Pain and Pleasure

Dr. Anna Lembke in her book Dopamine Nation offers a metaphor for the balance between pleasure and pain that is so often perturbed by modern excess. “Gremlins”, she says, “press down on the pain side of the balance” when we configure our lives around escaping discomfort. I thought about my own life as a software engineer; somewhat sedentary, always within reach of distractions and cheap, easy pleasure, both digital and physical.

I haven’t felt truly well for a long time. The exact reasons are hard to articulate, but the symptoms of my malaise manifest mostly as a generalized sense of discomfort and physical pain. I wake up, caffeinate myself into existence, and go to work in a location 20 feet from my bed. I do my best to organize my never-ending stream of small obligations and clear my mind for the real work that’s the reason I’m paid a high salary. Sometimes, I succeed. Often, I’m carried along by a deluge of meetings, Slack huddles and messages, and the gnawing sense that I should get up and move my body, until 6 PM arrives and I wonder what I’ve actually accomplished.

Sprinkled throughout the day are various minor indulgences in my own particular collection of vices: YouTube videos on the state of the economy, checking my investment portfolio, drinking more coffee, reading a few blog posts here and there. Cumulatively, however, they don’t seem so minor. I’ve been wondering recently whether I’m trapped in my own seemingly innocuous form of addiction that Lembke spends her book describing.

But I’ve noticed something. I’m far less inclined to distract myself and seek out cheap dopamine fixes if I’ve deliberately pressed on the pain side of the pain-pleasure balance. Exercise, cold showers, and sauna, all seem to alleviate the dysphoria that precedes my crude self-medicating behaviors. I don’t really understand the mechanisms involved, but it’s fascinating to me that this works. Perhaps my biology, evolved and adapted to harsh environments with scare supplies of pleasure-inducing experiences, requires me to manufacture some harshness to be healthy.