Dopamine – Part 2

The purpose of this Part 2 is to make the information that I outlined in part 1, practically useful. It is my belief that understanding our own brains, how they work, how they process information, how they learn, and their weaknesses; is the easiest and quickest way to align our priorities. Part 1 explained how dopamine works in a theoretically perfect system in our brains, but almost all of our brains are not perfect manufacturers of dopamine. The following article will give you a hack to examine how your brain creates its own motivation, therefore recognizing your brains’ weaknesses and strengths will help you strengthen your strengths and strengthen your weaknesses!

This is the fun part of our discussion about dopamine (and as such took less motivation for me to write!!)

What are the ways that creating dopamine in the brain can go wrong? You could produce too much dopamine. You could produce too little dopamine, or it could do both in a rather annoying and detrimental way that I will explain further.

If your brain struggles to produce enough dopamine, then you will have very little energy, have poor memory, experience extreme fatigue, have difficulty concentrating and overall have very little motivation or enthusiasm for anything. Things that others seem to love doing such as ice skating, swimming, dancing, drawing, walking, going to the movies, and playing with your kids; will hold little to no joy for you and other things that normal people struggle with on occasion, like chores, paying bills, being on time, or putting away laundry might as well be as painful as falling into a pond covered with ice. Your brain is fighting you to do the most basic things like it’s protecting you from something life threatening. All of these symptoms are easily associated with depression and even anxiety to some degree.

If the alternative is true, your brain produces too much dopamine, you will regularly experience hallucinations, mania and delusions that all feel very real. And your extreme energy will be motivating you to act on these hallucinations.

But what seems to be a more common problem in our human brains is an inability to naturally regulate the production of dopamine. The brain will produce too much dopamine sometimes and not nearly enough dopamine most of the time. If you are in a state of high dopamine, you will feel extremely happy, filled with energy, hyper-focused, enthusiastic, and highly concentrated. A few things that you are passionate about will kidnap your attention and not let you go! However, for other things, like the practical needs of life, you will feel next to no motivation. And there will be periods where you feel the other extreme, as in fatigue, losing focus, and an inability to focus. This inability to regulate the production in your brain is associated with many common mental disorders such as ADHD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder.

As someone with diagnosed ADHD, this realization that my brain struggles to regulate the release of dopamine while other times giving me way too much, really explains a lot. When I see a bunch of dishes in the sink, I feel no motivation to do them and if I did manage to do them, I’d feel really no pleasure from finishing them. While at the same time, I can read and research for three days straight on the effects of the hormone, dopamine, in our brains. The enthusiasm in one area and the complete lack of interest in the other is very detrimental to daily life. It would be easy to diagnose yourself as existing in one of these problem areas of dopamine production and resign yourself to forever being stuck in this cycle, but rather, I have started to think about it in a different way and I suggest, even if you don’t think you have an extreme version of the disorders mentioned above, that you try this too.

I am essentially manufacturing my dopamine consciously instead of letting my brain do it subconsciously. (I highly doubt that this is the way actual neuroscientists would describe this but I’m merely experimenting with motivational techniques not publishing in a scientific journal.)

When I am staring at the dishes piling high, I notice my brain gets stingy with the dopamine it would normally send to motivate me to do the dishes, it’s saying ‘I’m not sure that doing the dishes is really going to be worth it, we’ve done the dishes hundreds of times before and it’s boring and not fun.” Recognizing that this lack of motivation is stemming from a hormonal basis can help me regulate it myself from a rational basis. I think to myself, “No, doing the dishes will be worth it this time.” and when I’ve mustered up the energy and done the dishes, I end the task with rewarding myself. I compliment myself. I notice quickly I jumped up to do them this time. Or I’ll just smile to myself and think positively about myself. If I don’t follow through and let myself pause and feel a sense of accomplishment and pleasure, then the dopamine doesn’t get replaced and the learned experience of ‘washing the dishes zaps my dopamine’ gets even more engrained in my memory. If I give myself the satisfaction and appreciation, then the brain will start to remember that as something enjoyable and will adjust it’s motivational memory accordingly. I’m essentially lying to myself and claiming that I enjoy something that must be done, until it is true and I do actually enjoy it.

The reward at the end is one of the most important parts in my opinion. I don’t care how small the step was. I started off washing only a single dish at a time! Maybe your starting point is only a single jumping jack. Look, it doesn’t matter that that one jumping jack or one dish isn’t helping you immediately accomplish the entire goal of being fit or of being the tidiest adult in DFW, what matters here, is that you are training your motivation center. Once the brain has been trained from dishes are boring to doing the dishes is actually quite meditative and enjoyable, it becomes smooth sailing. Doing the dishes and exercising become as easy as binging a show on Netflix or scrolling through Facebook.

One last example, let’s say you saw this article pop up by me. And you thought, hey she is my friend, I know she spends time working on these so I’ll support her by reading it. First of all, Thank you! Second of all, thank the dopamine in your brain. It figured that even if you acquired no new knowledge from this article at all, that you’d feel a sense of pleasure related to supporting your writer friend. And I hope you do!! And now that you’re done reading, remind yourself how awesome of a friend you are, how awesome you are for wanting to learn, and how amazing you are as a person for taking the time to read through an entire article when you could be scrolling through Facebook!

If you have any questions, concerns or thoughts to add, I would love to hear them! As always, thank you for reading!