Dopamine Junkies

This is going to be a short post today since I’m limited on time. However, I wanted to share something I heard on a podcast that seemed very relevant to this challenge. This researcher was talking about dopamine and how our brains seek it out over and over again. However, not only do they seek it out, but they also strive to reach a point of homeostasis. That means that as soon as we get a hit of dopamine (like from scrolling on social media or eating chocolate) or brains immediately start downregulating it to get it back to a baseline level.

However, the more dopamine that’s released, the more it has to be downregulated. Think of a see-saw...the more one side goes up, the most the other side has to get pushed back down. If you eat an apple, a little dopamine gets released and that’s easy for your brain to handle. However, the more concentrated forms of pleasure release a huge amount and that’s why we feel the come-down (kind of miserable, irritable, or empty) afterward. That’s our brains trying to pull that dopamine level back down. That feels crappy. And you know what we do when we feel crappy? We seek out another hit of dopamine.

The cycle goes on and on until we’re essentially dopamine junkies. The good thing is that our brains can always get back to a nice, calm, homeostatic place if we’re willing to give up those constant, overly accessible, enormous hits of dopamine. That’s the hard part. I don’t know about you, but I find the chemistry and biology of it fascinating and super motivating. We’re basically slaves to these processes in our brains unless there’s some awareness and intervention. But thankfully we're human and capable of awareness and behavior change. Okay, there’s your science lesson for the day!