Dr. Lustig explores the difference between pleasure and happiness. These are old truths but ones I, like many, have ignored. He quotes Yeats: ‘Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.’ I have become happiest when I have now been growing in recovery from an inner-centered place rather than before trying to find happiness by growing toward an outer-centered goal of validation, recognition, accomplishment, pride.
He links pleasure to immediate rewards, something dopamine provides as it also creates in the brain more tolerance and the need for more immediate pleasure-rewards that need to become more extreme to keep providing the pleasure-rewards. That is how addiction works its trap. Happiness, though, is linked to contentment, to having and being enough. It is linked to serotonin not dopamine releases. It is long-term.
He writes: “Emotional stress aggravates the need for pleasure-seeking."Pleasure seeking is linked, he adds, to both heart disease and dementia. No coincidence I had a heart attack some 8 years before hitting rock bottom. Lustig, in examining our society's drive for pleasure, quotes the British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham saying anything that minimizes pain and maximizes pleasure by its very nature increases happiness. My life surely shows how false that belief is. Facing pain, stress, conflict and suffering caused by my emotions and addictive responses to my emotions would have brought some short-lived hardship but long-term happiness.
Part of what addiction does to your mind is to warp your sense of time. It becomes what has
been called a “poverty brain” or “scarcity brain.” It makes it more like a toddler’s. Everything
becomes in the now. So suffering that would have been short-lived is believed to be forever, and so we willingly opt for the quick fix not knowing how ephemeral it will become. Acting for long-term rewards is to go against the grain; it seems unnatural to one’s own well-being. It reminds me of the addiction maxim that we can get stuck in our emotional age wherever we are in our biological age when we first get our hit of our addictive substance or behavior. For me that was early adolescence when the "teen brain" is still developing rapidly.
He says “chronic excessive reward eventually leads to both addiction and depression.” And how did they become excessive, widespread? “They got cheap.” So true whether it is sugar, fast foods, drugs, or the internet. For porn or sexual experience, for example, you don’t have to take time to go someplace like a theater or store or even club and pay for a product and experience, repeatedly, anymore; you carry it all with you in a phone in a pocket. You don’t even have to pay for special sites much anymore either, or go to specific porn sites; you just get on social media or messaging apps for general use and easily find the rabbit holes of choice.
Finding balance in our lives helps us to find the proper balance in our brain chemistry, which
Lustig reminds us drives our behavior “because it always comes first.” Too little dopamine, for example, creates problems which will bring unhappiness into our life through lethargy. We live along a Biochemical Bell Curve of Dopamine, Cortisol, and Serotonin in our brains. We too often are found on one extreme end of the curve or another. Adding to this is that we know how often one addiction leads to another addiction and to another, driving us to an extreme end of the curve and keeping us there. We overdo it all: work-eating-drugs-sex-alcohol-gambling-nicotine-gaming. We can easily become lives always lived on only one side of the Bell Curves, or ricocheting between the ends of the curve. Addiction transfers. But likewise, recovery transfers. If focused in one substance or behavior it can have ripple effects into other areas of suffering.
He also mentions the role of genetics in addiction through, for example, the varying number of dopamine-receptors a person might inherit. (We will talk elsewhere, as Gabor Mate and others do, about generational trauma; it is passed down biologically and also through family dynamics and cultural systems.) Lustig points out that “fewer receptors mean more intake is necessary to generate any reward. They need more of a fix to generate the same level of reward as people without this particular genetic variation.”
I have wondered why, even as a pre-pubescent boy, I felt the “lack of rewards” so much? Part is that I feared the opposite—the pain of being hurt physically, of getting into a fight. Many addicts have had earlier experiences of feeling abandoned. I remember having an early surgery when I was around three years old and feeling, and expressing, being unloved because of it. Also I grew up in a large extended close family and I grew early to “need the rewards” to ego that came with standing out in some ways in academic or sports or any group setting like church. So much of the reward-seeking came from psychological and family dynamics reasons. Still, I wonder how much was genetic as well. Certainly alcohol use was in my broader family experience, and was one of my first substances abused. (More on generational dynamics to come.)
Chronic stress leads to chronic over-stimulation which leads to more feeling of lack and needing reward; more scratching to more itching to more scratching, etc. Which is why recovery is rooted in “easy does it” in our lives and relationships, respecting boundaries and our finite lives. My own “outer circle” begins with the boundary on my waking day, getting full and regular sleep. Easy does it to my body and mind both. Sleep is resistance both to my ego-drive and reward-seeking and screen life and also to the cultural expectations on productivity. I have found that getting enough sleep is one of the hardest healthy behaviors for addicts to undertake. I understand that. It took incarceration for me to get it and to feel its healing effects even in an unhealthy place.
Other outer circle behaviors, such as being in nature especially in the mornings, prayer and
meditation and reading, 12 step meetings, walking, cleaning house, listening to the radio that isn’t outrage-driven and to certain music, talking with my spouse or someone else face to face for a long time of sharing, all are just some of the ways to shift my life back toward the middle of those Bell Curves of biochemistry, turning off the buttons seeking over-stimulation.
Lustig’s program of recovery, or attaining Contentment, is called the 4 C’s:
1. Connect with others, tap into religious or spiritual or affinity groups that allow you to “get out of yourself and over yourself” (this is what Mate in his book In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts calls the need for “alternative communities”; 12 step groups are included). Ones that connect with nature are even better. Anything that increases face to face encounters in this digital age creates better brain wiring.
2. Contribute. Helping others is a basic for recovery, and it comes in many forms. Giving
through volunteerism puts others first. Any giving, even financial, especially if possible to
groups connected to recovery and to any victim support groups, helps create a more generous spirit in us which grows gratitude which is all important for experiencing the “enoughness” and blessings of what and who we have and who we are rather than the drive for more of everything and using up ourselves in selfish pursuits. It helps in recovery to remind us we are more than our past.
3. Cope. This is where Lustig slots many of the personal behaviors I put in my outer circle.
Primarily sleep and the mindfulness practices like prayer and meditation, walking in nature,
exercising We need to interrupt the treadmill of our day. Fashion it around new routines and
rhythms. The repetitive movement of the body replaces the need for dopamine with the release of serotonin, and also with healthy fully-present to the other sexuality comes oxytocin instead of dopamine, just as it does in the natural deep relationship bonding between family members. All these activities help the brain to become receptive to health and to respond to stress instead of reacting instinctively to it. Again, it is hard to just start doing these coping practices on our own; we need others.
4. Cook. Finally, Lustig returns to the concern that launched him into the ways our consumer
convenience driven corporate culture “hacks” our minds through our bodies. He focuses on sugar but also all fast food and processed foods. How we truly become what we eat. And how we isolate ourselves in a food bubble too, opting for drive-through and convenience stores and eating alone, something that goes against our evolutionary grain and what helped to make us human in the first place. We literally “eat on the run” and treat our basic necessity of life as if it is disposable. Our values and virtues follow suit. He encourages cooking for ourselves and others. It is a way to feed the brain in a healthier way, to slow down our lives, to be more mindful, and create community. Paying attention to the things in our life, even especially the smallest and most routine, is what our default mode of addiction wants us to avoid and neglect so it can insert itself. The good news is that changing up our bad routines in these smallest of ways pays off in big gains of recovery.
There are many other books that scope out some of the same territory as this one. We will get into many of them in the book and media review section of our site. This book, like those, does two main good and useful things for those seeking or in recovery: they combine the newest of Science with the oldest of Wisdom. We need them both. We will explore them both. Keep sharing your finds with us.