3 Reasons We Make Stupid Decisions (Psychology Today)

[valet]

I know a lot of yall are ADD so I just listed the 3 reasons. For those of you who have the patience (and it's not long but again alot of yall are ADD) read the article.

Reason #1: Wanting Can Overcome Liking
Reason #2: Not Having Something Makes Us Want It More
Reason #3: The Slippery Slope

1) From a 2007 paper in the journal Psychopharmacology comes the idea that there are actually two kinds of pleasure. The first type is how we usually think of pleasure: a state of happy satisfaction. This is the gratification we get from a good meal, sex and its afterglow, or that first sip when we’re really, really thirsty. We’ll call this pleasure “liking.”


But it turns out there’s a second kind of pleasure: the pleasure of pursuing something, the excitement, anticipation, seduction, or empowerment. We’ll call this pleasure “wanting.”

In other words, we usually think of “liking” pleasure as the kind Julia Roberts experiences in Eat Pray Love: falling in love, eating gelato—that contentment, relaxation, and feeling loved and safe. But the “wanting” pleasure is more like what Vince Vaughn pursues in Swingers—it’s the thrill of the chase and the tingling of desire.

And it’s this second kind of pleasure—the thrill of the chase—that motivates us to do stupid things. Even when we know we’ll regret it in the morning, we fixate on the “wanting” and do it anyway.

The starkest example of this is drug use. Cocaine and methamphetamine in particular are notorious for interfering with the brain’s dopamine system, which is heavily involved in “wanting.” Over time, in those with the right (or wrong, as it were) combination of predisposition and experience, drug use intensifies from a voluntary and occasional satisfaction to an irresistibly compulsive addiction. The wanting system creates an overpowering craving that makes addicts seek out hit after hit, even if it makes them feel sick or costs them their health and relationships.

Dopamine also plays a role in non-drug compulsive behaviors like gambling away our paycheck, binge eating, or sexual addiction. Even when you know you’ll hate yourself later, the “wanting” can be undeniably strong.

2) Anyone who’s ever been on a diet knows the effect of deprivation: it not only makes us miserable, it also makes us obsessed. In the famous 1945 Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which was run to determine famine relief practices after World War II, healthy volunteers were semi-starved for 6 months on a diet of about 1,500 calories a day. The result? Not only were they apathetic, irritable, and exhausted, not to mention emaciated, they also became obsessed with food. The participants couldn’t get their minds off it—they longingly read cookbooks and stared at pictures of food.
In an interview with one of the participants sixty years later, he said, “Food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life. And life is pretty dull if that’s the only thing. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.”


Even after the study was over and they had recovered to a healthy weight, the participants reported feeling insatiably hungry. Once done with the study, they ate an average of 5,000 calories a day, sometimes exceeding 10,000 calories.

So what does this mean for self-imposed deprivation? If you’re aiming to cut out all sugar, drastically cuhttp://www.thecoli.com/forums/the-locker-room.6/create-threadrb spending, exercise excessively, or adopt an overly strict diet, the sudden deprivation might make you crave that forbidden fruit—or chocolate bar.

But wait, it gets worse. When you try to suppress that craving, it gets stronger. Why? Suppression is like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. Not only are the thoughts right below the surface, but once the effort of suppression wears you down, they surge back up with a vengeance, which leads to doing the exact thing you were trying not to do. And then, once we slip, it leads to...

While food is the classic example, anything we deprive ourselves of in the name of self-improvement—screen time, spending, sugar—invites the What the Hell Effect. Even a minor criminal offense can snowball: “I got away with stealing that pack of gum; might as well try for the jeans!” In short, we aim for cold turkey, only to end up going whole hog.

To wrap up, there are myriad reasons we do stupid things, and though none of these might explain the Double Down Sandwich tattoo, I’m not sure anything could.

3)

 

[Ninjaz In Paris]

This explains a lot of affairs...