Know how pleasure works, and you'll see why you can't stop

3 min read

You reach for something sweet. You open your phone without thinking. Before writing off the behaviors you want to stop and can't as weak willpower, I want to understand the mechanism behind feeling good.

Why I recommend this book

The Compass of Pleasure is the neuroscientist David J. Linden's explanation of the brain mechanisms that make us feel pleasure. Its subjects range from sex, drugs, alcohol, and high-calorie food to gambling, and even good deeds like giving to charity. It lines up behaviors that seem unrelated and shows them from a single point of view: the "pleasure circuit."

The reason I recommend it is that you can understand pleasure and addiction as mechanisms, rather than pushing them away as "bad things." Once you know that getting absorbed in something and being unable to stop both extend from the same brain processes, you can look at your own behavior a little more calmly.

Reading it

It's a very readable book, even if it's your first book on neuroscience. It deals with technical material but starts from everyday behavior, so you never feel left behind.

You may feel there's a lot about sex. But if you want to understand pleasure more deeply, it's a topic you can't avoid. Precisely because it deals head-on with what people want most intensely, the mechanism of pleasure becomes clear.

Read it alongside Hard to Break

If Hard to Break on this bookshelf is about "why we repeat the same behavior," The Compass of Pleasure is about "why we crave it." The mechanism of habit and the mechanism of pleasure: knowing both gives you more ways to look at a behavior you want to change.

Read it with one "can't stop" in mind

When you read, think of one behavior you feel you can't stop. Reading while thinking about which theme in the book it's closest to makes the book personal.

This isn't a summary of the book's content; it's a suggestion for reading it. Knowing the mechanism isn't the same as having a way to change your behavior, but it can be a way in to asking "why am I like this?"

For people who don't want to be pushed around by pleasure, and for people interested in human desire itself.

Source for the book's content: booksellers' and the publisher's descriptions. I've summarized why I recommend it and how to read it based on those descriptions.