Pleasure Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

We're gonna get a little science-y today! I hope you'll stick with me through it, because I think this information can be very impactful in our daily decision making, which is something we're all trying to improve, right? I know I am! And my guess is that, if you're subscribed to this newsletter, you are too.

So, let's start with a definition:

Hormesis is a phenomenon seen in both animals and humans where, if you "expose an organism to mild-to-moderate doses of painful, toxic, or noxious stimuli, you will make that organism healthier, more resilient, more robust..." (As described by Stanford Psychologist Anna Lembke on this podcast.)

You've probably heard (from me and others) this idea that making the "difficult" choice now means an "easier" life down the road, where as making the "easy" decision now leads to a more difficult life down the road. This is true across the board...and winds up being pretty common sense in most cases. Even with things as simple as making your bed when you don't want to and then getting to enjoy a clean-feeling house and climbing into a nicely-made bed when you head to sleep.

When you choose the healthy food over the junk (consistently), you are healthier and better able to do things and feel the way you want to feel down the road. But that decision often sucks in the moment. And the other way around holds true too. Succumbing to that craving (at least when you do it over and over again), leads to worse health down the road. We all know this and it's why it can be so hard to make healthy choices: our emotions in the moment outweigh this down-the-road idea of health and feeling better.

But there's actually more to it than this: as Anna Lembke's research shows, there's an interesting dopaminergic thing going on in our brains that is beginning to show how and why our modern world and having everything we want when we want it is contributing to us being more miserable, overall!

Dopaminergic, you say?! What the heck is that??

I'm glad you asked. ;)

Dopamine is one of those neurotransmitters (chemical messengers) in our brains that everyone associates with pleasure, which is true. But it's also not the whole picture. Dopamine is what motivates us to make the choices we make, and it uses both pleasure and pain to do so.

When we find something we rate as pleasurable and "consume" it, our body actually pushes our brains into a dopamine depleted state after we've finished consuming it, which is not a fun state to be in. "Hey, you took away all my feel-good chemicals!" is essentially what that feels like. But, that "pain" is what helps push us in the direction of finding and consuming that feel-good thing again. This is the main thing that has helped keep us alive as a species; back when it was really difficult to find these pleasurable things (like calorie-dense foods), we needed something powerful to push us hard enough to go find it (often by having to walk for miles on end or even by hunting something down).

In other words, our reward system in our brain is extra powerful because it uses both our enjoyment of an experience and our desire to avoid the "pain" that comes afterwards in order to push us to seek out those experiences again.

So, while enjoying something we partake in is a good thing because our reward system drives us to seek that out again and again, the reality of our modern world is that we have WAY too many highly enjoyable things right at our finger tips that we never have to do any work for. We have every snack we want at our finger tips. We have those dopamine hits we get from social media. Whatever it is for you (sugar, alcohol, pizza...), chances are you can have it available to you whenever you want it without having to work for it. You never enter into that dopamine depleted state naturally, through having to work hard for something, so your body is constantly seeking equilibrium (also known as homeostasis) by pushing you into that dopamine depleted state just to try to balance out how many easy dopamine hits you're constantly getting!

I know it's complex, but let me try to break it down simply here: we need the experience of "pain"...of hard work and of restraint...because overloading our brains with these dopamine hits we don't have to work for is overloading our our pleasure system, leading us as a nation into things like depression, anxiety, and irritability as our body seeks to correct that imbalance. It's been shown time and again that the more developed a nation is, the more people have access to whatever they want at their finger tips, the more depressed, anxious, and irritable its people become. But by forcing ourselves to engage in difficult and challenging things (like we used to have to do just to continue to exist), we can reset that system and our brain will seek balance by then activating the "feel good" side of this pleasure/pain system.

Hard work (like exercise) sucks at first, but leads to us feeling overall more fulfilled and resilient over time.

Which brings us back to last week's newsletter - you have to find something you enjoy enough that you will continue to partake in it even when it's hard...so you can enjoy the long-term physical and mental health benefits that will help you build up a life you love. But, it's important to also learn to get comfortable with discomfort.

It's not only ok to be hungry for a little bit...It's not only ok for exercise to be hard...It's not only ok for us to have to work to through some pain in order to get something pleasurable...It's essential for our mental health.

In the coming weeks, try to start becoming aware of how often you do what feels good in the moment without even thinking about it (snacking, picking up your phone to check your Facebook, pouring yourself a soda) just because it feels good. Start to think about how this overabundance of ease may actually be contributing to a feeling of dissatisfaction in your life. Where can you work in a little of that "hard work" to help reset your pleasure/pain system?

When you find yourself in the kitchen about to snack on some potato chips, can you go for a walk first? What might this behavior change look like for you specifically?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this idea. It really rocked my world when I learned about it. What do you think about this pleasure/pain paradox and how it shows up in your life?

If you want to learn more about it, here's another podcast for you: https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/the-paradox-of-pleasure/. It's the precursor to the one I listed at the beginning of this email.

Thanks for sticking with me until the end! It's important to me that the work I do is based in research, and sharing what I learn with you brings me a lot of joy. I hope you enjoy it too.