Dopamine

📚 Reading

Cravings are a normal part of being human.

They are intense and persistent desires for something, and they are both fleeting and compelling.

What’s interesting is that they can be entirely unconscious and yet control our behaviour.

After I left London for Melbourne in 2021, I joined a mental health start-up where I was asked to design an app to help people quit smoking.

I jumped into the research into addiction.

And what I learned astounded me.

I thought that addictions were limited to certain food, substances or experiences.

And I thought that only certain people were predisposed to addiction.

But an addiction is any repetitive behaviour associated with cravings.

Cravings offer temporary relief but you are unable to control your behaviour despite awareness of negative consequences.

My addictions

When I looked at my own life I realised just how many addictions I had…

Coffee to help me feel productive. But it gave me energy crashes.

Sugar to cheer me up. But it put on weight.

Television to numb me out. But it consumed too much of my time.

And my biggest addiction was my phone.

Whenever I felt a sense of discomfort, my hand unconsciously reached for my pocket and before I knew it I was scrolling mindlessly.

But why?

The secret lies in dopamine.

Dopamine is known as the reward chemical because the brain releases it when we acquire something we desire.

We get a very pleasant feeling of reward.

If you go for a walk, you produce some dopamine. This helps you feel better, and feel proud of the action you’ve just done.

You feel alive and if the dopamine release was big enough, you feel motivated to repeat it again and again and you will be rewarded for it.

In other words, dopamine helps motivate us to repeat actions because it makes us feel good.

The dark side of dopamine

However, the ability to release dopamine on demand is a major cause of addiction.

Think about it. Rather than having to do something that takes effort, like go for a walk, you can feel good with one puff of a cigarette.

Or you can use your phone…

With social media, you have an on-demand supply of dopamine to make you feel good.

Your body is actually being efficient in giving you the same predictable “hit” of dopamine in exchange for the least amount of effort.

But dopamine highs don’t come without costs. With constant exposure, you need more dopamine to achieve the same feeling.

You are also less motivated to search for dopamine in other, healthier ways that may take more effort.

From this angle, we can see that addictions are just a method of self-regulation to help us feel better.

We all live stressful lives in the modern world. And yet we have never received education on how to regulate ourselves in healthy ways.

So, we end up depending on patterns that have supported us in the past.

For some people, if they feel upset, they might reach for comfort food.

Others might turn to social media, alcohol, or shopping.

These behaviours are simply survival responses.

We continue to repeat them even if they harm us because our minds have associated the activity with positive feelings.

We have been operating unconsciously for a large part of our lives.

Like rats in a maze, after receiving a reward enough times we have defaulted to following certain paths.

If you truly want freedom, you need to let go of this conditioning.

What can you do?

There are three steps to breaking free from the control of your addictions:

1. Identify your patterns
2. Learn your triggers
3. Find new, healthier ways to regulate yourself

As a journalling exercise, you could write a list of all the behaviours you repeat that you think may be unhealthy for you.

Choose one and ask, “what triggers me to do this behaviour?”

Triggers could be environmental cues, times of day, feelings or experiences (e.g. stress, first thing when I wake up, when I’m bored)

When you become aware of your triggers, you can interrupt the pattern of behaviour before you complete it.

Continue to pay close attention to this pattern. Sometimes you will only notice after you have done it and that’s OK.

Know that there are other ways of regulating your emotions.

Methods that are healthy for you, don’t cost a thing, and make you feel good about yourself.

The way I get my on-demand dopamine hit is by meditating, going for walks in nature, speaking to a friend, doing new activities, cooking a healthy meal, working on my projects.

📝 Journal prompts

Write a list of all the behaviours you repeat that you think may be unhealthy for you

Choose just one of these that you’d like to address first. What triggers you to do this behaviour?

Triggers could be environmental cues, times of day, feelings or experiences (e.g. stress, first thing when I wake up, when I’m bored)

What are some healthy things you could do to self-regulate?

🛠️ Tool

Elimination diet

Choose a pattern that you’d like to change, for example drinking coffee, eating snacks or watching Netflix.

Challenge yourself to see whether you can remove this behaviour from your life, just for a little while.

You could start with eliminating it just one day a week and gradually increase it to a continuous 30 days.

At the end of 30 days, you can decide whether to swap it out for a different pattern or add a new one to your diet.

Through practice, you’ll master how to consciously choose these behaviours rather than impulsively react to a craving.

🧘‍♀️ Guided meditation

This guided meditation takes you on a journey into your mind and starts to unpack why habits are so hard to break.

Listen to the meditation here.

💫 Wrap-up

Today we learned that receiving dopamine on demand is the reason that we develop addictions to unhealthy patterns of behaviour. And we talked about how we find better ways to self-regulate.

Tomorrow we are going to uncover the secrets of our sixth sense…