Pleasure; Are we all addicted?
We seek pleasure.
If there is a delightful experience, we derive pleasure from it. So that experience is linked with pleasure.
We tend to repeat the activities that please us.
Dopamine contributes to the pleasure experience. Dopamine connects pleasurable experiences and actions to a drive to repeat them by associating doing what makes you feel good. An essential component in the emergence of addiction is this connection.
The brain releases dopamine in the reward center whenever it recognizes a reward opportunity, either real or imagined. Dopamine creates alertness, craving, and arousal, motivating us to get that reward — and until we get it, we feel anxiety, restlessness, stress, and discontentment, often accompanied by a burning desire or sense of urgency. When we achieve the reward, dopamine quiets down, and that relief is perceived as pleasure or satisfaction — more so than the enjoyment of the reward itself.
The dopamine surge is like a high. We develop different ways to achieve that high. First, we get a high from a pleasant experience, and then the pursuit of that pleasure gives us another dopamine spike.
We earn money to buy things that give us pleasure. So then money is linked to pleasure, and that’s how the pursuit of money starts giving pleasure.
Some food gives pleasure. We start craving that kind of food more and more.
Pleasure is experienced during sexual engagement. For more enjoyment, we begin to indulge in it more and more.
Pleasure is what we are addicted to. Humans cannot function well without such high levels of dopamine. Thus, the human mind remains restless all the time. always attempting, by various means, to reach that peak.
Constantly trying to reach that peak has consequences. The negative effects of too much dopamine are:
Addiction: activities or substances cause elevations in extracellular levels of dopamine. The more they are repeated, the more our neural pathways begin to predict and crave the reward.
Decreased sense of pleasure: The more you repeat an activity, the less pleasurable it becomes in the future. As a result, those activities you once loved, when repeated consistently, will become less enjoyable.
Dopamine crash: What goes up must come down; dopamine is no different. After every peak comes a subsequent crash, where we feel less motivated than before we started, lasting as long as it takes to replenish the lost dopamine.
Lacking motivation: When dopamine spikes are abused, our baseline level is negatively affected. A lower baseline will decrease general levels of motivation, focus, and clarity, even for simple tasks.
The internet and the technological revolution have made it possible to find sources of enjoyment with ease. Anything from web series to movies to pornography to social media can instantly make you feel euphoric. Furthermore, these are the socially acceptable forms of pleasure, in contrast to gambling, drugs, and alcohol. But the fundamental psychology and physiology of both are the same. Alcohol, narcotics, social media, and digital entertainment are all the same; the only things that differ are their legal and social acceptability.
In the context of drugs, tolerance refers to the point at which you stop feeling the effects of a drug to the same degree that you used to, even though you’re consuming the same amount of the drug. If you develop a tolerance to a substance, you’ll need to use more of it to feel the effects you’re used to. Dopamine plays a role in this process. Consistent drug misuse eventually leads to overstimulation in the reward center. Its pathways become overwhelmed, making it harder for it to handle the high levels of dopamine being released. The brain tries to solve this problem in two ways: (1) decreasing dopamine production and (2) reducing dopamine receptors. Either change generally results in the substance having less of an effect due to a weaker response by the brain’s reward center. Still, the craving to use remains. It just takes more of the drug to satisfy it.
The same is the story with other pleasure-providing activities. Due to constantly elevated dopamine levels in the brain, there is a ‘dopamine downregulation’ in the brain with the same activity. So we need stronger stimulus to achieve that level of dopamine which we are habituated to (just like drugs). And after some time, our brain stops responding to that activity with pleasure. We stop achieving that dopaminergic high, and we stop enjoying that particular activity. For example, social media addiction: You keep on scrolling through the social media feed even though you are not deriving any pleasure out of it, and if you stop using social media and you don’t have any other source of pleasure with you at that time, you become restless. So we start looking for a different activity — a different source of pleasure then.
We are surrounded by sources of pleasure: food, sex, relationships, social media, entertainment, books, etc. And have a constant need to indulge in something. We are all addicted, and that is the great cause of suffering we face in our daily lives.
Getting repeated, short bursts of dopamine lowers our baseline dopamine levels, thus reducing our self-discipline — our motivation, willpower, energy, and focus.
Psychologist Douglas Lisle, in his TEDx talk on The Pleasure Trap, describes an experiment in which a caged bird could hit a button that flooded its brain with cocaine. The bird hit the button all the time. It skipped eating and mating, and it kept pushing that button until it died, fourteen days later. Our modern life is not too different from that cage. Every time we get a “like” on our social media post, watch another funny video, play an addictive game, get sexually aroused, drink alcohol, or go for chocolate cake, our brain produces a strong, if temporary, hit of dopamine. It doesn’t take much effort, seems harmless, and easily becomes an addictive habit.
And after one point when we have utilized easily available material sources of pleasure and they don’t make us happy anymore, we start indulging in spirituality and philosophy. But for most people, spirituality and philosophy are also different sources of pleasure, and they don’t even recognize it; instead, their ego gets inflated after indulging in it. They think that they are superior to the masses, and it gives them pleasure. But when it comes to a real-life scenario, they are not changed, their actions don’t change, and their behavioral patterns are still the same. And after one point in time, all this spiritual and philosophical stuff also stops giving them pleasure and happiness. And then there is nothing in the world that is pleasure-providing; happiness-giving. Does this mark the beginning of depression?
Now is the state where nothing in this world is giving you happiness. Even after understanding and cracking materialism and spirituality, you have gained a lot of knowledge and understanding, but life is still empty and absurd.
Can we live a life where we don’t need to depend on things and thoughts to be happy? Where we are not addicted to pleasure? Where there is not even a desire to be happy because we are in a constant state of joy.
(PS: Some images and excerpts in this article are derived from highermind.com)