Hey there, Jen here, and this is a happy bit. So it's the 4th of July week in the U.S. Independence Day,

which means we will have a midweek celebration for most of us where we get to watch the fireworks

and maybe watch a 4th of July parade and spend time with family, maybe go to the beach.

It's so much fun.

This is a pleasurable thing for us to do. And I want to talk about paths of pleasure in this

happy bit. In our episode this week with Susan Hyatt, she talked about how we need to experience

greater pleasure in one way or another. And we can choose to experience

pleasure in healthier ways or less healthy ways. Some of us, if we're not experiencing

enough pleasure, fun, connection, all of those good things, we get our pleasure from food

and we develop unhealthy compulsions to eat more than we want to and we end up

being overweight and so on. But when we experience enough pleasure in other ways and get those

dopamine hits in our brains in other ways, we don't have to get it through food. So what happens

when we're experiencing pleasure? Well,

when we have something that causes pleasure, usually that would be sex or connection with friends

and family or yes, food because it's necessary for survival, or being in nature or seeing

something beautiful or creating.

It seems like nature has wired us to experience pleasure for these things so that we will

repeat them.

So we'll survive as a species, right?

But when we are too reliant on one source of pleasure, we can develop what's called

an addiction.

Addiction is defined as when you crave something, thinking of chocolate right now or brownies.

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