Anna Lembke

It's that dopamine is essential for survival, and it keeps us moving and always looking for the next thing.

Yeah.

So there's a very famous experiment in which rats were bioengineered to not have dopamine receptors in the reward pathway of the brain.

And what the scientists discovered was that if they put food into the rat's mouth, the rat would eat the food and seem to get pleasure from the food.

But if they put the food even, you know, a single body length away, the rat would starve to death.

In other words, we need dopamine, not just for the experience of pleasure, but also for the motivation to do the work, to go get the reward.

And probably the way that dopamine makes us motivated is to create this dopamine deficit state or those gremlins on the pain side of the balance.

This ancient wiring that has us experiencing pain in the immediate aftermath of pleasure is woefully mismatched for our modern ecosystem.

Why?

Because we are surrounded by pleasure.

We have more access to more reinforcing drugs and behaviors than at any point in human history.

Even things that previously you could have thought of as healthy, like reading or exercise or playing games, has become drugified, has been turned into a drug in some way, making us all more vulnerable to the problem of addiction and also making us more vulnerable to the problem of

of this dopamine deficit state whereby our brains try to compensate for this excess of pleasure by down-regulating our own dopamine production and transmission, not just to baseline, but below baseline, creating this constant physiologic craving for more pleasure, but also the things that go along with craving, which are anxiety, irritability, and depression.

Yeah, this is the plenty paradox, right?

It's the literal physiologic stress of overabundance.

Yeah, well, let's go back for a second and talk about what's happening with the seesaw when you're looking for the date tree.

Because what happens as you're scouring your environment to try to find, you know, one date tree with a couple of dates on it is that your pleasure pain balance goes onto the pain side, right?

Because you're hungry.

and you're walking and you're tired and then finally you find this date tree and you you know you you're ecstatic and you eat this date and your balance your pleasure pain balance goes back to the level position which feels like euphoria because part of the key here is the directionality

of the pleasure-pain balance.