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

by Michael Easter

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.

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.

Obeying these evolutionary cravings kept us alive and still makes sense for all species. Except one. As humans figured out how to make things faster and cheaper during the Industrial Revolution, our environments of scarcity rapidly shifted to those of plenty. By the 1970s, the benefits of this revolution had spread to most people in developed countries. They’ve been rippling out across the globe ever since. 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).

Yet we’re still programmed to think and act as if we don’t have enough. As if we’re still in those ancient times of scarcity. That three-pound bundle of nerves in our skull is always scanning the background, picking up and prioritizing scarcity cues and pushing us to consume more.

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 ...

If and when we realize that overconsumption is causing our problems, we’re often told the solution is to simply shoot for less. Eat less food to lose weight. Buy less stuff or throw out excess stuff to spark joy. Spend less time on our screens to be happier. Do less work to avoid anxiety and burnout. Spend less money to fix our finances or overhaul our business. But less, I’d uncover, comes with its own set of problems. And some robust new research shows that blindly aiming for less can change us for the worse. There are even times we should lean into excess.

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.

It tends to ignore the dollar invested and perceives this as winning 50 cents. Casinos call winning less than we bet “losses disguised as wins.”

To non-gamers, playing through losses disguised as wins can seem irrational. But it’s textbook human behavior. Let’s return to the example of our crappy car. Pretend we turn the key to our car, and nothing happens. So we turn the key again. Nothing. But when we turn the key a third time, the engine cranks and putters for a second, making sounds as if it were going to turn on. Then it goes silent and doesn’t come to life. With this “loss disguised as a win” we will, of course, immediately turn the key again. We will sit there turning the key so long as the engine gives us signs of life. It’s the stringing together of too many failed attempts that prompts us to open the hood or call the tow truck. A finicky engine keeps our attention longer than a dead one.

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

Unpredictable rewards, on the other hand, are not. If we know we’ll receive a reward but aren’t sure when, we get sucked in. We experience a sort of exciting, suspenseful anxiety as we wait to see whether this occasion will deliver the good stuff. Our brains hone in on unpredictability. They naturally suppress systems that take in other information, and we fixate on whatever is unpredictable. One study found that unpredictable rewards “tap into fundamental aspects of human cognition and emotion.”

Sahl hit the Spin button again. “With this spin,” he said as the wheels rolled and began to set, “are we going to be disappointed? Or are we going to be happy? And will we be just kind of happy or will we be really, really happy? That’s what’s exciting. The result of a spin could result in nothing. Or it could be life changing.”

The idea that a near miss would lead us to play again immediately is another one of those things that seems weird but isn’t. Psychologists have been observing it for decades. They can even plot it on graphs. Let’s say we do something and expect something to happen. If that “something” doesn’t happen, we immediately repeat the behavior. Fast and hard. For example, we hit an elevator button. If the button doesn’t light up, we’ll quickly jab at the button a bunch of times in a row. Another example: A child says “Mom” and gets ignored. He’ll follow that up with “Mom. Mom. MOM, MOM, MOM, MOM…”

From an economic perspective, any hobby that costs time or money is a losing venture. The gambler could just as much ask, “Why pay $50 for a concert ticket when you know you’re not going to get the money back? Why pay $100 to play a round of golf when you’re not getting the money back?” If a gambler loses money playing a slot machine but still had fun, they have, in a way, won. If they happen to leave the casino with more money, they’ve double-won. See, that’s the thing: Falling into the scarcity loop can be fun. The combination of opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability provides the structure for the ultimate game. But if we play it too often and escape into it for reasons beyond fun, the problems can pile up, said Sahl.

Once we know something is pleasurable or rewarding, dopamine is primarily released when we’re pursuing and anticipating receiving that pleasurable thing, not when we’re actually receiving the pleasurable thing.

The executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling spent a few minutes on the app and told NBC News, “A lot of this [the tactics Robinhood uses] is directly taken from the user experience of casinos: It encourages immediacy and frequent engagement.”

The loop is particularly pernicious on YouTube. The techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci discovered that YouTube’s autoplay algorithms lead us into successively more extreme and polarizing videos. Extreme content captivates you, me, and everyone we know because human attention naturally gravitates to information that implies danger or drama. It’s an ancient survival mechanism being leveraged to capture our attention.

The video game world has stolen so many tricks from casinos that researchers now have a term for the phenomenon. They call it “the gambling turn.” It’s happening in mobile, video, and computer games.

NEWS Elements of the scarcity loop exist in our 24/7, all-encompassing news environment. Media scholars say that political news before 2016 was kind of like a boring old slot machine while political news afterward was more like one of Redd’s slot machines. This obviously started with president Donald Trump, who received four times more coverage than Obama. But politicians overall started acting more brash and unpredictable—keeping us in suspense about what they’d do, say, or tweet next and how that would make us feel. Many of us fixated on the news, waiting for the next breaking alert. Because of this, political news outlets like CNN and the New York Times had their most profitable years ever. Just as the casinos all shifted to Redd’s slot machines, news also changed. Media analysts at the Columbia Journalism Review believe that the media has become so hooked on the ratings and profits of the post-2016 era that it will create a feedback loop. Politicians will behave more unpredictably to get more media attention. The media, in turn, will run stories differently to grab public eyes. A recent study suggests the analysts are correct. It found that the most unpredictable and contentious politicians on both sides got the most engagement on news sites and social media.

In the end, he said, our life is ultimately a collection of what we pay attention to.

In 1928, the propaganda genius and father of public relations Edward Bernays wrote, “In almost every act of our daily lives…we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses….We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by [people] we have never heard of….It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

The novelist Margaret Atwood once said that humans have a “talent for insatiability.” The pioneering psychologist Abraham Maslow described us as the “perpetually wanting animal.”

In the human brain less equals bad, worse, unproductive. More equals good, better, productive. Our scarcity brain defaults to more and rarely considers less. And when we do consider less, we often think it sucks.

“People systematically overlook subtraction,” Klotz told me. “If people were thinking about either addition or subtraction, then choosing to add, it would be one thing. But if people aren’t even thinking of this basic option of subtraction, then that’s a big problem. This is arguably the most fundamental question about how we change and make things better. Am I going to add, do more, or am I going to take away, do less? And we are finding that people systematically overlook the option of subtraction and doing less.” His research landed on the cover of the prestigious journal Nature in 2021. Once we see this phenomenon, we see it everywhere. To toss out a few random recent examples: Federal regulations are seventeen times longer than in 1950. American homes are three times larger than they were in 1970. We own 233 percent more clothes than we did in 1930. Restaurant portion sizes are four times larger compared with 1950. Everything from our cars, to refrigerators, to microwaves, to coffeemakers is larger and packed with techy smart features (like, why does my dishwasher need to connect to the cloud?). Incoming university presidents are nearly ten times more likely to add new programs than they are to subtract programs that aren’t working. “Yes, and…” is the rule of improv comedy, and the phrase has been adopted as a line by the business community. Entire industries like academia and medicine have experienced a 44 percent ballooning of professional administrators since the e...

“We found that when you threaten people’s access to everyday things, they grab more for themselves and are less likely to give to others,” Goldsmith said. More makes us feel safe. As if we were doing something to solve this perceived problem of scarcity. And if we can’t immediately slake our thirst for more, the thought of what we’re lacking consumes us. The American Psychological Association explained, “Our minds are less efficient when they feel they lack something—whether it is money, time, calories, or even companionship.”

As the MacArthur Genius grant winner and neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky put it, “If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.”

The legendary basketball coach Pat Riley called this our “disease of more.” Across his career, where he racked up eight NBA championship titles as a coach or GM, he noticed that championship teams across sports usually fail to win again the next year. “Success,” he wrote, “is often the first step toward disaster.” At first, pro athletes just want more wins. But once they win a championship, “more” shifts. They begin to focus their attention on a newly perceived scarcity. They now want more sponsorships, more playing time, more money, more individual recognition.

To find enough, I needed to uncover and learn more about all the places the scarcity loop exists, in technology and beyond. I needed to figure out where, why, and how far we’re being pushed into more. I needed to get intentional with it. And understand, deeply, why we slip into the loop and the motives of the larger forces who are using it.

Now that I’d begun connecting the scarcity loop to scarcity brain, it was time to leave the safety of my home. If I really wanted to understand how to tame scarcity brain, I needed to meet people out on the edges. People finding answers in the real world and not just in sterile labs and over Zoom.

This isn’t unique. Utah, for example, has one of the highest prescription drug abuse rates because Mormons aren’t allowed to drink alcohol or coffee or use nicotine.

Eating this boozy fruit triggered what scientists call the “aperitif effect.” Studies show that people eat anywhere from 10 to 30 percent more food after drinking alcohol. So it compelled our ancestors to find and gorge more of the fruit to bulk up for leaner times. The buzz further rewarded us. Alcohol even kills germs. So this boozy food was less likely to contain bacteria that might make us sick. This means that in the past, alcohol equaled survival. But the alcohol levels in this wild fermenting fruit were so low that we’d fill up long before we’d start slurring our words.

But research on regular people struggling with substance abuse suggests a much brighter outlook. Satel pointed me to one study that surveyed roughly twenty thousand people. It found that 75 percent who reported struggling with drugs before age twenty-four no longer used drugs by age thirty-seven. Another extensive survey found that over ten years 86 percent of people struggling with an addiction got clean.

Take what happened to soldiers serving in Vietnam. Military doctors estimated that between 10 and 25 percent of American soldiers deployed in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. It was so bad that in May 1971, the New York Times ran a front-page story titled “G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam.” President Nixon didn’t want to let these addicts back into the United States, so he launched Operation Golden Flow. The deal was simple. If the soldiers wanted to return home, they had to provide a clean urine test. If addiction obliterates choice and relapse is a foregone conclusion, then most of those addicted soldiers wouldn’t have been able to overcome their broken brain and would have been left in Vietnam. But nearly every soldier produced a golden flow, a clean urine test. And this wasn’t a temporary stay. Once they were home, heroin lost its appeal for the majority of these GIs. Only 5 percent of the soldiers who were addicted while in Vietnam relapsed within a year of returning to the United States. The relapsers tended to be soldiers who had used drugs before the war.

For example, scientists at the University of New Mexico analyzed alcoholics in recovery for more than a year. The top reason for relapse was believing addiction is a disease. The relapsers said they didn’t see the point in struggling against a disease without a medical cure. This viewpoint can also lead would-be lifelines to give up hope. Other research found that the more a drug user’s family members believe addiction is an insurmountable disease, the more likely they are to distance themselves from the user.

I’m not alone. Scientists now know that the scarcity loop is a crucial reason substance use continues despite adverse consequences. Researchers at the University of Waterloo wrote that the unpredictable rewards of substance use “make the behavior even more resistant to…[adverse consequences] and extinction.” Consider illegal drug use. Much of the rush people get is from the loop that comes from acquiring and using drugs. Will we find drugs? Will we get arrested during the deal? How much of the drug will we find, and how strong will it be?

Hence, the National Academy of Sciences found that “there is little evidence that decriminalization of marijuana use necessarily leads to a substantial increase in marijuana use.” The scientists said this is due to a diminished “forbidden fruit” effect. Eating forbidden fruit is far more exciting than unforbidden fruit.

Another old study from the U.S. Department of Justice found that marijuana use seemed to fall in some states that decriminalized the drug. The experts believe this phenomenon is in part because there’s no game: rewards become predictable. Other research shows alcoholism rose 300 percent during Prohibition, when the government made alcohol illegal from 1920 to 1933. We still celebrate some of the scarcity loop excitement of bootlegging with NASCAR, a sport that evolved from bootleggers who souped up their vehicles to outrun authorities.

Some new thinkers have argued that addiction is a social phenomenon. “The opposite of addiction is connection,” they argue. But a lack of connection doesn’t explain addiction for everyone. Many addicts report feeling connected to others and have a strong social support network. I felt that way. Some are missing something else.

The missing piece may relate to what Zentall described as the optimal stimulation model. “It says that animals and we humans have a level of stimulation that we prefer,” he said. “And when it gets below that, we search for stimulation.” As he explained, “When you think of humans today, I think a lot of us get bored with how easy it is to get resources. We spend less of our time exploring and foraging for food. We spend less time outside. Our social worlds have changed. So we search for other ways to fill this gap in stimulation, to distract or comfort ourselves….We gamble, we shop online, we eat just to eat, we overuse social media, or even do drugs.”

Addiction, in other words, is a learned behavior that once worked well but begins to backfire. Using a drug or drinking still relieves discomfort, provides stimulation, and solves problems in the short term. But it starts creating long-term problems. The more often we repeat it, the deeper we learn it, the harder it is to break. Meanwhile, the problems pile up.

But if we start drinking at fourteen or younger, the odds of addiction become 50 percent. A coin flip. These same figures hold for most drugs and maladaptive behaviors. And this brain component is not unique to drugs. “Drugs and our other addictive behaviors and substances are potent, but they’re not magic,” said Kent Berridge, the University of Michigan neuroscientist. PSAs tell us that using a drug just once leads to addiction. But Berridge told me to picture the following scenario: Let’s say we give a group of people a powerful drug like heroin. Despite the drug spiking dopamine a thousandfold, about a third of people will hate the feeling it delivers. Hate it. Another third will feel indifferent to it. They could take it or leave it but have other things they’d rather do. That could be another drug, or something else they find more pleasurable, like eating cake, shopping, playing video games, or exercising. A third of those people will enjoy it. And if those people who enjoy heroin continue to use it regularly, “about 15 percent will become addicted to it,” said Berridge. That figure is based on multiple well-controlled studies and surveys conducted over decades. About 10 to 20 percent of regular users of even the most powerful drugs develop addiction. Marijuana’s addiction rate is less than 10 percent. Other drugs like alcohol, cocaine, and heroin hover between 10 and 20. Tobacco has the highest rate of addiction for regular users, at 30 percent.

So NIDA is right. Addiction is not a choice. Instead, it’s a summation of repeated choices that make a different choice harder to make for environmental, biological, and historical reasons. It’s deep learning.

Much like gaining weight. Few people set out to become obese. But over time, the weight accumulates, and we find ourselves obese. It happens through small decisions we make daily. Decisions about what, why, and how much to eat multiple times a day that become habitual.

And this same pattern applies to spending too much time online, binge shopping, working too much, gambling too often, obsessing over exercise or another hobby at the expense of family time—any habit that provides short-term escape and comfort but causes long-term problems. “The problem isn’t the substance or behavior of choice,” Szalavitz told me. “The problem is why you need that drug, why those drugs appeal to you, and why you are trying to...

The neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky remarked to me, “The fact that most people don’t get addicted to addictive substances [despite their powerful effect on brain chemicals] or, if they do, eventually stop using is fascinating.” And he’s right. One in ten Americans say they’ve gotten over a prior drug or alcohol problem. Half of those people got over it on their own. In any given year, a person with a substance abuse issue has about a 15 percent chance of quitting. The years pile up, and by age thirty half of people who report problematic substance use have quit.

“How do you help patients who come to you with addictions or even compulsions around other habits?” “My main advice is to make a big change,” he said. “Change your circle. Go to school. Educate yourself. Get a job or change your job. Take courses to improve your skills. Learn to read and pour yourself into books. Actively go out and make friends or change your friend group. Make big changes.” Embrace short-term discomfort to find a long-term benefit.

The pandemic accelerated want, leading people to seek comfort. Entire generations learned unnatural new ways to find stimulation and cope. “The pandemic was an enormous stressor on society,” Szalavitz told me. “I think people who were at the edge often went over it. I think this stress is why we’re seeing many people starting to do all kinds of dysfunctional things. Like, people are going to need to do something.” But the pandemic was just a powerful push toward a strange new kind of living. A type of living that compels us to seek stimulation from, yeah, something.

Problematic use of new technology, in particular, has recently boomed. Especially the technology leveraging the scarcity loop. The data shows just over 2 percent of the world’s population is addicted to drugs or alcohol. A study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research suggests the percentage of people addicted to technology is now roughly the same.

This is why the American Psychological Association is now recognizing tech use disorders and scrambling to treat them. But the answer isn’t to use our phones less. Not even close. “Like with drugs, problematic technology use is never just about the product,” Nir Eyal told me. He’s a former Stanford professor and tech entrepreneur who wrote the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. He continued, “Problematic technology use is about the interaction between the product, the person, and their ability to cope with discomfort, and then a situation in their life that causes a pain that they’re not equipped to deal with. When you have the confluence of these three factors at the same time, it can create an experience you can put yourself into where tech products help you immediately forget about all your problems.”