Dopamine Nation

🤔 Impressions:

What an insightful and eye-opening read! This book discusses topics such as over-consumption, the pain/pleasure balance, and strategies to break addiction. I recommend this book to anybody who is unhappy with their current consumption or addictive behaviors. It certainly inspired me to escape the comfortable and embrace the uncomfortable.

🔍 Analysis:

Our brains process pain and pleasure in the same place – so it essentially acts like a balance. This means that the more we push on the pleasure side, the more our brains will naturally try to make us feel bad. Conversely, pushing on the pain side will naturally make us feel good.

We are naturally drawn to any form of pleasure that helps us escape our negative thoughts or ruminations. Today, more than ever, pleasure is so easily accessible (alcoholic drinks, never-ending television shows, online pornography, junk food, social media, etc.). While they do relieve the pain of reality, addictive behaviors and drugs only make things worse in the long run. Instead of trying to hide from the world we can immerse ourselves in it. Embrace yourself fully in all life has to offer, both the good and the bad. Stop running from your problems and face them.

💡 Takeaways:

Pursuing Pleasure

We live in a dopamine economy, where everyone is trying to sell your attention and get you addicted to the next exciting “hit”. More than ever, it’s easier to get an instant rush of dopamine: online pornography, gaming, social media, drugs, e-cigarettes, junk food, television, etc. People will constantly tell us how badly we need the next novel hit; we all create our own (mental) masturbation machines to help us escape reality.

Perhaps the reason we feel so much pain is because we are trying so hard to avoid it. The pursuit of happiness has become central to our modern society. We watch TV to chill out, eat junk food to experience pleasure, or donate to charity to feel good about ourselves. Furthermore, kids today are wrongly treated as psychologically fragile. They are overprotected from challenges and left unprepared to face the realities of life.

This shift in running from pain results in a society that is over-medicated on “feel-good pills”, over-distracted, constantly entertained, and unable to face even the most minor inconvenience. Maybe all this constant distracting is even leading to an increase in depression and anxiety?

The Pain/pleasure balance

There is a reciprocal relationship between pleasure and pain. This means that whenever we feel pleasure, our brains naturally want to regain equilibrium, so it pulls us down and we feel pain. For example, we spend a night watching a movie, but then our brain tells us, “Oh but what about all the work we still have to do?” then we feel guilty for enjoying that movie.

When our dopamine levels fall below our baseline, we begin to crave a change of state that will increase dopamine levels. Craving, in turn, drives us to action.

I like to think of prolonged high dopamine levels as raising some invisible “satisfaction threshold”. We all have an intrinsic threshold, and when our dopamine levels rise past it we feel happy. Continued exposure to dopamine builds a sort of tolerance, raising our satisfaction threshold, requiring more and more dopamine to reach the same sort of high.

Bind Yourself

Binding yourself, simply means putting up barriers to keep yourself from consuming or engaging in addictive behaviors. There are three ways to “bind” yourself so you don’t engage in your unwanted/addictive behavior:

1. Physical – make it ridiculously impractical or painful for you to engage. For example, I wanted to stop using my phone right when I woke up, so I moved it from on top of my bedside table to a drawer in the kitchen.
2. Chronological – set time limits and reward yourself with consumption after crossing some self-established finish line. Restrict drug use to certain time of day.
3. Categorical – organize your dopamine hits to those you want to consume, and those you don’t. Identify triggers and what leads you to use.

Even though high-resourced countries are substantially increasing funding towards psychiatric medications, there have been no indications that the symptoms they aim to treat have actually decreased (source). There is little evidence that shows medications like Adderall and Ritalin (prescribed to improve memory and attention in the short-term) improve performance in the long-term.

Sometimes, the price of feeling better from psychotropic drugs comes at the expense of duller emotions and “flatter” life experiences (less enthusiasm, the inability to feel any emotions, can’t feel full range of emotions).

Use of psychotropic medications as a form of social control. Large amounts are prescribed to the poor and children. This is a sort of bandage that may cover up more fundamental socioeconomic or systemic problems facing these demographic groups.

Dopamine fasting is a great start to breaking addiction. Below is Lembke’s framework for dopamine fasting:

• Gather data on consumption habits
• Identify why we use our drug of choice, try and get down to the fundamentals
• Identify what problems come from your consumption
• Abstain from using for a minimum of 4 weeks (after withdrawal symptoms subside)
• Observe yourself without judgement; be mindful
• After abstinence, identify what meaningful insight you have gained about your behavior
• Plan out your next steps
• Put your plan into action and experiment with your newfound knowledge

Pursuing Pain

Pain forces our body to want to regain homeostasis (biological balance) so it pushes us towards the pleasure side to compensate for the pain. We must be careful not to become addicted to pain. Like the highs of a cold shower or some extreme sport (e.g. skydiving), the adrenaline rush can be addictive. Even the common “workaholic” so highly celebrated in our modern society, can become addicted to the rush of deep focus and rewards from work.

Practicing honesty makes us aware of our actions, it can foster deep human connections, and it leads us to telling a truthful narrative of our life. This last point is important because it holds us accountable to our present and future selves.

Avoid a victim’s narrative. With a victim’s narrative we are caught up in blaming others or the world for our problems, and fail to take responsibility for our own actions, leading to the false belief we deserve some form of compensation for our suffering. Start by being honest with yourself and take responsibility for your actions. The truth may be painful, but truth is needed to start healing.

Adopt a plenty mindset over a scarcity mindset:

• Plenty Mindset ⇒ we feel secure and confident in ourselves, the world, and our future. Even when scarcity does arrive we are confident the outcome will be okay.
• Scarcity Mindset ⇒ we are unsure about the future and question our safety in the world. We enter into competitive survival and begin to value short-term over long-term gains.

By being held accountable to ourselves, we can use healthy shame to help break addiction, but it is incredibly important that accountability is met with compassion should we fail.

Social media has made it easier than ever for us to compare ourselves, not just to those immediately around us but to practically the whole world. We’re then able to convince ourselves we should have lived life differently, done more, tried harder, etc.

🌟 Quotes I Like:

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