods: “It’s really good to have a digital sabbath to reset reward pathways, so we’re not always chasing dopamine, and we’re not always ending up in a further deficit state.” “You can have the most perfect life and still get addicted because we have brains that are naturally wired to seek out pleasure and avoid pain and because we live in a world that is full of ubiquitous access to these highly reinforcing drugs.” The problem, she argues, is not us, it’s the world we live in: She continues: “There is no natural stopping point and been engineered to release a whole lot of dopamine all at once making them, for those reasons, much more addictive.” “To figure out what the good life is we have to dial it back – we have to intentionally invite challenging circumstances.” Dr Anna Lembke And I do think that the rising rates of anxiety and depression, especially in rich nations, is primarily a function of our dopamine deficit state brought about by overindulgence in too many feel-good substances and behaviours.” “Seventy per cent of the world’s deaths are due to modifiable risk factors – the top three are poor diet, lack of exercise and smoking. “We’re now titillating ourselves to death,” she argues.
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