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

by Michael Easter

I was investigating the dramatic rise of a new, methamphetamine-like street drug called Captagon. It’s hardly known in the United States, but it’s wreaking havoc in the Middle East and spreading. How I ended up in Iraq, however, takes some explaining.

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.

Everyone knows any behavior is fine in moderation. But why do we suck so bad at moderating? Why do we keep eating when we’re full? Why do we keep shopping when we own too much? Why do we keep drinking when we’re already tipsy? Why do we scroll social media when it makes us miserable? Why do we binge-watch another episode even when we realize a more meaningful life beyond the screen is passing us by? Why do we get stuck? Stuck doing the same thing we regret over and over and over.

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 evolved in harsh environments that had one thing in common: they were worlds of less, of scarcity.

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.

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.

But of everything this city offers, nothing seems to trigger scarcity brain more than slot machines. Las Vegas wasn’t built on winners. It was built on spinning reels encased in pinging, dinging, flashing cabinets that people play over and over and over—eventually to their detriment. Which explains why the machines are everywhere.

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.

Redd’s slot machine revolution was one of those fundamental shifts that occur once in a century. Like when Netflix began allowing customers to stream their movies instead of mailing them back and forth in the form of DVDs, altering how we consume TV and video forever. Or when Amazon thought to sell more than just books and changed how we shop.

Redd had by instinct tapped into a powerful quirk in the human mind. 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

“The key to gambling is that you’re anticipating a reward,” he said. “You know you’ll probably get a reward eventually, but you don’t know when or exactly what it will be.”

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.

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.

“You’re right that everyone knows the house always wins,” said Sahl. “But you’re asking the wrong question. You’re assuming people play only to win. Gambling allows us to experience risks and thrills, and that’s fun.”

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

About 1 to 2 percent of the general population now qualify as compulsive gamblers. I began thinking about some of my own behaviors in the past and present. Alcoholism I’ve been in recovery from since 2014. Mindless eating. Endless scrolling. Amazon Prime shopping to distract myself from doing deeper and tougher work. Could some or all of that be connected to my own scarcity brain and tendency to get sucked into the scarcity loop?

We hear of people who do all kinds of counterproductive and depraved acts for the dopamine high. For example, one article in Forbes titled “Addicted to Bang” blamed dopamine for people’s enjoyment of firearms. Or there was one from NBC News titled “Why QAnon Followers Are Like Addicts.” Apparently, dopamine, this story explained, caused people to believe that “a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring that conspired against former U.S. President Donald Trump” (as QAnon has been described).

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.

Take recovering drug addicts. They can be clean for years. But if they find themselves back near a place where they used to score, their brain will still often pump out dopamine, causing them to crave their drug of choice.

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.

The average person today spends anywhere from eleven to thirteen hours using digital media. That’s on our phones, TVs, computers, and more.

Despite the criticism new tech receives, it’s delivered many social benefits. To take just one example, some data suggests there was a drop in the suicide rate among LGBTQ teens after the introduction of social media. Social media connected LGBTQ teens in small towns. They could form a support network that wasn’t previously there. Tech also allowed many of us to work and students to learn through COVID lockdowns.

William James, born in 1842, is considered the father of American psychology. His ideas laid the foundation of modern psychological thinking. James captured something profound about this brief stint of consciousness we all have and call life. In the end, he said, our life is ultimately a collection of what we pay attention to.

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.”

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.”

Zentall is alluding to a new and controversial theory of addiction. Since the 1990s, we’ve thought addiction is caused by unseen chemical phenomena deep in the brain. But more thinkers like Zentall realize that we have more in common with unstimulated pigeons and other animals than we might think. And their theories don’t just apply to drugs and alcohol. It’s a framework that can help us understand the root cause of any habit that delivers short-term comfort at the expense of long-term growth and fulfillment.

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.

Amphetamine use among soldiers isn’t new. A paper in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History reports that both Allied and Axis troops in World War II used different amphetamines because the drugs, the scholars wrote, “increased confidence and aggression, and elevated ‘morale.’ ”

“So I think that addiction is most often a function of circumstances,” said the doctor. “If the conditions are right and drugs are available, drug use rises. People use drugs for good reasons. Drugs are an easy way to escape, feel empowered, cope with life, and survive. Some hardworking Iraqis use drugs to stay awake and work longer hours.” The doctor was alluding to the same theory of addiction Zentall did. We’ve long viewed substance use as a bizarre anomaly—a function of either broken morals or broken brain chemistry. But there is a growing recognition that drug use in our past was nearly always good. It helped us survive.

scientists and practitioners I spoke with all generally circled the same idea. Addiction is chronically seeking a reward despite negative consequences.

Brain scans even show that addiction lives in the same system of the brain involved in love, whether with a partner or our children. “That system quite naturally evolved to create compulsive behavior despite consequences,” Maia Szalavitz, an addiction researcher, journalist, and author of Unbroken Brain, told me. “You’d never maintain a relationship with a partner or deal with all the diapers and crying and frustrations that come with raising a kid if there wasn’t some deeper reward that allowed us to persist despite negative consequences.”

The supply of lab-made drugs like meth, Captagon, and fentanyl is now larger than ever because these drugs are more than twenty times more profitable than land-grown drugs. They’re also up to eighty times stronger than their land-grown equivalent. Massive supplies have driven prices down to “an all-time low,” said researchers at John Jay College. Drugs like heroin and meth are more than ten times cheaper than they were in the 1980s.

But the last century has left us with two dominant schools of thought. The first views an addict as a bad person. It sees addiction as a selfish and destructive personal choice. The War on Drugs, for example, is based on this model. At its height in the 1980s, the War on Drugs tossed one million Americans into jail each year for offenses like possessing a small amount of marijuana, cocaine, or heroin. But by the mid-1990s, we realized that we were losing this war. We’d spent trillions combating drugs worldwide and arresting and jailing people for possession. But drug use rates weren’t budging. The approach was ruining lives and disproportionately hurting minorities. Research shows, for example, that most crack users in the 1990s were white, but 90 percent of people sentenced for crack possession were black. So in 1995, a group of researchers from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) convened to search for a solution. Neuroimaging was a hot field at the time. The technology, which captures images of how our brains react to different situations, had recently improved drastically. New scans showed that the brains of chronic drug users responded differently to drugs than nonusers’.

the leaders of NIDA came up with the second model of addiction. It sees addiction as a disease of a broken brain. The idea is that addictive substances “hijack” our brains. NIDA argued that addicts are helpless passengers of this hijacked and runaway freight train that is their brain. Even if an addict chooses to stop, said NIDA’s director, Nora Volkow, she won’t be able to. There is no choice. This is because, as Volkow wrote in the scientific journal the Lancet Psychiatry, “specific molecular and functional neuroplastic changes at the synaptic and circuitry level…are triggered by repeated drug exposure.” This idea, called the brain disease model of addiction, has been at the front of scientific and policy circles ever since.

The crucial question is not whether brain changes take place. They do. “The real question,” said Satel, “is whether those brain changes obliterate the capacity to make decisions. The answer to that question is no. Choice might be constrained. But people are capable of breaking through the neurochemical storm and changing their behavior. It’s possible to change. Everything is possible.” No

“There’s an idea called ‘the clinician’s illusion,’ ” Satel told me. It refers to the idea that addiction researchers and doctors tend to study and see only the most challenging cases, the people who can’t stop despite losing everything. And this leads researchers and doctors to believe that all cases of addiction are as hopeless. 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.

Drinking allowed me to let down my guard and behave in a way that, when sober, felt uncomfortable. My alcohol abuse fell into its own strange scarcity loop. I longed not so much for alcohol as for the psychological state where I felt as if anything were possible. From wider experiences to unfiltered human connections. At the height of my drinking, I was working an unstimulating nine-to-five office job. I felt like a bull in a chute, poked and prodded and raring to go with a power plant of bound energy and yearning and no outlet for it. Alcohol would open the chute. My weekend drinking gave me permission to be wild and free in an increasingly sanitary, orderly, rule-based world.

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?

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. My

The hundreds of sober people I’ve spoken to all say that alcohol or drugs initially served a valuable purpose for them, too. It allowed them to feel and behave like the people they wanted to be. Or it killed boredom or helped them work harder. Or it numbed their anxiety and lowered their inhibitions. Or it allowed them to escape from some restless passenger inside them they couldn’t quite understand. And then the phrase is always “It worked until it didn’t.”

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.

Consider: If we wait until we’re twenty-one to drink, our odds of developing an alcohol addiction are 9 percent. 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.

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.

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. “There’s

And now the United States is facing a new drug problem, similar to Captagon in Iraq. After the government relaxed regulations around telemedicine prescriptions during the pandemic, questionable online prescribers popped up, and use of the stimulant Adderall surged. Prescriptions have tripled since 2009, and today one in eight Americans is using the drug. Some of these are warranted, but many aren’t. The DEA worries we’re now headed into a new chapter of drug addiction. To supply the demand for pills, fake prescription pills are pouring in from Mexico. And they’re dangerous. In 2022, the DEA seized fifty million fake pills tainted with fentanyl. We, too, have billions of pills circulating.

“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.

What is it about tech products and the scarcity loop that can be a comforting escape in the first place? My questions led me to a thinker who is realizing that the numbers, data, and figures embedded in many uses of the loop can be their own sort of drug. But the ways all these numbers influence our behavior—not just in tech, but also some of our most common behaviors and critical institutions—are striking.

The point of a game is to enter into a small world that is an escape from our everyday life. It’s a challenging but captivating diversion. We can’t predict if we’ll win. We play games, as the philosopher Bernard Suits explained, to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of maybe overcoming them. The scoring system tells us precisely what unnecessary thing we must do to win.

A study in Nature Communications discovered that humans hate uncertainty so much that we’d rather experience punishment. The scientists had participants play a computer game where they clicked rocks on the screen. Once you clicked a rock, it would overturn and reveal whether a virtual snake was hiding underneath. The participants received a painful electric shock if the rock hid a snake. So it went like this: Click. No snake, no zap. Click. Big snake, big zap.