What Most People Get Wrong About Dopamine

What Most People Get Wrong About Dopamine

But you’d be wrong.

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

I hope you brought a considerable amount of dopamine, because you’re going to need it.

You hear that word a lot, don’t you? And when you hear dopamine, you think of reward, right? You think, “Oh, I got a dopamine hit.”

You think of gambling and shiny things and all the reward circuits that your brain has for things in your life. You think of exercising and all the positive, healthy things that you do for dopamine. And then you think of the negative things that you do: the overeating and the eating the bad stuff and the sweets, and the other behaviors that perhaps you shouldn’t be engaging in at all or as much.

But you’d be wrong.

Most people are wrong about dopamine. I’m one of those people until recently. See, I just basically took a broad brush and went, “Oh, you get a dopamine hit, your brain squirts dopamine, and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the stuff.'” But no, oh, that’s not the stuff at all.

How Brain Neurochemicals Drive Seeking

So let’s talk about the four neurochemicals that are involved. Technically, three of them are neurotransmitters while one is a neuropeptide, but let’s go with neurochemicals.

So here’s what you might be misunderstanding and why it’s so hard to sort of break out of certain loops of things, like doomscrolling and so forth.

See, you’re focused on thinking, “Well, I’m just going to scroll until I hit something. It’s that reward and then I stop or whatever.”

But it’s the… it’s the journey, not the destination. That’s your problem. That’s the problem with this stuff.

So, in other words, you are getting these little microbursts of dopamine. But here’s what dopamine does: It actually keeps you seeking. It says, “Keep looking.” We’re in a state of of almost anxiousness and seeking. And that’s really what its function is. We need a healthy amount of dopamine because that keeps… it can put us in the zone, and it can keep us looking when we shouldn’t be looking.

And that’s what happens when you’re scrolling. You get little tiny microbursts of dopamine that says, “Keep looking, keep looking, it’s here, it’s here, keep looking, keep looking.”

The norepinephrine gets released when you think you’ve found something. It provides the clarity and focus.

When you do find the thing that you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff,” that’s when you get the endorphins and the serotonin.

The endorphins are the reward. They’re actually a a painkiller, but they make us feel like we’re relieved. And then the serotonin gives us that that feeling of everything’s okay, like, “This is good. This is the good stuff.”

The Dopamine Cycle and the Empty Room

The problem with that is when you continue to get microbursts for an extended period of time, your brain sort of messes with the receptors and says, “Well, we need to we need to back off from this. This is… we’re getting flooded here.”

So then, you start feeling it less, so you start doing it more.

Do you see how that might be a problem? It would be analogous to you being put in a completely empty room. The dopamine says, “There’s something here, there’s something here.” So you’re looking and looking in the room and you see that it’s empty, but you’re like, “Well, maybe I haven’t checked every corner.” And you keep looking and looking and looking.

And then you see something. So the norepinephrine kicks in and goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s let’s focus on that. I think that’s the thing you wanted.” And you look at it and you’re like, “No, this isn’t… this is a ball of yarn! I don’t want this.”

But now you’re really looking.

So you keep looking and keep looking with your friend dopamine and epinephrine…

And then you find it. You finally find the treasure in there. It’s that thing, that thing you really wanted. Look at it! Just go get it. You go and you pick it up, and that’s when you get the endorphin, and then the serotonin kicks in. Ah, I’m so rewarded and I have so much calmness and satisfaction that I found this thing.

But wait! “Maybe there are more things in this room,” says dopamine. “We should keep looking!”

And that is the cycle that you’re basically repeating, whether you are doing the doomscrolling on Instagram or you are putzing around with something that has no real end or purpose. Okay, I’ve raised your awareness, now what?

Why Long-Term Effort Doesn’t Cause Neurochemical Burnout

Well, you might say, “Well, these are just biochemicals in your brain. These are these are not like foreign substances, so there’s got to be a real purpose for these, right? So how does that work?”

Well, let’s compare this to doing something constructive.

So if you really like your job, and since there are a gazillion jobs, let’s… let’s say writing a book, right?

You sit down and you write a book, those chemicals are involved as well.

Well, why doesn’t that burn out your brain?

This is something I wanted to know, because as soon as I found this, I thought, “Well, wait a second. I have been able to sit down and repeatedly focus for months at a time to complete a novel or a book or research or what have you.”

And I’ve told people that when I look at The Sword and the Sunflower and I look at how big and thick it is, I think, “My God, if somebody handed that to me and said, ‘I need you to write one of these,’ I’d say, ‘No, no, you don’t. I’m not doing that. That’s impossible.'”

So why didn’t my neurotransmitters go, “Whoa, hold your horses here, uh-uh, I’m I’m burnt out”?

And the difference is speed.

So while the dopamine kept me seeking, it was a slow burn of effort.

So if I stop the effort, everything else stopped.

When you’re scrolling, you’re just flicking your thumb going, “Nope, nope, nope, maybe, I don’t know, nope, nope, nope, maybe, I don’t know.” And in fact, it’s so low effort that you could be watching TV or talking to someone and scrolling at the same time, and you probably shouldn’t do that.

But you really have to focus if you’re looking at plot and characters and overarching things and and looking at the story as a whole and the outline and all that other great stuff.

Harnessing Dopamine and Focus for Healthy Productivity

And again, you’re probably coming up with analogies of what you do for a living and think, “Well, yeah, I have a lot of long-term, hard-focused things I have to do. I get lost in my spreadsheet, I get lost in my database, I get lost in my software, I get lost in discussions with clients.”

So the dopamine is keeping you in that seeking state of wanting to talk to them, of wanting to write, of wanting to do.

The norepinephrine keeps you alert and says, “Yeah, this is the thing that we wanted to focus on. Yeah.” In my case, it’s, “Yeah, this is the character development. Oh my God, this is what this person would definitely say here. Yes!”

When you make those connections on your spreadsheet, when you make those connections with people in real life, and they say the things that you would ideally want them to say because they’re getting what you’re saying and you’re making the sale, or you’re making the connection, or you’re teaching something, that’s when you’re getting your endorphins and your serotonin.

And that’s when you go, “Wow, what a rewarding job. This is what I like to do. I helped someone. I made a whole bunch of money. I taught someone something. This is good. I like this.”

Same four neurochemicals applied in a way that’s healthy.

Earned Rewards vs. the Cheap Thrill of Doomscrolling

So moving forward, I think the most important thing to learn here is that it’s not about getting squirted with endorphins, it’s the constant squirt of dopamine. Dopamine is the real thing that we have to worry about.

If you complete a difficult level, and then at the very end you’re rewarded with some sort of reward screen, a a spinny coin, or or a total goes up, or it plays an animation, you go, “Oh, yeah.”

But if all you had to do is hit a button on your keyboard and that exact thing would play, you’d say, “Well, well that’s no fun. There’s no challenge there. I didn’t earn it. I didn’t work for it.”

So when you are writing a book and you look back on it, or you are completing your job, or focusing on a client and so on and so forth, you feel that effort. You look back on what you did. You played the level!

You played the level and you risked your guy dying, and you only have two more quarters left. You risked possibly not making as large of a sale, or not getting the client, or not really getting through to the person with what you’re attempting to teach them. You risk all that, and then you get the reward, and you think, “I want to do that again. I want to go through that challenge with my buddy dopamine and norepinephrine when I’m really focused in on the target.”

And that’s why when you are doomscrolling and you look at the clock and you go, “Oh, it’s an hour and a half later,” that’s when you feel like, “What have I done?”

Because you don’t look back and feel the effort. There is no effort to feel because no effort was made.

Practical Strategies to Stop Doomscrolling and Reclaim Focus

Okay, then how do you break out of doomscrolling and things? Well, let’s… let’s take a step back. First of all, it’s perfectly fine to be doing activities that that don’t necessarily have an endpoint, right?

It’s okay to twiddle your thumbs, or to doodle, or to watch some silly reel once in a while. There’s nothing wrong with having downtime. It’s when the downtime is hours and you are filled with delightful regret at the end.

So one of the things you can do is set a time limit. “I’m just going to mess around for 10 minutes.” Like literally set an alarm. We have all these assistants around us, you… just with your voice, you can set a 10-minute alarm.

Or, actually give yourself a legitimate reward.

Say you’re going to do something in search of something.

Then you’ve brought it forward. Then it moves from your first voice up to your third voice, in which you say, “Hey, I am drawing a line here and I am saying out loud, I’m going to do this.” Now, if that sounds really silly and a waste of time, boom, you just realized that you’re probably not going to do that.

Do you have ways of breaking out of your doomscrolling? Do you have a schedule for doing nonsense?

Ultimately, I think it’s just the balance you feel is really the balance you are.

So, thank you again as always for listening. I will have links in the article to the definitions of these four neurochemicals so that you can look them up and study them yourself. Take care.

Thank you for listening as always. Go to markbradford.org to see all my author-related things. Go to Alchemy for Life to see coaching, speaking, writing, and this podcast.

Alchemy for Life theme by Mark Bradford and Alchemy for Life. All background music is by Audionautix and Jason Shaw.

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Links to authoritative sources:

• Dopamine: National Institutes of Health (NIH) – Dopamine in Health and Disease or Mental Health America / Mayo Clinic – What Is Dopamine?
• Norepinephrine: Harvard Health Publishing – Brain Chemicals and Communication
• Endorphins: National Institutes of Health (PubMed) – Neurotransmitters and Peptides
• Serotonin: Cleveland Clinic – Serotonin Function & Levels

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