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

by Michael Easter

The feelings people most cite as “happy” and the situations they say make them happy differ between cultures.

The scientists found that in the West the themes that most appear when people talk about happiness are “peppy emotions like excitement and cheerfulness” and self-esteem. In the East, people reference “calmer states like peace and serenity.”

“Pretending that any degree of [dissatisfaction] is abnormal or pathological will only foster feelings of inadequacy and frustration.”

dissatisfaction is not a personal failure. Far from it. [It is] what makes you human.”

“Contemplation” is also a slippery word. The word appears across spiritual and intellectual disciplines.

So the word has deep spiritual connotations. Secular definitions all suggest it means trying to wrap our head around what is larger than ourselves.

have to go to the extremes he did. Sort of like, “Well, I’m glad I did that so I learned you don’t have to.”

Benedict believed we find higher purpose and satisfaction in helping others, experiencing and making creative works, learning new things, balancing time in solitude and with others, and awareness in nature. And, most important, contemplating whatever big eternal mystery we think is the Big Eternal Mystery and letting that guide us.

Four hours of focused work a day seems to be the sweet spot for productivity.

Our greatest thinkers throughout history like Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Ingmar Bergman, and G. H. Hardy swear by four hours.

“Four hours creative work a day is about the limit,” said Hardy, one of history’s...

The researchers who worked hard twenty hours a week pumped out the most scientific articles.

Follow-up research suggests that working four hours daily allows us to find the sweet spot between hard work and adequate rest.

Less than that and we leave performance on the table.

And despite that whole rule about Sunday being a rest day, many monks work on Sunday. Or else no one would eat and the farm would go to hell.

Work, he said, can be a form of prayer and devotion. It’s a means to get closer to something larger than the job at hand.

See, that’s the thing. No job is useless so long as you’re treated well and can realize that it’s probably helping someone somewhere.

A manual hobby can create an abundance loop because it’s active and rewarding in a way that produces something tangible.

By detaching from material things, the monks are freer to attach to a bigger thing.

By my late twenties,

In her work Glittering Images, the intellectual and cultural critic Camille Paglia wrote, “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.”

Too much science, and we lose the most important aspects of the human experience. Too much soul, and we can lead ourselves into delusion.

We intuitively know that there’s something larger than ourselves, even if we don’t know what it is.”

The practice isn’t entirely dissimilar to the Zen practice of koans. Koans are puzzling, paradoxical statements, anecdotes, questions, or verbal exchanges practitioners sit and ponder to aid meditation and gain spiritual awakening.

research shows both meditation and traditional prayer can deliver positive shifts in perspective, reduce stress, and help us better control our emotions.

Day five, 2:00 p.m.

“On the other hand, I’ve also met plenty of very wealthy people who are perfectly happy because they have something larger in their life,” he said. Their wealth was just an afterthought.

We have bodies and souls. You also need to take care of and challenge your body and mind, but also soul.”

Your body will fade. Then what? You’re left with a soul. So you also need to focus on that.

You need to find a deeper meaning. That’s the thing. People focus too much on happiness. No one will ever be perfectly happy all the time because happiness is a moving target.

It’s better to focus on things we know are goo...

science agrees that we can change some degree of our outlook.

“the way we organize our lives, relate to our fellows, the goals we pursue, with what is in our hands and is an object of our choice.”

Occasional deprivation makes the ordinary feel extraordinary.

Purposefully going without can help us realize how great it is to have—to appreciate the wonders of our world of abundance.

Or we could pick a comfort or two and go without it for a while.

Gratitude often comes from scarcity,

“Giving something you have that others don’t is important for gratitude,” he said. “I’m a firm believer that the people who live long, good lives consistently devote themselves to service.”

“When all is gone, when all is lost, and not everything works for these people, they still have hope.

God is something they can rely on, talk to, trust, and feel like is there for them.”

“There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude,

“Solitude is purposeful and intentional.”

Chasing human relationships for the sake of our own happiness can become its own hollow and pernicious scarcity loop.

it’s better to have one great friend you truly care about and can count on than a million mediocre ones.

People retreat into solitude when they want to find enlightenment and total bliss.

we need solitude to truly understand and change ourselves.

Uninfluenced time alone allows us to strip away outside noise and ask the deeper questions. It might even lead us to think differently. Better.

Edward Gibbon said solitude “is the scho...

“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude….Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences.”

Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, Beethoven, Steve Jobs, and more have leveraged the creative power of solitude.