Are you Unwell due to the Nopamine effect?

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Dopamine fuels happiness – the more you have, the happier you are!

Neuroscience

Here comes Nopamine. The more your dopamine anticipation is, when unfulfilled, the less happy you are.

Coacharya

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Don’t search for Nopamine. The word doesn’t exist, not yet. Let me claim my 3 seconds of blogging notoriety!

I am getting notoriety for other unforeseen reasons. A reader was upset that I denigrated single mothers and non-believers in my last blog. I didn’t think I did. The message I wanted to convey was that loss of trust in marriages and religion leads to unwellness. I am a strong supporter of all personal choices and opposer of all institutional impositions, whether societal, religious or governance norms. Irrespective of my personal justification, I am grateful for such developmental feedback to move into my better Self. I apologise to anyone who feels hurt by anything in my blogs that they perceive as offensive and request feedback. I apologise for causing hurt, however unintended, not the content of what I wrote.

Back to the as-yet-undiscovered Nopamine. Here’s a very personal Nopamine effect. I desperately needed the email of companies to seek some information and to lodge a complaint. If you have been awake for the last few years, you would have noticed that email IDs for customer ‘dis’-service have disappeared from most major corporate websites and searches. Google as a company has none. You cannot email any customer service entity at any corporate major in B2C business if you don’t know a person and their email ID. All old-style [email protected] or [email protected] have disappeared. Try them and find out for yourself. It’s the same with many governments and large corporate websites. They do not want you to contact them anymore. You are not worth their attention.

?Many provide a telephone number instead. One on which you rarely reach a human. A robot weaves circles around you. If on the rare possibility, you have an option to communicate with a human, you will be on hold forever.? Some offer to call you back if you leave a message. You can keep waiting and hoping. Even bigger scams are a contact page where you fill in your need or complaint with no hope of getting a response, or a chatbot which leads to a fixed range of answers the company wants to provide. Who said disruptive AI is not here? It has been around for some years now disrupting our Dopamine with Nopamine.

You approach the customer service page of an institutional website with great dopamine anticipation of being served. Step by step the anticipation sours into Nopamine. Pleasurable expectation of a response descends to helplessness, disgust, and anger. Yet, most of these institutions claim 9 to 10 responses on NPS. Are they for real?

?Every major service provider provides dis-service to their customers. I wish the CEOs playing their trumpets loudly would once a while reach out anonymously to experience the quality of service the company provides. The result is mass disappointment and distrust. In an earlier blog, I spoke of distrust being the source of unwellness in our society today. Tragically, corporates seem to lead the way in this Nopamine effect leading to dissatisfaction and unwellness.

You may ask, is it any different from other societal institutions?

Governments have always been at the lowest levels of trust in many countries. You need to have your head and heart examined if you trust a politician. Bureaucrats and judiciary elicited better levels of trust. A 2018 IMF blog here says trust levels across all institutions are less than 50%. Since the pandemic and its repercussions this could be significantly lower now. People would trust the toss of a coin more than institutions of governance, business and religion.

?Yet, at its core, the human mind would like to hope, believe and trust. These qualities bring optimism, resilience and confidence helping us excel in what we do. It’s possible that our expectations are higher than reality. Many studies have shown that the absence of wealth dissatisfies, but wealth doesn’t ensure happiness. The celebrated study of Princeton’s Nobel Laureates Kahneman and Deaton on the magic happiness salary of $75,000 in the USA was restudied with their help. The 2023 restudy results concluded that ‘money can keep buying happiness for already happy people, but among the most unhappy, the money helps stave off unhappiness only to a point’. Simply put, wealth does not buy happiness. Dopamine becomes Nopamine.?

Does happiness mean wellness? The Grant studies, possibly the longest on record measuring the correlation between happiness, life satisfaction and mental health say yes. Its message is ‘Happiness is Love. Full stop’. This is a scientific study, not new-age spiritual fiction.

?Is there a message somewhere in all this? Perhaps Nopamine will be discovered one day and a pill to cure it. Till then, can we practise what all these studies point to 'Do good for others and yourself, and what you are good at'? Some of us call this spirituality. You can invent your own term.

?I should add what I discovered. Always expect the worst. Then you cannot go wrong. No Nopamine!

Reflection

What are the experiences that release your Nopamine? Please share.

I shall be writing about the crisis in mental wellness we are experiencing globally over the next few months. Coacharya plans to run a 20-hour workshop on scientific and spiritual approaches one can use to be well holistically, including yoga and meditation practices and psychological techniques.

?We would like your interaction on this subject. We would like to learn what you have tried successfully in the mental wellness space. We would also like to learn what may add value to you both in these blogs and the workshop.

Ram is a co-founder and mentor at Coacharya?https://coacharya.com. Ram's focus is the integration of Eastern wisdom with modern science, spiritually, systemically and sustainably. Visit Coacharya.

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