Scarcity Brain

That’s from the first chapter, appropriately called “The Scarcity Loop,” in which Michael walks us through how it works.

Michael is a journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He takes us on a tour of a FASCINATING lab in Las Vegas dedicated to understanding (and manipulating!) human behavior to get people to gamble more.

Let’s just say that the stories are eye opening.

And, let’s just say that the engineers developing the apps on your iPhone are, essentially, using the same manipulative behavioral design tools as the casinos. Further, let’s be clear that these individuals DO NOT have your (and/or your kids’) best interests in mind.

Let’s take a quick look at The Scarcity Loop’s primary components: Opportunity, Unpredictable Rewards and Quick Repeatability.

“1. Opportunity.

The first part of the scarcity loop is opportunity. An opportunity to get something of value that improves our life.

But this opportunity comes with risk. We might get something valuable. For example, money, possessions, food, or even status. But we also might not—or we could even lose it.

2. Unpredictable Rewards.

The second phase of the scarcity loop is unpredictable rewards. The rewards of everyday actions are predictable. …

But decades of research show that these predictable rewards can be dull.

Unpredictable rewards, on the other hand, are not. If we know we’ll receive a reward but aren’t sure when, we get sucked in. We experience a sort of exciting, suspenseful anxiety as we wait to see whether this occasion will deliver the good stuff. Our brains hone in on unpredictability. They naturally suppress systems that take in other information, and we fixate on whatever is unpredictable. One study found that unpredictable rewards ‘tap into fundamental aspects of human cognition and emotion.’

3. Quick Repeatability.

The third phase of the scarcity loop is quick repeatability. Most everyday behaviors have a clear beginning and end, and we don’t immediately repeat them. …

Scarcity loops, on the other hand, are immediately repeatable. We see opportunity, receive rewards sometimes, and then do it all over again. As much as we’d like.”

Michael continues by saying: “And that’s it. Those are the three conditions for a behavior to fall into a scarcity loop: opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.”

Then he asks the question: “But how do we get out of it? A person stuck in a scarcity loop stops for only three reasons, all of which jam a stick in the spokes of the loop.”

Helping us understand how we’re stuck in the loop and how to jam a stick in it is, of course, the focus of the book. Let’s explore some ways to go about doing that…

That’s from chapter #5 called “Escape.”

After Michael establishes the fact that we all have “Our Scarcity Brain” then establishes how “The Scarcity Loop” works and “Where the Scarcity Loop Lives” and “Why We Crave More,” we get to work on how to jam a stick in the spokes of the loop. It’s time to escape.

The #1 thing we need to have in mind if we want to escape ANY addiction?

THE BELIEF THAT WE CAN.

As per that passage above, Michael walks us through the pernicious affects of the individual trying to change their behaviors (AND THEIR FAMILY MEMBERS!) thinking they have an incurable “disease.”

When they believe there’s nothing they can really do to deal with the challenge, THEY DON’T TRY HARD ENOUGH to do something about it. And *that* locks them into the scarcity loop more than anything else.

This isn’t just about alcohol or smoking or cocaine addictions. We want to be mindful of ALL labels we use—whether that’s “ADHD” or “depression” or any other label that wraps us up in a fixed-mindset package and diminishes our hope and agency to create our ideal lives.

Ellen Langer talks about this a lot in her work—which is all about mindfulness and “The Psychology of Possibility.” (Check out our Notes on Mindfulness and Counterclockwise.)

As she says in Counterclockwise: “In most of psychology, researchers describe what is. Often they do this with great acumen and creativity. But knowing what is and knowing what can be are not the same thing. My interest, for as long as I can remember, is in what can be, and in learning what subtle changes might make that happen. My research has shown how using a different word, offering a small choice, or making a subtle change in the physical environment can improve our health and well-being. Small changes can make large differences, so we should open ourselves to the impossible and embrace the psychology of possibility.

The psychology of possibility first requires that we begin with the assumption that we do not know what we can do or become. Rather than starting from the status quo, it argues for a starting point of what we would like to be. From that beginning, we can ask how we might reach that goal and make progress toward it. It’s a subtle change in thinking, although not difficult to make once we realize how stuck we are in culture, language, and modes of thought that limit our potential.”

Want to escape the less-than-awesome loops of your life? KNOW you can. Then do the hard work to move beyond your current limitations.

P.S. Any time I think about addiction, I always think of a line from Adam Alter’s great book Irresistible where he quotes an addiction counselor who told him “that the most dangerous time for an addict is the first moment when things are going so well that you believe you’ve left the addiction behind forever.”

After establishing the high-level challenges we face and how to address them, Michael walks us through the specific domains in which we are most challenged by The Scarcity Loop.

As you probably guessed, that passage is from the chapter on “Food.”

As we’ve discussed MANY times, there are MANY (!) diets that will work. And... There’s ONE diet that WILL NEVER WORK—the Standard American Diet (SAD!)!

Why is that?

It’s the ultra-processed food.

More specifically, at its essence, it’s the SUGAR and FLOUR.

In Why We Get Fat, Gary Taubes tells us: “... when isolated populations start eating Western foods, sugar and white flour are inevitably first, because these foods could be transported around the world as items of trade without spoiling or being devoured on the way by rodents and insects. The Inuits, for example, living on seals, caribou, and whale meat, begin eating sugar and flour (crackers and bread). Western diseases follow. The agrarian Kikuyu, living in Kenya, start eating sugar and flour, and these diseases appear. The Maasai add sugar and flour to their diet or move into the cities and begin eating these foods, and the diseases appear. Even the vegetarian Hindus in India, to whom the fleshpot was an abomination, ate sugar and flour. Doesn’t it seem a good idea to consider sugar and flour likely causes of these diseases?”

Casey Means echoes this wisdom in her great book Good Energy.

She tells us: “Ultraprocessed foods make up 60 percent of calories consumed by adults and 67 percent consumed by children and they drive Bad Energy diseases like obesity, high blood pressure, dementia, type 2 diabetes, and insulin resistance.”

And, here’s what she tells us to do about it: “If you remember one food principle in this book, remember that cutting the unholy trinity of these three ingredients from your diet will completely change your health and ensure you’re making room for more Good Energy foods: 1. Refined added sugar; 2. Refined industrial vegetable and seed oils 3. Refined grains.”

That’s from the chapter on “Stuff.”

As I read that, I thought of a couple brilliant wisdom gems on the power of constraints—one from Igor Stravinsky and another from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The great composer Stravinsky said: “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”

btw... I asked ChatGPT to find that for me. In the process, I found another longer version of the wisdom from Poetics of Music in which he said: “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself from the chains that shackle the spirit.” (←LOVE THAT!)

Then there’s Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his great book CREATOR, Steve Chandler tells us: “Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘As the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, so should you stop off your miscellaneous activity and concentrate your force on one or a few points.’

Why should you do that? Because more creative power is now available for the few points really important to you! So the pruning is a great idea. Look at the dying branches the gardener took away from the tree. Doesn’t the tree look healthier and more beautiful? ...

We don’t glamorize severe pruning. We don’t even want to talk much about it. Even though upon further review it’s seen to be profoundly creative.”

Constraints. They do a Hero good.

Let’s use them wisely TODAY.

That’s from the chapter on how The Scarcity Loop operates on our brains in the context of access to “Information.”

I REPEAT... Research shows that we are exposed to MORE INFORMATION IN A SINGLE DAY than our ancestors from the fifteenth century were exposed to in THEIR ENTIRE LIFETIMES. That’s crazy. So is the fact that people who watched 6+ hours of news on the Boston Marathon had more PTSD symptoms than people who were actually there.

The last Note I created was on a book called Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. Check it out for more on “the unintended catastrophic consequences” of businesses built on attention economics—aka, businesses that make money by hacking your brain stem and capturing as much of your attention as possible. It’s not good. (And check out Nexus and The Chaos Machine as well!)

For now, here’s to jamming a stick in the scarcity loop behaviors as we fix our craving mindset and rewire our habits so we can give the world all we’ve got... TODAY!