Roller coaster of love

Continuing our exploration of Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke offers a simple but powerful way to understand how the brain works. She asks us to imagine a balance scale with a fulcrum in the center. When the scale is level, we’re at baseline. When we experience pleasure, dopamine is released and the scale tips toward pleasure. The faster and farther it tips, the more intense the pleasure feels.

But the brain is always trying to restore balance.

And what's really interesting about this is that pleasure and pain are processed in the same system. When the scale tips toward pleasure, the brain immediately compensates by tilting in the opposite direction. And it doesn’t just return to baseline. It overshoots. That overshoot is experienced as discomfort, restlessness, irritability, craving, or emotional flatness.

In the 1970s, psychologists Richard Solomon and John Corbit described this as the opponent-process theory: any prolonged or repeated departure from emotional neutrality has a cost. That cost is an after-reaction opposite in value to the original stimulus. Put simply, what goes up must come down.

This helps explain something we’ve all experienced. After pleasure, craving often follows. Another chip. Another episode. Another scroll. More. More. More. The brain isn’t malfunctioning when this happens. It’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do: restore equilibrium.

The problem emerges with repetition. With repeated exposure to the same high-dopamine stimulus, the pleasure response becomes weaker and shorter, while the pain response becomes stronger and longer. This process, known as neuroadaptation, is why we need more to feel the same effect and why stopping can feel so uncomfortable. And why we keep chasing the dragon.

This matters during a reset. When stimulation is reduced, the initial increase in discomfort can feel alarming. Many people interpret this as a sign that something is wrong. In reality, the scale is swinging back. The system is recalibrating. Nature is healing itself.

Understanding the pleasure–pain balance changes how we relate to early discomfort. Instead of seeing it as a problem to fix, we can recognize it as part of the process. But there’s another consequence of living on the pleasure side of the scale that deserves its own attention.Over time, it’s not just that pain increases. It’s that pleasure itself can start to feel muted.