![]() ![]() But what if I don’t wait? What if instead I watch another video, and another, and another, until hours later I’m watching Youtube videos of people watching Youtube videos late into the night. If I wait long enough, the gremlins hop off the balance, neutrality is restored, and craving passes. That means the same parts of the brain that process pleasure also process pain, and they work like opposite sides of a balance: When we feel pleasure the balance tips one way when we feel pain it tips the other If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you. This is the hangover, the comedown, or in my case, that moment of wanting to eat one more piece of chocolate, read one more romance novel, watch one more episode of American Idol. They stay on until it has tipped an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. But the gremlins like to stay on the balance, so they don’t hop off once it’s level. I like to imagine that as these little neuroadaptive gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again. There are several rules governing this balance, and the first and most important is that the balance wants to stay level, what neuroscientists call homeostasis, and our brains will work very hard to restore a level balance after any deviation from neutrality. That means the same parts of the brain that process pleasure also process pain, and they work like opposite sides of a balance: When we feel pleasure the balance tips one way when we feel pain it tips the other. One of the most important discoveries in the field of neuroscience in the past 75 years is that pleasure and pain are co-located. To understand how too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing, we need to understand how our brains process pleasure and pain. SUGGESTED READING Paul Bloom: The Pleasure of Suffering By Paul Bloom Any child with access to the Internet can consume digital media, which lights up the same parts of our brains as drugs and alcohol. We also have drugs that didn’t exist before. ![]() Wired for scarcity and a world of ever-present danger, the human brain is woefully mismatched for this world of dopamine overload, in which almost every human activity has become druggified in some way – made more reinforcing, more accessible, more potent, more novel, and nearly infinite in quantity. Abundance itself has become the source of our suffering. I suggest to you that the primary cause of our unhappiness today is The Plenty Paradox. Today I’m more likely to suggest a dopamine fast: Abstaining from our drug of choice for four weeks Twenty years ago the first thing I would have done for a patient presenting with anxiety or depression was prescribe an antidepressant or recommend psychotherapy. Some argue that trauma is the source of our suffering, but what kind of trauma are we talking about, beyond the trauma we create for ourselves? Can we honestly say that life today is more traumatic than it was thirty years ago? ![]() Even the poorest of the poor living in rich nations today have more leisure time, more disposable income, and more access to luxury goods than at any point in recorded history. But the long view tells us that in fact the gap between rich and poor is smaller than it has been in centuries. Some argue that our despair is the result of a widening income gap. Rates of anxiety, depression, and chronic pain are increasing all over the planet but especially in rich nations. Global happiness surveys show that people today are less happy than they were 20 years ago. My clinical experience broadly mirrors what is happening in the rest of the world. ![]() Groundbreaking Stanford psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke, provides a fresh perspective on why anxiety, chronic pain and depression have been on the rise, locating the problem in a mismatch between the modern world and our brain’s pain and pleasure apparatus.Īs a practicing psychiatrist in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley for more than two decades, I’ve seen growing numbers of patients struggling with depression, anxiety, and chronic pain, despite otherwise good health, loving families, robust social networks, financial privilege, and access to elite education … all the things we’ve come to associate with the ‘good life’. Happiness has been declining precipitously in the West for 30 years, despite better access to healthcare and education and decreases in poverty and violence. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |