“The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia. Which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”
Dr. Anna Lembke
The content of this post is drawn from a great book called Dopamine Nation, by Dr. Anna Lembke.
Dopamine is a powerful neurotransmitter. Common knowledge tends to associate dopamine with pleasure, however, that’s only half the story. Yes, the release of dopamine in your brain induces a state of pleasure. But it is the effect of this pleasure on our motivation that is the most important aspect of this brain chemical. From a biological standpoint, dopamine is the main moderator of goal directed behaviour, i.e. motivation to do something. If dopamine is released in response to a certain stimulus, we are motivated to search for that stimulus, whether it is to search for a tasty morsel, or scroll to the next video on our phone.
This neurotransmitter has been hijacked in increasingly effective ways by companies over the years as a way to extract dollars from customers. Unfortunately for customers (us), the invention of the smartphone and machine learning has meant that controlling our behaviour has been refined to scarily effective science. Large companies have learned exactly what triggers the release of dopamine, and in doing so, have taken control of much of our goal directed behaviour. They have given us control of dopamine release in our own brains for profit, essentially providing a pleasure button for us to push whenever we please (sugar, social media, television, drugs, alcohol). And given the nature of dopamine, we are motivated to push it very often without clear knowledge of the consequences.
This has many implications, but the one I want to talk about today has to do with our day to day contentment. In all things, our brains seek balance. This includes dopamine. When we push the pleasure button we flood our brains with dopamine. The brain responds by trying to restore balance by releasing chemicals that counteract that pleasure, which induces varying states of discontent. The more we trigger the release of dopamine/pleasure, the more the brain tries to correct.
Unfortunately for us, this process causes the resting balance of our mood state to be on the negative side (rather than the neutral state we started at), essentially making our “normal” a negative mood state. In this state we experience many of the symptoms of drug withdrawal, including anxiety and depression symptoms. This starts a vicious cycle in which we feel bad most of the time, which motivates us to push our pleasure button more often, which worsens our resting mood state. Some see this as a major contributor to worsening overall mental health in the Western world.
So What can we do?
There are 2 main strategies we can employ to restore our resting mood state back to neutral, or even push it into the positive. The first is to stop pushing the dopamine/pleasure button so often. Whatever your most reliable pleasure is (and it’s different for everyone), try not to engage in that behaviour as often and sit with the anxiety of denying yourself. By reducing the amount and frequency of dopamine release, we stop the natural compensation process in the brain, allowing our resting mood to move back toward neutral. Second, we can intentionally engage in behaviours that are unpleasant. By causing the release of negative mood state chemicals in the brain, we can turn its desire for balance in our favour, causing it to naturally release dopamine and other positive mood state chemicals.
Though it sounds paradoxical, engaging in what Dr. Andrew Huberman calls “micro sucks”, that is, behaviours that are unpleasant (but not harmful), we can even push our resting mood balance into the positive through engaging the brain’s desire for balance. Some examples of this could be:
- Exercise
- Be bored, don’t pull out your phone the second there is a lull
- Take the stairs
- Turn the shower to cold for 30 second
David
Simply Counselling Services