Why We Do Stupid Things
We all do things we know we’ll regret. They could be little, like funnelling Thin Mints straight from the sleeve when we’re ostensibly on a diet or sending an angry, heat-of-the-moment email we know will require a mea culpa. Or they could be big, like having an affair or relapsing into drugs again. Turns out it’s not just you—it’s science. This week, Savvy Psychologist Dr. Ellen Hendriksen reveals three reasons we do dumb things.
Ellen Hendriksen, PhD
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Why We Do Stupid Things
We all do things we know we shouldn’t. Eat that party size bag of M&Ms when we’re stressed. Have just one more drink. Sleep with our ex. Get a tattoo of the KFC Double Down sandwich (this actually happened).
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There’s even an entire city is built on the knowledge that we will do stupid things: what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Today we’ll talk about three reasons why—even as our conscience or our common sense screams, “Nooooooooo!”—we watch ourselves do things we know we’ll regret.
Reason #1: Two Kinds of Pleasure. From a 2007 paper in the journal Psychopharmacology comes the idea that there are actually two types of pleasure. The first type is how we usually think of pleasure: a state of happy satisfaction. For example, we get this kind of pleasure from a good meal, sex and its afterglow, or from that first sip when we’re really, really thirsty. We’ll call this pleasure “liking.”
But it turns out there’s a second kind of pleasure: the pleasure of pursuing something, excitement, anticipation, seduction, or feeling powerful as you know you got this. We’ll call this pleasure “wanting.”
In other words, we usually think of “liking” pleasure as Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love: falling in love, eating gelato—that feeling of satisfaction, relaxation, and feeling loved and safe. But the “wanting” pleasure is more like Vince Vaughn in Swingers—it’s the thrill of the chase and the tingling of desire.
And it’s this second kind of pleasure—the thrill of the chase—that helps us do so many stupid things. Even when we know there will be no “liking” pleasure and we’ll regret it in the morning, we do it anyway.
The starkest example of this is drug use. Cocaine and methamphetamine in particular are notorious for short-circuiting the dopamine system in the brain, which is heavily involved in “wanting.” Over time, in those with the right (or wrong, as it were) combination of predisposition and experience, drug use moves from being voluntary and occasional to irresistibly compulsive. The wanting system creates an irresistible craving that makes those addicted seek out hit after hit, even if it makes them feel sick or costs them their health and relationships.
Dopamine also plays a role in non-drug compulsive behaviors like gambling away our paycheck, binge eating, or sexual addiction. Even when you know you’ll hate yourself later, the “wanting” can be so strong it’s undeniable.
Reason #2: Deprivation, Suppression, and Obsession. Anyone who’s ever been on a diet knows the effect of deprivation: it not only makes us miserable, it makes us obsessed. In the famous 1945 Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which was run to determine famine relief practices after World War II, healthy volunteers were semi-starved for 6 months on a diet of about 1500 calories a day. The result? Not only were they apathetic, irritable, and exhausted, not to mention weak and emaciated, they also became obsessed with food. The participants thought about food 24/7–they obsessively read cookbooks and stared at pictures of food.
In an interview with one of the participants sixty years later, he said, “Food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life. And life is pretty dull if that’s the only thing. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.”
Even after the study was over and they were once again at a healthy weight, the participants reported feeling so hungry they couldn’t eat enough. Once done with the study, they ate an average of 5,000 calories a day, sometimes topping out at over 10,000 calories.
So what does this mean for self-imposed deprivation? If you’re tough on yourself and aim for some serious deprivation: cut out all sugar, drastically curb spending, exercise excessively, or stick to an overly strict diet, sudden deprivation might make you crave that forbidden fruit.
But wait, it gets worse. When you try to suppress that craving, it gets stronger. Why? Suppression is like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. Not only are the thoughts right below the surface, but once the effort wears you down, they surge back up with a vengeance, which leads to doing the exact thing you were trying not to do. And then, once we slip, it leads to …
Reason #3: The What the Hell? Effect. So once we accidentally-on-purpose eat the remains of our kid’s abandoned cookie (but it would have gone to waste!) the What the Hell Effect? kicks in, the breaking of the inhibitional dam just because it sprung a leak.
A bite leads to a whole cookie, because well, we’ve ruined things already so we might as well enjoy ourselves, right? A cookie leads to a sleeve and we end up with a stomachache and a bad case of self-loathing. A few bites of cookie quickly expands to eating whatever’s not nailed down for dessert, the day, or maybe the week.
While food is the classic example, anything we deprive ourselves of in the name of self-improvement—screen time, spending, sugar–invites the What the Hell effect. Even a little bit of criminal behavior can snowball: “I got away with stealing that pack of gum, might as well try for the jeans!” In short, we aim for cold turkey, only to end up going whole hog.
To wrap up, there are myriad reasons we do stupid things, and though none of these might explain the Double Down Sandwich tattoo, I’m not sure anything could.
For more on the What the Hell Effect, check out How to Stop Dieting from the archives.
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About the Author
Dr. Ellen Hendriksen was the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast from 2014 to 2019. She is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD). She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA and completed her training at Harvard Medical School. Her scientifically-based, zero-judgment approach is regularly featured in Psychology Today, Scientific American, The Huffington Post, and many other media outlets. Her debut book, HOW TO BE YOURSELF: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, was published in March 2018.