Chasing Higher Highs

'' We all get addicted to something that takes away the pain. ''

Happy Monday Gang! 💓✿ 💚
I hope this post finds you happy and well.
I’m writing these lines on Sunday, aka my high on life day of the week!
Because I wake up extra early to go walk and workout in the nature and it makes me feel so ecstatic!
And as I was headed out the door… I got the chance to see this epic and gorgeous cotton candy looking sunset! How much luckier can I get!?! 😍

So today I was thinking of my long time no see friend, aka hedonic adaptation, and as to how we can inject more of our best friend, aka, novelty.
I think that holding a gratitude journal is an excellent and easy way to prevent hedonic adaptation, because we make a deliberate effort to appreciate and remember the good in our lives, rather than just let it slip away from our consciousness, right after something happy happens to us.
The way we operate as human beings will just never cease to fascinate me!
All the stories we construct too well in our minds will unfortunately very rarely match the expectations of the real world.
We are continuously looking to chase happiness, which in my words means pretty much chasing the illusion.
We love to feel excited, and boredom is our own worst enemy.
But as I’ve stated in one of my posts from last month, even in boredom, there is novelty to be found!
It all comes down to a matter of perspective in the end.

Let’s take the example of suffering.
As humans, we are naturally wired to want to avoid suffering.
While this is a normal reflex, when you think about it long enough, you realize that by doing so, we actually suffer more than if we would have accepted the pain in the first place.
Resistance is the enemy of healing.
Yet, again and again, we come to think that repulsing the pain is the way to combat it.

The only euphoric highs that I’ve personally experienced, and that have yet to wear off (trust me, I’m still waiting 😉 ), only come from these three guys:

Meditation
Physical activity
Nature

Day in, day out, I do them, and each coming day makes me as excited as the day before.
I’m gonna keep on thanking my brain for this one!

In a book I read a while back called '' The compass of pleasure: How our brains make fatty foods, orgasm, exercise, marijuana, generosity, vodka, learning and gambling feel so good'', there was a line that really caught my attention:
'' Pleasure is replaced by desire; liking becomes wanting. ''
While I have never struggled with a substance addiction, it still deeply resonated with me for some reason.
There was also an interesting experiment that was done with rats.
They had the choice to press two different pellets: one for food and the other that would give them cocaine.
The rats ended up pressing the pellet that would give them a shot of cocaine, to the point that they ended up dying from starvation.
This is a tragic example, but it illustrates very well the consequences that can come from chasing higher highs.

Last quote (because it is hands down my favorite line of the book and even though I've written it before on here)

'' You know, once you’re an addict, you’re always an addict, so just because I found something good to do doesn’t mean I’m not going to hurt myself doing it. '' -Jeff Tweedy