H04 · Attention and Compulsion
Dopamine overload and compulsion
Understanding the brain's pleasure-pain balance and breaking compulsive overindulgence.
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Odysseus and the Sirens
Knowing no man could resist the Sirens, Odysseus had his crew plug their ears with beeswax and bind him to the mast, recognising that compulsion can remove voluntary choice.
“One can avoid opportunities for gratification of the drive [for pleasure], and through long and ever longer periods of non-gratification weaken it and make it wither away. Then, one can impose upon oneself strict regularity in its gratification: by thus imposing a rule upon the drive itself and enclosing its ebb and flow within firm time-boundaries, one has then gained intervals during which one is no longer troubled by it ...”