Food, drink, drugs, a long run, a new personal best. They look like very different things. Some of them people worry about. Some of them people praise you for.
But I've come to think a lot of us are chasing the same thing underneath. The hit.
I know the hit from food. That moment when you give in, and for a little while everything goes quiet. I know it from running too. The rush at the end of a hard session, the high that carries you through the rest of the day. And over the years I've listened to a lot of people describe the hit they got from a drink, or from something stronger. The words were different. The feeling they were describing was the same.
The brain has a reward system, and it runs on chemistry. Dopamine is a big part of it. What surprised me is that dopamine isn't really about pleasure. It's about wanting. The craving. The anticipation. The pull towards the next one.
That explained a lot for me. It's why you can keep reaching for something you don't even enjoy any more.
The wanting carries on long after the enjoying has stopped.
And the hit doesn't stay the same size. The more you lean on it, the more you need for the same effect. A bit more food. A bit more distance. A few more drinks. It's a ladder with no top.
This is your baseline. Tap to take the hit.
Many of mine came when I was looking to bury my mind in the hit. Most came from running marathons too close together. London, Belfast, and the hardest of them all, the arduous Mourne Way mountain marathon, all within six weeks. I clearly hadn't recovered from the first one. Who ever really does? What was I feeling? I knew it would come back on me tenfold, whether as injury or in my head. The extreme high of finishing, then the low of everyday life. And the people nearest and dearest to me were affected by those all-consuming events.
None of this makes the things themselves bad. Food is fuel and pleasure and family. Exercise has given me more than I can say. The question isn't what you're doing. It's why, and what happens when you can't have it.