There is a concept in pop psychology called the “hedonic treadmill”. The idea of the hedonic treadmill (or hedonic adaptation) is that we have a baseline level of happiness that we return to eventually no matter what good or bad things happen to us. Usually this concept is brought up as a way of explaining to people why they shouldn’t continuously be chasing money or fame or whatever else they’re chasing, since in the end, you’ll end up at the same level of happiness that you started at.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a major role in the reward and motivation systems in the brain. From Wikipedia:
The brain includes several distinct dopamine pathways, one of which plays a major role in the motivational component of reward-motivated behavior. The anticipation of most types of rewards increases the level of dopamine in the brain, and many addictive drugs increase dopamine release or block its reuptake into neurons following release.
In popular culture and media, dopamine is often portrayed as the main chemical of pleasure, but the current opinion in pharmacology is that dopamine instead confers motivational salience; in other words, dopamine signals the perceived motivational prominence (i.e., the desirability or aversiveness) of an outcome, which in turn propels the organism’s behavior toward or away from achieving that outcome.
From what I understand, dopamine is the reward your brain gives you when you it sees progress being made. The closer you are to completion, the higher your dopamine levels become. When you finish a task, your dopamine levels peak, and the brain pathways that led to that outcome are reinforced.
Sidenote: Drugs like cocaine and amphetamines spike levels of dopamine in the brain, which is probably why people who are on these drugs become super motivated for no obvious reason. The spike in dopamine levels inevitably leads to a crash later on. In order to avoid this crash, people will take the same drug again (more on this later). Also, since dopamine strengthens the brain pathways that led to the high dopamine levels, a cocaine user will have their “find cocaine” pathways strengthened and thus be more likely to use it again and eventually become addicted.
As we’ve talked about earlier, the brain is always adjusting expectations based on current and past data (the adaptation component of hedonic adaptation), which is basis of the hedonic treadmill concept. The brain does this to update its model of the world and stay adaptive, and it does this for everything, including dopamine levels. This is where dopamine cycles come into play.
Dopamine cycles occur on a much smaller scale than the hedonic treadmill cycles. The hedonic treadmill looks at macro-level events in an individual’s life, while the dopamine cycle model applies to the micro-level. There are (usually) multiple dopamine cycles per day. The same rule applies to both, though — you will always inevitably return to baseline.
Baseline is when your brain’s dopamine expectations match your current dopamine levels. A dopamine “high” occurs when your dopamine levels are higher than expected, and a “low” when levels are lower than expected. If you max out your dopamine levels (there is a biological max), you will experience a high, but the intensity of the high will start decreasing as your brain’s expectations start adjusting upwards towards your maxed out dopamine levels. Eventually, the expectation will match the dopamine level (both maxed out), and you will return to baseline. Any decrease in dopamine levels from then on will lead to a low. The same dynamic applies to lows as well.
The dopamine cycle is inevitable since your brain cannot predict your dopamine levels accurately 100% of the time. Since this is the case, the question becomes one of management — what is the best way to manage dopamine cycles in a way that minimizes unwanted behavior and unpleasant experiences and maximizes desired behavior and pleasant experiences?
Generally, the transition from a “low” into a “high” (i.e. “the come-up”, “upshifting”) feels good, while the transition from a “high” into a “low” (i.e. “the come-down”, “downshifting”) is unpleasant. The “high” and “low” states themselves can be pleasant or unpleasant depending on the person. Because of the cyclic nature of the dopamine cycle, there is no clear way to get a significantly greater volume of highs than lows in the long run. What you can do is learn how to make the transition from highs to lows as tolerable as possible.
If you replace “Perceived Rate of Exertion” with “Unpleasantness” and “Workload” with “Speed and Magnitude of Downshift” in the following graph, you’ll get a good picture of how unpleasant downshifts of different magnitudes are. In the Workload and Rate of Perceived Exertion post I concluded that you want to avoid the middle by staying either below 4 or above 9. The same applies here — you either want a small and/or gradual downshift (0–4), or if you have to downshift really far in a short period of time, you should rip the band-aid off (do it all the way as quickly as possible) to minimize total unpleasantness.
In practice, this means doing small downshifts throughout the day to periodically reset your dopamine levels and keep your brain’s dopamine expectations at a reasonable level. If you do have to downshift a large distance (e.g. right after work), the best way to do this is gradually, either by tapering the activity you are doing or switching to an activity of lower intensity. If you have to downshift quickly, go from 100 to 0 as quickly as possible. For instance, once you get off work, you can lie on the floor with the lights off for 10–20m.
High highs usually lead to low lows and vice versa, simply because higher highs and lower lows move dopamine expectations faster. Ideally, you want to keep your upshifts (low to high) and downshifts (high to low) between 0–4 for the vast majority of the time. It’s good to occasionally run through the gears and upshift as high as you can and then come down from that, just so you know what it feels like and how to handle it.
Sidenote: This is probably why “performance as a service” concept is useful, since it reframes the feedback from the audience in a way that doesn’t trigger nearly as much dopamine as it otherwise would (JRE Episode 1430 w/ Raghunath Cappo, starting at 1:56:54).
You don’t have complete control over your dopamine levels since they are, to a large degree, dictated by external stimuli, but you do have control over what stimuli you decide to expose yourself to and what activities you decide to do.
Undesirable and addictive behavior almost always occurs when you’re on a high and trying to avoid a low. Usually, the activity or source that’s been giving you dopamine has run out and you’re frantically looking for something else to continue the dopamine high, and in the process end up with the most convenient option, which is often undesirable. (Look at how twitchy people get after scrolling Instagram or TikTok). For example, if you’re scrolling Instagram and you run out of new posts, you might switch to TikTok to keep the dopamine train going. Once you’ve exhausted TikTok, you might go to YouTube, and so on and so forth. It doesn’t help that these platforms are set up with infinite scrolling and all sorts of other features that encourage this behavior. They have, in the process of trying to optimize user engagement, managed to take advantage of the dopamine cycle and encourage addictive behavior in their users.
Processed foods are engineered to hyper-stimulate your taste buds through salt, sugar, fat and other goodies in order to maximize the pleasure hit you get from eating. Similarly, processed stimuli are engineered to hyper-stimulate your brain and maximize the dopamine hit you get. In both cases, the processed versions have an unfair advantage over their unprocessed cousins by virtue of the way they were engineered. The engineering in this case is analogous to steroids in sports. In order for a non-processed food to give you the same pleasure hit as a cheeseburger, it probably costs way more, takes more time and energy to cook, and requires a skilled chef. Similarly, in order for a non-processed stimuli to give you the same hit as porn, it most likely has to be the result of much more effort on your part. In both cases, the non-processed stimuli loses 99 times out of 100, simply because the unprocessed stimuli requires much more effort for the same result.
Previously I mentioned that you want to occasionally experience high highs and low lows, and keep it between the lines otherwise. In order to do this, you need to avoid hyper-stimuli as much as possible, processed or non-processed, since these will shoot you up to a high high. Examples include cocaine, methamphetamines, porn, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc. You probably know what stimuli are hyper-stimulating for you based on personal experience.
