The Quest for Stimulation: From Boredom to Addiction

Everyone has some bad habits, and they nearly always involve doing something too much. Eating too much, drinking too much, buying too much, looking at your phone too much. Why do we have such a propensity for overdoing it?

My guest says it's all thanks to a "scarcity loop" that we're hardwired to follow. Once you understand how this loop works, you can start taking action to resist the compulsive cravings that sabotage your life.

Michael Easter is the author of Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough. Today on the show, Michael unpacks the three parts of the scarcity loop, and how they've been amplified in the modern day. We talk about the slot machine lab that corporations use to hack your brain, why your main problem may be that you're understimulated rather than overstimulated, why addiction may be better thought of as a symptom rather than a disease, how the quantification and gamification of life can negatively impact your experience of it, and how ultimately, the fix for resisting your bad habits is having something better to do than chase the cheap, unsatisfying hits of pleasure our culture so readily offers.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Michael's previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #708 — Overcome the Comfort Crisis
• AoM Article: Via Negativa — Adding to Your Life By Subtracting
• Research of Thomas Zentall
• Research of C. Thi Nguyen
• Sally Satel
• Maia Szalavitz
• AoM Article: The Groundhog Day Diet — Why I Eat the Same Thing Every Day
• AoM Podcast #636: Why You Overeat and What to Do About It
• Sunday Firesides: Tidying Up Our Gilded Cages

Connect With Michael Easter

• Michael’s website
• Michael on Instagram
• Michael on Twitter