Understand dopamine for motivation and happiness. (Resource)
This is an entry from The Happiness PhD Project: an open-access digital encyclopedia of happiness research and insights.
Dopamine is a neurochemical governing the pursuit of outward goals.
Think of it, in an evolutionary context, as the chemical governing foraging and seeking. Imagine a hunter-gatherer who wakes up to realize he or she doesn’t have much food or water. This awareness causes a release of dopamine — as it rises above baseline level he or she feels motivated to go look for food and water. Once food or water is found, dopamine drops back often to below baseline. (Interestingly this chemical and its corresponding effects are found in nearly all animals even flatworms).
There is no such thing as a “dopamine hit” as we often hear. Rather there is a baseline with peaks above and troughs below baseline. In the literature this is known as tonic and phasic release: tonic is the baseline level circulating in the brain and blood and phasic are the peaks.
It’s the spread between peak and baseline that determines our felt experiences of things like pleasure, excitement, motivation, and energy. Baseline is determined by genetics, sleep, habits, nutrition, and levels of dopamine from past days. Peaks can be triggered by things we consume, actions we take, or even thoughts.
A few examples…
chocolate can lead to 150% increase
sex (the pursuit or the act itself) 200% increase
nicotine 250% increase (but it is very short-lived)
amphetamine 1000% increase
exercise 200% increase (although this depends on if you like exercise or not)
We should use caution in looking for peaks or spikes of dopamine as, although it feels good, this can diminish the sustainability of our motivation and drive. That’s because when we have a peak there is a corresponding drop in dopamine usually to below baseline level.
So we may almost think of this as analogous to money. If you “take out a loan” today, you will have to “pay it back” in the future. Of course, this is somewhat of an oversimplification. But it’s true that if you are super excited and committed to say, winning an award, and you finally, after weeks of hard effort, win it — you are likely to experience some what of a “hangover” where you just don’t feel quite as in the zone for a few days.
Similarly if you continue to peak dopamine, even if from various sources, it can eventually lead to a sort of burnout. Imagine someone who during the week continues to hit a lot of work milestones. Then in the evenings they engage in hard workouts followed by celebratory dinners. On weekends they do action sports and party.
While this is not to say you shouldn’t have fun or enjoy yourself — someone going from high to high to high (even if they are healthy, non-drug induced states) may eventually start to feel a bit of burnout or at the very least a dampening of the joy from these activities. This is because dopamine plays a role in what we call “hedonic adaptation”. The more we engage in something or consume something we enjoy, the more it starts to lose it’s edge.
The prescription for this is to simply avoid those dopamine triggers for some time to let your baseline recover. Imagine you just really love social media. Now there are probably other adverse mental health consequences from engaging too much with it. But that aside, you can see a situation where, after scrolling for a few hours every day, you start to not get much pleasure from it. If you were to stay off social media for a week then get back on, your enjoyment of the activity would “rebound”.
Along these same lines, use caution in rewards: extrinsic sources of motivation. There was one study where they took children who were intrinsically motivated to draw and started giving them rewards for drawing. They then took away the rewards and found the children stopped drawing. Note that before the awards the children would draw on their own for the sake of the activity itself. So even if you have an activity you like to do — doing it in pursuit of a reward can eventually undermine your intrinsic motivation to engage in the activity.
There are several things we can look to to support healthy levels of dopamine.
Caffeine (reasonable doses) supports up-regulation of dopamine.
Avoiding bright light through the night and getting morning sunlight for at least 10 minutes support higher levels of circulating dopamine.
Cold exposure is a powerful tool. One study found with exposure to very cold water (say high 50s) you get an immediate release of adrenaline (more alert) followed by a slow rise in dopamine for up to 3 hours (250% increase).
Finally consider the use of random intermittent rewards. This goes back to the cautionary note on rewards. It turns out that receiving rewards at random intervals is the key to keeping engaged in an activity (this is in fact the exact principle that slot machines leverage to get people addicted). A simple application for this would be if you engage in something or accomplish something that “deserves” a reward then perhaps you flip a coin after. If heads, you celebrate the accomplishment and get your little reward (e.g. a treat after a workout). If tails, you simply continue on as if nothing extraordinary happened. Again this may sound a bit bleak, but it’s really about leveraging our own innate psychological tendencies in support of long term motivation.
Thank you for reading. Your happiness nerd,
Jackson Kerchis