When pleasure becomes a prison
Liberate yourself from the tyranny of convenience
Things often come to me in threes.
About six weeks ago, my friend Dan was telling me about something he recently purchased with one click on Amazon.
He followed his statement with a sheepish look and a shrug of the shoulders.
“I know I probably shouldn’t buy from Amazon,” he said, “but it’s so convenient.”
Shortly after that, I was visiting another friend’s house for lunch. She asked the voice-activated speaker in her kitchen, “Google, can you tell me how long I should poach these salmon fillets?”
After she got her answer from the little lady-bot living inside the device, she gave me a sheepish look almost identical to Dan’s and said almost the exact same words:
“I know it’s not great to use this thing. But it’s so convenient!”
And then, just a few days ago, I was talking to my friend Lauren about my commitment to craft these Substack posts with 100% natural human intelligence.
She snarked at me, “Don’t be a such a dork! Just get ChatGPT to write your posts for you! You’ll save so much time!”
Maybe I come off to my friends as a technology Nazi. Yes, I do put strong guardrails on my use of tech (which is part of the reason why you’ll hear from me only every few weeks or so), but generally I try to stay in my own lane and not tell other people what to do.
In any case, while Lauren was regaling me I noticed she was wearing a cute, stretchy baseball cap that I admired.
After she told me she got it from lululemon, guess what I did?
Bought my own hat with just one click.
It arrived just yesterday. So convenient!
In my previous post I wrote about pleasure as a feminine superpower. And while I still stand by that immutable law of nature, there’s another dimension of pleasure that deserves equal and opposite air time.
That is … when pleasure becomes a prison.
We spent this past month in my Women, Food & Forgiveness Academy exploring the light and dark of pleasure through the archetype of the Maiden—she who arises in the tender glory of Spring.
If pleasure as a feminine superpower is the domain of the Wisdom Maiden, pleasure gone awry is the purview of the Shadow Maiden—that naïve, gullible, immature, and too-trusting aspect of our psyche that wades unwittingly into troubled waters and can’t find her way back to shore.
One of the obvious ways that pleasure becomes a prison for my Academy women (and indeed for all of us) is with the imperious cravings we feel for the foods—edible and otherwise—that we hate to love to eat.
Craving is the hallmark of the addicted brain.
You know you’re craving when you feel that push-pull between your human upper brain—the prefrontal cortex responsible for executive reasoning and strategic thinking—and your mammalian midbrain—that amygdala-driven limbic system that runs on emotion, impulse, and traumatic associative memory.
Your higher brain knows full well, for example, that a third glass of wine at dinner means no sleep tonight and a groggy day to follow.
But that Shadow Maiden presiding over your hijacked limbic system says, “I don’t care about tonight or tomorrow. Give me the fucking wine!”
The immediate satisfaction of any craving triggers a surge in dopamine, the neurotransmitter that provides that “ahhh” feeling of relief and reward in response to pleasure.
Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, has been studying pleasure as we experience it in this culture and has made a curious discovery:
We denizens of the so-called wealthier nations—with our Amazons and our Googles and our lululemons—are less happy and more depressed than those who live in the so-called poorer nations.
Her conclusion:
“The increase in our access to pleasure causes degradation in our mental health.”
Our access to a wider quantity, variety, potency, and novelty of addictive substances—including drugs that never existed before—has resulted in a precipitous decline in emotional well-being and a corresponding spike in anxiety, depression, and suicide.
The mother of all such drugs is right on your bedside table.
You know—that little computer you look at before you pee in the morning?
The one you happen to call a phone?
In reality, that’s your personalized syringe shooting you up with your quotidian dose of digital dopamine. Make it a great day!
Much like a slot machine, your phone-like computer delivers an intermittent reward system to your dopamine receptors, in which you sometimes hit the jackpot—your post gets tons of likes, you find a funny meme—most times you don’t.
Either way, that on-again-off-again reward is engineered to keep your eyeballs on that screen for as long as possible, ever scrolling and ever trolling to find—what?
You can’t even say, can you?
And thus convenience morphs into enslavement.
While you are mindlessly scrolling to find that perfect something-or-other, the supercomputer behind your tiny screen is tracking your eye movements, recording your voice, capturing your face—all your faces—and collecting ever-more sophisticated levels of data about your usage habits.
It then boomerangs its findings back at you to subtly persuade, coax, suggest, determine, and herd you into the choices it has predicted you will most readily accept based on that data.
This is what Aldous Huxley called “the dictatorship without tears.”
Before we know it, we’re trapped in a prison of our own co-creation. We think some evildoers are doing it to us, but you and I, just like that Shadow Maiden wandering into the waves, blithely hand over our agency for the sake of … convenience.
That Faustian compromise always—always—carries a cost. The grocery-store cashier might miscount your change, but cause and effect never fail.
My Academy student Georgia put it like this:
“The tyranny of convenience feels very consumptive. When things are overly convenient I’m not in my body. I’m just grabbing and consuming. I feel like a miser.”
Dr. Lembke warns us ominously of the cost in no uncertain terms:
“We are so overloaded with pleasure and convenience we are actually consuming ourselves to death.”
Hitting bottom is good news.
When the dopamine onslaught hits its saturation point, the next phase in the addiction cycle is diminishing returns that plummet us into dopamine overload.
That first glass of wine is wonderful … reality blissfully blurs at the edges as you become the uninhibited happy-chatty life of the party.
Second glass? Still pretty good. But not as good as the first.
By the time you get to the bottom of the third glass you feel like a disgusting lush.
You berate yourself for your inability to titrate your consumption.
You swear on your mother’s grave you’ll never do it again.
Until you have five glasses the next time.
This is your brain on dopamine overload, Sweetheart.
And this is actually the good news.
Because in your brain’s quest to keep that pain-pleasure equation in balance, you’ll eventually hit bottom and have to choose: either you sober up, or you die.
Fortunately, there’s a simple (but not easy) antidote to this dilemma:
Sit on your hands.
If you can find the will to wait at least 10 minutes before the next scroll, the next cookie, or the next glass of wine, the dopamine rush subsides.
That 10-minute interval makes room for the neurotransmitter serotonin to shift your mindset from craving to contentment.
As Dr. Lembke puts it: “To reset your brain, first abstain.”
I like to say to my Academy women, “Sit on your hands.”
Literally. Place your hands under your butt for 10 minutes.
You cannot engage in any addiction without the use of your hands, unless you’re on some kind of fantasy bender.
And yeah, sitting on your hands is easier said than done.
Those first few hours, days, or weeks of abstinence can be crazy hard. Those little dopamine gremlins will torment you with thoughts of relapse and demand your drug of choice as their ransom payment.
You need the strength of Odysseus to resist their siren call.
If you do resist and don’t relapse, the gremlins leave, the craving loses its steam, and the pieces of your soul that have been living in addiction exile come tip-toeing back to you, along with a renewed confidence and trust in your ability to be a loving stand for your own well-being.
I used to check my e-mail, news, and social media while still in bed in the morning and then wonder why I felt anxious all day long.
As I was starting to wonder if I needed medication, I instead just said Whoa and sanctified my bedroom as a technology-free zone.
I built the habit of keeping all technology—including my wifi router—turned off until after I had completed my morning journaling and meditation.
The anxiety has since given way to a sacred, pristine silence where I can actually hear my inner voice inseparable from the promptings of the God of My Understanding.
So much better than Morning fucking Joe.
The pain will set you free.
When we enslave ourselves to the tyranny of convenience, we trade an ounce of pleasure for a pound of pain. We have a moment of seeming ease followed by an interminable purgatory of struggle.
What if we were to flip that equation on its head:
An ounce of pain for a pound of pleasure?
Turns out that, as pleasure and pain sensations in the brain are very closely connected, the dopamine that results from pain is indirect, more enduring, and thus more inclined toward homeostatic balance.
If pain is the cost of convenience, then pleasure—big pleasure—is the reward for pain.
Mind you—I’m not talking about abject torture here. I’m talking about the everyday do-it-it’s-good-for-you pain that our convenience-addled brains avoid like the plague.
Number one? You guessed it:
Exercise
My happy place is the man-cave gym I frequent once or twice per week. I always wondered why the muscle-dudes there grunt and moan as they lift impossibly overselected weights when they could just do a little-old-lady workout like I do.
But now I get it:
When we mindfully push the edge of pain in exercise, the feel-good afterward is almost ecstatic.
Again, Dr. Lembke:
“Exercise increases the neurotransmitters involved in positive mood regulation, helps build new neural networks and reduces the likelihood of addiction. Exercise has more profound and sustained positive effects on mood, anxiety, cognition, energy and sleep than any pill I can subscribe.”
So when you get that I-know-I-should-exercise-but-can’t-be-bothered feeling, this is where your Wise Inner Crone needs to take that Shadow Maiden in hand and make the conscious choice to push through the resistance. It doesn’t last forever, and the payoff is manifold.
Cold-water plunges and baths
I resisted cold-water plunges for so long. I’m willing to sweat and strain and huff and puff, but pleeeeease don’t take away my hot showers.
Then I started doing very cold-water rinses to finish off those showers. I also started using the high-pressure, single-stream, ice-cold shower after soaking at my favorite hot springs.
This is a far cry from the hard-core polar-bear plunges we hear about these days, where folks stay 10 minutes or longer in 35-degree water.
But even my rudimentary foray into cold-water therapy profoundly rejuvenates my entire system.
According to Michael Kummer, cold-water therapy, much like exercise, is a stressor that can make you stronger. Among its myriad benefits, regular exposure to very cold water speeds recovery, boosts your mood, improves sleep, helps burn fat, and up-levels cognition and cardiovascular function.
A pound of pleasure for an ounce of pain, indeed.
Fasting
Sometime in the future I’ll write an entire post about this most miraculous of healing practices. If you want to drink from the fountain of youth, fasting is a cup that never runs dry.
I’ve always been intrigued by the thought of fasting but never wanted to take it on for fear of prolonged hunger.
And then, with guidance from health coach Christian Elliot, last year I undertook my first 36-hour fast.
No solid food. Just water, juice, herb tea, and bone broth.
Combined with silence, prayer, meditation, short walks, journaling, and just sitting looking out the window.
The first 12 hours were not fun.
Yes, I was very hungry—also mildly nauseated and extremely tired. I mostly slept.
After 24 hours I started to feel like Superwoman.
I understood directly why every genuine spiritual tradition has a practice of fasting.
Again, I’ll write more about this later, but suffice it to say when the fast was complete I felt as if I had looked directly into the face of God.
No joke. It’s that powerful.
Technology fasting
If food-fasting—both prolonged and intermittent—can deliver such results, how might this practice be ported over into our ever-growing addiction to technology?
In addition to ordaining my bedroom as a tech-free zone, I also have committed to using my devices for a max of 10 hours per day during the workweek.
During most weekends, I enter into “Technology Shabbat.”
Off it all goes from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon.
There are so many technological juggernauts converging in this new Aquarian age as to be utterly overwhelming.
I can’t singlehandedly hold those juggernauts at bay. But today at least, I can reclaim my agency and quell my anxiety by setting my own rules around when and how I engage with this beast.
That starts with turning off the “idiot box,” as my mother used to call the TV.
Doing nothing
This last one can be disarmingly difficult if you get your dopamine hits from being chronically busy.
So much of our craving—for anything—is about getting out of the present moment. It stands to reason, then, that the simplest antidote to dopamine addiction is simply to give ourselves permission to be.
Or, as the Italians put it, “il bel far niente.” The beautiful doing nothing.
Afternoons are generally the time when serotonin wanes and we want to reach for a quick “pick me up,” so it’s a good time to be generous with yourself around doing something restorative.
Now that the weather’s getting warmer here in the Northern Hemisphere, how about logging off and taking a leisurely 20-minute walk?
Or enjoying an afternoon herb tea on your deck and noticing the play of the sunlight on the leaves?
Or even laying down on the couch with an eye pillow on—allowing your blood to pool into and nourish your adrenals—while filling your ears with relaxing music?
It all boils down to coming home to your body.
As my Academy student Georgia put it:
“[The tyranny of convenience] makes me realize the importance of being in our bodies, the importance of learning what our body is communicating to us and following that wisdom and knowledge.
We are mentally fed so much on social media. We’re told what we find pleasurable based on the knowledge they have accumulated about us of what we like because of what we’ve searched and what we’re talked about.
We just really have to be more and more aware of how things are affecting us. If we’re just living in our heads we’re just going to be blown in the wind of mental illness.”
What would a dopamine-fasting lifestyle look like for you?
Now that you’ve made it to the bottom of this article, I’m curious to hear—what might a spring-cleaning of your worn-out habits look like?
What new self-care practices can you adopt to dial down the ersatz pleasures of dopamine addiction and embark on a rejuvenating routine of revitalized self care?
Please post your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to hear from you!
