My phone has been acting out over the last few days.
It decided to stop sending any and all notifications. Messages from friends and family, school work notifications, fantasy basketball alerts, calendar reminders—all of it, silenced. Although there were messages from certain people I wish I could’ve been notified of, for the most part, the silence was a welcome one.
But then came the anxiety, of not feeling updated enough about the world, of not feeling busy or connected enough. I thought to myself, “What if i miss out on a big message in a group chat?” “What if I forget about an important appointment?” It felt like a withdrawal. All those consistent spikes of dopamine throughout the day, suddenly gone.
Like most people, I first heard about dopamine in the context of social media. We call them “hits” of dopamine every time we got a ding or a buzz on our phones. Along the same vein, one would go on a “dopamine detox” when taking a hiatus from social media and screen time.
It wasn’t until late last year that I finally understood—at least enough to know how it works practically—how this neurotransmitter affects so much of our lives, especially our moods. I listened to a 2-hour-long podcast episode by Dr. Andrew Huberman, a professor in the Department of Neurology at the Stanford School of Medicine, where he goes deep into what dopamine is and how it works.
I took a mental record of the important and useful bits (though they all seemed important and useful) and tried to distill them into something I can read and process on the fly. Here are some notable notes:
1. Basics and Baselines
What is dopamine? It’s the thing in our brains that makes us feel like we want to keep living. It motivates us, drives action (without it, your muscles literally cannot move), boosts our mood, among many other goodies. When we do something pleasurable, dopamine is released in our bodies and we get that rush, the one that makes us feel like wanting to get stuff done. Some classic examples of things that cause the release of dopamine: chocolate, sex, cocaine, coffee (indirectly) and social media.
Everyone has a dopamine baseline called the Tonic Level. This is the level of dopamine that’s swimming around our system at any given time, without all the delightful stimulants added to the mix. This explains why some people are generally more motivated and pumped than others. Their baselines are just higher. Of course, there are other factors at play, but taking everything else at constant, this would be the case.
I like to think of dopamine as a renewable resource in our bodies. When it’s released into our system, this resources naturally gets depleted and will take some time to be replenished. This causes a constant rise and fall of dopamine levels in our brains. And things get really interesting when we start to mess with these levels.
2. The Dopamine Wave
One way to visualize our dopamine levels is to imagine a wave. Every time we do something that makes us feel good, dopamine is released and that baseline goes up. It peaks. These are the “hits” that we refer to. Some things, like drugs, sex, and coffee, cause a sudden and high, but unsustainable peak. Other things, like exercise, work, and—surprisingly—a cold plunge, cause less dramatic but more prolonged peaks in dopamine.
It’s tempting to go the “easy” route and resort to the “high-yield” stimulants like drugs and even junk food. But dopamine is a wave. And just like ocean waves, every rise is always followed by a dip. The higher the peaks, the deeper the crash. Huberman says, this explains why we get post-concert depressions the day after we watch our favorite artists live. The dopamine peak was so high that the dip the next day takes us all the way down.
This also explains certain addictions. When we get those big peaks, the dip that comes after is so painful that we’d want to go back to the peak. So we take another hit of that substance or another shot of the alcohol. It becomes a cycle that’s quite difficult to break. For those of us who are involuntarily on our phones for most of the day, this isn’t hard to imagine.
The first time I learned about this, I thought to myself, “Of course that’s how dopamine works. That’s how everything works.” The Chinese idiom 物极必反 (Wù Jí Bì Fǎn) puts this aptly—anything taken to its extremes naturally turns the other direction. This is true in nature, physics, and life. Dopamine is simply following the rules.
I think of this every time I wake up feeling really unmotivated to get up and get on with the day. I think of how I spent the night or day before. How much of this is dopamine? A profound reminder from this humble chemical: our past affects our present and futures.
3. Enough
There’s another lesson to be learned here. It’s about contentment and knowing what’s enough.
Huberman suggests that we avoid layering activities that cause the rise in dopamine levels. For instance, when working out, try to not listen to any music. Exercise already stimulates dopamine release; adding music on top of that forms a peak that is unnecessarily high. As a result, the enjoyment of just working out on its own—without the music—begins to dwindle in degree. We start to enjoy it less. In the same way, we don’t really need music to enjoy our walks. We don’t need food to enjoy a good view.
However, this isn’t to say that we should avoid enhancing an experience altogether. I think, it’s enough to know how certain activities on top of other activities affect our dopamine levels moving forward. But I also think, it’s worth considering stripping an activity down to its bare essentials to simply enjoy something at its purest form. The minimalist way.
This is why I love the whole dopamine system so much. It’s the brain’s balancing agent and it just makes sense. It keeps everything in check. “Perfectly balanced, as all things should be,” said Thanos. He might as well have been talking about dopamine.
I’m reminded of the famous Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller anecdote about being at a billionaire’s party. Vonnegut wrote a poem about it for the New Yorker:
Joe Heller
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
Kurt Vonnegut, The New Yorker, May 16th, 2005
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”
4. The Reward System
I’d say, one of the more unpopular sources of a dopamine release is work. It feels wrong just typing this down. Work feels like the complete opposite of pleasure. However, it is precisely because work can be painful that the dopamine spike that comes after it is remarkable.
The trouble comes when we meddle with this internal reward system by stipulating our own rewards, be it a bottle of beer or two after hours of studying, or a cheat meal after a solid run.
Enter Dr. Andrew Huberman:
“There’s a classic experiment done actually at Stanford many years ago, in which children in nursery school and kindergarten drew pictures, and they drew pictures because they like to draw. The researchers took kids that liked to draw and they started giving them a reward for drawing. The reward generally was a gold star or something that a young child would find rewarding. Then they stopped giving them the gold star. And what they found is the children had a much lower tendency to draw on their own. No reward.
Now, remember this was an activity that prior to receiving a reward, the children intrinsically enjoyed and selected to do. No one was telling them to draw. What this relates to is the so-called intrinsic versus extrinsic reinforcement. When we receive rewards, even if we give ourselves rewards for something, we tend to associate less pleasure with the actual activity itself that evoked the reward. Now, that might seem counterintuitive, but that’s just way that the way that these dopaminergic circuits work.”
Dr. Andrew Huberman, Huberman Lab Podcast
The truth is, there is pleasure in the effort. Our bodies have an internal system to reward us for this effort, if only we knew how to tap into this system.
Back to Huberman:
“This is a system that exists in your mind, that exists in the minds of humans for hundreds of thousands of years, by which you’re not just pursuing the things that are innately pleasureful—food, sex, warmth, water when you’re thirsty—but the beauty of this mesolimbic reward pathway is that, it includes the forebrain. So you can tell yourself the effort part is the good part: “I know it’s painful, I know this doesn’t feel good, but I’m focused on this. I’m going to start to access the reward.” You will find the rewards, meaning the dopamine release inside of effort if you repeat this over and over again. And what’s beautiful about it is that, it starts to become reflexive for all types of effort.
When we focus only on the trophy, only on the grade, only on the win as the reward, you undermine that entire process. So how do you do this? You do this in those moments of the most intense friction. You tell yourself this is very painful and because it’s painful, it will evoke an increase in dopamine release later, meaning it will increase my baseline in dopamine, but you also have to tell yourself that in that moment, you are doing it by choice and you’re doing it because you love it. And I know that sounds like lying to yourself, and in some ways it is lying to yourself, but it’s lying to yourself in the context of a truth which is that you want it to feel better. You want it to feel even pleasureful.
The ability to access this pleasure from effort aspect of our dopaminergic circuitry is without question the most powerful aspect of dopamine and our biology of dopamine.”
Dr. Andrew Huberman, Huberman Lab Podcast
Dopamine drops another lesson on us: enjoy the process. It’s not easy because we’re so used to looking for results or for instant gratification. And so does society. But I’d argue that all of it is process. This whole act of living is all process. The results and the reaching our goals part, these are all just effects. We have no real control over them. We can hope and maybe even do our best to get the results that we want, but even that is just part of the process. It’s all process.
Yes, we have to do things, but we also get to do things. How we embrace the work, and the effort, and the act of living itself—despite all the evidence that says it’s always going to be tough and unpredictable—is up to us. Dopamine sheds a bit of light into what goes on in our brains. But it’s indifferent to our feelings and hopes. It simply follows and flows with the laws of nature, and so should we.
I think of dopamine the same way I thought of plants and trees when I took a botany class back in college. At the time, I felt like I could almost see through all sorts of vegetation—yes, of all branches of science, I nerded out on botany. Now, I feel my level of drive and motivation and I can almost measure the rise and fall of my dopamine levels vis-à-vis my prior actions.
I’m careful not to attribute everything that happens and everything that I feel to dopamine. It’s tempting, but I know I shouldn’t. After all, life isn’t just about managing our baselines. That would be too boring. The way I think of it, it’s a tool and it’s there when we’re in need of an extra push, or when things get totally out of hand. Let’s hope it’s the former.