Making an interesting life for yourself focuses your attention away from food.

We have lots of open ground where we live and a huge weed problem. Some years it seems we are growing a weed garden instead of a real garden. We weed and weed yet we can’t keep up.

Then we discovered something interesting. Some of our plants were able to keep the weeds out all on their own. These plants are self-seeding, which means they spread and grow by themselves, so they crowd out the pesky weeds and don’t give them any place to grow. We are growing more of these miracle plants in the hope that over the long run the weeds will never again be able to establish themselves in our garden.

It turns out that our relationship with food is similar to the plants that grow so well they crowd out the weeds. Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, thinks you are less likely to need the artificial boost of food and drugs if you create meaningful connections to the world. The more naturally excited about your life you are, the less you need other substitutes. Dr. Volkow says:

If you don’t get excited by everyday things in life, if things look gray, and the drug makes things look extraordinary, that puts you at risk. But if you get great excitement out of a great multiplicity of things, and intensely enjoy these things—seeing a movie, or climbing a mountain—and then you try a drug, you’ll think: What’s the big deal?

Dr. Volkow bases her recipe for happiness on exciting new research on how our body decides what to pay attention to. Food isn’t as potent as drugs, but it can still demand our attention when there aren’t other interests to crowd out the thoughts of food. Food won’t seem so important if we can give ourselves something else to pay attention to.

She is asking of us something we all want for ourselves, but is still hard to do: for us to have interesting lives.

The “Rat Park” experiments conducted in the 1970s by Dr. Bruce Alexander prove the wisdom of Dr. Volkow’s often difficult-to-follow advice. Dr. Alexander and his research team thought rats became addicted to drugs in experiments because the rats had awful lives. They lived lonely lives in isolated wire cages.

To prove their idea, they created Rat Park, 200-square-feet of rat heaven featuring bright balls, tin cans to play with, painted creeks and trees and plenty of space for mating and socializing. The rats were given access to sweet morphine laced drinks. Another group of cage bound rats were also given access to sweet morphine laced drinks.

What the researchers found was surprising, especially if you, like I did, thought all the rats would become equally addicted to the morphine drink. After all, it’s morphine, wouldn’t any rat be attracted to the constant stream of morphine-induced pleasure? Curiously, the answer is no.

Rats living in Rat Park had so much fun they barely touched their sweet morphine cocktail. In contrast, rats stuck in isolated cages eagerly drank more than a dozen times the amount of morphine solution as the rats in the park.

The implication is clear: living unhappy and disconnected lives encourages addiction. A sunflower turns toward the bright sun as it grows. If you don’t have something bright in your life, you may end up turning toward the darkness.