The Pleasure Trap: Why seeking the easy and comfortable life leads to more suffering

It sounds counterintuitive at the surface level, right? Why wouldn’t we want to minimize pain and suffering in our life? Or why wouldn’t we, flipping that statement, want to maximize our pleasure? Don’t people in popular self-help books, podcasts, shows, etc., always talk about maximing pleasure through life as an essential pursuit?

It all has to do, like so many things, with evolution and how we have spent the vast majority of our 200,000 years as homo sapiens developing adaptive mechanisms in our brain. So a little bit on that, and then why I would strongly posit we need to learn a bit more in today’s world on resiliency by sitting in our suffering a little more often. Not always, just some. 

Stress has been a constant for almost our entire time as humans on this planet. At the physical level, some stress is very helpful, and non-critical amounts let us live longer and more healthily. One example you’re familiar with is exercise; you run a little faster and a little farther and you stress your heart a little more, and that has positive cardiovascular outcomes. Same, too, with weightlifting — break down your muscles and they build back stronger. This holds true in so many areas, heat/cold, high-intensity training, etc. Some stress makes the body healthier. Per a growing number of scientists and researchers, this might be a beneficial way to look at other stressors in our lives. I’ll paraphrase the work of Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, and link a podcast to her research from her book Dopamine Nation, but this is a concept I refer to in this blog as “the pleasure trap.”

The problem with the pleasure trap isn’t you, or me, or anyone’s lack of motivation. It’s modern society itself. For many of us on the planet at this moment, we have an overload of accessibility, abundance, potency, and novelty of things that will give us pleasure. Straight from Dr. Lembke. Take food for example, in this case a donut. It is loaded with sugar, something that was much rarer for most of human existence and that we needed to store energy from as fat to use in periods of starvation. Thus things densely packed with sugar give us great pleasure — we needed the motivation to seek and acquire sugar again for most of our existence. Now though, we don’t just have a donut available from rare time to time, nor do we need to be motivated to walk 50 miles to find it again; we have the ability to eat as many as we want until we are entirely and sickly full. On any given day you can have 12 donuts and feel a great deal of pleasure, albeit temporarily while eating them. So too with just about anything else that causes dopamine release — video games, gambling, extreme sports, alcohol, heroin and opioids, and that is literally just the tip of the millions of pleasurable and sometimes extreme things we have available to us today.

Therein lies the problem. It’s that crazy adaptive brain of ours that is always seeking homeostasis. Homeostasis in this sense simply means what the brain is used to and therefore wants to stay in a certain and precise biochemical state. So sure, if you do a shot of tequila right now, and particularly if you like alcohol, you may feel a mild sense of pleasure. Go to a bar with friends and do three more and that pleasure is going to increase to a non-linear and (in our brain’s case) unacceptable degree. You’ll be feeling great for a time, but your brain is not happy. So it is releasing all kinds of counteractive measures to not let those molecules of ethanol sedate you or relax you, which your brain determines is dangerous. Guess what happens the next morning? The alcohol is gone, but those chemicals that were released are peaking. Hence the hangover.

This isn’t true though for just alcohol, or heroin as I used in an above example and which per the Lembke research produces hundreds of times more dopamine than sugar, it is true for just about everything that gives us pleasure. Over time, your brain is going to desensitize your dopamine receptors such that you need more and more pleasure to feel the same level of pleasure with just a little bit of alcohol, a little bit of video gaming, a little bit of it that gives us a good feeling. That is the definition of the word tolerance, and it is not good. There’s a rare condition called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain and Anhydrosis (CIPA) that causes affected individuals to be unable to feel pain and unable to sweat. Sound good? No — actually you’ll likely die at a very early age. You could touch a hot stove indefinitely without knowing your hand is burning and bacterial infections are taking over. Which is the point of this blog. The desensitization of all pain causes worse things to happen.

We, people today, are at an all-time high in terms of depression, anxiety, addiction, and mental health challenges. Likely the primary driver for this is a lack of enough interpersonal relationships, experiences, and growth within the community and with others, replaced with the immediacy of an incredible range of things that can give us pleasure. It’s much easier to reach for our iPhone and check a “like” or “upvote” than to even just press dial on that phone and call a friend. Therefore we are in a twofold and harmful bind; number one, our dopamine receptors can’t get enough and are constantly seeking a steady stream of pleasure. Number two, just as problematic, we are developing the brain to compensate for those rushes of constant pleasure. Dr. Lembke calls these gremlins that hop up on the other side of the pleasure see-saw every time we produce pleasure. These gremlins build up over time and release chemicals that make us more depressed, more anxious, less able to sleep, etc. And we are at a loss for why as our suffering goes up.

What have we given up in today’s society of abundance? The innate ability to be resilient, both physically and mentally. There is the oxymoron unmasked. By constantly seeking out and increasing our pleasure, we are actually causing ourselves future pain. What is the solution? Certainly one doesn’t have to intentionally experience tremendous pain. If your kneecap is broken, go to the ER. If you feel in a broken state mentally, talk to a friend or therapist. This might be more important, actually, in the mental health concern, because a broken kneecap is only going to hurt you. The harmful mental state could have negative collateral impacts on many others around you.

But, I think most of us also need to embrace the fact we are going to suffer some in life. It is inevitable without exception for everyone on this planet. Inevitable that I will in my future and that you will too. If the mental suffering is mild, take for example simple boredom, there’s no need to fear it. Just like there’s no need to fear one night’s insomnia and lack of that night’s sleep. You will likely be fine by making it through, and lifelong attempts to numb the boredom through substances or behaviors are going to increase pain in the future. This is what is referred to as the pleasure trap.

I suspect if you’re reading this it maybe there’s a little bit of a bell ringing; it might be a little bit relatable. I am far from saying or judging that there’s anything wrong with us. Just like everyone else, I fall prey to the pleasure trap. It’s really, at the surface level, in our best interest to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. But avoiding mild pain 24/7 is not good for us in the long run. So I’m trying this in my life, learning to embrace some of those moments of isolation, bad days, rejection, whatever it may be. To be quiet and reflective in them. To learn from them and not need to escape each time. I hope that even in knowing that accepting mild suffering can actually make us more healthy, you might try an experiment in the same vein, and be better off in the long run for it.

– Mike

We are our own griefs. We are our own happinesses. We are our own remedies.