Everything in moderation. This expression about self restraint takes a pretty extreme position on the matter. That’s what tips me off first. Second is that my childhood was peppered with this phrase. My mother has many phrases up her sleeve, but this might be her favorite. Probably added it soon after she had her third boy (she didn’t go for a fourth).

Moderation is a useful mantra that can be applied across the board without doing much harm. We use it in the form of self control; 3 cookies will make me happier while not harming my long term health, whereas 16 cookies would be overindulgent! I catch myself in this type of self negotiation at least 10 times a day. The brain can perform incredible feats of mental gymnastics to lawyer itself into getting another cookie. You have to appeal to the jury of reason presenting moderation as exhibit A in prosecution of your cookie consumption.

The policy of moderation works really well for controlling unhealthy junk food. This is its bread and butter. Where it makes its cake! But of course moderation would never let you have your cake and eat it too! There are plenty of things going on today that we all would agree are intolerable and better in less than moderation – Uighur concentration camps, child trafficking, modern slavery, etc. So maybe this rule is too simplistic to apply to everything. But we’re left with a question of when is more better? Not to beat the dead horse with food examples (and now bad euphemisms). But American culture clearly thinks more is better in regard to portion size compared to most other countries. What about an ethically charged question like are more lives better? Most people would only answer based on the context of those lives but I’m generally in favor of increasing the number of people that have ever lived. It depends on whether the human life will experience a net positive having lived. (Unless you are an antinatalist–then you believe not having ever lived is better than living. This doesn’t mean antinatalists hate life…they’re already here…but they do seem like a bunch of downers. And they still don’t care even if you sweeten the pot with a promise of this hypothetical life to be the most happy, joyful and harmless life! Their beliefs are born of arguments like: the impossibility of consent, and minimizing suffering is more important than maximizing happiness. Fortunately, they’re not passing their beliefs down to progeny.)

Forget about the question of when is more better, we have paradoxes like “less is more” to deal with. A 1998 study found an overfilled ice cream serving with 7 oz of ice cream was more valued than an underfilled serving with 8 oz. Or a 1995 study that found that athletes who had just won silver medals tended to be less happy than those who had just won bronze medals. Here there seems to be a framing effect where people are not sensitive to the actual value of x, but to the relative position of x within that frame. Using the phrase everything in moderation is helpful because it provides a reference point for both good and bad things. It’s especially helpful when we’re unsure if something is good or bad because we can hedge away from the extremes.

Everything in moderation saves us from the worst outcomes. I still can’t decide on sunscreen; there is a surprising amount of controversy. For instances like these, it could potentially turn out either way. Either we should not have been rubbing chemicals into our bodies for no reason, or we should have been using safe lotion to protect us from the sun. Since we don’t know we’re best off taking a moderate approach where hopefully neither side kills us. The world is too complex for us to know every little effect let alone the combination of effects from all our actions and habits. Too little sugar and you have a tiny chance of fainting, too much sugar and you’ll get diabetes (not really a fair trade off by the way). Moderation makes sense considering how much flux there is in the popular sphere of nutrition and diet. And for this reason it’s a good and simple heuristic to live by when we don’t have complete information.

But surely there is something that transcends any reason for moderation. Like what about happiness? Here I have to side with a different trite cliché: there is no good without evil. Unfortunately for us, the self-moderation of happiness is written into our neurochemistry and we have to walk forever on the hedonic treadmill. Unfortunately even winning the lottery doesn’t have an effect on your long term happiness. You could play it, but reddit says you might want to avoid winning. Some people think they’d trade their boring even-keeled suburban life for an emotional rollercoaster of high peaks and low valleys. But introduce them to bipolar disorder and they would very soon miss the mood stabilizers in their brain. A cycle of depression and elevated mood follow one another leading to a higher risk of anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide. Getting off the hedonic treadmill isn’t really a viable option, nor should we be ungrateful to the moderation circuitry we do have.

Just as emotions are hardwired to return to baseline after some period, the mind and body too thrives on returning to familiar patterns of routine. As we grow older we become really efficient at living. The systems of moderation (habits, values, routines) we develop allow us to respond to whatever life throws our way. This is why traveling in a foreign country is so tiring. It cuts through all the conventions we’ve built up and makes us really interact with the world (through culture) in a fundamentally different way. In this way traveling is really good not just in a social sense (i.e. fostering openness and cultural pluralism) but in a healthy sense. It forces you to break out of your neural pathways and solve new problems. For this reason it could be helpful to frame moderation differently.

As much as my mother moderated my junk food intake, my father was happy to not moderate the stress of mountains of homework and school projects. I would be conveniently reminded before a long night at the kitchen table of the importance of stress. Stress serves an important function in growth. As much as it’s true for astronauts’ bone integrity and muscle growth, it’s also true for the brain. Stimulation of the brain and creating new synapses is the key idea behind combatting neurodegenerative diseases (i.e. crosswords to combat alzheimers). In recent years, with the help of Michael Pollan’s latest book, psychedelics are finding their way into clinical trials for a range of psychotherapeutic treatments for addiction, anxiety, PTSD and depression. For depression our current prescription of antidepressants seems decently effective at moderating the condition. But it’s not uncommon for users of SSRIs to feel emotionally muted, apathetic, and/or [fully moderate]. The contrast between the symptomatic approach of antidepressants and the potential curative treatment with psychedelics is clear. We don’t have any FDA approved psychedelic treatments yet so the jury is still out, but there are other treatments that are in the same spirit. One of them, requiring no drug, is the potentially antidepressant effects of sleep deprivation. Efficacy aside, people react differently to different types of therapy so exploring a diverse range of treatments is worth it. And a curative approach without being too invasive or infinite side-effects is vastly better than palliative care.

“Everything in moderation” is a phrase that can be applied to life broadly, especially in the context of 3 boys. But it shouldn’t be applied blindly, rather it should be a tool for framing an issue with incomplete information. And it’s not helpful when we need a drastic change or outcome.

Single sentence refutation: An infinite amount of anything is not infinitely better so there is always some sort of moderation.