Having a general understanding of how the pleasure centers in our brains work can free us in profound ways in this insane era of human history.

Neurochemistry becomes more complex the deeper you go, but there’s no need to go into the weeds to benefit from the knowledge.

There are simple ways – not easy, but simple – to overcome our addiction to quick pleasure and therefore raise our baseline level of happiness. To find deep joy in very simple, natural things. As with anything, it first takes awareness, and then some disciplined action. But the reward is worth it.

Personally, I have a ways to go to heal my brain after decades of pleasure seeking damage, but I’ve made a lot of progress in the last years, and even months, and the juice is definitely worth the squeeze.

The squeeze is some discipline and some withdrawals. The juice is deep joy and happiness from the little things in life, which is most things.

How Our Brains Process Pleasure

I’ll combine dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, etc into “reward chemicals”; happiness, joy, fulfillment, etc into “pleasure”; depression, anxiety, sadness, etc into “pain”.

There are differences and nuances here, and even the ideas of pleasure and pain are intermingled with motivation, happiness, fulfillment, or depression, anxiety, trauma. To keep it simple for maximum applicability in the shortest amount of time, I’ll just talk about pleasure and pain.

Stimulus > reward chemicals > pleasure > pain

A stimulus causes a flood of reward chemicals in the brain, and we feel pleasure. Then the reward chemicals drop below baseline/average and we feel pain. When the stimulus results in unnaturally high levels of pleasure, the subsequent pain is increased, and in some cases such as trying a potent drug like heroin, the pleasure can be so intense that all of the rest of life’s former pleasures immediately and forever lose their appeal. Nothing is ever as important as getting that euphoric high again, and so life falls apart in an instant.

Pursuing and achieving unnaturally high levels of pleasure for extended periods causes the receptors in our brains to reduce in number; therefore, the same flood of reward chemicals that caused great pleasure the first time cannot produce the same degree of pleasure again. Further, the other stimuli that used to result in high levels of pleasure start to seem blasé.

Natural vs Unnatural Pleasure

Basically everything in modern society encourages us to seek unnaturally high levels of pleasure in very quick, easy ways, and the inevitable result is that we build a tolerance, so it takes more and new stimuli to achieve pleasure, and over time our average daily level of happiness goes down, down, down.

It’s helpful to think about and watch young children playing. When I take my kids out in the woods, they derive high levels of pleasure from picking up sticks and hitting trees or rocks with the sticks. They have fresh, sensitive pleasure centers in their brains that haven’t been dampened by years or decades of abusing screens, refined sugar products, any kinds of drugs or alcohol, or really much of anything that’s not simple and natural. And so their default state is incredible happiness and they derive euphoric pleasure from extremely simple things. They’ll play with each other in the living room, just the two of them being silly, and laugh hysterically.

As adults, seeing and doing what we have in our modern lives, it’s impossible to return to that virginal brain state, but we can get a lot closer to it than we think by being conscious of the activities and substances we partake in that provide nothing other than quick, cheap, unnatural floods of reward chemicals in our brains, making us feel pleasure in the moment, but detracting from the overall pleasure of life, the pleasure of being alive as humans.

And as parents, it is incumbent on us to do what we can to help maintain the pure brain state of our children into their adulthood and teach them to avoid the pleasure traps which will only increase in number and degree as time goes on.

Line A is things like drugs and porn, quick, easy, potent. B is things like reading a good book or hanging out with good friends or going on a walk in the woods. C is achievement, working on something difficult and completing it, which you’ll notice results in a higher baseline of happiness. The only downside is in the beginning, getting past the difficult work.

The more we do B and C and the less we do A, the happier we will be overall. The problem is A activities are everywhere and they are always accessible, always easy. Ultimately we have complete control over what we do. We just have to do it.

Pleasure Trap Examples

In this era, every single day is a mine field of pleasure traps. It’s outrageous on its own, but even more so when you realize that each trap is actively encouraged by society at large. Essentially, it’s addicts encouraging other addicts.

Drugs and alcohol are big, obvious ones, and when we partake with regularity, life seems more dull when we’re not under their influence.

I mentioned that I still have a lot of work to do to heal my brain, but I recently took the huge step of quitting alcohol forever after almost 25 years of [what many would consider] abuse. I’ll write a separate post on that subject because I have a lot to say on it.

I used to drink at all social events, and basically during most of the “fun” activities I had in my life, whether it was fishing, golfing, poker, billiards, or even hiking in the woods with my dog.

What that did was make those activities I love much less pleasurable when I wasn’t drinking. My reward chemicals were flowing extra high from the booze, so without that artificial pleasure boost, I enjoyed the activities sober far less than I would have if I had never drunk during them. I was below baseline without the alcohol.

If you’re a man watching a lot of internet porn, scene after scene of artificially “beautiful” women doing extreme sex acts, overwhelming your brain, which was never designed to deal with such an experience, then good luck getting a boner with your beautiful, but comparatively normal looking and behaving wife. Good luck enjoying normal lovemaking, which is beautiful, exhilarating, and soulful without porn-induced brain damage. No wonder boner pill sales are always at an all-time high every new year.

And ladies, if you’re using the Magnum Horsecock Vibramax 5000, good luck finding pleasure, and even feeling intimate love from a human man with a non-vibrating human penis made of flesh.

If you’re always watching Netflix at night, getting that brain stimulation that media creators know will keep you engaged (addicted), good luck enjoying sitting on the couch just talking with your partner, or for that matter doing anything that doesn’t involve a screen.

If you’re pulling out TikTok or Instagram every time you have a short break in your day and scrolling, scrolling, as new attention-grabbing videos of a wide variety of topics flow into your brain and spike those reward chemicals, good luck focusing on really any less stimulating activity than that. I see people every day who are scrolling, scrolling, while waiting in line for three minutes. They can’t bear even a few minutes without stimulation because they are so, so addicted to those artificially spiked reward chemicals and they don’t even know it.

When I downloaded the TikTok app a few years back, I was blown away at its drug-like effect. I actually felt a comedown after 20 mins or so of scrolling. I was mildly depressed for a period after. And when I’d get a little break in my day, the addictive pull of the app was always there. Truly amazing, and it’s by design.

As I’ve said in other recent posts, the most valuable thing in the world is human attention. And if we’re unaware of how the reward/pleasure centers of our brains work, unaware of the fact that whoever it is controlling this realm is attracting our attention by short circuiting our brains with a constant, ubiquitous barrage of artificial stimulation, then we just give our attention everywhere we get those reward chemicals, even if it hurts our lives, and we have less attention and energy to give to the things that actually matter. We become slaves.

And how about sugar for a pleasure trap? I’m sure everyone who ever reads this knows what a sugar craving feels like. That cheap, shitty, refined sugar that’s in everything jacks our brains up and makes our lizard brains think we’re getting a real reward, a rare sugary treat which will aid in our survival, when in reality that sugar is destroying our bodies in every way. Fortunately you can easily and quickly kill that sugar addiction by doing this. Sugar is the same as the other traps – our enjoyment of wholesome, natural, healthy foods is diminished when our brains are used to the flood of reward chemicals that immediately follows eating sugary garbage.

The Solution

The only total solution to all of this is to move into the woods off-grid and live a totally natural life outside of society, immersed in nature. The Amish are a good example of this, and they are probably the most sane group of people in the West.

However, that’s unrealistic for anyone who is reading this on a computer or phone. Although my idealistic side loves the idea of such a life, I realize that I imagine it from the comfort of my modern, heated home, and all the rest of it.

There is no easy solution to any of this, other than to be aware of it in the first place, then find some kind of balance that works for us in our lives. What my ideal balance looks like will be different from yours. And what my ideal balance is next year will be different from my ideal balance a year, and especially a decade later.

But in no world is a human going to live a good, happy, fulfilling life if he’s watching porn all the time, eating sugary garbage, scrolling social media, clicking around news articles and only reading headlines, unable even to dedicate enough focus to reading the text of the article, and drinking every night while watching Netflix. That’s a 100% guaranteed recipe for a sad, unfulfilling life, and big surprise, it’s what society encourages. And like boner pills, depression pills continue to make record sales every single year.

Fortunately, things are changing and people are waking up to all of this. It’s an exciting time to have chosen to incarnate into this realm.

It’s helpful to think about the useless, cheap, quick pleasure traps we all succumb to in our daily lives as addictions, because they are exactly that. And just to know that the more of them we rid ourselves of, the more beauty will present itself in all other areas of life.

Speaking from experience, there will be a period of withdrawal from whatever trap you’re working to get out of as your brain returns to a more natural baseline, so it will take a little discipline. But the rewards are noticeable, and they can happen really fast, in a matter of just a few days for some things.

Try deleting your social media apps and going a week, or better, a month without them. Notice the withdrawals you have in the first few days. Then notice how you’re more inclined to read books, or call your friends and family. Then notice how after a week or so, you’re just generally in a better mood, and that underlying dull anxiety just kind of went away.

Maybe instead of listening to a podcast on your next walk, you decide to listen to the sounds and watch the sights around you instead, and you’ll notice a beautiful owl up in a tree that you never would have noticed if your mind were focused on the podcast. And you’ll feel pleasant tingles go all through your body, and you’ll smile to yourself. And you’ll have a moment where you’re so grateful just to be alive.

And maybe that owl is your eternal Soul taking a separate physical form in order to inspect its human incarnation from within physical reality from a 3rd perspective. Maybe that’s its way of saying, “Good job my human, you’re on the right path.”

I should have ended this post there because that was a cool paragraph, but I have a few more things to say.

Personally, I’m striving for a life completely free from all addictions. Alcohol was a big step, but I still have nicotine and caffeine to tackle at some future date. And YouTube poker vlogs, but I don’t consider those all that harmful. Like I said, it’s a balance.

What are some pleasure trap addictions you have in your life that you’ve never thought of as such? Don’t you think it’s worth getting rid of them, at least for a period, as an experiment?

The Spiritual Aspect

Every spiritual practice of all time teaches the importance of being in the moment, quieting the mind, being pure awareness. It is in that state we are most strongly connected with the Divine.

When our brains are on the pleasure roller coaster, we are completely disconnected from the Divine.

Our Souls can be yelling at us, “Please hear me, please let me guide you, I know what’s going to happen if you don’t listen to me!” And we’re sitting there giggling at a TikTok fart prank video, completely deaf to our Souls.

And so we suffer. Free will can be a bitch in some ways.

It’s in those rare moments of being still, mind empty, just appreciating that very moment, appreciating existence itself, when the most profound insights are gifted to our human selves.

Let’s try to have more of those.

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How ridiculous are all of the YouTube thumbnails these days? 😂