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.

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.

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 brain’s excitement and reward circuitry react strongest during these moments where we’re waiting to find out if we got the reward.

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.

Research shows the faster we can repeat a behavior, the more likely we are to repeat.

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

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.

“We consistently find that the value or reward of a behavior depends in part on how often you think you’ll get the reward. If you are almost certain the reward will happen, it’s nice. But if you are unsure the reward will happen, then you’re very excited when it happens. So much so that you’ll make suboptimal decisions. And we see it in humans all the time. In all different areas.”

When it comes to behavior, dopamine helps us associate certain conditions in our environment, or cues, with getting a reward. 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.

As the work of Skinner and Zentall shows, all animals, including humans, want a reward infinitely more if we aren’t sure we’ll get it. If it’s received unpredictably. Unpredictability makes us obsessive and far more likely to quickly repeat the behavior.

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.”

It’s a deeply attractive, ancient game that takes our hand and walks us into more. And there’s a reason for that.

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 each, participants could solve the problem by adding or subtracting elements. The catch was that subtracting was always the most efficient solution.

But there’s no solid evidence that any of those tips into more are better. Consider meetings. More than two-thirds of managers said that most of their meetings are unproductive and inefficient. They said this new influx of meetings keeps them and their employees from completing important tasks, interrupts their thinking, and (quite counterintuitively) actually pushes their teams further apart. No wonder we’re experiencing what researchers call “time scarcity.” It’s a feeling that we don’t have enough time. The truth is that we have more time than ever, thanks to advances in human longevity and the changing nature of work. Still, we cram our lives with so much compulsive activity, things “to do,” that we feel pressed.

But now decades of research have found that many of our biggest problems—at both the personal and the societal levels—come from our modern ability to easily fulfill our ancient desire for more. Scientists call this an evolutionary mismatch. It happens when behaviors and traits that help us in one environment hurt us in another.

Our craving for stimulation, calorie-dense food, ample possessions, information, status, and much more is backfiring in our world of concentrated drugs, junk food, online shopping, Google search, social media, and more. And corporations have created an entire arsenal of new technologies using the ancient scarcity loop to push us even further.

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.”

Addiction is chronically seeking a reward despite negative consequences.