"Pleasure is short-lived, happiness is long-lived." Dr. Robert Lustig explains why guilty pleasures such as sugar, social media, and video games are hurting our happiness in the long-run.
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00:00Pleasure is short-lived, happiness is long-lived.
00:20Pleasure is visceral, you feel it in your body.
00:22Happiness is ethereal, you feel it above the neck.
00:25Pleasure is taking, happiness is giving.
00:29Pleasure is experienced alone, happiness is usually experienced in social groups.
00:33Pleasure can be achieved with substances, happiness cannot be achieved with substances.
01:00Why should we care?
01:01So what?
01:02They both feel good.
01:03Well, it matters a lot.
01:04Because dopamine, which is the pleasure neurotransmitter, kills neurons, slowly, but kills neurons.
01:15Neurons like to be stimulated, that's what dopamine does, but they don't like to be bludgeoned,
01:19they like to be tickled.
01:21Chronic overstimulation of any neuron, including a dopamine neuron, will lead to cell death.
01:29Chronic overstimulation leads to less gain, and so you end up needing more and more to
01:39get less and less, and that's called tolerance, and then when the neurons start to die, that's
01:43called addiction.
01:58Serotonin does not cause cell death.
02:01Serotonin is not excitatory, it's inhibitory, so you can't overdose on too much happiness.
02:19But there's one thing that reduces serotonin, dopamine.
02:23So the more pleasure you seek, the more unhappy you get.