Cacti in the rainforest—how too much pleasure gives us pain
Photo by I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to an event, hung out with friends, eaten food, had a conversation, and not gotten maximum enjoyment out of it.
Life isn’t a sponge where you’re trying to squish every drop of happiness out of it—thinking like that can often suck the joy out of life—but we’ve all felt that itch. An itch that pulls us away from the present moment, that makes you wish you were somewhere else. Maybe in that ideal place, the conversation would be better, the environment would be more ideal, or pains in our body wouldn’t be as prominent.
The danger of this mindset is that you’re not focused on what’s in front of you—not dialed in to the wonderful experiences that are real and in your grasp in this very moment.
But what controls how much pleasure we feel in any given moment? What makes doing something feel good today but not a week from now?
The past few weeks, I’ve been diving deep into the book Dopamine Nation, written by Anna Lembke, a medical doctor from Stanford.
In this book, she discusses the role of dopamine in motivation and pleasure, and what happens when we, as humans, become “cacti in the rainforest”—and drown in dopamine.
Motivation & pleasure
First, a brief summary of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine was identified as a neurotransmitter in the human brain in 1957 by two scientists, one of which went on to win a Nobel Prize.
In experiments, dopamine is known to play a role in wanting and liking. In other words—it first motivates us to do things. Then, it affects how pleasurable doing that thing feels.
Dopamine is used to measure how addictive a behavior or drug is—the more dopamine something releases, and the faster it releases dopamine, the more addictive it is. A rat in a box sees an increase of dopamine by about 55% when it consumes chocolate. Sex increases dopamine in the brain by 100%. At the high end of the scale, amphetamines, the active ingredient in both meth and Adderall, increases the output of dopamine by 1000%. 🤯
Pain-pleasure Balance
At this point, dopamine-release may sound pretty good. Why not go do meth and flood our brains with dopamine?
Well, here’s the thing.
In the book, Lembke talks about pain and pleasure as a balance. Our bodies and minds are self-regulating, and don’t ever want to be tipped for very long from one side to the other. When we engage in pleasure, our body reacts by pressing on the pain side to level out the scales. However, once the balance is level, it keeps going, tipping an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. The cost of pleasure is an “after-reaction” that is opposite in value to the stimulus, known as the opponent-process theory.
In other words, pleasure creates an eventual self-regulating dip in dopamine, or craving—craving to do the pleasurable thing again.
Tolerance
If you eat a salty chip, you might get a spike of dopamine—pleasure. After eating the chip, you’ll experience a dip in dopamine—craving. And so, you reach for another chip. Yum.
What’s wrong with that?
Well, the danger is that your body builds tolerance to repeated exposure of the same (or similar) pleasure stimulus. If you snack on chips for a week, your pleasure release at the end of the week will be much less than after the first chip you ever had.
You will eventually need more of a substance to feel the same amount of pleasure. In the chip example, you’ll need to eat a whole bag of chips to feel the same pleasure that a single chip used to give you. Over time, you might even need to try crazier flavors. If you do this long enough, it might remove your ability to experience pleasure at all.
Neuroscientist Nora Volkow and colleagues discovered that heavy, prolonged consumption of high-dopamine substances eventually leads to a dopamine deficit state. This decrease in both dopamine release and dopamine receptors would “result in a decreased sensitivity of reward circuits to stimulation by natural rewards”.
In short, nothing feels good anymore.
Eventually, you need to have five bags of crazy flavors in one sitting, and instead of feeling pleasure, you just feel neutral. When you’re not eating chips, you experience withdrawal, or negative symptoms, and you reach for those chips to alleviate the pain.
Now, you’re reaching for chips not because you want to feel good, but because you don’t want to feel bad anymore.
Hedonism leads to anhedonia
Lembke ends the chapter by saying, “ With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases…” As cacti in the rainforest, transforming a world of scarcity into abundance, “the net effect is that we now need more reward to feel pleasure, and less injury to feel pain.”
In a dopamine-abundant world, we get dopamine spikes our ancestors never had the option to experience. From scrolling on our phones, eating out at that Thai restaurant, and watching a movie, we are “drowning in dopamine.”
So what do we do?
Lembke suggests several ways to navigate this dopamine-abundant world, the first of which is abstaining from your vice, or maybe several vices. This allows your pain-pleasure balance to return to normal.
Second, you can “inhibit great pain with little pain”. In other words, press on the pain side of your balance so your body levels out with prolonged pleasure. “Unlike pressing on the pleasure side, the dopamine that comes from pain is indirect and potentially more enduring.”
For example, Lembke specifically mentions:
- Exercise. “Exercise has a more profound and sustained positive effect on mood, anxiety, cognition, energy, and sleep than any pill I can prescribe”
- Cold exposure. “…plasma dopamine concentrations increased 250 percent, and plasma norepinephrine concentrations increased 530 percent as a result of cold-water immersion.”
- Intermittent fasting and calorie restriction “extended life span and increased resistance to age-related diseases in rodents and monkeys, as well as reduced blood pressure and increased heart rate variability”.
- Exposure therapy. A man struggling with crippling social anxiety exposed himself to various social situations of increasing severity. “Over time it got easier and easier.”
So, what’s your poison?
Where in life do you want to experience more pleasure? Do you want to see a sunrise and feel joy? Do you remember conversations bringing a smile to your face, but now all you want to do is watch TV?
As someone who has struggled with addiction in the past, I remember when doing extreme things made me feel absolutely nothing. Maybe some of you have your own “thing”. Or maybe it’s not one “thing”, but a collection of smaller dopamine hits, like scrolling your phone, eating junk food, or getting validation from swiping on dating apps.
Whatever it is, can you abstain from it for a time, and experiment with what happens when you do? Or maybe you can introduce small, “painful” habits that rebalance your pain-pleasure balance.
Here are some ways I’m putting this into practice. Maybe some of these inspire you too.
- Doing 12:8 intermittent fasting every day—I love food way too much, and being surrounded by delicious eats in NYC got me to a point where no matter what exotic, delicious food I thought about trying, I stopped feeling excited about it. Intermittent fasting has helped me get excited about food again.
- I’m also taking cold showers (yes, even now, in the winter). Because I struggle with mood and motivation, I see taking cold showers as a “pill” I take in the mornings—a pill to increase the dopamine in my brain and experience a general sense of well-being.
- Social anxiety—I sometimes postpone or avoid phone calls for weeks because the thought of it fills me with dread. I sometimes get nervous just complimenting a stranger. I want to expose myself more so I can grow my comfort zone.
If you think you’re struggling with addiction, I’d highly recommend getting involved with a 12 step group in your area. They’re free, and the people there know exactly what you’re going through. They have helped me a lot in the past, and even if you don’t think you’re struggling with anything, they can be a great source of support and encouragement when you feel lonely or depressed.
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