Anna Lembke

And when that teeter-totter or that beam on a central fulcrum is level with the ground, it's at rest, or what neuroscientists call homeostasis.

And when we experience pleasure, it tips one way, and when we experience pain, it tips in the opposite direction.

And there are certain rules governing this balance, and the first and most important rule is that the balance wants to remain level, that is, at homeostasis, and

And our brains will work very hard to restore a level balance after any deviation from neutrality.

That's right.

So when we do something that's pleasurable and we release dopamine in the reward pathway and the balance tilts to the side of pleasure, no sooner has that happened than our brains will work very hard to restore a level balance.

And they do that first by tilting an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain before going back to the level position.

And I like to imagine that as these little neuroadaptation gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance.

And that's the come down, the hangover, the after effect.

And it often happens even while we're still experiencing the dopamine hit.

And it often happens outside of conscious awareness.

That's a great question.

And I don't exactly know why the mechanism is built like that, why we pay a price for every pleasure.

But I suspect it has to do with the fact that that kind of mechanism makes us the ultimate seekers, never satisfied with what we have, always looking for more.

And if you think about it, we are evolved over millions of years of evolution to approach pleasure and avoid pain.

And then on top of that, you have this pleasure-pain balance whereby as soon as we get whatever reward we're looking for, we experience pleasure, we immediately remember where and how that happened, and we want to recreate it.

And that recreation is accelerated by the fact that as soon as we get that hit of dopamine, we essentially go into dopamine free fall.

That's those gremlins on the pain side of the balance.

And now we're in a dopamine deficit state and we feel this overwhelming motivation to do the work it takes to get the next reward, which, you know, for most of human existence has meant walking tens of kilometers every day, you know, has involved doing enormous work in order to get just a little bit of reward.

So it's not that dopamine is good or bad.