What is Dopamine?

Dopamine plays an important role in many of the body's systems. In the brain, dopamine is involved in the regulation of emotion, reward, and motivation. It helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centers, allowing us to experience pleasure and satisfaction when we achieve goals or perform rewarding activities. It is also involved in the regulation of movement, cognitive functions, and emotional responses. Low levels of dopamine can lead to depression, high dopamine levels lead to a productive and fulfilled life and very high levels can lead to anxiety and stress. In addition, dopamine helps regulate blood pressure and heart rate, making it essential for healthy functioning.

Dopamine is also important for healthy functioning in other ways. It helps regulate appetite, sleep, and learning, and it plays a role in how we process and remember information. Dopamine also helps us to focus and to make decisions, allowing us to think more clearly and make better choices. Additionally, dopamine is involved in the regulation of hormones, which can affect the body's ability to fight disease and to heal.

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Research has shown

Research has shown that dopamine appears in a form of an up and down curve, however, this wave like graph will most likely always go further up or further down. But what does this mean? As we already know a low dopamine baseline means being unmotivated, depressed…. and a high dopamine baseline makes you feel motivated, exited, happy, …… Now how do we get a low or high Baseline.

It is important to remember that we don’t have an infinite amount of dopamine each day.

Lets first talk about a lowering baseline: The baseline goes lower when we engage in easy and painless activity like pornography, social media, shopping and drugs. As shown on pictures (1) we see that our dopamine spikes before the activity and when we are done it depletes / drops, but it doesn’t just drop, it drops below baseline. Engaging only in easy activity’s will result at a constant lowering of our baseline leading to a worse life in the long run.

Now how do i increase my dopamine baseline? Its pretty simple, trough hard and painful activity’s like Exercise, difficult work, cold showers…... As shown on picture (2) Before a hard activity we are in a low, thinking “i don’t want to do this”, “This is painful”,……. But when we menage to finish the activity we feel exited, we are proud of ourselves and we feel good. These feeling come from dopamine being released after the activity and the great thing here is that the dopamine now spikes above baseline and it stays there leading to a higher baseline. These hard activities are although activity’s that bring you further in life unlike the easy ones.

So to conclude: Chasing pain will lead to a greater life and chasing comfort will lead to a miserable life of no joy. So “do the hard work, especially when you don’t feel like it.” (Hamza).

Addiction

“Any activity that evokes a lot of dopamine release will make it harder to archive the same level and certainly a greater level of dopamine trough a subsequent interaction” Dr. Andrew Huberman.

We fell bad after a high spike of dopamine from an easy activity because of the depletion of dopamine, this means there is no more dopamine around to be released. Now many people do the same activity again to try spiking there dopamine again to feel good. But now there is no dopamine left to give someone the great peak again, but the interaction into the addictive habit causes another depletion of dopamine causing a even lower dopamine baseline, therefore make the person feel even worse. But now when they feel even worse they engage into the same activity again to try and feel good causing another dopamine depletion, and so on…..

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This is then a addiction. Now if someone is addicted he will reach a point, where the activity is the only thing giving him any form of pleasure and he will loose interest in every other activity. But he will although reach a point of not feeling any pleasure from the addictive activity anymore, leaving him with literally nothing.

Video games are a great example: If someone gets addicted to video games he will get to a point where he invests all his time into the game leaving every other activity at rest. But at some point the game will no longer give him a good feeling, it will be nothing else than boring and it will feel like a time waste. You can ask any former gamer, he will tell you that, that is exactly what happened to him at some point while gaming. The problem here is that after he looses all pleasure from the game he has nothing else to gain pleasure from since he left all other activities behind.

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Another important example of addiction to mention is pornography: We have to understand that our brain is a learning machine that learns from what we do. So when we engage intensively into pornography we firstly always release dopamine lowering our baseline, and secondly we teach our brain to be aroused when watching someone having sex, meaning that it is likely that this person will have problems with real life sexual interactions in the future.

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So addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure, meaning that the person will at one point only get pleasure from the one activity and none from others causing him to loose interest in school, social interactions, fitness, well being, and so on. This often ends in a serious depression and even to suicide.

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