Is your organisation addicted?
Join the discussion on LinkedIn:
To respond, you could:
- Give an example of an organisational addiction
- Ask for examples of the things organisations are addicted to
- Respond to the concept of addiction arising from too much pleasure resetting the balance of pleasure and pain
- Ask me why I’m sceptical of neuroscience
- Share your favourite learning from neuroscience
- Talk about your own experience of pain/pleasure, addiction, or building your happiness
- Query whether it’s appropriate to talk about organisations in these terms…
I’m sceptical of ‘neuroscience’ for a number of reasons, but I was extremely taken by two recent episodes of Shankar Vedantam’s Hidden Brain podcast.
The two podcasts are based on Anna Lembke’s work and her book Dopamine Nation — with Anna, a psychiatrist who is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University, as the guest.
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The core concept is that we are set up to maintain a balance of pleasure and pain.
If we have an excess of things that give us pleasure, our systems seek balance — homeostasis — and reduce the amount of pleasure those things give us.
When we were living as an intrinsic part of nature, this balance made us seek out new sources of food — and, I’m sure, new ways of playing, dancing, loving.
We could be very happy finding a date tree and gorging ourselves, but then we would move on. It would perhaps be miles to the next source — resetting our balance.
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These days, of course, things that give us bursts of pleasure are everywhere. Social media, the news, a carton of artificially sweet, juicy, tasty, sugary dates delivered almost instantly (slightly weird example, but it’s the one they use in the book!). Not to mention alcohol, drugs, gambling, even romantic fiction.
Whatever you want, you can get excess of it.
And as you have more and more, your systems make sure it takes more and more to give you that pleasure.
The system designed to keep you moving on, can lock you in: to addiction.
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Take too much of what gives you pleasure, and your happiness default — the steady state you are going back to in the absence of stimulus — gets reset.
Eventually, the norm is for you to be miserable — depressed.
And before you know it, the pain you’re running from is the withdrawal from the thing that was giving you pleasure. And it takes more and more to overcome that pain.
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The solution is withdrawal, and voluntary exposure to pain — effort, exercise, hunger, boredom. The things that reset our balance to healthy norms.
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The obvious question here is: ‘what’s your poison?’
I suspect we’re all a little bit addicted, perhaps to multiple things, in our current world.
But what are organisations addicted to?
