We’ve come to understand our behavior and choices in terms of chemicals. Certain stimuli (hugs, coffee, bike rides, social media scrolling, etc.) produce certain responses (contentment, the jitters, endorphin highs, anxiety, etc.). Our daily lives then, have a pharmaceutical quality.
Bike rides are anti-anxiety and anti-depressant. We used to say ‘fun,’ but science has helped us understand what fun is. It’s dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.
When we talk about what we love about riding bikes, we sometimes refer back to when we first learned, the elation of freedom, of exploration, of independence and pure fun. Drug addicts spin a similar narrative of “chasing that first high.”
I wonder about this often.
Sometimes I ride a bike like a rat in a lab, furiously pressing a bar and hoping against hope that a food pellet will emerge. Sometimes I ride a bike because I don’t know what else to do. Sometimes it just feels like my healthiest compulsion.
Very few of my adult pursuits have paid off as consistently as bike riding, but there are days when I’m out there sawing away at the pedals wondering when it’s going to work, and I exhaust myself and go home and feel as miserable as I did before. This is not common, but it happens. Sometimes it even happens a few times in a row.
And I start to feel a little panicky.
Part of it is that I depend on the bike for some level of relief from the things that bother me, the garden variety nonsense we all contend with. Part of it is that I know well that a drug that stops being effective is a drug the user will stop taking.
But then I remember, the human mind isn’t usually perfectly rational. We will go on doing a thing that only partially serves or interest, or that we think might eventually again serve our interests for a long, long time. This, I believe, is why so many of us continue to scroll through social media, which used to be a nice way to connect with people not in our immediate lives but has now devolved into a cauldron of emotional reactivity. And we scroll.
So I throw a leg over and push the pedals up and out of the driveway, because some compulsions are less nefarious than others.
Thumbs Up to this. Thank you.