These days we have remodeled our world from a place of paucity to a place of astounding abundance, be that drugs, food, gaming, which through micro-transactions can go into the territory of gambling, voyeurism, tweeting, you name it, today’s world can do it. The unprecedented increase in the number and variety leads to an astonishing potency of highly rewarding stimuli. Even look at your modern-day android, iOS, or Linux smartphone, it is nothing short of delivering a 24/7 dopamine supply to a generation that has revealed, in the United States, to be getting more and more miserable since a peak happiness in the early 90s.

Pleasure from these things is all ruled by one main neurotransmitter, that being dopamine, and one of the most intriguing findings in neuroscience in the past 75 years is that the same areas that process pleasure, also process pain. These work like a balance and the brain will always try to keep a state of physiologic equilibrium, referred to as homeostasis by neuroscientists, between the two.

So how can we find serenity and contentment in this hyper stimulated world?