Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Stricter churches” achieve a larger following and are generally more successful than freewheeling ones because they ferret out free riders and offer more robust club goods.

We’re all running from pain. Some of us take pills. Some of us couch surf while binge-watching Netflix. Some of us read romance novels. We’ll do almost anything to distract ourselves from ourselves. Yet all this trying to insulate ourselves from pain seems only to have made our pain worse.

The way I understand this is by differentiating what I call the plenty versus the scarcity mindset. Truth-telling engenders a plenty mindset. Lying engenders a scarcity mindset.

The question is, why do so many of us living in rich nations with abundant material resources nonetheless operate in our daily lives with a scarcity mindset? As we have seen, having too much material wealth can be as bad as having too little. Dopamine overload impairs our ability to delay gratification.

Scientists rely on dopamine as a kind of universal currency for measuring the addictive potential of any experience. The more dopamine in the brain’s reward pathway, the more addictive the experience. In addition to the discovery of dopamine, one of the most remarkable neuroscientific findings in the past century is that the brain processes pleasur

That moment of wanting is the brain’s pleasure balance tipped to the side of pain.

When the people around us are reliable and tell us the truth, including keeping promises they’ve made to us, we feel more confident about the world and our own future in it. We feel we can rely not just on them but also on the world to be an orderly, predictable, safe kind of a place. Even in the midst of scarcity, we feel confident that things wil

When our lived experience diverges from our projected image, we are prone to feel detached and unreal, as fake as the false images we’ve created. Psychiatrists call this feeling derealization and depersonalization.

Addiction broadly defined is the continued and compulsive consumption of a substance or behavior (gambling, gaming, sex) despite its harm to self and/or others.

A nationwide study in Sweden analyzed rates of prescribing for different psychiatric drugs, based on indices of what they called “neighborhood deprivation” (index of education, income, unemployment, and welfare assistance). For each class of psychiatric medication, they found prescribing of psychiatric medications increased as the socioeconomic sta