Attention! Stop Priming Your Reward System…
How Short-Term Rewards Will Mess With Your Life
Recently I’ve gotten into a bad habit of vaping. Even though my concentration becomes cloudy following a pull and I swore I’d never smoke — given the fact my father died of lung cancer and my mother is a long-term smoker —, we are here.
I don’t vape consistently through the day and rarely have one on me, but when my stress levels rise I can feel an all-too-familiar urge to reach for my friend’s vape. As many addictions go, it’s not so much the feeling that vaping gives me — as it doesn’t feel too great at all — but the relief found in calming the feelings of desires and accompanying thoughts that fill my brain prior.
I’m also aware that in my inability to tell myself NO to the urge, I’m only priming myself for future sabotage as I’m essentially saying to myself, “You can’t stop yourself from doing it”.
It's not a great pattern to be in.
One thing I’ve noticed when taking that nicotine-filled hit is how my perception changes. It’s like engaging in a habit that is built around a short-term reward then creates a desire for me to engage in other like-minded reward-seeking. For example, I’ll find it easier to laze around listening to music, procrastinate, entertain fleeting connections, or death-scroll my phone.
This isn’t a coincidence, either. It’s down to us priming our reward centre to seek out and prioritise short-term rewards. It doesn’t matter if you’re a vaper, if you engage consistently in any sort of short-term reward, you’ll find yourself more inclined to find other sources of instant gratification.
This is obviously detrimental to our long-term satisfaction because many of the things that offer us short-term pleasure don’t offer us long-term fulfillment. Alcohol and drugs; doom scrolling, entertaining short-term connections often based around sexual desire, will all feel good in the moment but leave us hungover in the case of alcohol, procrastinating long-term goals, or potentially hindering our ability to form long-lasting, meaningful connections.
We need to be aware of what we’re feeding our brain — particularly our reward centre. It loves short-term rewards, something we’ll touch on in the next part, and without awareness, we’ll find ourselves more inclined to sabotage our long-term happiness as our desire for immediate gratification grows.
With this in mind, I wanted to take today’s article to talk about our brain’s reward centre. Why it loves short-term rewards, and why we need to shift our priorities in order to make the life we want to live.
The Brain’s Reward Centre: Evolved To Want More
Our brain’s reward centre comprises a series of structures within our limbic system: an evolutionarily ancient part of our brain, with the purpose of identifying what feels good to us (reward valuing) and prompting us to seek-out those things through feelings of desire.
The neurotransmitter dopamine exerts its effects here, with its release in the brain signaling to us what in our environment is going to make us feel good. For example, when I’m stressed and suddenly get an urge to find a vape, dopamine release in the reward centre is signalling to the rest of my brain that something potentially good is nearby i.e. a vape.
Other things high in dopamine activation are of course other drugs and alcohol (which target dopamine receptors in the brain), sex (as we need to want to have sex in order to reproduce), sugary foods rather than others (due to their high energy release, valuable to our ancestors), and our own unique likes subject to our perception, upbringings, and personality (like the Netflix show you love to procrastinate watching, or the music you listen to).
The problem with 21st-century living and our reward system is that society has evolved so quickly that our reward centres haven’t had a chance to evolve to adjust to our new dopamine-rich environments.
For example, our reward centres evolved for us to strongly desire sugary foods for energy in a world where sugar was likely scarce, but now our world is full of high-sugar foods.
Once sex was something we evolved to find extremely desirable but now we can watch porn 3 times a day and become addicted to it. In the case of phone usage, apps are specifically designed to manipulate our brain’s reward centre, thus pulling our attention, and we only need to go to the shop to purchase drugs or alcohol.
To live in the 21st Century is to live in the temptation of short-term rewards.
But what if long-term rewards? Like the projects we want to work on, and other things that can’t give us immediate satisfaction?
Short-Term VS Long-Term Rewards
To be clear, our reward centre also governs long-term rewards. If you think about your goals and get excited about what you can achieve, that’s dopamine in your reward centre signalling to you that there is something in your future that you feel is going to be rewarding for you. Such thoughts and dreams then make you want to work towards them through feelings of desire.
The problem with long-term goals however is that most of them are not immediately gratifying. Whereas I can take a hit of a vape and get an instant hit of dopamine, sitting down to write doesn’t necessarily give me the same rush of satisfaction when I’m finished, yes, but rarely before.
Our reward centre governs all types of rewards, but it will naturally prioritise short-term over long-term rewards as these are typically initially more fulfilling, and quicker to obtain. In this, it can’t differentiate between what is good for us now vs what is good for us later.
That job is governed by the frontal lobes of our brain, particularly our pre-frontal cortex. “The seat of willpower” as a Harvard Business School article calls it, this brain area serves executive functioning responsibilities; looking down at our desires and considering if such feelings are worth our attention i.e, is vaping worth the cloudy feeling I’m going to get afterward? Probably not. Should I direct my attention elsewhere? Probably, yes.
How strongly our prefrontal cortex manages our desires, the better we’ll be at choosing between rewards that make us feel good now vs rewards that fulfill us later on. This ability to regulate our emotions is part of what psychologists call emotional intelligence or IE.
Prime Your Reward Centre With Short-Term Rewards; Strengthen Its Power
You can see here that we have two brain areas battling for supremacy: our reward centre begs us to reach for any reward, whilst our prefrontal cortex wants us to consider our future selves.
But this relationship isn’t evenly matched: the reward centre often has the upper hand. It is an older part of our brain, having had more time to evolve, and as I mentioned previously, we’re living in a society quite literally designed to grab our attention with marketing tactics, outlets to procrastinate, sugary foods, porn, alcohol, and drugs aplenty. I recently read a book called “Dopamine Nation”, and indeed we are.
It’s no wonder so many of us find it difficult to resist temptation.
We’re at a disadvantage.
Thankfully, however, we can do something about it.
Donald Hebb, the famous neuroscientist for his work on how humans learn, once said that “neurons that fire together, wire together” in relation to habit formation. What he meant by this was that the more we do something, the stronger the neural networks corresponding to that behaviour become, and the easier it will be in the future to carry out.
This is to say, the more we engage in short-term rewards and neglect our long-term rewards, the more power we give to our reward centre. We’re priming it to focus on the short-term, rather than the long-term.
Imagine a tug of war with the pre-frontal cortex on one side and the reward centre on the other. When we’re faced with a dilemma like procrastinating versus working on a long-term goal, and you give in to procrastination, you are pulling the rope away from the pre-frontal cortex.
And the more you do it, the stronger you will make the reward centre. In overriding our logic and reasoning for short-term bursts of reward, we’re priming ourselves for doing more of the same in the future. We create a habit of behaviour.
To break free? Work on resisting the temptation of short-term rewards. This is the basis of dopamine detoxes, and why they can be so effective. They give us distance for short-term rewards and allow us time to re-set, hopefully decreasing the temptation to engage in them in the future.
Thanks for reading this article. Let me know your thoughts on this below and subscribe to Above The Middle for frequent updated! Have a great weekend.