That's not dopamine

Unless this is your first self-help page ever, you have probably heard the term “dopamine addiction”, “dopamine detox”, or “manage your dopamine levels”. The word “dopamine” has really struck a chord with people over the years. It is deeply connected with our sense of getting pleasure (a “rush of dopamine”) out of things.

Unfortunately, this is based on highly outdated information.

The idea that dopamine is the pleasure drug is based on studies from the 1980s that were disproved in the 90s. It looked like this was true back in the day, but then a study impaired some rats’ dopamine systems, and it turned out they enjoyed everything just the same. Science went on to come up with a much more interesting and complicated explanation for dopamine — it’s actually our motivation chemical. But our popular consciousness didn’t hear or care to update itself^[1].

The reason this matters is as a result, people are getting an incorrect picture of to deal with the very real phenomenon of being worn out by an environment that is over-tuned to give them constant little jolts — Message! Email! Checkbox! Notification! Reply! Sound! — these may not feel like it, but science has also discovered that these little moments of feeling like you’ve responded to or done something in your environment (called “mastery”) are just as important to our sense of happiness as what we usually think of as “pleasure”, which is more sensual and indulgent. Think back to the lasting pleasure of a “job well done,” or beating your high score — that’s what these different kinds of pleasures are like.

But getting back to alcohol — the real problem is your motivation to do anything else but drink. By being an easy, on-demand source of motivation it squeezes its way into your reasons for doing things, for existing, for the whole deal, if you don’t actively push it out. It occupies the same kind of place as all these other things people are addicted to, and is really part of the same problem. The difference with booze is that it also has a bunch of other insidious mental and physical traps that grind you down without you being fully aware, in a much, much more serious way than most attention-gatherers.

And if you don’t know this, it will lead you to incomplete — or possibly completely backwards solution. Because dopamine going up and down or running out is not the problem — the problem is that your brain just doesn’t respond to it any more (the medical term is “downregulated”). It’s burnt out. The dopamine is right there, it just doesn’t make your brain move in the same way any more. Your brain is like a poor animal that has been treated roughly for so many years — slapped and pulled one way and the other for so long, that it kind of doesn’t give a shit any more. You can even get out the cattle prod if you want, but it has been through a lot and is not going to move any faster than it’s going.

And the final implication is that your brain doesn’t need pleasure. And it doesn’t need just to be given a break from whatever was torturing it for a few days (i.e. turning off your phone for the weekend). Like the poor beast, it needs more than a rest, and you can’t rush it with more and more exciting things, trying to overcompensate by making everything else so incredibly amazing that it jumps for joy again.

What it needs is to be coaxed out, slowly. It needs to be given a bit of its old favourite food until it slowly perks up again, remembers what wanting that was like, hesitantly, getting more and more excited as it all comes back. This is literally what you do with a technique like BA (Behavioural Activation). You follow steps to slowly and manually restart and retrain your motivation centres. And you can learn how to do this by yourself, and recognize when it’s starting to happen — if you know how they really work, first.