Daddy Dopamine
Illustrated by Kimi Whiting
Most of us are familiar with sitting down to watch a couple of TikToks and blinking forward a couple of hours; or putting off an assignment we were excited to write until the thought of touching a laptop makes you want to drop out and pursue a career in stripping. These experiences are all to do with dopamine, a chemical most of us haven’t heard of, but have spent our lives chasing.
Dopamine is your pleasure endorphin, it’s a wee chemical in your brain that makes you feel good. It’s key for motivation, productivity, and happiness.
Dopamine plays a significant role in what we know as the reward system. We get satisfaction from completing important tasks, this is what encourages us to get our shit together.
It’s also why people with dopamine deficiencies (i.e. ADHD, depression or Parkinson’s) can come across as a mess or lazy. The brain providing what it needs to in order to get up and live life productively.
The purpose is for survival. Our brain gives us a little “thank you” in the form of a dopamine release for drinking water, using the bathroom, or escaping a dangerous situation. This high of pleasure is what ensures we continue taking care of ourselves.
It can be ridiculously helpful to understand how this ‘happy hormone’ works. It explains a lot about human behavior and once you see it, it’s pretty hard to unsee.
All about that base
There are two types of dopamine releases in the brain: the baseline and peak.
The peak is what you may have heard as a “dopamine hit”. We experience dopamine peaks when we do or ingest things which cause the release of dopamine – when we’re high, we’re not really high from the drugs we’ve done, but high on ol’ mate dopamine.
Our baseline, which is less discussed, is our natural or more stable levels of dopamine. Baseline levels of dopamine reflect how we feel in our general everyday life when we aren’t peaking. It’s always changing relative to the peaks we experience. In the wise words of physics, what goes up must come down.
The higher our dopamine peak is, the lower our baseline levels of dopamine follow.
We tend to feel gross and demotivated after binging on junk food, having a TikTok marathon or on the day after a night out on party drugs. When our brains achieve a dopamine peak, our baseline drops by just this much.
Going out and doing anything productive feels so much harder because it physically is. You may have reached a big goal you’ve always worked towards and be hit with the feeling of ‘oh… now what?’. This is what comes after the dopamine peak of achieving your dreams.
Pushing the dopamine button incessantly doesn’t work.
Novelty plays a big role in the release of dopamine. The more you press that button, the less it works. It’s like listening to your favourite song daily until you kind of hate it.
Do you remember the butterflies of your first love, the forever superior high of your first joint, or the initial excitement of your shiny new phone? This is all a result of these dopamine-inducing experiences being novel, and it’s why the more we do or expect something, the less exciting it is. Hence your now dreaded assignment that started off seeming somehow fun as hell; you backlogged her a little too hard.
The function of this is to push humans to work for more and more and create a better community for future generations to come into. However, it’s also why humans are so greedy. Our brains are wired to be looking for the next snack of dopamine, this is why addiction is so common and dangerous - it’s why TikTok is like meth for kids.
Dopamine domination
o, what can we do to utilize our dopamine? To get it working with us instead of against us? This is something the most successful people in our lives have mastered, whether or not they know it.
Scientists at Vanderbilt University held a study which found that those who were more willing to put hard work into tasks had higher levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex, the side of our brains responsible for rationality and logic. Those less willing to work for a reward had most of their dopamine stored in the bilateral insula, the side of our brain which regulates our most basic needs such as food, water, and sleep. This part of the brain is also generally responsible for your automatic responses.
Luckily, there are in fact things even the most impulsive of us can do to balance out our dopamine levels.
False advice?
One piece of advice students are relentlessly attacked with is to treat yourself with a reward after study. For every page you read you get a gummy bear, or, when you finish this assignment, you can go out and party.
This is actually a pretty shit piece of advice.
Stanford University found that when kids were rewarded with a gold star for completing art, their willingness to do art on their own accord shot down immediately.
By motivating ourselves to do our work with a reward, we are wiring our brain to focus on the dopamine peak that will come with the reward at the end of the task we are trying to complete. We end up blocking the potential release of dopamine from doing the work itself; it becomes a chore.
Dopamine heavily affects our perception of time - time flies when you’re having fun! But this reward hanging over our head will inevitably make our one hour of work feel like so much more.
In saying that though, it is crucial that you give yourself a work/school/life balance. If you adopt the workaholic lifestyle you will burn out! The dopamine you could be getting from sitting and hustling will windle away if the grind is what you’re addicted to (even hard work can be like cocaine). You need external, non-hustle sources of dopamine to keep that will to live intact.
Going back to our good friend Novelty, this is something you can absolutely milk. As tempting as it is to forget about your schoolwork until you have to, getting it started from the get-go can give you that extra dopamine to get a good start on it as the task is new and novel.
When you start to feel stuck on an assignment move onto another part or different assignment for a bit, coming back with fresh eyes will make your task feel that much easier. Take breaks to keep your tasks novel but certainly don’t count them down as reward time.
Breaking it down:
Breaking down tasks is another way to trick our little brains into complying with our more responsible needs. When we see that we need to write a 2000-word essay as the task at hand, our dopamine receptors are screaming. Hard work is hard; but when you can break down your assignment into a step-by-step process it will not only feel significantly easier and stop you from getting lost on an empty page – it will also give you a little burst of dopamine for every task you check off.
The high of achieving progress will be something you can track and in the long run will feel much better than going out and drinking after binging an essay (how boring, right?).
Dopamine fasting:
Dopamine fasting is another highly effective way to get you going at work. We live in an age of dopamine, nearly all of us live our lives by layering different dopamine-inducing behaviours and chemicals. Many of us study with a coffee in hand, nicotine breaks, our phones nearby, music blasting, and maybe even stimulants in our system.
This gets our bodies used to needing this much stimulus to get us in ‘the zone’. While the first few times this might work well, once our bodies adjust to these dopamine peaks, studying gets harder and harder – this is why we’ve usually already started to crash by the time hand-ins roll around.
A dopamine fast doesn’t have to be regular, in fact it is most effective when done so irregularly. You may flip a coin and heads means no or reduced external sources of dopamine for this study sesh. It will be hard as hell the first few times, but over time your body will thank you and when you do need a little bit of external assistance it will work!
There can one little exception to the rule, and that’s caffeine. While caffeine certainly does give us a wee kick of dopamine, it’s pretty minor. What caffeine actually does is increase the uptake of dopamine from other behaviours or chemicals. This is why many of us enjoy a morning coffee and durry, a cheeky vodka red bull, or pre-workout before whipping out our body’s natural endorphins. Caffeine can make the work itself give you more dopamine, but of course it is still a psychoactive drug and snorting lines of No-Doz before a study session will do far more harm than good.
Ideally, we should learn to enjoy the process of doing the work. This is what we experience when we find ourselves ‘in the zone’, the world around us blurs and can smash out an essay in one night.
An effective way to trigger this state is before getting into your grind, dig into what the task at hand is, and find out what interests you the most about it. Then throw on those rose-tinted glasses and milk your passions to until you get that mahi done. Start with the most interesting part and let your inspiration grow.
This is of course far easier said than done (and is for sure a process and a half) but learning to love your work is possibly one of the most powerful skills one can have, because it is entirely possible to rewire our brains to get dopamine from putting in effort and doing the work.
Finding some Hank Green-esque videos, or just some form of passionate nerd can make your topic seem more interesting than your 80-page reading. ‘Crash course *insert relevant topic here*’ is forever a go-to. Other people’s passion can be contagious when they frame the topic in a more mentally stimulating light.
Leaving assignments to the last minute injects your brain with adrenaline and makes that zone easier to step into, but the more often you do this, the less effective this trick is. This is usually when you find yourself overwhelmed with work at the end of a semester, fully welcoming of the late penalty because that sounds like a better option. Novelty is far superior to adrenaline.
Our modern world is a bit of a dopamine smorgasbord. We have all different flavors of dopamine available at our fingertips. It’s great to load up our plate but if we don’t get our portion of greens and keep filling ourselves to max every night, we’ll be left with empty pockets and feeling like shit. Be realistic with yourself, and don’t beat yourself up every time you do nibble on a bit of dopamine: it is pretty dope. But certainly, with this is mind, it is a powerful little endorphin, and it really does control how we feel and interact with the world around us. When we master dopamine, we can master our lives.