Why we have unhealthy desires and how to stop

Why do we do things that are bad for us?

Many of our modern desires are a product of external influence and manipulation, such as processed foods, fashion, electronics, and even online interactions.

These distorted desires often lead us to harmful behaviors that benefit their creators, not us.

Despite their frequently harming us, we tend to believe these desires to be good. In fact, we will often say we love them.

Here's how I use self-reflection about my desires and values to address them.

How I started and stopped drinking alcohol

"I love a good scotch, and Macallan is one of the best," – I said that line many times.

While it's been several years since I stopped drinking alcohol, I used to love to drink. I'd drink a glass of wine after a hard day at work, meet friends at the bar for a few drinks, or a cold beer on a weekend barbecue.

It wasn't always good for me, though. As I got older and continued to drink, my face started to look more bloated, and the digits on my weight scale steadily climbed. Sleep became more difficult, as did waking up early in the morning to exercise. Occasionally, I would drink excessively and end up drunk.

While I had played in the past with the idea of a "detox" and not drinking for 30 days, it was after getting drunk one day that I realized:

"Wait, drinking alcohol is not good for me."

But if alcohol wasn't good for me, why did I love it?

After internalizing that drinking wasn't good just because it felt good, I decided to stop drinking for 30 days.

I liked the results so much! Losing weight, sleeping better, saving money, and having the energy to exercise. I decided to extend it for another 30 days.

I then extended it further and never drank again.

Desire: our natural motivator

These modern perversions of desire are easy to spot in our day to day. Here's a recent example that prompted my wanting to write on the subject:

When I was running earlier this week, an old man said to his partner as I passed them by "I love sugar, do you understand?" – I'm not sure why the elderly here like finishing sentences with "do you understand?", but they do.

I was amused by how passionately he declared love for something I intentionally avoid.

"What exactly does it mean to love sugar?"

We love our partners, family, cats and dogs, arts and books.

And then we love substances like sugar.

Much of our saying "I love this thing" comes from desires, our positive feelings about our consumption.

Desires are natural motivators. We act on them to feel good. This behavior has been reinforced through countless generations.

But under this definition, not every substance we love is good for us. If someone loves alcohol to the point of becoming an alcoholic, that's a desire that shouldn't be desirable.

However, our desires can lead us to engage in several undesirable behaviors.

Our desires are being manipulated

Acting on desires is hard to avoid. What's the point of having desires if we don't act to fulfill them and feel good?

And so desires become an excellent way to manipulate others. Control one's desires, and you control one's behaviors.

Through advertising, a culture of consumerism, and even social norms that normalize negative behaviors, others constantly influence our desires.

Epictetus, one of the 3 famous Roman Stoic philosophers alongside Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, touches on our dependency and vulnerability to desire in his Enchiridion (the notebook); and not measuring any words while at it:

Chapter 14
[...] We are at the mercy of whoever wields authority over the things we either desire or detest. If you would be free, then, do not wish to have, or avoid, things that other people control, because then you must serve as their slave.

Epictetus. Discourses and Selected Writings (Penguin Classics) (p. 224). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Epictetus was born a slave, so I don't take his use of the word lightly.

Since we're biologically wired to act on our desires, if someone can control them, they can control our actions.

Ironically, we'll act on those desires because "we want" to.

Let's investigate another desire in detail: smoking.

Smoking: modern addictions as misguided desires

A cigarette is a tool that creates a desire that we fulfill by smoking it, making us feel good and crave another cigarette later.

It also so happens, according to the influential 1956 British Doctors Study, that cigarettes kill 1 out of every 2 smokers.

(In fact, a recent study published in BMC Medicine updated that figure from 1 out of 2 to smoking killing 2 out of 3 smokers, a shocking finding)

As many of you know, it can be incredibly tough to stop smoking. A friend of mine, let's call her Jude, has quit smoking for over 15 years now.

Jude recently confessed, though: "I still crave smoking every day. It's so good."

This leads us to wonder:

1. Why would anybody willingly create, distribute, and market a tool that kills 1 out of every 2 people who use it?
2. Why would anybody willingly want to use a tool that kills 1 out of every 2 people who use it?

Are the people in #1 evil, just trying to kill as many people as possible for profit?

Are the people in #2 fools hopelessly trying to get sick and die?

No.

However, many modern inventions pervert our desires, misguiding us and turning our actions against our well-being.

Several desires that benefited us in the past are harming us today, like eating as many calories as possible, avoiding exertion, and even seeing day-to-day interactions with others as dangerous.

Maladaptation: the modern deceiving of our senses

Maladaptation means behaving in a historically evolutionary fit way that leads to bad consequences under modern circumstances.

If we evolved to like the sweet taste of fruits or the pleasure of fat from hunted animals, and that led us to eat more nutritious food, that's adaptation.

But if this desire for sweetness and fat makes us crave and eat that mixed sugar and fat 800 calories cheesecake on display at the bakery, that's a maladaptation.

Modern technologies are a common source of maladaptation: these modern inventions pervert some of our natural desires, tricking us to act in ways we didn't evolve to.

Substance abuse, such as sweets, processed food, alcohol, and other drugs are common examples. But it's not just manufactured substances that we are maladapted to.

Cal Newport, in the book Digital Minimalism, explores how our brains are commonly exploited through the design of our phones' apps:

In his 2017 book, Irresistible, which details his study of this topic, Alter explores the many different “ingredients” that make a given technology likely to hook our brain and cultivate unhealthy use. I want to briefly focus on two forces from this longer treatment that not only seemed particularly relevant to our discussion, but as you’ll soon learn, repeatedly came up in my own research on how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.
Our brains are highly susceptible to these forces. This matters because many of the apps and sites that keep people compulsively checking their smartphones and opening browser tabs often leverage these hooks to make themselves nearly impossible to resist. [..]
“Apps and websites sprinkle intermittent variable rewards all over their products because it’s good for business.” Attention-catching notification badges, or the satisfying way a single finger swipe swoops in the next potentially interesting post, are often carefully tailored to elicit strong responses. As Harris notes, the notification symbol for Facebook was originally blue, to match the palette of the rest of the site, “but no one used it.” So they changed the color to red — an alarm color — and clicking skyrocketed.

Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism (p. 17). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Examples abound.

But how can we avoid being manipulated by others through their control of our desires?

Redefine what a good desire means

Desires shape our actions, and actions shape our future, so we must be careful about what future our actions create.

Before fulfilling a desire, the question "Will this action make me feel good?" is easy but often the wrong question to ask.

Instead, we must reflect not on whether fulfilling the desire feels good but whether it is good by the criteria of goodness of our values.

So instead, ask:

"Is this action good for me?"

That's it. This question is more challenging, yet not impossible, to answer.

Despite its difficulty and depth, even if you are not a philosopher or don't have delineated values, you should be able to answer it quickly.

Like me saying, "Drinking is not good for me" several years ago, or a smoker saying, "Smoking is not good for me" today.

When I was explaining to a friend, let's call him Bob, that I no longer planned to eat meat, he asked me:

Bob: "Wow, but don't you crave the flavor of meat? It's so good!"
Dui: "Before I answer that, tell me, you never smoked before, right?"
Bob: "Right, never tried a single cigarette in my life."
Dui: "Are you planning to try it sometime?"
Bob: "Oh no! Never!"
Dui: "Why not?"
Bob: "Smoking is not good for me."
Dui: "Right, that's how I feel about meat now."

I don't mean to say meat is bad for you or everyone or that it's as bad as smoking.

I want to illustrate that while we can stop doing an action even though we think it's good, like Bob eating meat, we can stop the desire by judging it as not good, like Bob smoking.

And this judgment is in our control to create and change.

Choose your desires carefully

Our desires will compel us to act, but desires created by others can cause us to act against our self-interest.

Because of our maladaptation to modern technology, our instinctual desires can be stimulated in ways we aren't prepared for, with dismal consequences.

By reflecting on a desire with the question, "Is this good for me?" we start creating value judgments about our desires, taking back control over our actions.

Choose a desire to evaluate

So think about a desire that feels good but isn't beneficial according to your values.

It may be waking up late, watching TV, using social media, or consuming unhealthy food and drinks.

Choose that desire and stay alert. The next time you act to fulfill it, ask, "Is this good for me?". Let it first justify itself and convince you it's good for you.

And only then, call it good.