How to Be Human

by Ruby Wax

  Before the internet, we were manipulated by advertisers (see Mad Men), who knew very well what would draw our eye to their particular product. In the sixties, The Hidden Persuaders was published, which discussed how we are suckered into choosing one product over another, how the admen made sure we reached for the detergent that made our whites ‘whiter than white’ rather than any of the other detergents that did exactly the same thing.

  The difference now is that, with the advent of digital advertising, we’re being manipulated every second, day and night. We are living in an ‘attention economy’, where admen/women make a living by knowing how to turn our most precious commodity – our attention – into hard cash. Their metric for our attention is referred to as ‘number of eyeballs’. Everywhere you look, they’re competing to get our focus: on the street, onscreen and on public transport. In the past, we were at the mercy of billboards to lure us in but, when the internet went mobile, addictions soared. In the sixties, people got hooked on cigarettes, alcohol and drugs. By 2010, people were hooked on Facebook, Instagram, porn, Twitter, Grindr, Tinder, online shopping, box-set bingeing, and the list goes on.

  Each month, each person spends almost one hundred hours texting, gaming, emailing, reading online articles, checking bank balances, etc. That adds up to about to eleven years over the average lifetime. Forty-one per cent of the population have suffered from at least one behavioural addiction over the past twelve months. Today, most people spend on average three hours a day on their phone: that’s a quarter of your waking life plugged in. There’s even a word that describes the fear of being mobile-less: ‘nomophobia’. Eighty per cent of teens check their phones at least once an hour. Most of them have learned to never look up from their screen or tablet and live their lives in a permanent state of distraction.

  That Good-time Drug: Dopamine

  Both substance (hard drugs) and behavioural (sex, shopping, etc.) addiction involve the release of dopamine produced in the ventral tegmental area (for you neuroscience nuts); it’s then sent to receptors in the brain, generating a rush of pleasure. We need a small dose of dopamine to initiate almost every action we do. Even drinking a glass of water has a reward in it: to stop the craving of thirst. It was our need to survive that created this reward system. When we came upon a source of food to satisfy our hunger, we’d remember where it was so we could find it again. The dopamine rush has three elements: trigger, behaviour and reward.

  The problem today is that our reward-based learning system goes into overdrive with no brakes because, with enough money, those sources of pleasure never need to run dry. When you have constant dopamine rushes, the brain decides to stop the gushing. Now, you don’t get the same buzz as you did before, so you need to up the dopamine to get the same kick and, if you don’t, you’re left with the craving. Eventually, you’ll need great waterfalls of dopamine just to feel normal and may have to take up even more harmful addictions, for example, cocaine, to fill that void of need. When you get a craving, an area of the brain called the cingulate is activated. fMRI scans show that this region quietens down in those who practise mindfulness. People who practise have learned not to latch on to the thoughts about the craving but instead regard the sensations as simply sensations.

  You can’t depend on your thinking, because it knows how to justify your urges, as in, ‘I’ll only have a little bit, then I’ll give up,’ or ‘I’m not addicted, I just like smoking,’ or ‘I’m snorting this because my mother screwed me up.’ But if you learn to sense that urge in your body early enough, you’ll gain the ability to pause and make a choice to take or not to take another dose of whatever it is before it swells into the full Billie Holiday story.

  Some people can do certain drugs or indulge in certain behaviours and not get addicted but, if you’re highly anxious or depressed, you stand more chance of getting hooked, because you learn that whichever substance or activity you’re addicted to lessens the pain. If you need to keep doing or taking something to get emotional relief, after a while you’ll feel you can’t live without it. Then you have become, officially, an addict.

  How to Get Over Addictions

  What can you do about it? AA, NA – all the A’s are a brilliant answer to addictions and help millions of people. I think part of what makes them so successful is that they provide a community, and that resonates with our primitive instinct to want to be accepted and included. This sort of community brings out the best in humans because it’s a space where there is no judgement or social hierarchy. Each man or woman is considered equal and all are cared for, no matter who they are.

  What keeps many addicts hooked is that feeling of inclusion; hanging out with other addicts. AA and NA give the user a replacement tribe, but now the members help each other to have a better life. The community has its own rules and boundaries, which make the members feel safe. Those who go to AA or NA hold back on instant gratification for the good of the group, and this is a throwback to what made an ancient community successful. If individuals didn’t hold back on food back then, the tribe would starve.

  An addict can recover, but they must be willing to give it up. Neuroplasticity can come to the rescue, because none of us has to be stuck in a habit, we can take control and decide to change our brains. The difficult part is that it takes time and discipline. Whether you practise mindfulness, go to meetings or see a counsellor, the key is to become aware of your thoughts and feelings. Then, you have a choice to pull out or stay sucked in.

  The Monk, the Neuroscientist and Me

  Ruby: Ash, do you think there’s an addict’s brain?

  Neuroscientist: No, there is no such thing as an addict’s brain; you’re not born with it. There’s no way to tell, looking at brains, or genes, or anything else, who’s definitely going to become an addict and who won’t. Certain things make addiction more likely, like childhood trauma and parents who are addicts and, obviously, access to drugs makes a big difference. But even these risks are not absolute. Some people at low risk will still become addicts, and some people at high risk will not and, so far, we don’t know why.

  Ruby: What’s the difference between a habit and an addiction? I mean, is shopping an addiction?

  Neuroscientist: I’d say that a habit is a behaviour with some choice but an addiction is a compulsion with much less choice. If you don’t feed a habit, it may make you feel uneasy, but people will turn their lives upside down to feed an addiction. And withdrawal from addiction can make you physically ill. One of the reasons people keep drinking is to relieve them of that jittery withdrawal. Most alcoholics don’t drink for a buzz, they drink to feel normal.

  Monk: I want some chocolate. I know you’ve got some in here. (Starts going through the cupboards.)

  Ruby: Ash, is Thubten an addict?

  Neuroscientist: He’s out on the sidewalk selling your TV for chocolate right now. You tell me.

  Monk: I struggled with addiction before I became a monk. Then, when I joined the monastery, I even got addicted to meditation. I was doing it to get a buzz, to feel high, like drinking a triple espresso. Instead, after a while, I started to get depressed, carrying a heavy feeling around all the time. I went to my teacher and told him that meditation was making me depressed. He said that it wasn’t the meditation, it was me. He said, ‘You’re a junkie. You’re trying to get high through your meditation, but grasping can never be fulfilled, you’ll always be looking for more. The sadness you feel is disappointment.’ It was a breakthrough because it changed my attitude to the practice.

  Neuroscientist: I think that’s a profound insight. You’re looking for that hit of pleasure from meditation and, actually, you’re practising noticing the absence of pleasure.

  Ruby: I’ll tell you what gives me a hit. I’m addicted to Netflix. After episode one, I’m hooked, then I spend the rest of the night chasing the dragon, eating my way through box sets. This is how nuts it is. I was invited to go to the cast party for The Crown because I know the writer. I didn’t go because I was so hook
ed, I had to stay home to watch episode six.

  Neuroscientist: Yeah, binge watching. It’s like that experiment they did with the rats, pressing levers to get more drugs.

  Ruby: Rats watch Netflix?

  Neuroscientist: Yeah, I heard they love Breaking Bad. No, I’m talking about those experiments where rats pushed levers to get access to cocaine. The story is that the rats gave up food, sleep and exercise and just kept pressing the cocaine lever over and over. Eventually, many of them died of starvation. That’s exactly what it looks like to me when people keep pressing the Netflix button to get the next episode.

  Ruby: In your eyes, we’re all rats. Thubten, do you watch Netflix?

  Monk: Have you guys seen GLOW? I mean, I’m not usually into women’s wrestling, but this is really about the human condition.

  Ruby: The human condition? Yeah, in Lycra and tearing each other’s hair out.

  Neuroscientist: I think that’s a fair assessment of the human condition.

  Monk: Actually, I don’t really watch television that much, because I’m really busy.

  Ruby: Isn’t being busy also an addiction?

  Monk: I definitely get a lot of joy from working hard and helping people, but it’s not a toxic ‘buzz’. I guess if I were getting paid, I might get addicted to making more and more money.

  Ruby: Money seems to be the most addictive of them all. The ultimate buzz.

  Neuroscientist: Yeah, money is like mainlining drugs. It’s like we designed money specifically to give us a dopamine dependence. We get the hit of pleasure, but it doesn’t last, we always want more. Big banks use that infinite craving to drive people to do practically suicidal levels of work. It’s a lot like those rats with the cocaine levers.

  Ruby: I heard that at a big investment bank – I won’t say the name, but the first word starts with a G and second one with S – when they hire new recruits, they give them the same test psychologists give people to see if they’re psychopaths. If the potential candidate gets high scores on the psychopath test, they get hired. It indicates they’d kill to get a deal. If we revere maniacs now, what do you think is going to happen in the future?

  Neuroscientist: We’re committing more and more to a system that rewards short-term dopamine hits over long-term happiness. Your brain produces dopamine as a reward for taking risks, not for making sound long-term decisions.

  Monk: People get addicted to the dopamine. I think it’s interesting that they don’t get addicted to organic kale, but they do to sugary drinks and so on. It’s all about having our senses ramped up, a kind of buzz. Then we end up swinging between the highs and the lows, and contentment seems boring. I was scared of becoming ‘bland’. When I first joined the monastery, I phoned my family in a panic, saying, ‘What if I end up like an automaton, with no feelings?’ I think I was worried that meditation would take away any sense of ‘pizzazz’, and that it would all become very grey. But, actually, I now feel that happiness is all about a stable sense of inner joy. When you don’t need a high, you can feel great.

  Ruby: Yes, part of being happy is not having to constantly chase it.

  Neuroscientist: Exactly, but commercial businesses are all about hyping up the chase. Right now, Google knows from your search history that you’ve been thinking about buying shoes, so they’ll put a shoe ad next to your email. You think it won’t affect you, just like all addicts think they’re the exception and that they won’t get addicted. But Google knows it will get you, and they know how to do it. They know when you’re going to be most sensitive to that ad, they’ll tailor the ads right up to what you were thinking about in the last hour. These are manipulative technologies and they’re designed to create and feed addictions.

  Ruby: When you go shopping, do you think there is some kind of Big Brother manipulating you to buy stuff?

  Neuroscientist: Yes, definitely. Shops use lighting, smells, music and layout to create fantasy experiences. They give you beautiful fountains and cheap food so you feel like you’re on holiday and you’ll be more frivolous with your money. Every piece of the retail experience is designed to make you give in to your compulsions, to make an impulse purchase without thinking about it too much. You’ve opened your wallet even before you’ve decided to buy anything.

  Ruby: How do I avoid all that? Do I just have to stay in my house?

  Neuroscientist: That’s not going to help because, now, the store comes to you. It’s on your computer even when you’re just checking your email; you’re shopping before you even made a decision to shop. Normally, one of the defences against addiction is not putting yourself in situations which might feed your addiction but, with the internet, you have less control over what comes into your life.

  Ruby: If you’re an addict, what do you suggest doing?

  Neuroscientist: We’ve known for a while now that changing your environment is one of the most effective things you can do to combat addiction. The best evidence for that view came from US soldiers after the Vietnam War. A lot of them became addicted to heroin but, when they came home, most were able to stop using. Heroin is a very difficult addiction to kick, so that’s a big success story. Part of that was because the army provided good support and monitoring, but the biggest factor was that the environment changed. Back in their homes in America, it was much harder to get access to drugs, it was less acceptable to use and, for the most part, the psychological trauma of the war was over. That’s why it’s important to focus on social changes, not only on biological ones.

  Monk: Ash, I agree with that focus on changing environments. I’ve taught mindfulness in addiction clinics and I suggest to addicts that they change their circle of friends or maybe rearrange their house. They could change their living room into a kitchen or the bedroom into a living room. It sounds simplistic but, if you rearrange things, it breaks up your routine and can prevent you from falling into old habits. Shake up your environment and it can give you a fresh start and a chance to move forward.

  Ruby: Seriously? You’re going to tell a heroin addict to get a new kitchen and that’s going to work?

  Monk: We don’t stop there. Then we talk about the inner environment. I talk about how addictions are like scratching a wound. The more you scratch, the more it itches or gets infected. If you can just experience the itch and hold back on the scratching, it can start to heal. That’s where mindfulness comes in.

  Neuroscientist: That’s a great analogy. Wounds release a molecule called histamine, which helps the healing but also causes the itch. Scratching releases even more histamine, so you get even more itching. If you can put off scratching, if you put a slight gap between the thought and the action, the itch will start to fade. So, feeding an addiction or compulsion just reinforces the addiction. The gap between thought and action is everything.

  Monk: Yes, as we said when we were discussing thoughts, mindfulness is all about that gap, where we can learn to pause and make choices.

  Ruby: I can’t just let an itch go, I would go nuts. Sometimes, when I have an itch on my back, I have been known to rub myself against tree bark until I’ve sanded off all the bark, like a bear. Is that so wrong?

  Monk: It’s not the itch, it’s the thoughts about the itch. The deepest addiction we have is to our thoughts. Of course, when you’re withdrawing from heroin or alcohol, it’s physical agony and you need treatment, but when you get through that phase you can start working on your mind. With mindfulness training, you can slowly learn to accept the itch and leave that gap before you go back to your habit of scratching. In that gap, you practise learning to accept the state of discomfort, not to push away the feeling. You’re challenging the mind-set that tells you there will be relief if you scratch. Eventually, you’ll be free of the itch.

  Ruby: I still would need the tree bark.

  Monk: Also, when I worked in the clinics, they talked about having a ‘hole in the soul’. The addiction becomes a desperate attempt to fill some kind of deficit. But mindfulness practice is incredibly enriching and regene
rative, and I think it helps a lot when they can learn to use compassion to nourish that ‘hole’ within them which led to the addiction in the first place.

  Ruby: I think a nourished hole is everything.

  You’ll find the relevant mindfulness exercises for addiction in Chapter 11.

  10

  The Future

  We keep talking about the future as if it’s something out there that’s coming. We’re moving so fast it’s already here. Your next breath is the future, so get ready. Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, says, ‘A billion hours ago, modern Homo sapiens emerged … A billion seconds ago, the IBM personal computer was released. A billion Google searches ago … was this morning.’

  New Evolution

  In the past, we evolved primarily through our DNA. Each time the world threw a new challenge, yelling, ‘Okay, sucker, how you gonna cope with this one?’, our genetic makeup mutated to make sure we’d be able to see in the next New Year. Evolution has always come to the rescue. For example, about ten thousand years ago, to ensure the survival of Australian aboriginals living in desert climates, a genetic variant developed that meant man could now survive in boiling temperatures and take on a tan like nobody’s business without burning. Another example is that, again about ten thousand years ago, when we morphed from being knuckle-dusters to standing-uppers, Europeans and Africans were the same dark colour: both came from the motherland – Africa. (A big ‘sorry’ to the fine racists of Alabama.) Over time, human skin in less sunny northern climes grew lighter, to help the people absorb the sun’s ultraviolet rays and synthesize vitamin D more efficiently. Finding out that the colour they are is only because of the direction their forefathers walked in has bummed out a lot of bigots.