WHEN CONSUMPTION NO LONGER NEEDS PLEASURE

July 2026

What if stress makes us consume more without making us enjoy what we consume? In a triple-blind crossover experiment, 66 healthy adults with little previous opioid exposure underwent either social-evaluative stress—the pressure of being judged by others—or a neutral condition, then received oxycodone, a prescription opioid painkiller, or saline. They could subsequently work to obtain more of the sampled dose. Stress increased oxycodone self-administration by six percentage points. In this sample, the effect was driven by men, without greater drug liking, improved mood, or stress relief (Eikemo et al. 2026).

The result is narrow. A laboratory task involving 66 healthy participants cannot predict addiction, establish population-wide sex differences, or represent people with opioid dependence. But the randomized crossover design compares the same person, with the same drug, under stress and without it. The experimentally supported point is precise: drug-seeking increased while reported liking and relief did not.

This fractures the comforting psychology of consumption. Repetition is routinely interpreted as desire: if someone takes more, clicks again, buys again, or works again, the act is counted as preference. Yet stress may intensify repetition without increasing satisfaction. Under evaluative pressure, behaviour can become more insistent while pleasure remains flat. “Choice” then records the force acting through the subject and misnames it as wanting.

The forecast is an economy increasingly able to profit from behaviour that nobody enjoys. Workplaces, platforms, and markets organize continuous social evaluation—ratings, rankings, targets, visibility—then interpret the repetitions produced under pressure as demand. This experiment does not show that metrics cause addiction. It exposes the mechanism worth watching: stress can enlarge consumption without enlarging pleasure. Psychiatry will treat the substance and the “addictive personality”; the architecture producing the urge to repeat will remain intact.

Liviu Poenaru

Reference

Eikemo, Marie, Guro Engvig Løseth, Molly Carlyle, Martin Trøstheim, Gernot Ernst, Claudia Pazmandi, Matthew Thompson, et al. 2026. “Effects of Psychosocial Stress on Opioid Self-Administration in Healthy Participants: A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Crossover Trial.” Nature Mental Health, July 29.