Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough

humans hate uncertainty so much that we’d rather experience punishment.

And this affects us. Consider, immediately after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, investigated two groups. The first group was made up of people who watched six or more hours of televised bombing coverage. The second group was people who actually ran in the 2013 Boston Marathon. The finding: The first group, the bombing news bingers, were more likely to develop PTSD and other mental health issues. That’s worth restating: people who binge-watched bombing news on TV from the comfort of home had more psychological trauma than people who were actually bombed.

Do you want to be right or happy?

There are now more self-storage facilities in the United States than McDonald’s, Burger Kings, Starbucks, and Walmarts—combined.

As the Las Vegas strip came into sight through my car's windshield, I remembered the words that unnamed monk wrote in the 19th century. You risk so much by hesitating to fling yourself into the abyss.

Embrace short-term discomfort to find a long-term benefit.

The behaviors we do in rapid succession—from gambling to overeating to overbuying to binge-watching to binge drinking and so much more—are powered by a “scarcity loop.” It has three parts. Opportunity—> Unpredictable Rewards—> Quick Repeatability

The worst habits are things we can do over and over and over in rapid succession—eventually to our detriment. These behaviors are often fun and rewarding in the short term but backfire in the long run.

Addiction is not a choice. Instead, it’s a summation of repeated choices that make a different choice harder to make for environmental, biological, and historical reasons. It’s deep learning.

The hundreds of sober people I’ve spoken to all say that alcohol or drugs initially served a valuable purpose for them, too. It allowed them to feel and behave like the people they wanted to be. Or it killed boredom or helped them work harder. Or it numbed their anxiety and lowered their inhibitions. Or it allowed them to escape from some restless passenger inside them they couldn’t quite understand. And then the phrase is always “It worked until it didn’t.

So far, there isn’t a miracle cure like a pill or procedure for addiction. Recovery takes effort. But fully accepting the brain disease model can, for some, kill motivation to put in the necessary hard work. For example, scientists at the University of New Mexico analyzed alcoholics in recovery for more than a year. The top reason for relapse was believing addiction is a disease. The relapsers said they didn’t see the point in struggling against a disease without a medical cure. This viewpoint can also lead would-be lifelines to give up hope. Other research found that the more a drug user’s family members believe addiction is an insurmountable disease, the more likely they are to distance themselves from the user.

There's a thin line between post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth.

There's a difference between loneliness and solitude, and they're often conflated," said Bishop. "Solitude is purposeful and intentional." The famed English psychologist Anthony Storr wrote of solitude, "Some of the most profound and healing psychological experiences which individuals encounter take place internally and they're only distantly related, if at all, to interaction with other human beings.

Make everyday decisions within 60 seconds. After that, analyzing more and more information only wastes time and doesn't steer us into significantly better outcomes.

As you increase your status by letting people know you’re great, you simultaneously decrease it by letting people know you’re great. And that makes you look like a jerk. The much harder but more effective way is to actually go out into the world and do great things. And then status arises naturally.

If we wait until we’re twenty-one to drink, our odds of developing an alcohol addiction are 9 percent. But if we start drinking at fourteen or younger, the odds of addiction become 50 percent. A coin flip. These same figures hold for most drugs and maladaptive behaviors.

Because here’s the more important thing: expressing that we care, ironically, is the worst thing we can do for our status.

In the human brain less equals bad, worse, unproductive. More equals good, better, productive. Our scarcity brain defaults to more and rarely considers less. And when we do consider less, we often think it sucks.

A scarcity cue is a piece of information that fires on what researchers call our scarcity mindset. It leads us to believe we don’t have enough. We then instinctually fixate on attaining or doing that one thing we think will solve our problem and make us feel whole.

It’s nice to hear that exploring Amazon for the best deal on, say, a coffeemaker is similar to our ancestors exploring the African savanna. But it’s also kind of depressing.

What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won't be enough tomorrow.

In almost every act of our daily lives…we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses….We are governed

The data shows just over 2 percent of the world’s population is addicted to drugs or alcohol. A study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research suggests the percentage of people addicted to technology is now roughly the same.

Research suggests that many people start “learning” addiction in their teens. From the time we hit puberty until we’re about twenty-five, our brain undergoes a massive renovation. During this time, we’re learning how we cope with problems and find comfort. Consider: If we wait until we’re twenty-one to drink, our odds of developing an alcohol addiction are 9 percent. But if we start drinking at fourteen or younger, the odds of addiction become 50 percent. A coin flip. These same figures hold for most drugs and maladaptive behaviors.

Each time we off-load our quest and remove effortful exploration, we quit the journey.

The DSM-5 explains that people from age eighteen to twenty-nine have the highest substance use rates. The data shows “use disorder among adults decreases in middle age, being greatest among individuals 18- to 29-years-old (16.2%) and lowest among individuals age 65 and older (1.5%).

Addiction, in other words, is a learned behavior that once worked well but begins to backfire. Using a drug or drinking still relieves discomfort, provides stimulation, and solves problems in the short term. But it starts creating long-term problems. The more often we repeat it, the deeper we learn it, the harder it is to break. Meanwhile, the problems pile up.

But research on regular people struggling with substance abuse suggests a much brighter outlook. Satel pointed me to one study that surveyed roughly twenty thousand people. It found that 75 percent who reported struggling with drugs before age twenty-four no longer used drugs by age thirty-seven. Another extensive survey found that over ten years 86 percent of people struggling with an addiction got clean. Satel began firing off counterexamples from the people she’d worked with. People who stopped because they finally got tired of being homeless. Or because they got fired from a job or got a DUI. Or because their drinking caused them to miss their kid’s soccer game. Or because they had a child or a new job opportunity. Or because, as the psychologist William James wrote, they’d had a “vital spiritual experience” that kicked them out of the cycle of addiction.

The crucial question is not whether brain changes take place. They do. “The real question,” said Satel, “is whether those brain changes obliterate the capacity to make decisions. The answer to that question is no. Choice might be constrained. But people are capable of breaking through the neurochemical storm and changing their behavior. It’s possible to change. Everything is possible.” No science has ever been able to document specific changes in the brain that occur because of drug use and lead to addiction.