Dopamine Speech

Point one: what is dopamine?

Dopamine is associated with rewards, but it’s more about motivation and craving.

Take 2 rats, put them in separate cages, and make them press a lever for food. Dopamine is released
when they get food, but if you deplete dopamine in one of the rats, but the rat still enjoys the food,
so dopamine isn’t involved with the enjoyment of pleasures, but in the motivation. The other rat will
work to get its food.

A human without much dopamine can still experience pleasure, but they will have no motivation to
pursue things that will give them pleasure. Dopamine drives forward the evolution of our species –
makes us pursue things that we don’t already have.

Rather than thinking of dopamine as a signal for reward, it’s more accurate to think about dopamine
as driving motivation and craving to go seek rewards and it helps for us to tell where we are doing in
life – good or bad. And when you look back on a time in your life when you feel better, it’s because in
that time, you had higher dopamine than current levels.

When you make that process conscious, and you understand how dopamine is released and how it
changes perspective and behaviour, you can work with it.

Point two: how to work with dopamine?

You can still achieve pleasure without achievement.

If you’ve ever scrolled social media, and you’re like “I don’t even know why I’m doing this?” and it
doesn’t even feel that good, and you used to enjoy it so much, like starting to watch podcasts, and
then they start to suck and get boring, if you stop watching it for a while, and then you come back to
it, then they will start to feel good again.

The problem is that when people don’t feel motivated, they still get the mild hits of opioid hits. If you
take dopamine drugs, like cocaine, people will only think about what they want more of, and these
drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward, and only the drug can give
this much dopamine, and the opioid effects like indulging in social media and video games come to
the point that they no longer evoke motivation and craving.

Dopamine itself isn’t the reward, it’s the build up to the reward.

The reward usually has a bliss-like property, which isn’t bad, but now we can just sit there like the rat
with no dopamine and abuse it, and the pleasures no longer work to affect the feel good circuits, so
there is no reason to pursue anything.

The problem isn’t pleasures. The problem is that pleasure experienced without prior requirement for
pursuit is terrible for us.

Now we are finding that those who will be successful are those we can control their relationship to
pleasures.

Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure, whereas a good life is a
progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure that includes pleasure through pain and
hard work. When you achieve pleasure through hard work and effort, the rewards are that much
greater when they arrive.

So any situation where someone isn’t motivated, a lot of people think is ADHD, but the majority of
the time, it’s just people over-consuming dopamine from various sources.

Also, the context switch from TikTok is insane, usually you’d have to walk from your house to a forest
to get a context switch, but now you just get 10,000 context switches from scrolling for 30 minutes
on TikTok.

So knowledge of knowledge can now allow us to intervene.

So if you don’t feel good and nothing feels good, are you depressed? Maybe, but perhaps you’ve just
saturated the dopamine circuits, so what do you do? You have to stop indulging in dopamine.

Any pain you feel – a long day, no sleep, TV won’t work, the amount of pleasure that you eventually
experience, is directly related to how much pain you experience.

Going to the gym or having an ice bath is painful, but afterwards, the dopamine goes up by 250%
after an ice bath.

Pain evokes dopamine release after the pain is over.

More friction = more dopamine. That serves as its own amplifier.

The pursuit is actually the reward, and seeking dopamine as a motivator, and not just as a reward is
infinite.