The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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What's your take on dopamine detox?
Everyone's got a story about how they read so much back in the 90's/00's. But they pick up a book now, and... it's just not entertaining. We all know we can dopamine detox and make reading enjoyable again, but the corollary is quitting the hyper-stimulating activities everyone does nowadays. No TikTok, no Twitter, no mindlessly playing games while listening to podcasts. You'll be (roughly) just as stimulated after detoxing, but you'll be disconnected from the root of modern culture. Your opinions on culture will be less accurate because you're simply out of touch, like boomers reading newspapers.
OTOH, dopamine detox has huge benefits. Your mind isn't constantly bombarded with stimulation, so you can perceive subtleties and "flavor" in art more, like when you remove sugar from coffee. You perceive the world in a slower, calmer, more rational, interconnected way. You're around people less, so when you meet people IRL you're much friendlier and happy to see them. There is probably some balance to the dopamine situation, but it's hard to spot, so we mostly stimulate ourselves as hard as possible from FOMO, scared of falling behind the world.
I suppose there are probably objective experiments that prove it, but I don’t know how true it really is that TikTok is hyperstimulus compared to books. Sure, sometimes I open a book and the words look like a blur and I don’t have the attention span to continue, but sometimes I scroll on these dopamine apps or play a video game and feel the same feeling, that I just don’t care to do it and everything’s boring.
I strongly suspect that while there’s a core of scientific truth, much of the whole theory surrounding dopamine up/downregulation is conjecture built around a kind of minimalist, de-stress, meditation-heavy wellness lifestyle that is largely a class signifier more than anything else.
It’s kind of like the moment in The Road where the kid who never grew up pre-apocalypse tries Coca Cola and it’s so good because he’s never had it before and is presumably used to much plainer and less flavorsome food/drink. We have this idea that if we live some ascetic lifestyle (forced or by choice) that even the ‘simplest’ pleasures - a good strawberry, a classic novel, an old black and white movie, a beautiful sunset - will be so much better because we’re not constantly experiencing pleasure.
I’m very skeptical that that is true. I think, instead, that some people are able to enjoy life more than others, and that this is likely largely biological/genetic.
Both these statements are true. The baseline for pleasure is roughly fixed from person to person -- some people are just happier than others -- and because it's fixed, our brains will adapt to any lifestyle/level of stimulation and balance it out. If you suddenly read nothing but 1800s novels, you'd be bored as hell for a week, but eventually the brain will adjust and the novels will hit harder.
This is intuitive. Reverse it: If things didn't work this way, wouldn't the average person be bored out of their minds 2000 years ago? If we can mindlessly scroll TikTok and only feel moderately entertained/content, wouldn't some European peasant feel an absurd lack of stimulation 24/7 back then? If the brain does not balance stimulation like this, this logically has to be the case. Otherwise, the average TikTok/Twitch user must be absolutely thrilled the whole time, which doesn't pair with experience. They watch streams with a bland expression, apparently not more excited than an old man reading the papers.
I think this misses some gradation. The core claims, that people have a relative set-point of happiness and that hedonic adaptation negates the pleasure of many things, those I think are true, but I also think they go too far. I don't have empirical evidence for this, only personal experience and appeals to others to consider their personal experience. Nonetheless, a few examples:
Food - I really love burgers. After decades of life, having tried many different foods, including expensive Michelin Star restaurants, fancy steaks, high-end sushi, there is still nothing that hits better for me than just a really good cheeseburger. I don't seem to have experienced any hedonic adaptation on this front, in fact. Every time I bite into a perfectly cooked burger, it is delightful all over again, the same way that it has been since I was a kid. I do not think simply eating bland foods could result in me enjoying those bland foods the same way I enjoy regular cheeseburgers.
Flying - On this one, I will grant that there is massive hedonic adaptation, that the first-time experience of anything is very different from doing it again and that things can start blending into the background. Nonetheless, I have traveled a lot, and first-class international flights still give me a sort of childlike joy. The sense of traveling thousands of miles while having genuinely good food and a cozy place to sleep doesn't seem to be something that I can just adapt to and not notice. I do not think people that take the same trips, but are stuck in steerage, actually have the same experience and relationship to flying that I do.
Work - Having worked in manual labor prior to having a real career, then a decades in research labs, then a decade in software, I am very confident that I do not fully adapt to my conditions. I fucking hated grad school. It made me miserable. I didn't hate my postdoc quite as much, but man, it still made me miserable, almost to the point of despair at times. I didn't adapt to this being my norm, I was just way less happy than I was after I switched careers and got an easier job with way more monetary reward.
Relationships - Seriously, there's just no goddamned way you're going to convince me that I have a set-point that I return to. Not even close. No way. Being single sucks, being in a bad relationship sucks even more, but being in a happy marriage is awesome. You might get so accustomed to being in a relationship with someone that makes you unhappy that you forget that there are other options, but really, you're going to be much less happy than in a good relationship. I don't know how anyone that has had a chaotic, messy, toxic relationship and then later a fantastic one could think that they just arrive at a set point.
My own life makes me pretty thoroughly reject the idea that I have some happiness set point that I move back towards. While you're not going to be comically jubilant at literally all times of the day even with a very good life and it may be possible to still have nice peaks when you're not happy with life, the differences in the valleys are genuinely enormous.
Humans vary a great deal, and the hedonic treadmill and recalibration has strong evidence even if it doesn't overwhelm literally every human. Consider yourself lucky it doesn't seem to be an issue for you.
Besides, those concepts do not claim that happiness and joy can't exist. Otherwise opioid addicts would eventually stop outright as they get bored. They certainly develop tolerances, but the actual enjoyment remains the same with ever increasing doses, it's downregulation in other aspects that makes them need bigger doses till the point the side effects become lethal.
Plus the recalibration works both ways, it might well be that even a day or two is enough to reset your enjoyment of a cheeseburger, whereas if you were (somehow) given a dozen cheeseburgers in a row and an infinite stomach, you'd be rather bored of them by the end if you went through like a train.
The problem is the application of downregulation theory to subjective experiences. The hedonic treadmill applies to opioids, the suggestion that TikTok is more pleasurable than some arbitrary other kind of media is complete, evidence-free conjecture, because unlike opium the amount of enjoyment obtained from media is very dependent upon many different factors. You’re also confusing the hedonic treadmill with novelty. They’re related but not the same thing. The hedonic treadmill is solely about returning to a biological baseline happiness, it says nothing about differences between media or why using TikTok everyday would make looking at a sunset less fun.
I think people are largely happy or unhappy, and the ‘hedonic treadmill’ is mostly about the ways in which that naturally unhappy proportion of the population cope.
What is the hedonic treadmill but a consequence of a series of subjective experiences?
A disabled person experiences the utter horror of being disabled. He's still disabled later, and subjectively experiencing all the issues that brings (alongside coping mechanisms), and yet his mood trends back to where it began. The same for the suddenly rich lottery winner, though presumably the more modest but sustained gains from those who earn a lot of money (I don't think the studies were on net worth, rather income) leads to higher well-being longterm.
These are almost certainly not the same as the downregulation of opioid receptors in addicts, but they're all examples of the body's stubborn desire to achieve homeostasis. It's the ultimate Nothing Ever Happens Chud of all time. Then when shit does happen, I come in.
It's all homeostasis, be it becoming inured to a single form of once novel stimuli, or to the gestalt impression of all the things that act on your mood.
Some people are certainly happier or unhappier by default than others. What the hedonic treadmill claims is that they tend to revert to whatever that default is. It does not rule out variance between people or even within the same person, simply that in the latter case it will almost inevitably converge.
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I guess this is the core of what I'm objecting to. As mentioned, I buy that the claim that the treadmill and recalibration are real, but I am very skeptical of any purported evidence for the idea that it's totalizing. To be a bit snarky about it, I think it's basically a coping mechanism, similar to the misinterpreted evidence that happiness and satisfaction don't improve above a certain income. That might be nice if it were true, that once you're above some threshold it doesn't matter anymore, but when I search both myself and the people I see around me, it just seems pretty clearly false to me. Does it not feel that way to you?
The hedonic treadmill is very much not a cope. Paraplegics recover to baseline happiness in months and so do lottery winners. It's one of the more robust findings in psychology.
But claims that money doesn't buy you happiness are bunk, it does, even if it has diminishing returns and is more of a log scale. There have been plenty of recent papers on it, of pretty high quality. Obviously when you get into the realm of multi millionaires and then billionaires, good luck getting a proper sample size, but for anyone who doesn't have 7 digits or more, money will make you happier, just not linearly.
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