Shankar Vedantam

Let me summarize what you're saying and make sure I'm understanding this correctly.

Your central argument here is that there is a system in the brain that tries to maintain homeostasis.

When we press down on the pleasure side of the balance, the brain gremlins get on the pain side of the balance to try and compensate it and recover equilibrium.

But if we were to press down on the pain side of the balance, now homeostasis starts to work in some ways in our favor because the gremlins hop onto the pleasure side of the balance and they basically get us to a state where we're feeling better on average than we were doing before.

You made an interesting analogy a second ago, and I want to just draw attention to it, which is that there is an analogy here between the way we engage with our brains and the way we engage with money.

You can buy things on credit, and that is sometimes valuable and smart to do, but it does mean that you're getting the good stuff first and then paying for it later.

later.

So that's what we do when we intentionally trigger dopamine in our heads.

We're getting the good feelings now, but have to deal with it later.

You're arguing that focusing on the pain side of the equation in some ways is, as you say, paying for the dopamine up front.

You're doing the difficult thing now in exchange for the reward down the road.

I'm wondering if it will sound to many people that you're almost recommending a life of, you know, asceticism here.

Are you recommending that people become ascetics, Anna?

What do you do?

Yeah.

So what is the reward for living this way, Ana?

What do you see in your life?

Do you think you're seeing effects in your mind, on your brain?

One of the most striking things about stories of addiction is that they often involve increasing levels of social isolation.

Think of the person who is up playing endless first-person shooter video games in an apartment by himself at 4 o'clock in the morning, or the furtive, heavy consumer of pornography, the young woman addicted to pot.