Anna Lembke

And maybe you'll eat two this time because then that'll level your balance, but also get you over to the pleasure side.

And pretty soon you've eaten the whole crate of dates.

And now you're essentially at war with those neuroadaptation gremlins.

Well, what happens as we continually bombard our reward pathway with highly reinforcing substances and behaviors is that we accumulate more and more gremlins on the pain side of the balance.

They're just doing their job, you know, trying to restore homeostasis.

And over time, you know, those gremlins essentially are camped out on the pain side of the balance, tents and barbecues in tow.

And now we're in addicted brain.

We've changed our hedonic or joy set point.

such that now we need more of our drug, quantity-wise, and more potent forms of our drug, not to get high, but just to level the balance and feel normal.

And most importantly, when we're not using, we're walking around with a pleasure-pain balance tilted to the side of pain, which means we are experiencing the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance, which are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, depression, and craving.

You're absolutely right.

What I'm saying is that science, technology and innovation has allowed us to drugify almost every human behavior.

If you're not addicted yet, it's coming soon to a website near you.

And my bigger claim is that the rising rates of depression, anxiety and suicide, which, by the way, are rising fastest in the richest nations in the world,

are due in part to the fact that we are overloading our brain's reward pathway with too much dopamine.

And that in our brain's effort to compensate for too much pleasure, we are essentially individually and collectively down-regulating our own dopamine production and transmission, not just to baseline levels, but actually below baseline levels.

So we are in a dopamine deficit state.

which means that we're all unhappier, more anxious, more depressed, more irritable, less able to take joy in the things that used to give us joy or that have given people joy for generations, and also more susceptible to pain, right?

Even the merest slight now can make us pain.

And that we're not, this isn't happening because somehow we're spoiled or our values have changed.