Dopamine Nation

Going on Being about his own journey toward authenticity, “No longer
endeavoring to manage my environment, I began to feel invigorated, to find a
balance, to permit a feeling of connection with the spontaneity of the natural
world and with my own inner nature.”
Truth-telling Is Contagious . . . and So Is Lying
In 2013, my patient Maria was at the height of her drinking problem. She was
frequently presenting to the local emergency rooms with a blood alcohol
level four times the legal limit. Diego, her husband, had assumed the bulk of
caring for her.

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Meanwhile, he was struggling with his own addiction to food. At five feet
one, he weighed 336 pounds. It was only when Maria stopped drinking that
Diego was motivated to tackle his food addiction.
“Seeing Maria get into recovery,” he said, “motivated me to make changes
to my own life. When Maria was drinking, I got away with a lot. I knew I
was headed to a bad place. I didn’t feel safe in my own body. But it was her
getting sober that got me active. I could tell she was headed to a good place,
and I didn’t want to be left behind.
“So I got a Fitbit. I started going to the gym. I started calorie counting . . .
just counting the calories made me realize how much I was eating. Then I
started the keto diet and intermittent fasting. I wouldn’t let myself eat late at
night, or in the morning until I had worked out. I ran. I weight lifted. I
realized hunger is a notification I can ignore. This year [2019] I weigh 195
pounds. I have a normal blood pressure for the first time in a long time.”
In my clinical practice, I often see one member of a family get into
recovery from addiction, followed quickly by another member of the family
doing the same. I’ve seen husbands who stop drinking followed by wives
who stop having affairs. I’ve seen parents who stop smoking pot followed by
children who do the same.
—
I’ve mentioned the Stanford marshmallow experiment of 1968, in which
children between the ages of three and six were studied for their ability to
delay gratification. They were left alone in an empty room with a
marshmallow on a plate and were told if they could go a full fifteen minutes
without eating the marshmallow, they would get that marshmallow and a
second one as well. They would get double the reward if they could just wait
for it.
In 2012, researchers at the University of Rochester altered the 1968
Stanford marshmallow experiment in one crucial way. One group of children
experienced a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted:
The researchers left the room and said they would return when the child rang

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the bell, but then didn’t. The other group of children were told the same, but
when they rang the bell, the researcher returned.
The children in the latter group, where the researcher came back, were
willing to wait up to four times longer (twelve minutes) for a second
marshmallow than the children in the broken-promise group.
—
How can we understand why Maria’s getting into recovery from her alcohol
addiction inspired Diego to tackle his food problem; or why when adults
keep their promises to children, those children are better able to regulate
their impulses?
The way I understand this is by differentiating what I call the plenty versus
the scarcity mindset. Truth-telling engenders a plenty mindset. Lying
engenders a scarcity mindset. I’ll explain.
When the people around us are reliable and tell us the truth, including
keeping promises they’ve made to us, we feel more confident about the
world and our own future in it. We feel we can rely not just on them but also
on the world to be an orderly, predictable, safe kind of a place. Even in the
midst of scarcity, we feel confident that things will turn out okay. This is a
plenty mindset.
When the people around us lie and don’t keep their promises, we feel less
confident about the future. The world becomes a dangerous place that can’t
be relied upon to be orderly, predictable, or safe. We go into competitive
survival mode and favor short-term gains over long-term ones, independent
of actual material wealth. This is a scarcity mindset.
An experiment by the neuroscientist Warren Bickel and his colleagues
looked at the impact on study participants’ tendency to delay gratification for
a monetary reward after having read a narrative passage that projected a
state of plenty versus a state of scarcity.
The plenty narrative read like this: “At your job you have just been
promoted. You will have the opportunity to move to a part of the country you
always wanted to live in OR you may choose to stay where you are. Either
way, the company gives you a large amount of money to cover moving

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expenses and tells you to keep what you don’t spend. You will be making 100
percent more than you previously were.”
The scarcity narrative read like this: “You have just been fired from your
job. You will now have to move in with a relative who lives in a part of the
country you dislike, and you will have to spend all of your savings to move
there. You do not qualify for unemployment, so you will not be making any
income until you find another job.”
The researchers found, not surprisingly, that participants who read the
scarcity narrative were less willing to wait for a distant future payoff and
more likely to want a reward now. Those who read the plenty narrative were
more willing to wait for their reward.
It makes intuitive sense that when resources are scarce, people are more
invested in immediate gains, and are less confident that those rewards will
still be forthcoming in some distant future.
The question is, why do so many of us living in rich nations with abundant
material resources nonetheless operate in our daily lives with a scarcity
mindset?
As we have seen, having too much material wealth can be as bad as having
too little. Dopamine overload impairs our ability to delay gratification.
Social media exaggeration and “post-truth” politics (let’s call it what it is,
lying) amplify our sense of scarcity. The result is that even amidst plenty, we
feel impoverished.
Just as it is possible to have a scarcity mindset amidst plenty, it is also
possible to have a plenty mindset amidst scarcity. The feeling of plenty
comes from a source beyond the material world. Believing in or working
toward something outside ourselves, and fostering a life rich in human
connectedness and meaning, can function as social glue by giving us a plenty
mindset even in the midst of abject poverty. Finding connectedness and
meaning requires radical honesty.