What is Dopamine?
Dopamine is a critical chemical messenger in the brain that plays a key role in motivation, reward, and pleasure. It’s often referred to as the “feel-good hormone” because it’s released in response to pleasurable or rewarding experiences. However, the role of dopamine in the brain is much more complex than just making us feel good. Dopamine is involved in a wide range of processes, including focus, attention, decision-making, and motor control.
The one thing we don’t want to do is over stimulate and lower the sensitivity of the dopamine pathways and drain our dopaminergic system. There are a lot of ways and things available to us in our daily lives to do so.
What then ends up happening is you have to increase the stimulus higher and higher just to get the feel good effects. This then drains us, lowers our mood and drive to do anything productive because our brains are wired to get cheap feel good hits instead of working for them.
‘The more you press that morphine button beside your hospital bed, the less effective it becomes’
Leveraging dopamine to be at our best
So, how can you leverage your dopamine to improve your daily life? One key strategy is to focus on the effort and reward ratio.
The effort and reward ratio refers to the balance between the effort required to achieve a goal or task, and the reward that you receive for that effort.
As I mentioned, there are a lot of ways and things accessible to us that give us quick and easy reward. Scrolling through social media, getting likes and comments or playing mobile games, can all provide a cheap dopamine hit. The bad thing is they often leave us feeling empty and unfulfilled in the long run.
How many of you once you open some chocolates can’t stop until you feel sick?
Another stimulant which is very bad for our brains and hormones is porn and a large amount of stimulating images.
What can we do to fix this?
The thing to do to help reset your dopaminergic system is to cut a stimulus off all together every so often, then manage it back in if needs be and keep it under control. If it’s something that doesn’t provide us any utility and isn’t good for us like porn, leave it out all together!
One thing that takes a lot of effort to get reward is resistance training or exercise in general. I often find clients learn to curb cravings, excessive comfort eating or addictive habits once they start resistance training and exercising regularly. This is because they are conditioning their brain to get rewards and good feelings from effort.
So are you lacking drive, motivation and generally feeling down or tired?
Try assessing what’s actually making you feel good each day.
Are you running on caffeine?
Do you need a few biscuits at 10am to get you through work?
Do you drink a lot of sugary drinks, mindlessly scroll through your phone when you should be focusing on something?
Do you look at pictures of naked people or watch porn often to give yourself a buzz?
It may be that you’re over stimulating yourself and no matter how much sleep you get or how much “good” food and drink you eat, you just can’t shake feeling low and tired.
I’d advise going cold turkey on a couple of things at a time and replace them with more high effort rewarding things. Start by hitting the gym.
You won’t regret it and your energy will sky rocket!
Team Sozo