Quit Dopamine
I realized recently that I’m a dopamine junkie. It’s not been an easy thing to come to terms with because it means acknowledging that a lot of the activities I find most enjoyable are the ones that I need to ease out of my life. Tough.
Dopamine is a bitch. It makes you feel amazing, and some of the most insidious acts give you the most. There’s a phrase circling the wellness space right now called, “dopamine deprivation” and one, albeit small, example is delaying your coffee in the morning. If you’re a coffee drinker you probably understand that great sense of relief when you wake up and immediately brew that hot cup of coffee. Even thinking about it right now is giving your brain a small hit of dopamine.
What people in the wellness space are saying to do is to delay that cup of coffee an hour or two. You can have the coffee, but you should sit in the pain of not getting it right away for a few hours before you reward yourself. This will regulate your dopamine and show that YOU are in charge, rather than that neurotransmitter being in charge of you.
“Dopamine is a bitch.”
The example is silly, (although I know a lot of people who swear by delayed dopamine with coffee), but you get the idea. There’s tons of research right now on how putting yourself in painful situations like a cold shower or exercise can be revitalizing when we’re so used to getting everything we want and being rewarded heavily for it. It’s almost like by choosing what activities we want to be painful, we can more appreciate the high dopamine activities that really bring us joy. I like the idea of this.
To zone in specifically, I LOVE a video game. Scientists measure that they’re a gold mine for dopamine release because of the constant new exploration and leveling up. In fact, the amount of dopamine released playing video games is between smoking cigarettes and doing cocaine. Pretty wild.
I’m pretty lucky that video games never take over my life. I can’t think of a time where playing video games kept me from getting work done or turning an assignment in on time. But I can say that when I’m in a bout of playing video games - usually a 3 week period every 3 or 4 months - everything else sucks. And I mean that scientifically. Life just sucks. Playing the game is great. Everything else, bad.
My brain is getting a constant supply of dopamine so why would I want to cook dinner with my partner, or do work that I generally find enjoyable, or see friends? It’s never going to give me the dopamine high that video games do, so why bother?
When we allow high dopamine (and low importance) tasks into our lives, we skew the data. We allow for what was once a gratifying activity like cooking dinner with your partner to fall in our dopamine perception because it just can’t keep up with the mega dopamine of the video games (or whatever activity of choice). Dopamine outliers skew the data.
So what does this mean? Are we going to completely get rid of any activity that brings us true joy that we’re super excited about because it’s going to give us a huge dopamine release and skew our dopamine?
Absolutely not. But eliminating low hanging fruit dopamine vending machines from our lives isn’t asking you to miss the Beyonce concert. Like so many aspects of our lives, we’re looking at moderation in order to succeed.
Dopamine moderation.
Can we look at the activities that we do in our lives and gauge what activities are high dopamine/low value? Without thinking for more than 30 seconds I can think of this list for myself:
Video Games
Social Media
TV
Eating Dessert
And once we have this list, are we able to figure out if we can decrease the dopamine associated with these activities or if we need to get rid of them altogether? Could we shorten our TV time to one episode a day? Could we say that dessert is a once-a-week thing rather than an every-night thing? Can we put restrictions on social media that kick us off the platforms after a certain amount of time?
OR
Do we need to quit those dopamine vending machines cold turkey because they’re just too rich?
Here’s the thing - and I’m figuring this out as I write it - for some of these activities, I believe that we can curb the dopamine response by limiting time. Not every episode of TV is going to give you so much dopamine that no other activity sounds exciting enough for you that day. But then anecdotally, I know that as soon as I start playing video games my satisfaction for just about anything else in my life goes down. My relationships suffer, I’m unhappy, I’m unmotivated. In this case, it feels like ridding myself of this dopamine outlier cold turkey is the best or only solution.
Trying to keep our daily activities within a smaller range keep us off the rollercoaster of motivation. We can accomplish this dopamine average by decreasing certain high dopamine tasks or getting rid of them completely. We can also decrease the dopamine release by making the activity slightly painful before inevitably doing it (i.e. delayed coffee consumption).
If you’ve been unmotivated to do the activities that you know you love to do, it’s worth asking the questions: do you have a dopamine outliers that are skewing the data? Could getting control of those outliers bring you more satisfaction in the rest of your daily tasks? Could you be more deliberate about WHAT (non-daily) activities you allow to give you a huge dopamine boost (i.e. our Beyonce concert)?
Behavior change is hard and NO ONE wants to do it. Leave me and my habits alone. But if you’re really looking for motivation to come more easily, the key is deliberately choosing where you want to get your dopamine. It’s as simple as that.
“it’s worth asking the questions: do you have a dopamine outliers that are skewing the data?”
Dopamine reaction chart: 1-9 how much dopamine is released when you do a certain task? are the 789’s worth it? Cutting them out of your lives could be the change you need to feel motivated and energized again.
