If you were a caveman, your impulses wouldn’t be such a problem. Life would be pretty simple. If something tastes good, you eat as much as possible, and if something feels good, you do it as much as possible. Nowadays, though, there are too many easily obtainable pleasures, which hijack dopamine in the nucleus accumbens and create a tendency to act for immediate gratification. It becomes even more problematic in depression, because there’s less dopamine activity in the nucleus accumbens. First, that means things that used to be enjoyable no longer are. Second, with reduced dopamine activity,
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