Cheap Dopamine and Your Depression
Welcome to the twisted manipulated world of our most important molecule...
Welcome my friends, welcome to the LoCD - the Land of Cheap Dopamine. In the LoCD it’s all there for the taking, all you have to do is flick your attention to it and it’s at your fingertips. You want to see funny cats? There’s millions of pages dedicated to those adorable little fur balls. Oh, sorry, you’re more of a motorcycle trick guy? Here’s a video of two guys flying off a 30 meter ramp performing two double back flips while corkscrewing their spines to achieve enough rotation to let go of the handles and re-grab them in the air. At the exact same time. Ugh, I know, boring. Sorry, I didn’t realize you were hungry - here’s a video of hot bubbling cheese spreading over a toasted buttery sourdough bread topped with the finest slow cooked pork with pickled - ah, whoops, I see you’ve already swiped on to your next dopamine hit.
The LoCD goes beyond just your phone of course, though we must confess, the ability to vibrate in your pocket and grab your attention whenever we want really was a master stroke. We gave that tech engineer a solid raise. Our world is meant for ALLLLL the senses. Hungry are you? You must be the culinary type. Just check out the nearest gas station and buy a bag of crispy spicy salty crunchy flavorful artificial processed corn that accelerates your road to heart disease. They’re delicious! Oh you want touch, you want feeeeeeels. Well we haven’t bent the laws yet to actually touch you. Yet. But in the meantime never forget internet rule number #68: if it exists on the internet, then a porn version of it exists on the internet. We’ll show you that sexy Hermione Granger, just do the touching for yourself.
Now the Land of Cheap Dopamine doesn’t come for free, but honestly it's such a small price to pay. Just look at some of these advertisements. No baby, don’t turn away. LOOK! They’re specifically designed for you. We just took all the information we could extract from your behavior - it’s totally normal - like whether or not you mentioned a cooling pad for your mattress in the vicinity of your phone, or other stuff like monitoring the amount of time you spend looking at a specific t-shirt, or recognizing that your crush happens to like zumba so you should consider the local zumba classes. We guarantee you’ll like these advertisements. They’re just there to make you think about spending your cash on things you don’t need. You know, that cash that you spend the majority of your time - it’s just your limited time on earth - creating….just look at this ad. It was made for you! Designed for you! Just buy the fucking table-cloth that says live, love, laugh dammit!
We just want your attention baby. Just look. And keep looking. Spend hours and hours looking. Don’t think about the problems you need to solve or the goals you have for the future. Feel good right now, that’s what matters, give your attention to that girl you’ve always dreamed of having. Feel the rush of dopamine with every finger you drag across the screen in front of her body. But don’t touch or pursue in real life, that might actually cause pain. What if she says no!?! What if she rejects you!?! The real world is full of challenges, stay here where it’s warm and safe. “Bzzzz” - oh go check, go check. Your ex just said yes to the guy she met after you, and you should definitely look at all the photos.
The Molecule of Pursuit
Dopamine1 might be the most interesting molecule of all time. It’s found in every single living organism and it governs our motivation to pursue the things we want - the things that make us feel good. Whether it be food, sex, warmth, shelter, social connection, money, drugs, or whatever, dopamine gets us off our butt and in pursuit. When we achieve the thing we are pursuing we experience a surge in dopamine which fills us with warm fuzzy feelings of comfort. It’s how we feel joy in this life.
However, there’s a very important principle that we need to recognize when we experience pleasure, and this is the pain/pleasure balance scale. In a very simplified nut-shell, your body is always trying to return to homeostasis. So, let's say that you find enjoyment from watching reruns of The Office. When you watch an episode you feel a kick of pleasure from watching it - that would be your body releasing a little bit of dopamine. But! To balance out that surge of dopamine your body quickly decreases the amount of dopamine transmitters running through your system so your body can return back to its baseline level. When you feel pleasure, your body is also going to feel some pain due to the lack of dopamine following the pleasureful event. Highs are always followed by lows. I mean goddamn, it’s like philosophy is encoded into our biochemistry.
Our bodies evolved in a world of scarcity. Food, shelter, sex, etc. were not always readily available, so having a biological system that actually caused dissatisfaction was actually quite elegant on nature's part. Imagine if you hunted down a deer, brought it back to camp, skinned it while talking with your tribe, got it mounted up on a rotisserie, and proceeded to have one of those life affirming meals with friends and good company. You’d be basking in the glow of joy, warmth, and satisfaction….aka dopamine. Then proceed to imagine that you never come down from that high; you simply stay there, happy and satisfied…You’d be dead within a week.
Why would you hunt when you feel that good? Why would you get up and do the back breaking work of building a shelter? Why pursue things when you are experiencing such happiness and contentment from your current situation? In a world of scarce resources, experiencing dissatisfaction after a high is actually a good thing. It gets you out of camp and into pursuit again. There are rewards to be found, and the drop in your dopamine levels is telling you it's time to get out there and claim them.
But in the world of plentiful? This biological system is killing us. You buy an ice cream - something exponentially more delicious than anything our bodies ever evolved to experience - and you feel that warm fuzzy feeling when you successfully lick it down to the cone without losing a single drop. A well trained person will stop there. But someone just following the demands of their dopaminergic system will immediately go get more. After all, they just experienced a dip in their dopamine levels after experiencing a peak from the ice cream. Suddenly, someone just following their emotions finds themselves bloated, sick, and down one gallon of ice cream. Hence the term “eating your feelings.”
Social interactions work the same way. Biologically speaking, humans are social creatures. We can experience great joy when interacting with other human beings, particularly ones we care about. A life changing date can leave you on a high for days, but eventually, you're going to have to go on another date to try and chase that high…and chances are it won’t be as good as the first time.
This is why social media is so dangerous. These are systems designed to manipulate your dopamine release. It’s a never ending scroll wheel of endless entertainment. Whether it be social interactions through DMs or seeing that uncle you forgot about holding a fish or watching the hottest girl you’ve ever seen in your life make out with an even hotter girl followed by a post with adorable baby cats, all of these posts can cause the release of dopamine. And if you’ve understood the above paragraphs you know that these constant peaks of dopamine lead to ever greater troughs of dopamine where your body is trying to restore balance to its baseline by preserving what little of the chemical you have left after your 4 hour social media/Netflix binge.
Perhaps the best way to think about dopamine is this, our joy is a finite resource that is renewable - we must take care on what we spend it on, and we must have solid practices that restore our reserves of it. If we don’t, the consequences are immense. People who frivolously spend their dopamine on limitless excess such as social media, streaming television (just one more episode!), hyper-palatable calories that degrade your health, porn, and drugs find themselves depressed and often suicidal. Likewise, people who have poor strategies for taking care of their health and don’t take time to restore their dopaminergic chemicals find themselves in the same position. Depressed, un-motivated, possibly suicidal.
The Future Belongs to Those Who Can Self Regulate
So, you want to take over the world? Then know this, your ability to say no is far more important than your ability to say yes. In the LoCD we are surrounded by excess, and the excess has the ability to derail our dreams. Because there’s no doubt, if you have things you want to accomplish, you’re going to need the ability to feel joy while you pursue them. If I didn’t feel some sense of satisfaction while I was writing, then this blog wouldn’t exist. If I replaced my writing time on my commute with some mindless scrolling on Instagram, I would simply waste this precious time and hate my commute like everybody else. The easy drip of dopamine that social media provides is at first way more attractive than sitting down to write, but it ultimately leads to a hollow feeling. It would steal my ability to produce something I’m proud of, and ultimately steal some of the joy I want to suck out of this life.
I’m ultimately writing about this because I’m thinking about the kids I teach. Everyday I have an advisory where we work on social emotional learning. I noticed every single kid at one point or another would blatantly disregard the class activity and hop on their phone. I eventually got curious. How much time were they spending on their cell phones? Eventually we fell into a tradition of a screen time check. I made every student turn on their screen time app, and every Tuesday and Thursday I would ask how long they had spent on their phone. They would yell out their average screen time from the past week. The results depressed me.
8 hours and 36 minutes!
9 hours and 12 minutes!
11 hours and 53 minutes!
One kid even consistently averaged 14 hours and 6 minutes
Perhaps the worst part was that they said the numbers proudly, like frat bro’s rattling off the amount of drinks they had the night before. How are these students ever going to accomplish the things they want to do in this world if they waste their time attached to a cheap dopamine drip? How does anyone accomplish anything if 10 of the total 16 hours they have in a day is spent looking at a screen 2 inches wide and 4 inches long2. What a desperately narrow way to spend your time looking at the world.
So here’s the rub. Our access to unlimited sources of easy entertainment, whether it be screens, crap food, or drugs is destroying our ability to pursue the things we actually want. Our joy is a finite resource, and spending it on frivolous entertainment found in our pockets 24/7/365 is a recipe for falling into a depressed unmotivated rut. The more we fight back against these applications of neurological warfare, the more we get to pursue the difficult work on problems we actually care about.
I’ll end with a tale from my health class. I wrote on the whiteboard as a warm-up, “Agree or Disagree: I am in control of phone, the phone is not in control of me.” Ever student agreed that they were in control. They had all been hoodwinked. All except one. The salutatorian of the graduating class of 2022 looked uncomfortable as she said it, but she raised her hand anyway and said, “while I’d like to think that I’m in control, I’m not sure if I am. Yesterday I was in the shower and I heard my phone vibrate on the sink. Before I knew it, my hand shot out from behind the shower curtain and I grabbed my phone to check it…while I was in the shower.” As scary as that sounds, I’m proud of her for recognizing that maybe it wasn’t her deciding to check it, but her phone addiction telling her to do it instead.
It starts with recognizing the comfort that’s killing us. It starts with seeing the excess and simply turning yourself away from it. Because the people of this generation that learn how to auto-regulate, which means they know how to habitually limit the cheap dopamine that surrounds them - those are the people that are going to shape the world while everyone else drowns in their screens.
The following information about dopamine has been distilled from Andrew Huberman’s two hour long podcast on dopamine, Anna Lembke’s book “Dopamine Nation,” the documentary, “The Social Dilemma,” and my own anecdotal experiences since my exposure to this information.
This is assuming that the kids are sleeping 8 hours a night. Which of course they are not. Their phone time is almost certainly wreaking havoc on their sleep, which has for more dire consequences then simply wasting the time you’re awake.
Great article, thanks for writing it!
I’ll definitely be looking at my phone and snacks with more suspicion.