We often say that we want happiness, but in fact we pursue pleasure. Dr. Robert Lustig author of «The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains» explains pleasure and happiness and discusses the basic brain mechanisms behind various addictive products that are hacking our reward centers.

Expect to learn:

• What are the 7 differences between pleasure and happiness?
• Why is it that the more pleasure you seek, the more unhappy you get?
• How do adictions develop?
• What do serotonin, cortisol and dopamine have to do with all that?
• How does it impact our motivation and well-being?
• What is the difference between depression and burn-out and what can you do to overcome them?

7 differences between dopamine (pleasure) and serotonin (happiness):

• 1. Pleasure is short term like a meal, happiness is long term like a lifetime.
• 2. Pleasure is visceral you feel it in your body, Happiness is ethereal you feel it above the neck.
• 3. Pleasure is taking, like from the casino, happiness is giving like habitat for humanity.
• 4. Pleasure is achieved alone like eating a chocolate cake, Happiness is achieved in social group like in birthday party.
• 5. Pleasure is achievable with substances like cocaine, heroine, nicotine, alcohol, sugar, some addictive behaviors. happiness is not achievable with substances.
• 6. The extremes of pleasure, weather it being substances (cocaine) or behaviors like shopping, gambling, social media, internet, gaming, pornography, foody. In the extreme are addictive. There’s holic after every one of those things shopaholic, alcoholic, sexaholic, chocoholic etc but there’s no such thing as being addictive to too much happiness.
• 7. Pleasure is dopamine and happiness is serotonins. Two different neurotransmitter, areas of the brain, regulatory pathways, mechanism of actions, drivers. Dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter. Neurons like to be excited and tickled but they don’t like to be bludgeoned.
• Chronic overstimulation of any neuron in the body leads to neuronal cell death. Because neurons are so metabolically active so If you keep it up and keep it up that neurons is basically exhaust and die. Even tho you have lots of dopamine molecules you have fewer receptor which means there’s less chance that any molecules will finds the receptor. What that means in human terms is you need more and more to get less and less. That’s the phenomenon we call it tolerance. Dopamine leads to tolerance. And then when those neurons do starts to die that’s called addiction.
• Serotonin is other neurotransmitter it’s inhibitory. There’s no such things as overdosing on too much happiness but there’s one thing that downregulates a serotonin that’s dopamine. So the more pleasure you seek the more unhappy you get. So Coca Cola does not give you happiness it gives you pleasure. So don’t chase pleasure (dopamine) it will make you unhappier (less serotonine).

For the full podcast episode, visit: https://www.fitmind.com/podcast.

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