The science of pleasure and pain

How I'm beating depression

For most of my life, I was not a depressed person. I had my ups and downs, but my baseline was positive and happy. That changed in my 30s, when I became low-level depressed and eventually progressed to deeply depressed by my 40s. What happened?

I blamed my depression on a number of life changes that occurred after I turned 30. I blamed it on moving to hot and not-so-pretty Texas, far from the beautiful and temperate Pacific Northwest where I was from. I blamed it on social isolation and being far from family. I blamed it on the difficult slog of graduate school. I blamed it on losing my mother to cancer.

I was moderately depressed after all this, and then it got worse. I got cancer twice. Between those bouts of cancer, I lost my first child. I went through severe postpartum depression with my second child. I had several painful surgeries and a brush with death. Just when I was crawling out of that state, the Covid-19 calamity hit with its multi-faceted matrix of public and private misery. The result was, by the beginning of 2023, I was deeply, clinically depressed.

I have a low tolerance for pain and suffering, for which I’m grateful, because it motivates me to find practical solutions quickly, but a solution for depression was eluding me. There is also the spiritual aspect of pain and suffering, which I couldn’t ignore. It was a struggle not to feel abandoned by God during this time, but I grew spiritually quite a bit. God always uses our pain for good. But I don’t think God intends for us to go through never ending periods of spiritual drought and despair, so there had to be a solution I was missing.

When I wrote my Sunday Superposition piece on motivation and pleasure, I thought back to the happiest times of my life. Ironically, they were also some of the hardest times. During this previous part of my life, I experienced prolonged periods of poverty and hard regimentation—yet I was happy and highly motivated. Why, after going through other difficult times, had I instead become deeply depressed?

The answer, I believe, is rooted in both Christian spirituality and modern science.

I recently started studying the role the neurotransmitter dopamine plays in depression. There’s a lot out there, especially on YouTube and social media. People talk about dopamine fasts, dopamine hacks, dopamine detox, and so on. A lot of it’s junk based on the common misperception that dopamine produces feelings of happiness. It doesn’t. As Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman explains in his podcasts, dopamine is responsible for feelings of motivation. It creates the possibility space within a person where happiness can result. You still have to work for it.

The gist of happiness is this. You can’t go after it directly. If you could, then everyone who’s rich, everyone who has a life of ease, everyone who binges on food, drugs, alcohol, porn, and gambling, should be deliriously happy. But those are usually the most miserable people on earth. Conversely, some of the happiest people you’ll ever find are those who live austere lives, like monks and the Amish.

As many of us know from experience, the paradoxical truth is that pursuing happiness directly usually leads to its exact opposite. Unless you’ve been an ascetic monk your entire life, you’ve experienced this first hand. We’ve all also experienced the reverse. Have you ever come home from a long, hard week of work and genuinely relished the weekend? That’s what I’m talking about. Conversely, if you’ve ever had so much free time that you start to get bored and unhappy, that’s the other side of the paradoxical coin.

So, the current problem for me was that I was feeling sad, unmotivated, and fatigued. I was so fatigued that I made an appointment with an endocrinologist to look into a possible thyroid issue. But then I began to wonder if my current lifestyle was working against me. Most of my work is done at home, so I can pretty much do whatever I want. I was up until 3:00 or 4:00 am and sleeping until 11:00 am. I was loafing for a lot of the day until my workout in the evening. I eat a restricted diet in terms of calories, but I was spreading those calories out all day long. I had TV and podcasts on in the background for hours and hours every day. Nothing in my life consisted of hardship except for my daily workout, and that had become a miserable slog because of the fatigue. My work was suffering, because I was miserable, tired, and uninspired.

I contrasted my current lifestyle with how I was living during the happiest times of my life. During one of those happy times, I’d get up at 5:00 am to do my first workout, go to school, go for a mile run after school, go to the gym for my second workout, go to one of my two after school jobs, do my homework, then go to bed at 9:00 pm. The only restriction I didn’t implement was watching what I was eating, but I was a teenager working out three times a day and didn’t need to.

The question was, would going back to a more disciplined and regimented lifestyle help me deal with depression?

In my search for dopamine truth, I feel like I really hit on something when I listened to this interview between Huberman and former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink talking about the ideal morning routine.

What I liked about this routine, or at least the idea of it, was that it implicitly acknowledges the happiness paradox. Here’s what it involves:

• Going to bed and getting up with the Sun (more or less).

• Delaying coffee and food for a few hours.

• Chugging a big glass of water + salt first thing in the morning.

• Getting bright natural light into the eyes within a few minutes of waking.

• Exercising within the first hour of waking.

• Taking a cold shower.

So, I tried it.

I went a bit further and implemented a 16:8 plan of intermittent fasting, but that proved to be too much. I adjusted that to a 14:10 plan, which means six days a week I eat all of my calories in a 10-hour window between 11:00 am and 9:00 pm and fast the other 14 hours of the day. For someone who really likes food, this was difficult to implement.

Result? So far, pretty good. Almost immediately the feelings of depression and fatigue were vastly improved, and I felt motivated again. The sole down side was that, for the first few days, I was irritable and hungry, but with the new 14:10 plan, that’s gone.

The only thing I’m not sticking with is the cold showers. I tried precisely one cold shower, and brother let me tell you, one of the great inventions of civilization is hot showers. They rank right up there with the wheel, modern sanitation, and electricity. I’ll never willingly give up hot showers. I get that there are proven benefits to cold showers and other forms of cold immersion, but it’s just a bridge too far for me.

Everything else is in the routine is gold, and I’ll be sticking with it.

It all amounts to choosing your pain, because you will experience pain no matter what you do. It’s either planned pain now and earned pleasure later or borrowed pleasure now and pain paid back with interest later. I dunno about you, but I prefer the former.

The spiritual aspect of all this is that we shouldn’t be making idols out of ease and pleasure. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of Bible verses about work and discipline, especially in Proverbs.

Those who work their land will have abundant food, but those who chase fantasies have no sense. – Proverbs 12:11

A sluggard’s appetite is never filled, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied. – Proverbs 13:4

Diligent hands will rule, but laziness ends in forced labor. – Proverbs 12:24

One of the few wise things Sigmund Freud ever said is that we need but two things to make us happy: love and work. It was wise, because it’s God’s own truth—he put us on Earth to work.

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. – Genesis 2:15

There is also a vast store of accumulated wisdom from earlier generations, based on experience, which we’d be foolish to ignore. Remember this one from Benjamin Franklin?

Early to be and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

This is stuff people were noticing hundreds of years before neuroscientists like Huberman discovered the science behind it. If you can, it’s best to go to bed and get up with the Sun like we were designed to do.

There are other Bible verses about avoiding gluttony, drink, lust, and so on. None of it is meant to kill our joy, but to increase it, and neuroscience is proving it. There’s a reason people with religiously-motivated restrictive lifestyles, like the Amish, have significantly lower rates of depression and suicide than the general American population.

The bottom line is this. Work, discipline, regimentation, and healthy forms of deprivation = a higher baseline of happiness.

Of course, when all is said and done, we should enjoy some well-earned rest. I have one day a week where I relax the eating rules, sleep a bit more, and don’t exercise at all. God set the example for us right from the beginning:

Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. – Genesis 2:3

It’s been about two weeks since I’ve been on this new lifestyle, and it’s going well. My depression has improved so much, I feel like I have my life back again. Let’s see how this goes for another six months.