Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough

by Michael Easter

Baghdad is generally considered a good place for solo journalists to get kidnapped and sold to ISIS, whatever they’re there for. I was there for the drugs.

it doesn’t matter how much gas we give good new habits; if we don’t resolve our bad ones, we still have our foot on the brake.

The worst habits are things we can do over and over and over in rapid succession—eventually to our detriment. These behaviors are often fun and rewarding in the short term but backfire in the long run.

I learned that these behaviors are usually reactions to feelings of “scarcity.” And all it takes is a small “scarcity cue” to incite them.

A scarcity cue is a piece of information that fires on what researchers call our scarcity mindset. It leads us to believe we don’t have enough. We then instinctually fixate on attaining or doing that one thing we think will solve our problem and make us feel whole.

Today it’s well accepted that for most of human history, obeying the next scarcity cue and constantly craving and consuming more kept us alive. We evolved in harsh environments that had one thing in common: they were worlds of less, of scarcity.

We’re still compelled to eat more food than our bodies need. To impulsively search for more information. To buy more unnecessary stuff. To jockey for more influence over others. To do what we can to get another fleeting hit of pleasure. To fixate on getting what we don’t have rather than using and enjoying what we do have. We have a scarcity brain.