After a friend went through a painful breakup, he stopped wearing a coat. It was the middle of a cold northeastern winter, and yet, he was outside in a tee shirt and jeans, acting like it was normal. I finally asked him why—wasn’t he cold? He thought about it for a moment before quietly answering, “I mostly feel numb right now. Stepping outside in the bitter cold reminds me I’m alive, at least, and that’s better than feeling numb. Some pain helps.”
Lately I’ve been reading and listening to psychiatrist, author, and chief of Stanford University’s Addiction Medicine Clinic, Dr. Anna Lembke. She makes a compelling argument that pain is essential to our well-being. She describes the brain in a neutral state, homeostasis, and how it acts like a teeter-totter. We tip it towards pleasure, and in order to correct the balance, it tips to pain, before settling back to homeostasis. Using a simple illustration, she describes the dopamine hit we get eating a cookie, but as soon as we finish it, we experience the pain of realizing there’s no more cookie—a sort of withdrawal—which leads us to want another cookie in order to re-set our neurotransmitters to signal pleasure and reach homeostasis yet again. The problem is that as we turn to cookie after cookie, our brain starts labeling everything that’s not a cookie as something that causes pain. On top of this, the dopamine hit becomes weaker with each additional cookie, causing us to need more to get back to that first pleasure.
When I was going through a divorce and feeling intense emotional pain, I was hired to choreograph a dance piece for a local company. When they approached me, I thought I was too sad to do anything, least of all dance. Plus, being in a room with dancers—telling them what to do—takes a lot of energy and is a sort of performance in its own right (I couldn’t very well do all that while crying, and if I couldn’t cry at a time when I was crying all the time—well, wasn’t this performative and inauthentic?). But then the thought of choreographing something about my pain seemed interesting. Maybe I could be myself (my very sad self) and still do something that I’ve always done (dance). So I said yes, got out of bed, and started moving my body to music. It felt surprisingly honest.
I didn’t do a happy dance. The art wasn’t a bandaid or a mask. I started the piece in silence, one dancer walked on stage uncontrollably shaking her hand, then her arm, until she stopped it by clenching a fist over her heart and collapsing to the ground. I’d noticed that, since my heart had broken, I’d find myself incidentally touching my chest where my heart was buried. It’s what we do with pain, isn’t it? Try to touch it, gauge how bad it is, if it’s superficial or something deeper. I kept doing that to my heart, not even realizing it until I’d stop myself. So I started this dance piece with that gesture. My protagonist entered the stage in silence, in isolation, just one lone dancer in a small shaft of light. Because art reflects life reflects art until we can’t quite remember which came first.
I had no idea about Lembke’s — or anyone’s—notions about pain, but I felt the incredible effect of doing something that didn’t feel comfortable in the moment (getting up and dancing, not to mention interacting with a lot of people). It started with a little pain, and then the teeter-totter in my own brain tipped to pleasure in order to arrive at homeostasis. I cannot overstate this: it was an incredible gift. I’d leave rehearsal feeling energized, less sad, more focused, like I mattered, and consequently that what I did mattered, too. It was an unexpected entryway to feeling better at a time when I didn’t think that was available. After all, if we don’t think something exists, we generally don’t bother looking for it at all.
When Dr. Lembke talks about pressing into pain in order to tip the balance to pleasure, I can’t help but think about that time I spent in rehearsal. This kind of relief is available to all of us. The most obvious example of this is movement, the pain of exercise that produces a pleasure like the runner’s high. But Dr. Lembke also talks about more subtle ways to do this, like not automatically reaching for your phone to provide the dopamine hit of entertainment and mindless, cheap information (we don’t have to “press into the pain” of studying to learn this information. We don’t even have to press into the pain of getting off our couch, going out, and having real conversations and connections with others in order to read—to know—the vulnerable things people post on social media). She suggests sitting in the moment instead of looking to your phone for entertainment—or even to inform you on how to feel and what to think. She suggests being present and taking stock of how you feel and what you think. Wouldn’t that be something.
For a few months now I’ve been getting out of bed and immediately making it. This is a small thing, but it has a domino effect. Also, don’t let anyone convince you that our life is not built by all the small things we do or don’t do that pile up, shaping days, weeks, months, years— a whole life. But specifically in the morning, it’s not like I want to get up and do the work of making my bed. It’s a little bit of pain, if you will. Not much, but a little. But then I get to see this neat bed and that taste of organization makes me immediately feel better about life. It’s a simple reminder that my choices matter and they can actually change the atmosphere. Then, it makes me want to organize other stuff, because if a neat bed brings this much peace—well, what would a neat desk, an empty sink, an organized closet do? The possibilities become endless and I feel like this could be a sarcastic sentence, but it’s genuine. It’s exciting—how ripe the world is with potential when the blank space of our mornings, our afternoons, our shimmied in moments are colored by the choices we make that align with our goals.
Dr. Lembke talks about the correlation between the richest, most advanced nations and miserable people. She named a stat—80% of the world’s opioids are being used by Americans, which make up only 5% of the global population. This bears the question—what happens when an abundance of pleasure and ease is not only available to us, but is the norm? Is instant gratification always the best thing? In our culture, drugs aren’t the only way we grasp for pleasure. It could also be wine when you need to escape some feelings that you’d actually benefit from confronting. It could be an addiction to social media. It could be a lot of things; Dr. Lembke is clear that this American automatic reach for pleasure is a way of life that’s hurting us.
There’s a guy I got really close to after my divorce. We never really said the word, but I