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

by Michael Easter

As a science journalist and professor, I’m interested in understanding human behavior. Everyone likes to focus on developing good new habits. But I want to know how we can resolve the behaviors that hurt us most. Because here’s the thing: 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.

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.

We now have an abundance—some might say an overload—of the things we’ve evolved to crave. Things like food (especially the salty, fatty, sugary variety), possessions (homes filled with online purchases), information (the internet), mood adjusters (drugs and entertainment), and influence (social media).

The people I met on my journey are asking the more profound and challenging questions. But their efforts are revealing the answers that work. They’ve found that permanent change and lasting satisfaction lie in finding enough. Not too much. Not too little. Some have even flipped the scarcity loop to an “abundance loop,” using the loop to do more of what helps us.

Thirty-four states allow slot machines. And like Nevada, many of those states allow the machines beyond casinos—in all sorts of nooks and crannies of everyday life. And they’re cash cows anywhere we put them. The machines make more than $30 billion each year in the United States alone, or about $100 per American per year. It’s more than we spend on movies, books, and music combined. And the figure rises about 10 percent every year.

Sahl had a knack for dreaming up casino games that compelled people to play in rapid succession.

Games created in Sahl’s lab have raked in untold amounts of money. Millions of dollars have made their way back to the lab. “We’ve got nearly thirty patents and counting. We’ve sold over thirty games to casinos around the world,” Sahl told me after we sat at a semicircular card table in the lab. “And that money all goes back to the center and students. It’s not often you can take a class, come up with an idea in it, and six months later get a check for an entire year’s tuition.” And the lab’s graduates don’t just end up working for the world’s biggest casinos, slot machine manufacturers, and mobile betting apps. They, too, follow the money. They’re developing new behavior-modification technologies for U.S. military contractors, law enforcement, tech start-ups, and massive online retailers. Suppose you can design a game that is so engaging a person will play it hundreds of times in a row despite knowing they’re likely to lose money. In that case, you can design products that compel people to repeat all sorts of other behaviors, too.

The behaviors we do in rapid succession—from gambling to overeating to overbuying to binge-watching to binge drinking and so much more—are powered by a “scarcity loop.” It has three parts. Opportunity—> Unpredictable Rewards—> Quick Repeatability

These moments when we wait to learn the outcome of an unpredictable reward are, in fact, so exciting that Stanford neuroscientists discovered that they become rewarding in and of themselves. The brain’s excitement and reward circuitry react strongest during these moments where we’re waiting to find out if we got the reward.

“Casinos call what just happened a near miss,” Sahl explained. “And near misses are key. They appear in all games, but they’re critical in slot machines. They provide entertainment, excitement, and stimulation and compel people to play again quickly.

Those are the three conditions for a behavior to fall into a scarcity loop: opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.

But how do we get out? A person stuck in a scarcity loop stops for only three reasons, all of which jam a stick in the spokes of the loop. First, the opportunity could go away. For gamblers, this could be from running out of money or, in the rarer occasion, making enough that they feel satisfied to stop. Second, the rewards could stop trickling in. For a gambler, this is stringing together too many pure losses in a row. Which explains why so few people played early slot machines. Third, the repetition could stop being quick. This is rarer for gamblers, but it could be that the gambler gets physically tired or the Spin button starts jamming.