Mind Hacks 5 - Honesty and Our Habits

Yesterday, I saw a movie called The Whale. It focuses on a man who compulsively overeats (with a fine performance by Brendan Fraser). Because I have been working on this series of articles, I couldn’t help seeing the man completely at the mercy of his brain’s dopamine addiction. The lead character had literally sacrificed his conscious life to his brain’s desire for chemicals.

The movie starts, perhaps by happenstance, with a great truth about self-destructive habits. The man teaches an online college class on essay writing via Zoom, but he does not turn on his camera and show himself to his students because he is morbidly obese. I was reminded that the word for “truth” in ancient Greek means, literally, “not hidden.” Hiding what we truly are is at the root of both our bad habits and our flawed strategies.

Truthtelling is the foundation of both breaking bad habits and forming good ones. Returning again to Anna Lembke, Chief Psychiatrist at Stanford Addiction Medicine, in her book Dopamine Nation, who we have quoted several times in this series: