Dopamine, Delays, and Personal Discoveries

By juxtaposing personal experiences with academic findings, the narrative underscores the importance of nurturing a secure environment for growth, discovery, and healing.

Oct 26, 2023

If you were asked what your interpretation of “the future” was, how far into the future would you think of it?

Recently, on the advice of

I listened to Dr Anna Lembke’s book, Dopmine Nation. Dr Anna Lembke is an American psychiatrist who is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University.

The book discusses the pleasure-pain balance and its impacts on addiction and other behaviours. It’s an incredible book, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand better what drives them to do what they do. It’s still fresh in my head, and I plan to listen to it again because I feel like I left a lot of gold on the table.

I found a few of the referenced studies particularly interesting, and they got me thinking about my own life to date. I feel compelled to write about them to help me understand my journey.

The Studies

The Marshmellow Experiment

The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification in 1972 led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University^. In this study, a child was offered a choice between a tiny but immediate reward or two small rewards if they waited for some time. During this time, the researcher left the child in a room with a single marshmallow for about 15 minutes and then returned. If they did not eat the marshmallow, the reward was either another marshmallow or apretzel stick, depending on the child's preference. In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who could wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational attainment, body mass index (BMI), and other life measures. A replication attempt with a sample from a more diverse population, over ten times larger than the original study, showed only half the original study's effect. The replication suggested that economic background, rather than willpower, explained the other half.

The Marshmellow Experiment Revisited

A 2012 study at the University of Rochester altered the experiment by dividing children into two groups: reliable condition and unreliable condition. Both groups were left unsupervised in a room with some art supplies. They were told that if they could wait a short time, the researcher would soon return with better and more supplies.

A short while after, the researcher returned to the unreliable condition group and explained that they had made a mistake and there weren’t, in fact, any more or better art supplies. The researcher then placed a sticker on the desk and again said, if you can wait a short period, I will return with a greater variety of stickers. Furthermore, the researcher returned and said they had made a mistake, and there were no more stickers.

The researcher did the same thing with the reliable control group, only each time they returned, they brought more art supplies and stickers.

After this, the researchers conducted the original marshmallow experiment. They found that the reliable control group could wait 12 minutes before eating the marshmallow. The unreliable control group could only wait three minutes before eating the marshmallow.

Duel Systems Theory

Dr Lembke refers to a 2014 study titled A dual-systems perspective on addiction: contributions from neuroimaging and cognitive training. It’s all about the difference between automatic and deliberative behaviours and how people in addiction or with conditions like Schizophrenia and ADHD.

It discusses how addicts or people with the above conditions struggle with automatic or impulsive decision-making. I found the below paragraph the most confronting of all.

A study testing this hypothesis asked control and heroin-dependent subjects to complete narratives like, “After awakening, Bill began to think about his future. In general, he expected to…” Responses were coded for how long the completed narratives were stated to occur in the future.

Control subjects generated stories that occurred an average of 4.7 years in the future. In heroin addicts, the mean considered future was only nine days from now.

Addiction in Families

Research shows that genetics are responsible for roughly half the risk of alcoholism and addiction. I don’t know enough about the science behind this, so that I won’t get into the finer details. However, it is believed that there are other contributing factors, such as childhood traumas, family dysfunction, a parent who is depressed or mentally ill and one or more parent who abuses or is addicted to drugs and alcohol. Of course, there can be other contributing factors, but it’s believed that the above are the most common.

I found the below statistic interesting and thought they were worth sharing.

Children of addicts are eight times more likely to develop an addiction.
A 1985 study suggests a strong genetic component, particularly for the onset of alcoholism in males. Sons of alcoholic fathers are four times more likely to become alcoholics.
The use of substances by parents and their adolescent children is strongly correlated. Generally, if parents use drugs, sooner or later, their children will as well.
Children who use drugs are more likely to have one or more parents who also use drugs.
Children of addicted parents experience more significant physical and mental health problems and higher health and welfare costs than children from non-addicted families.
A child who perceives that a parent is more permissive about the use of drugs is more likely to use drugs themselves.
A relationship between parental addiction and child abuse has been documented in a large proportion of child abuse and neglect cases.

Personal Experience

I’ve been reflecting on it for a few days now and thinking about how I wanted to write about it to help me better understand myself and the things that have happened in my life to date.

This isn’t about taking potshots at anyone but rather a process I feel I need to go through to find peace of mind.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about exploring my insecure attachment to provide my 14-month-old son with the secure attachment I so desperately craved. As kids, we want to feel safe. We want to feel like everything is going to be okay. It’s only when kids feel this way that they feel comfortable enough in their own skin to go out and explore the world, try new things and learn from the process.

I don’t know if it was undiagnosed ADHD, my parent's lack of pediatric psychological education, a combination of the two, something completely different or something in between. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter.

What matters now is that I am in my position, and if I want anything to change, it’s entirely my responsibility to effect that change.

I do know that I felt an underlying sense of fear throughout my childhood and adulthood. It was evident, too. My mum used to joke that I would be the only kid to ever die from a stress-induced stomach ulcer.

I had an irrational fear of dogs, even though a dog has not once attacked me.

Even as a child, my fear of not getting enough sleep to function properly the following day would keep me up all night to the point where I would call my mum at work in tears, terrified that if I didn’t get to sleep soon, the world would just about end.

I remember texting my older brother when he first started going out at night with his friends, saying things like, “Be careful tonight. I have a horrible feeling”. Nothing had ever happened or ever did.

Reflecting on my childhood and early adulthood, I still feel that uneasy feeling of anxiety in my stomach. It was this almost constant feeling that something was about to go horribly wrong. Even though nothing ever really had.

Back then, it was passed off as me just being me. It was decided that this was just the way I was, the way I was born, perhaps. As I work through these things with my psychologist to uncover what drove these emotions, I know it is more nuanced than simply being who I was. Kids aren’t supposed to feel like this. How can we enable a child to grow and develop while living with a semi-constant, irrational fear that something horrible is about to happen for no reason?

I feel like I was in the unreliable control group at some point, or perhaps on several occasions, I was a part of my own marshmallow experiment.

I think there is a link between the kids in the unreliable control group and the people in the dual systems theory experiment who, on average, considered the future to be only nine days from now.

To me, it makes perfect sense. How can you even begin to consider the future when, through your unique life experiences, you end up in a place where you spend so much of your time in a fight or flight style mindset?

The emotional brain drives fear and anxiety, and the emotional brain is designed to protect us.

I think this constant, underlying sense of fear and/or anxiety contributed to my inability to do grown-up shit until after I was 30 years old. I never felt secure or certain about where my life was headed until I met my partner five years ago.

I can’t help but wonder, though, whether it was the heroin that made these people consider the future to be just nine days away or that they were already the kinds of people who were too anxious and stressed about what was happening every day even to consider the future that drove them to heroin for some reprieve?

Maybe the future is far too daunting even to consider, so they avoid thinking about it altogether. I know that’s how I felt last February when I was dealing with the prospect of moving cities, buying a second house, starting a new job and preparing for our first child. It was all too much for me, and instead of being proactive and using my time effectively, I would spend my weekends doing coke and drinking, mostly on my own.

Whatever the case, my takeaway from all of this is that we need to be more empathetic to struggling people. Maybe there is a good reason why someone may appear to be hopeless. Perhaps they would absolutely love to have their shit together, but for some reason, right now, they can’t, and we should be more understanding and compassionate about that. Just because someone’s actions aren’t currently aligning with what they say they want to achieve doesn’t mean they are full of shit.

Every Monday morning, I woke up with a brain fried by another weekend of cocaine abuse. I knew that I wasn’t being who I wanted to be. I genuinely wanted to stop. I hated it. I was embarrassed and ashamed. Even if nobody knew that I’d done it, in fact, I think that secrecy and dishonesty made me feel even worse. But I remember saying almost every Monday that I was done. I wasn’t doing it anymore. I believed it. It was genuinely what I wanted so badly. I couldn’t quite do it yet. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones who had support when I finally hit rock bottom.

I’ll be forever grateful that I managed to get sober four months before my son was born. I was recently asked if there was one thing I’ve achieved in sobriety I’m most proud of. I said, there can’t be just one thing. That’s not what sobriety is about. You don’t get sober because you want to achieve one fixed goal. It’s a day-in, day-out way of life, but I am most proud that my son has never (and hopefully will never) seen that version of me. It didn’t come out that easily, though; I was surprised at how difficult it was to say those things as I was choking back tears trying to answer my friend.

I never truly felt like myself back then, and I feel like had my son been exposed to that version of myself, it would have been a dishonest representation of who I truly am.

In early adulthood, when I too wasn’t able to think too far into the future, the questions of how I would ever save a deposit for a house, how would I work my way into a job where I don’t have to live paycheck to paycheck where far too daunting for me to consider. Now that I have figured those things out, I realise they were never all that daunting, and the amount of stress associated with those questions wasn’t warranted.

It wasn’t until after I achieved those things that I realised, they didn’t provide me with the answers I sought anyway. In ways, they have only added more stress and anxiety to my life.

For now, I think my greatest achievement will be protecting my son from being exposed to the abovementioned factors that can push a person toward a life of addiction or ill mental health. I want to provide him with that secure attachment so that he knows he doesn’t have to eat that single marshmallow because I will always be there for him, and he will always have whatever he needs.

Hopefully, I can continue to grow along the way.

Cheers Wankers.

How did you interpret the results of these experiments? Is your interpretation different to mine? I’d love to hear what you think.