How You Can Have Sustainably High Levels of Dopamine

Dopamine is essential for getting anything done. It is responsible for all energy and movements. The dopamine cycle is intricate, but its understanding is crucial.

Everyone has a baseline level of dopamine. Whenever you do something enjoyable, the dopamine level rises and drops below the baseline, returning to the baseline with time. The crucial thing is the sustainability of that dopamine high.

The baseline also depends on the layering of activities to achieve a dopamine high. For example, taking a walk with music/podcasts/audiobooks on. Walking without these external stimuli becomes a drag. (I am guilty of it.)

Sustained Dopaminergic Activities

Activities such as cold showers have sustained dopamine highs, whereas smoking has short-lived dopamine highs.

Cold water showers can increase the dopamine level up to 2.5 times as compared to your baseline. That’s a remarkably high increase. In contrast, chocolate, sex have a doubling effect on the baseline; nicotine and cocaine are 2.5 times above baseline.

This increase is comparable to what one sees from cocaine, except in this case, it doesn’t rise and crash, instead a sustained rise taking up to 3 hours to come back to baseline. And most people report feeling a heightened level of calm and focus after getting out of cold water.

The Protocol for a Healthy Relationship to Dopamine System

Looking at positive and negative aspects of rewards for the behavior emerges a protocol by which you can achieve a better relationship to your activities and your dopamine system.

Hard work is hard.

Generally, most people don’t like working hard, but some do. Most people work hard to achieve some end goal. Hard work becomes more challenging because of the way that dopamine relates to the perception of time. It makes us much less likely to lean into hard work in the future.

A Case Study

An experiment was conducted at Stanford many years ago. Kids in nursery school drew pictures because they liked to draw. The researchers started giving rewards to these kids for drawing. When they stopped rewarding, they found these kids to have lower tendencies to draw on their own.

This is called intrinsic versus extrinsic reinforcement. When you receive rewards (self or external), you tend to associate less pleasure with the actual activity itself that evoked the reward.

A peak in dopamine from a reward lowers your baseline, and the cognitive interpretation is that you didn’t really do the activity because you enjoyed the activity. You did it for the reward.

When and how much dopamine you experience is analogous to your experience of time.

When you engage in an activity, because of the reward you are going to receive, you start to dissociate the neural circuits for dopamine reward that would have usually been active during the activity because the reward arrives at the end.

It substantially reduces the pleasure achieved from the activity.

What Is the Answer?

The abstract answer is to enjoy the process/journey rather than focusing on goals.

This is the antithesis of the growth mindset, which is striving to be better where striving itself is the end goal. It delivers tremendous performance. All of us can cultivate a growth mindset.

You need to convince yourself that you are enjoying the process. It feels like lying to yourself; in a way, it is but this is the way you will reinforce your brain to start enjoying the process and start to associate with a dopamine release.

For example, if you are a student having difficulties studying, sit at your desk and tell yourself that you enjoy studying continually. Make yourself believe that you are not studying for a final grade instead to learn.

When you focus only on the trophy, only on the grade, only on the win as the reward, you undermine that entire process.

So how do you do this?

You do this in those moments of the most intense friction. You tell yourself this is very painful and because it’s painful, it will evoke an increase in dopamine release later, meaning it will increase my baseline in dopamine, but you also have to tell yourself that in that moment, you are doing it by choice and you’re doing it because you love it.

David Goggins comes to mind as an excellent example. Many of you are probably familiar with David Goggins, a former Navy SEAL. He has made a post-military career by explaining and sharing his process of turning the effort into the reward.

What Are My Dopamine Triggers?

• Writing Daily
• Reading Daily
• Watching Netflix while eating
• Inability to take a walk without audiobooks/podcasts
• Inability to commute without music/audiobooks/podcasts
• Unlocking my phone to answer a text leads to checking social media, emails, game scores, etc.
• Checking stats and cricket score websites

What Do I Do to Reset My Dopamine Baselines?

• I mix the genres of what I am writing and take a day off in the week. During the days I write, I am not marching towards a word count; instead, I enjoy every word I write because I love writing.
• Changing genres of what I am reading and skipping days in between to talk to family and friends during the allocated reading time.
• I do dopamine fast once every six months for a week. During this week, I only allow myself to work, read, write, study: no Netflix, YouTube, games, social media, podcasts.
• On weekends, I take walks, leaving my phone at home.
• Sporadically, I leave out my AirPods at home while commuting.
• Use Focus modes on my iPhone to not hibernate notifications, keep my phone on the other side of the room away from my desk, and turn off the Internet at night before going to bed.
• Using Freedom app to block distracting websites for most of the day.

References:

[1] Spatial and temporal scales of dopamine transmission

[2] Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction

[3] Human physiological responses to immersion into water of different temperatures

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Originally published on Medium.com