The Problem With Dopamine

When most people think about dopamine, they think about pleasure, but it is actually most instrumental in helping us maximize our future resources.

Dopamine is responsible for states of:

• energy
• motivation
• excitement
• confidence
• dissatisfaction
• unhappiness
• misery
• constantly chasing something we can never capture

In essence, the neuromodulator dopamine is seeing something in your mind and striving to create it.

This is a familiar state for most of my clients and particularly individuals in tech. It’s a beautiful thing to create something out of nothing, but it requires a certain balance. When taken too far, spending too much time in the dopaminergic state can feel awful.

There is a quote by Daniel Lieberman about dopamine that best illustrates this: “the guy who is most able to afford the beach house is least likely to enjoy it."

What this means is that the person who is highly dopaminergic is the person who will be able to achieve the big goals and earn the big rewards. Yet, if a person is this dopaminergic, they are less likely to know how to shift out of this state into a state of contentment.

This is essentially a catch-22. You can probably think of many examples of individuals like this in your workplace or in pop culture. This explains why so many people who accomplish so much are more miserable than the average person.

So, are we just doomed to never really enjoy anything?

Well, no, this would be an incredibly depressing article if that were the case.

If you relate to this feeling of never being satisfied, always feeling agitated and worried you may be lacking in what Daniel Lieberman calls “here and now” chemicals.

These are substances such as serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, and endocannabinoids. They are all correlated with enjoying things in the present moment. Brain circuits that produce here-and-now neurochemicals compete with and even suppress the production of dopamine.

Dopamine isn’t all bad, though. In individuals with high executive function, essentially the ability to override short-term desires for more optimal long-term ones, dopamine serves as a driving force toward action in the pursuit of goals. People with high dopamine control systems tend to be intellectual, ambitious, and overachieving.

The downside is that they often have a difficult time enjoying any of their achievements due to their excess of control in dopamine systems.

In order to feel better emotionally, we must find a balance between our dopamine and here-and-now chemicals.

Although dopamine is the source of our drive, it is actually only one of many neuromodulators that color our experience of life.

The issue is that in our current culture in most Western industrialized nations, we have set out mental models and conditioned ourselves to primarily view life from the context of dopaminergic fulfillment.

Yet, in order to feel better in a consistent and stable way, we cannot rely on dopamine, as in its nature, dopamine needs to be unstable in order to regulate itself. Remember, dopamine works via a seesaw-type mechanism, as it goes up, it must come down.

So if you are someone that can say that your life is a good one, but you are struggling to enjoy it, you are most likely too dopamine-focused.

Dopamine cannot exist without the future or the past.

Dopamine is most often attributed to future thinking. “I want that.” It is the drive to pursue our future goals.

Yet, the past can also be a sneaky way of shifting your mind into a more dopaminergic state. If you think of things in your past and wish you still had them. This is also dopamine.

The only real solution to this is to be in the here and now.

The present offers us the opportunity to engage neuromodulators that create feelings of calm and contentment. They allow us to recuperate from that constant, exhausting feeling of never having enough.

Although many of us have heard this concept of the present as important, in my experience, most of us are not quite there in understanding it.

The key is to not judge where you are right now. This current moment, do not judge it in any way.

The resistance we create against reality activates our dopaminergic pathways.

Essentially, we are telling our brains "this is not good enough, let's change it".

This is adaptive in many situations, but most of us overuse it and feel unhappy and exhausted throughout our days.

Consider using the phrase "Thank you for this moment, I have no complaints." Throughout your week and see if you can reduce the resistance you have to the here and now. You may be surprised by how much better you feel.

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Reading

The Molecule of More

If you are interested in dopamine and the impact of neuromodulators on your behavior and motivations, this is the book to read.