Here is my notes on dopamine. What is it? Why is it important? How to avoid being “control” by dopamine? What is the relationship between dopamine and addiction?
These notes are taken from this podcast. I have not completely fact-checked it. Feel free to do so.
I would highly recommend you to watch or listen to the complete podcast yourselves. (English translation below)

The basics

Okay, let’s start with the basics. One would need to know briefly:

• What is dopamine?
• What is the pleasure, pain pathway and homeostatis?
• The brain mechanism to balance pleasure and pain, aka, to reach homeostasis.

It’s important to understand how these work, then you can do something about it. Take advantage of this knowledge, or simply, to not let it drives your life into a wrong path.

So, dopamine matters so much because it’s a chemical that motivates us to do things, all things. Dr.~Lembke mentioned an experiment with rat, in which they are engineered to have no dopamine. Even if you put the food just a few centimeters away from the rat, the rat will starve to death. The hypothesis is that, without dopamine, the rats are not motivated to seek out things to survive. To those think: “well, we are not rats”, well, you can google that for more details. But briefly, rats share 90% of genes with humans. Their bodies behave similarly to us. Rats are the most preferred animals for many experiments. Anywho, let’s not go off the topic.

In neuroscience, it is believed that pleasure and pain are tightly connected in our brains. Pleasure and pain are processed by the same parts of the brain and work, more or less, like two sides of a scale.

Talking about the scale, this is where homeostasis comes in. Homeostasis implies a state that things are stable internally. It’s the state with condition such that our bodies function optimally. Eg., the optimal temperature for our bodies is 37 Celsius degree. If our body’s temperature is higher or lower, we would be in a not so functionally optimal state. Though, yes, sometimes it is necessary to not be in a optimal state, eg. our body temperature rise when we are sick. We also have a homeostasis state for a balance between pleasure and pain.

Okay, now let’s link all of the above: dopamine, pleasure, pain and homeostasis. The experience of pleasure is essentially the release and transmission of dopamine in our brain. However, as we experience pleasure, the pleasure-pain scale will be unbalanced. Our brain responses with the aim to balance the scale again. One of the way to adapt to the increased dopamine firing is to down-regulate dopamine transmission. This will reduce the amount of dopamine transmitted between neurons. But in addition to this, some “gremlins” are put onto the pain side. Now, here’s the fun part, this mechanism of adding gremlins to the pain side does not perfectly reach homeostasis. It overshoots by adding more pain than needed and now, the scale lean towards the pain side. Thus, you would experience feelings of anxiety, restlessness or utter insomnia. This explains things like hangover, blue Monday, or simply that crave for one extra shot / boost of dopamine.

Why does the brain overshoot instead of perfectly reaching homeostasis? No clear answer yet. The hypothesis is that this mechanism is meant for a world of scarcity. When foods and water are rare, this mechanism motivates us to crave and continue hunting. And yes, this is also where the problem arise. Nowadays, we live in a world that it actually requires much less effort to gain pleasure. Comparing to hunting, much less effort is required to gain access to pleasure, eg. swiping your phone on Facebook, Instagram, pornography, alcohol, drugs. When we consiume too much of these things, the brain would also place more and more gremlins on the pain side and these gremlins persist there for a while. We will be in such a state of prolonged pain, unhappiness and anxiety. On one hands, we would need an extreme level of pleasure to even temporary reach homeostasis, let alone experience pleasure. On the other hands, we would feel so demotivated to do anything at all.

Addiction and dopamine

Addiction happens when we experience too much pleasure and maintain a large amount of gremlins on the pain side. We feel so demotivated to do important things for our survival. The only things we crave for is something that give us just a bit of pleasure. However, in that scenario, we would still need an extreme amount of dopamine to even experience some pleasure. This viscous cycle might repeat endlessly.

The major cause why it’s much easier to be addictive nowadays is the ease of access to pleasure.

• Pornography addiction is probably one of the biggest, yet most silent and shameful addiction.
• Funny enough, there is also love addiction.
• There is a permanent latent echo of addiction in your brain. When you are first exposed to the above addiction cycle, you go through a gradual ramp-up period of accumulating gremlins on the pain side. However, once you have been exposed to and became addicted to a drug, even if after a sustained abstinence, if you are re-exposed to the drug, you would immediately plunge into the depths of your addiction, without the ramp-up period.

Dealing with addiction

Sadly, the most effective way to help people with severe addiction is for the to see real life negative consequences. Protecting them from these negative consequences is not really protecting them at all. It is harsh, but you gotta let them hit rock bottom.

“Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of making a change.” - Tony Robbins

1. Acknowledge the addictive behaviors that are problematic and require changes
2. Be honest with ourselves and maybe another person: why do we do it, what do we get out of it, what is positive about it
3. Be honest about the problems with the behaviors, how does it interfere with my goals in life? How do others say to me about how it’s problematic?
4. 30-day dopamine fast from that addictive behaviors?

An indirect source of dopamine

When we experience pleasure first, the brain put gremlins on the pain side. On the other hands, if we experience pain first, the brain will put gremlins on the pleasure side. Just as before, the brain will overshoot it and the gremlins disappear slowly. Thus, when we intentionally do the hard things first, aka, press on the pain side first, we will indirectly got a boost of dopamine.