The reason I say that is because dopamine keeps showing up in various neurological conditions. So far, the list includes addiction, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, OCD, Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, fibromyalgia, and restless leg syndrome.
Not only that but the dopaminergic network in the brain plays a central role in feeling high and feeling low.
Let me explain.
We all have a baseline for feeling content; a general sense of well-being. When this feeling of content falls below the baseline, we need a dopamine fix (together with other neurotransmitters) to restore equilibrium.
Dopamine can fall below the baseline for two reasons.
First and foremost, you are not intellectually engaged, interested or present most of the day. In simple terms, you're not doing enough things that nourish your emotional well-being throughout the day.
That means you're not being rewarded by your environment often enough. So you have a dopamine deficiency. This makes you highly susceptible to mood disorders and the neurological disorders mentioned above.
In this situation, people have a tendency to increase dopamine levels and restore your mood to baseline or beyond. And that's when you turn to coping mechanisms which then become habits and addictions.
Addiction is the other reason you might have a dopamine deficiency. Addictions give us a spike in dopamine. However high the spike goes above the baseline — your happiness scale from 1-10 — there will be an equivalent drop below the baseline — your sadness scale from 1-10.
If you have a daily addiction that rewards you, you’re more likely to gravitate towards that substance, activity or behaviour more often when you are not nourishing your emotional well-being through other means during other parts of the day.
And that’s what dopamine does. This is a neurotransmitter that motivates you to seek out rewards.
In moments of emotional stress, dopamine motivates you to seek out and engage in activities or behaviours the ego associates with comfort, joy or pleasure.
The ego seeks comfort to alleviate the emotional disturbance caused by anger, frustration, irritation, annoyance, passive-aggressive behaviours and so forth.
Thought-Provoking Quote
“A person’s needs, drives and motivating states in general as annoying, irritating, unpleasant, undesirable, as something to get rid of. Motivated behaviour, goals seeking, consummate to the responses are all techniques for reducing these discomfort.”
~ Abraham Maslow, Toward A Psychology Of Being [1]
Essentially, the ego is always in search of your comfort zone and turns to things you love to do because that is where you feel safe.
When you're in your zone of comfort there is no dis-ease towards your environment.
So, good stuff that dopamine. It has your best intentions at heart and helps you to engage in things you love to do where you feel safe and good about yourself.
What happens next is the brain records the behaviour as a survival mechanism. Neural networks are forged decision-making faculties and the reward centre.
Rewards enhance connectivity between the ventral stratium and the default network. [2] When information is received by the stratium from the cerebral cortex the appropriate action is taken to achieve the goal.
Thus dopamine plays a key role in motivating you to take action.
This is how addictions are forged into the neural network.
However, the problem that many us encounter is that the coping mechanisms we turn to are not good for us or our relationships. In many cases, they can be downright destructive.
And practically everyone’s got a coping mechanism; alcohol, smoking, sex, porn, work, gambling, shopping, caffeine, social media. When coping mechanisms are not reigned in, they become addictions you have no control over.
Hands up if you’re an addict.
I have an addictive personality.
It used to be football, then computer games, smoking, sex, alcohol, cannabis, porn, smoking again, chilli-coated peanuts and such like, then back to alcohol; Ferrero Rocher and brandy.
How many times do you find yourself parking an addiction only to go back to it, or worse, replace it with another addiction that gives you a higher dosage of neurotransmitters. And so the cycle continues but with a different area of focus.
Do you know the type of people who suffer the most from addictive behaviours?
I'll tell you.
It's people who feel unloveable.
Or you at least have a subconscious program that informs the ego you are unloveable and creates experiences that confirm this.
Except that program is a lie. You're probably highly loveable and do things that make you loveable. You just don't recognise this about yourself because that not the information being passed to your brain registers.
Do you keep finding yourself in situations where you feel rejected, isolated, unheard, lonely (even when you’re in company) angry, irritated, frustrated, sad, hopeless, unloved, unappreciated, hopeless, unmotivated and less excited about things you used to love?
Do you often feel as though you’re not good enough and you don’t know where you fit into the world.
If you're feeling like this, it’s likely that you have a dopamine deficiency.
You may have already been slapped with one or more of the neurological labels that qualify you for medication (ADHD, depression, Alzheimer’s etc).
Instead of relying on medication to mask your discomfort or dis-ease, it may be more beneficial for you to alter your lifestyle and mindset towards activities and behaviours that are more rewarding for you.
By addressing your dopamine deficiency, there is huge potential to pull yourself out of feeling dissatisfied, frustrated and irritable and overcome destructive addictions that no longer serve you as a coping mechanism.
Creating the life you want to live and being the person you want to be is a far healthier and constructive solution for your health, well-being and relationships.
Do you want to know how to do that?
Let's go deep-diving.
I don't know about you but, for me, making lifestyle changes and overcoming addictions is one of the hardest things to do. That's because addictions are emotionally charged to reward us.
With that in mind, it's important to understand what dopamine is and how it drives addictions, behaviours and activities.
Dopamine is a neurochemical that serves as a motivational signal in the brain. When you anticipate a reward or engage in goal-directed behaviours that norish your emotional well-being, dopamine levels tend to increase.
When you don’t engage in activities that are rewarding, dopamine levels are lower. The dopaminergic pathway is switched off because there is no traffic. Zero information is passing through.
To compensate for a dopamine deficiency, the mammalian brain generates a craving for behaviours that activate the dopaminergic system. The mammalian brain hankers after security.
Abraham Maslow noted that humans only feel secure when their basic needs are met: food, shelter, sex, belongingness, love and self-esteem.
When these needs are not met, the ego goes in search of things that provide a source of comfort; a reprieve from the dis-ease you are experiencing from your environment.
By seeking out a source of comfort, the brain’s reward system plays a central role in regulating and establishing your mood. Dopamine also plays a role in memory by motivating you to engage in learned behaviours you know offer some sort of reward.
And this is how habits are formed. You learn which coping mechanisms alleviate emotional discomfort and dopamine acts as a signal that motivates you to seek out and engage in "rewarding" behaviours.
Because you were rewarded in the past. It is a survival mechanism the ego associates with to protect your emotional structure.
For example, research has found that the dopaminergic system lights up when people eat their favourite foods, [3] or what has been described as “comfort foods”.
A 2020 paper published in the journal Physiology & Behavior [4] further discovered that the brain has "hedonic hotspots” [5] — subregions that amplify satisfaction and can stimulate your motivation to seek out activities or things to consume which give you sensory pleasure.
The problem with dopaminergic urges is that we grow resilient to them. Once rewards are learned, dopamine becomes more about his anticipation of a reward rather than the reward itself.
Thought-Provoking Quote
“Our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won't be enough tomorrow.” [Wounded Ruler; gluttony, greed, lust etc]
~ Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, p.83, (2017) [6]
But that’s not the most interesting fact researchers discovered about dopamine.
Do you want to know what that is?
When dopamine levels are too low you risk becoming depressed. When they’re too high, you become hyperactive and have a tendency towards addiction.
You heard that right. Depression and hyperactivity share the same neural pathway.
Surely then, the key must be to find a balance between depression and hyperactivity, sad and ecstatic.
We’ll get into this neural connection in a future article, but for now, I just want to point out that I’m not a trained neuroscientist so much of what you read below may be naive.
But here goes anyway. Let’s take a look at what dopamine does.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in motivating behaviour. It gives our brains the drive to perform tasks we will be rewarded with by feelings of satisfaction, pleasure and contentment.
Thus dopamine motivates you towards things that stimulate your attention. It contributes to arousal and plays a critical role in reinforcing behaviours through learning.
In other words, it plays a role in encoding the psychobiological system — the ego — to associate actions that deliver rewards; comfort, pleasure, and sensation.
But dopamine also encodes memories which the ego associates with emotional punishment or suffering.
You probably know this from your own experience, but have you noticed that the things we are motivated towards help us to get through the day?
Maybe that’s mind-altering or mind-focusing drugs for you, or maybe alcohol, cigarettes, binge eating or…caffeine anyone?
Addictions look different for everyone, and they also come at different times of the day. For example, you might notice this in yourself…
…You start the day off with a cup of coffee because you can’t operate until you’ve had your first cup of coffee. You continue to drink coffee throughout the day at work, but, like every hour.
It might be a bit excessive is what I’m saying. The number of coffees it is recommended to consume a day is between 2 and 5.
If the evening you turn your attention away from caffeine and maybe have a little tipsy-poos. or you smoke cannabis, take coke or meth.
Or maybe you binge-watch TV throwing peanut MnMs into your mouth or devouring the chocolate fudge cake you sneakily bought from Starbucks on your way home because you fancied a vanilla latte.
The neurotransmitter responsible for these behaviours is dopamine — and it’s because you have a dopamine deficiency that drives you towards goal-directed behaviours seeking gratification that makes you “feel good”.
But it turns out that dopamine is not strictly a “feel-good” neurotransmitter per se.
Neuroscience throws us a curveball. What researchers have discovered is that dopamine is related more to the anticipation of a reward than it is to the outcome of the activity or behaviour.
Eventually, predictable outcomes mean certain brain regions do not receive a sufficient amount of dopamine.
Thought-Provoking Quote
“Dopamine is not just about to record anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behaviour needed to gain that reward; dopamine "binds" the value of a reward to the resulting work. It's about the motivation arising from those dopaminergic projections to the PFC that is needed to do the harder thing… in other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It's about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring.”
~ Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)
We then have a dopamine deficiency and a chemical imbalance in the brain. This can cause the brain to become overstimulated when you do engage in a stimulating activity for a certain length of time. Like all night.
For some people, the surge can be so high you go into hyperfocus and zone out. You know, the feeling when you’re “dead to the world” yet you’ve never felt so alive.
You may even stay in the zone for hours until something snaps you out of it. Computer games, movies and your imagination can do this.
Here’s another oddity. People with ADHD, an apparent attention-deficit disorder, can go into hyperfocus when they are engaged in something that stimulates them.
People with ADHD, therefore, show us that dopamine deficiency probably occurs when we are not engaged in life. We are at dis-ease with our environment because of the stress it invites.
Stress induced by feelings of social inadequacy is an inhibitor for dopamine.
So if you find life mundane, scary or unimportant, is there a higher risk of depression or addiction?
Apparently so. Here’s a snippet from Anna Gosline writing for the Scientific American about boredom:
“Easily bored people are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, drug addiction, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, eating disorders, hostility, anger, poor social skills, bad grades and low work performance.”
This is the same list of conditions that are associated with people who have a low dopamine level.
Let’s face it, we’re fucking bored!
It shouldn’t come as any surprise then to find studies showing a correlation between depressive moods and low dopamine levels. [7]
Could the solution be to do more things that stimulate you?
The way dopamine stimulates the reward centre is like fuelling a car engine. The more stimulated you are the more attentive and focused you become. The better you perform the better you feel.
With fuel in your engine, you are driven to do things that excite your senses.
In optimal and balanced measurements, dopamine makes you alert, present and interested. It also puts you in a relaxed state of mind whereby you feel calm and composed and your cognitive processes are optimal.
When you’re in this state of mind notice your behaviour and attitude towards your environment.
Are you serving from a love-based centre or are you rooted in fear?
Most people will find they are generally charming, loveable and sociable when their dopamine levels are balanced. Whatever loveable qualities you possess will come to the surface. And that’s because you’re a happy and content little bunny. You have been rewarded.
However, a dopamine surge induced by pleasure-seeking behaviours programmed in the subconscious, creates an imbalance.
The spike comes down to the same level as it goes up. So, if you have a high dopamine spike that reaches say, 7 out of 10 above your baseline, you will have an equally low dopamine spike that also falls 7 out of 10 below your baseline later on.
And this is the downer or hangover. The moody you who is low on energy and now feels bored.
In people with ADHD, it was found that surges in dopamine can induce a state of mind known as hyperfocus”. We know this better as zoning out. Some people can stay in the zone for hours if they are engaged in an activity that stimulates them; computer games, reading, writing, art, sports, polishing the floor, whatever.
However, after being zoned out, you later become grumpy, moody and miserable. You feel this way because you're not producing sufficient amounts of dopamine throughout the day to reward you.
The point I’m making is that it seems as though there is a dopamine deficiency in individuals who find life mundane. If you’re not being engaged or present throughout the day, the subconscious pushes you towards activities that turn your reward centre on whenever an opportunity presents itself.
And they are the times of day when you can engage in addictions.
We’ve all been there!
Chin up!
Yes, there is. I’ll tell you that right off the bat.
What you might not want to hear is that regulating dopamine requires a change in lifestyle that moves you away from addictive sources.
And, that can be tough. I’ll not lie to you.
Breaking away from addictions is arguably the hardest lifestyle change you will encounter.
That’s because substances and behaviours offer the ego comfort, pleasure, or sensations. You basically become dependent on addictions to get you through the day.
The more chronically bored you are, the more you chase dopamine-inducing activities. Dependencies increase in dosage over time. Instead of five coffees every day, you have five triple espressos a day.
Eventually, you become intolerant to your addictions and no longer produce enough dopamine. Low levels of dopamine can lead to symptoms of anhedonia — the inability to feel pleasure.
This is the downward spiral depression takes you to and life becomes even more manic and you scramble for a source of comfort.
When one coping mechanism stops working, you move onto something else that does. Something stronger. If you observe your addictions over time you may find a trail where your addictions became coping mechanisms because other coping mechanisms began to fail.
So the first thing you need to look at is where you get your dopamine and where you do not.
Anything that bores the shit out of you means you're not getting dopamine. You get dopamine from things you enjoy doing, that interest you and make you focus.
So the question I want to ask you is: “How can you increase your dopamine levels in healthy and constructive ways?
The answer to this question is not the same for everyone so I can’t tell you personally what that looks like for you. I could suggest doing something that is creative because creativity requires focus but that might not be your choice or you may already have that in your life.
But what I do know, and what I can tell you is this:
If you can work out why your dopamine levels are low in the first place, you can identify ways of regulating dopamine flow and reduce dopaminergic surges.
Some common reasons why we don't engage with our environment is because we are not present. That's because you are preoccupied with your self-image because you have low self-esteem and worry what people think about you, or you don't feel loveable, or because you don't think your good enough.
The parts of your personality that would make you feel good about yourself, that will make you feel loved, that would make your recognise your value and feel as though you belong are repressed.
Once you know which parts of your personality are repressed you are in a stringer position to change your lifestyle. Align your behaviours with your intention.
When you focus on the life you want to live and the person you want to be and start living that life, helps you to regulate emotions and take control of your impulses. You also become calmer no matter what you’re experiencing in your environment.
Remember that dopamine release strengthens the neural pathways associated with a particular behaviour. Find an activity that ignites your passion and you're more likely to repeat it in the future.
Once you recognise specific habitual behaviours that offer an emotional “reward” you have a reason to engage in that activity or behaviour more often.
Another way to look at this is to recognise when you don’t feel rewarded. If you feel guilt and shame after indulging in a “comforting” behaviour, you are not rewarding yourself engaging in that activity.
So do you need the addiction that causes you to feel guilt and shame?
No, you don’t.
Irrational guilt surfaces from the Self. This is a part of your being that delivers internal message to inform you a particular behaviour is no longer providing you with any value.
The Self also feeds you messages which inform you how to manage your environment successfully. This becomes your coping mechanism. Learn your archetypes and you will know which repressed qualities you need to utilise, develop and integrate.
It’s clear to see how dopamine causes addiction. Substance abuse and certain behaviours, like gambling, emotional eating, promiscuity and hypersexuality, shopping, working out etc, can lead to excessive dopamine release that reinforces addictive behaviours.
Overtime, addictive behaviours become increasingly destructive because they are coping mechanisms that enable us to deny we are not coping with life.
The simple truth is that you don’t cope with life because you repress the part of your personality that would enable you to meet your challenges.
Once you integrating qualities that are repressed, your behaviours shift from being destructive and become constructive. You shift from surviving to thriving.
Essentially, dopamine binds you to an attachment whereby you feel you are entitled to and deserving of a reward. But when you build resilience to it, you no longer feel satisfied.
Subsequently, you have low energy and feel sad, frustrated, hopeless, depressed, less excited etc.
You can read an example of why you never feel satisfied in Greek mythology. Click the link to learn about the story of Tantalus — from where we get the modern English word, tantalise.
[1] Abraham Maslow, Toward A Psychology Of Being, p.31 (1962)
[2] E. Dobryakova, D.V. Smith (2022)
[3] Reward, dopamine and the control of food intake: implications for obesity, N Volkow et al (2010)
[6] Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, p.83, (2017)
[7[ Ibid, p.87
[8] Dopamine System Dysregulation in Major Depressive Disorders, Belujon & Grace (2017)
