This is why you can't stop playing with your phone.

Dopamine nation - Anna Lembke MD

Why did you spend hours again scrolling through social media? Why did you eat all the cookies instead of just the one you were going for? Did you really have to buy all this crap from Amazon on ‘Black Friday’? Dr. Anna Lembke tries to answer all of these questions and more in her book ‘Dopamine nation’.

For all of you with too little patience, you will find her “ten most important lessons” at the end of this post.

Our world changed dramatically, from a place of scarcity to a place of abundance in record time. Which is great in every economical measure, but our bodies can’t keep up with that rapid change. Just let the following metaphor from the author sink in.

“We are cacti in a rainforest, built for scarcity - drowning in abundance.“

Smartphone in hand, you can get your dopamine fix whenever you want. Shopping, texting, gaming, social media, porn, and food; we get everything by just moving our thumbs over the screen.

We saw through experiments, what happened when you gave a rat a button that instantaneously released dopamine in its brain. It stopped eating, drinking, or caring for anything other than the next fix.

But what is dopamine? Unlike what you might think, dopamine is not the reward molecule. It is all about wanting. It makes you want to do things. It is the body’s currency that allows it to do anything. It is the mental fuel your motivation runs on. Without dopamine - there is no action.

So why is too much dopamine a bad thing? If dopamine is the molecule that keeps you going, then it’s only rational to want more of it. Well… kind of. Our brain and body are naturally striving for a state of homeostasis (a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements), in which, phases of motivation are followed by phases of rest and recovery. If you push the button that releases dopamine too often, you bring the system out of balance. The high spike is followed by an even deeper lack of dopamine.

Going into a low dopamine state only increases your longing for the next boost. The spiral has begun, and you are crossing the line into addiction.

What is an addiction?

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

“Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.”
- Dr. Andrew Huberman.

Disclaimer: If we would fully understand addiction, I guess we could solve the crisis in a heartbeat. So until then, we can only try to prevent it, lower the bad consequences, and try to help people suffering from addiction to recover.

Can anyone get addicted? Theoretically, yes. If you are free from addiction (or think that you are), maybe you haven’t found your drug of choice, yet. Maybe the next addictive drug is yet to be invented. However, one of the biggest prediction factors for addiction is how easy it is to have access to those drugs.

Even if you are completely free from addictive behavior, the next paragraphs should still be interesting for you¹. But first, as always, if you have the time to watch the video (2 hours), or to read the book, then go for it and don’t rely on my words alone.

What is the most severe form of addiction? What causes the most damage to society, your loved ones, and yourself? Well, you could argue, that above all it's food. Yes, you read that right - food. The days when we ate to survive are long gone. Food intake now takes many forms. If there is one true example of abundance in this world, it’s food.

The leading risks for mortality are high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and physical inactivity. In 2016 an estimated 3.1 billion people were overweight. There are more overweight people than underweight people in the world. We know that too much food is literally killing us, and yet, we can’t seem to stop eating.

But, no matter what addiction you think is the worst, let’s look at possible ways to counteract some of it. In order to do so, we first have to look at the so-called pain-pleasure balance. In nature, rewards rarely come without effort. For example in order to get food, you had to scavenge, move, or hunt.

Just as pain is the price we pay for pleasure, so too pleasure is our reward for pain.

But these days we are doing everything to avoid pain. (I’m not just talking about your Ibuprofen pill that is readily available). We try to dial down the mental pain we feel when we are alone with ourselves using all kinds of methods. Overeating, binging Netflix, and using social media are just the tip of the iceberg. Yet all these short-term pleasures and attempts to shield ourselves from mental or physical pain, only seem to have made things worse.

Richer countries have higher rates of anxiety, not only that, richer countries report higher levels of physical pain.

The truth is: Our bodies can take a lot. The more you dive deeper into your own body’s biology, you can’t help but be amazed. For every system, there is another system to balance it out. For every problem, it seems, there is a solution in place. At least as long as we don’t overdo it, and stress our systems too much. An unhealthy meal per week is not going to make you obese. The occasional glass of wine will not make you an alcoholic. It is when things get out of hand that your body is throwing the towel in the ring, unable to achieve that desired homeostasis.

So how can you restore homeostasis, and what else can you do to counteract addiction? Well, that is still a hot topic in a lot of research facilities all over the world. However, here is my hitlist of things to prevent or even help with reversing addiction:

• Cold showers: Not only will you get an enormous dopamine boost (up to 250%), but it will restore the brain's perception that pain and pleasure belong together. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I suggest next time you hop into the shower, slowly turn the water all the way to the cold side, and see for yourself.

• Intermittent fasting: People love it, people hate it, and scientists have found evidence for and against its health benefits, but all of that doesn’t matter. What’s most important is the fact that you’ll learn how to restrain yourself. Start with not eating for 12h and then gradually move up to 14, 16, and ideally 18h of fasting, and only a 6h window in which you will be eating your meals.

• Exercise: Find something that is hard while you do it, and ideally, rewarding when you’re done. For a lot of people, it’s running. It takes willpower to start and to keep going but it feels great to get that “runners high”. Here is what Dr. Anna Lemkbke had to say about it:

Exercise has a more profound and sustained positive effect on mood, anxiety, cognition, energy and sleep than any pill I can prescribe.

If you could only implement one thing from this post into your life, it should be to work out regularly.

Photo by Gervyn Louis on Unsplash

But there is another crucial part of the stories of recovering addicts, other than restoring the pain-pleasure balance, and it’s by far the most painful one: Radical Honesty.

We start lying as early as two years old. Interestingly, the smarter we are as kids, the more likely we are to lie.

Honesty is crucial, and it is the only way that leads to ownership. Don’t fall for the victim trap that society has built for you. You and you alone are responsible for your actions. Your situation might be out of your control, but your behavior never is. Forgive others and most importantly forgive yourself, and with that, move on to a new path in your life where you, and only you, take full responsibility for your actions.

There is a reason why one of AA’s philosophies and maybe the most important one is: “I am responsible”

A nice side effect of this practice is that once you start owning up to your actions, you will be able to hold others equally accountable. You will break the cycle of endless complaining and see through the facade they have built, playing the victim of their story, instead of the hero.

Are you going to be free from all forms of addictions forever after reading this? Most likely not, but hopefully, I’ve given, or better, Anna Lembke has given you some pointers on how to spot addiction or destructive behavior, early on. Maybe you can try a couple of things to reduce your current struggle with candy, coffee, Netflix, Facebook, or whatever it is you are overconsuming. Anyway, if you fall off the wagon- don’t beat yourself up. Be honest with yourself. Own up to your mistake, and start fresh. You will never be perfect, but you can always be better today than you were yesterday.

Here is the beautiful (and somewhat emotional) final thought from the Author:

I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is. Then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe-inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to.

With that, I’m leaving you for now

Have a successful day

GNF

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As promised at the beginning here are Anna Lembke’s ten lessons for restoring balance:

1. The relentless pursuit of pleasure (and avoidance of pain) leads to pain.

2. Recovery begins with abstinence.

3. Abstinence resets the brain’s reward pathway, and with it, our capacity to take joy in simpler pleasures.

4. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine-overloaded world.

5. Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain.

6. Pressing on the pain side resets our balance to the side of pleasure.

7. Beware of getting addicted to pain.

8. Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy, and fosters a plenty mindset.

9. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe.

10. Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it.

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Bonus#1: For people with a phone addiction, or the ones trying to prevent it:

• Set your phone on airplane mode for as long as you can. Especially when you go to sleep.

• Have a morning routine that does not involve your smartphone. (at least 90 minutes after waking up).

• You can change the settings on your wifi router so that it’ll turn off two hours before you go to bed.

• Set your phone to black-and-white mode.

• Deinstall all social media apps, you can always reinstall them if you “need” them on a specific occasion, or access them through the browser of your phone or computer. Don’t be scared, it won’t disappear once you deinstall it. The point is to take as much “fun” out of it as possible so that the pleasure is not immediate.

I always try to add friction points or barriers for the bad habits and remove them for the good ones. (That’s why I don’t buy candy and even if I do I ask my wife to hide it. If I get hungry or feel like snacking, I can always have all kinds of fruits or nuts, which are readily available in our house. The candy is always one step further away than the healthy option.)

Bonus#2: Next time you find yourself feeling unmotivated and craving that candy bar or whatever brings you cheap pleasure, here is a list of ten things you can do to get instant motivation.

1. I’m not a doctor and I don’t want to play one on the internet. Do your own research and consult with your physician first before doing any kind of intervention.