Long ago (50 years maybe?) when I had no car or other access to real—and genuinely delicious—pizza, I’d break down and buy a frozen one from a grocery within walking distance. The first bite (after baking, of course) was divine—the tang of tomato, the bite of mozzarella and pepperoni—and then the second bite: Oh dear. Yet I kept on eating it until it was all gone—in spite of the cardboard crust and what gradually was revealed as a somewhat industrial /metallic after-taste.
I clearly remember what I said to myself at the time (and shared with others later as an amusing “I am such a dope” anecdote, while secretly hoping someone would say “me too”): I said/thought, “Maybe the next bite will be better.” And, as I’m writing this right now, I see that maybe that has also been a not-articulated mantra regarding my compulsions stretching waaaay back to marshmallows and hardened light-brown sugar in my mother’s cabinets, and even, perhaps, not so far back, men. “Oh dear” indeed.
An opinion piece in the New York Times by an ex-addict on quite a bit harder stuff than brown sugar has shed some light on this behavior. The writer sees a more complicated process at work in the brain than the psychobabble about the “pleasure principle.” This distinction, for instance: “Dopamine is linked with creating a desire to repeat actions that previously led to pleasure,” NOT causing the feeling of pleasure itself.
Holy cow. So, after a long time without any kind of pizza, I wanted the thrill of that first taste of pizza-after-a-long-time again, even though—too bad—I had lost my pizza virginity, which I kept trying to recapture with more (unsatisfying) pizza. This also helped explain what I read a long time ago about people with “food addictions” actually pawing through the garbage or eating off the floor—two behaviors that I hoped were exaggerations. But now I have to wonder.
It appears that dopamine and the activation of brain circuits are more complicated than pop science can sum up in a sentence. For one thing, the Times writer (she does have a name, even if I can’t pronounce it: Maia Szalavitz) distinguished two kinds of “pleasure”: “the experience of desire and anticipation (labeled ‘wanting’ by researchers), and the experience of satiation, comfort and contentment (known as ‘liking’).” What I got was that addiction looks like mostly “wanting” chasing ever decreasing “liking.” That maybe explains why people glued to their phones never look especially happy.
Maia S. suggests we need to investigate what addiction is trying to cope with. In other words:
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” ~ Desmond Tutu