Effortless Health: The Power of Healing Your Brain’s Broken Reward System

How to deeply enjoy your healthy food (and your healthy life)

Did you know? You can train your brain to gain more pleasure from an apple than you currently get from chocolate.
Image by Janet Cloete.

Modern life is a constant battle between our primitive desires and our common sense. And let’s be honest, our desires win all too often, making our common sense very sad indeed.

But it doesn’t need to be this way! In this article, we’ll discuss how to repair your brain’s reward system so that you get even greater pleasure from healthy things than you currently get from unhealthy ones. The main focus will be on food, but we’ll also touch on the broader implications.

Let’s start at the root of our troublesome attraction to unhealthy pleasures.

The Hedonic Treadmill

There’s a very particular aspect of human psychology that drives much of our self-destructive behavior. It’s called hedonic adaptation: our tendency to quickly return to prior happiness levels following any major positive or negative life change.

This hedonic treadmill causes any good feelings from our direct pursuits of happiness to evaporate far too soon. A bigger house, a faster car, greater chocolate consumption, or a bigger Netflix habit are all fun for a while, but they soon become the “new normal,” resetting our…