There is a special scene in an earlier episode The Simpsons I found this to be a ten-year-old whose main interest was candy. On the morning after Halloween, Bart and Lisa wake up and eat dessert so painful that they can’t even see the candy pile. When Marge suggests handing the rest of the kids over to need them, they protest, throwing them into the candy pile to protect it and start eating more in pain.
By then, I’ve noticed that the deliciousness of the candy is highly variable. The first batch of twizzlers or nerds taste the best. After that, the pleasure steadily dropped, although I almost always used the allowance to complete anything I purchased.
At that age, my candy consumption was usually limited only by my budget. But, I know from the Halloween annual surprise you can eat enough candy to get to a state where the magic is basically gone, and everything else is irritating candy. Obviously, the party is over, but some of you still want to continue to swallow the toffee and Tootsie volumes.
This is because, even when the pleasure was basically gone by then, eating another candy still brings a faint initial delicacy. Just like you’ve squeezed all the juice out of the orange or lemon, but you can always give the empty peel another hard squeeze and then drop another drop.
I was thinking about this analogy when I tried to get out of my phone. I did my usual rounds (email, social media, sports scores), exhausting the novelty of each app, but I still find myself looking for Bit There will be more stimulation before it is stimulated. I checked the weather again, and then emailed again, ending up scrolling Reddit unpleasantly for so long that I could see the algorithm nervous to find new posts from my usual topics. Ultimately, I wasted a lot of time and I don’t even want to say it.
I’m sure people are different in terms of barriers to radiating or linking (I’m very susceptible). But if you can completely relate to the above, you may have noticed that after bringing one of these pleasures to its exhaustion point, you will feel personal exhausted. Motivation and initiative are already spreading, and it is difficult to jump into something productive. The brain is looking for something simple and satisfying – like picking up your phone again.
My understanding is that this drainage state is depleting your available supply of dopamine, which is the supply of neurotransmitters at the center of the brain reward system. Engaging in novel and immediately satisfying activities such as snacks and phone rolling can lead to dopamine release and deplete if you keep working hard.
Just like a lab mouse hitting the food button too many times, there is no reward soon and you end up being uplifted, focused and moody until your reward system recovers.
Squeeze lemon
The lemon-scented analogy above comes from psychiatrist Alok Kanojia, who comes through “K Dr.k” to his tech-attracted Zoom and Millennial audience. For those who are struggling with motivation, dopamine can be managed intentionally and can be managed in different ways, he said.
As someone who is prone to motivational breakdowns (which has obviously damaged the dopamine circuit), my ears will cheer up with this possibility.
Essentially, the lemon metaphor is like this. (Dr. K emphasizes that this is a loose analogy, and I emphasize that I just share my explanation for this):
Suppose you start with a complete, unimportant lemon, as it allows the dopamine system to recover during sleep.
When the lemon is full, any squeeze of the lemon will cause a large amount of dopamine to be released. Highly dopaminergic activities (such as the first thing to check all your favorite apps) squeeze the lemon especially hard, resulting in a large amount of dopamine release, which strengthens the behavior that triggers it and greatly depletes dopamine reserves.
The more active (i.e., the more powerful the activity of “squeezing lemons”), the less you need to reserve. that’s why always Even if you get more exhausted at the end of the day, dopaminergic activities such as work, exercise, or problem solving usually need to be done earlier, and often need to be done earlier, and you can still do it earlier, and you can still let yourself do it. The rewards of harder activities will get further and further over time, and a more comprehensive lemon is needed to generate enough motivation.
Doing anything is probably impossible when dopamine is triggered from too much squeeze but Keep squeezing lemons frantically because the reserves don’t exist to inspire anything harder. This is how a person can “lock” to negate, Oreo-Muntering, game or channel surfing, and cannot burst. People with ADHD are even more likely to enter this lockdown because the dopamine system has been compromised.
Ideally, you want to maintain dopamine reserves as long as possible every day. You especially want to avoid making any large lemon spots earlier in the day, which is exactly what you do when you wake up with your smartphone directly.
According to Kanojia, the best thing is to stand up and go straight into something hard and productive. This will save dopamine reserves and retain the motivation for a full day of hard work.
Starting with an effortful activity is always harder than picking up a phone and lying on the bed to roll, but this will make the day easier and avoid motivational breakdowns, resulting in lemons wrapped around the lemon and stimulating with snacks, entertainment or other forms of self-stimulation.
An experiment
All of this makes me think. For those who keep their phones on the nightstand and look at the head of the bed first: This is just a smaller compromise, will we avoid better, or are we basically eating candy every day? From the moment of every day, will a large population automatically emerge?
I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than just a small mistake. I’m not always stuck in this motive dirt – it started over the past few years. My guess is that my device habits worsen at some point (during lockdown?), which leads to worse than usual dopamine conditions, which leads to more phone use, even worse habits and so on.
For my 38Th Experiment, I will test the above-mentioned ideas for dopamine management to see if I have subjective differences in motivation and focus.
Again, I don’t have any real knowledge of how neurotransmitters work, and I don’t know how accurate my metaphor is here. I’m just going to test Dr. K’s advice on the above, along with some other dopamine management practices, for a month, and see how it affects my days.
This mainly means not using my phone at all during the first few hours of the day. Before I meditate and do some work at my desk. After that, using it consciously and cautiously avoids any other behavior that I tend to get stuck in, as well as any other behavior that seems to squeeze lemons early and often.
Most other suggestions fit the topic of avoiding “cheap dopamine” as much as possible. Default on what you need to work hard, face the necessary discomfort, especially at the beginning of the day. Find a way to deal with unpleasant emotions that are not easily satisfied (i.e. taking a walk instead of snacking or unlocking your phone).
Another thing I plan to try is cold exposure. I’m going to take a few minutes, days a week, take a shower or take a shower. This is said to result in slow, lasting dopamine increases and has other health benefits. Also, I’m just curious how unpleasant it will be.
This is just an informal experiment to see what happens. There are many ideas for “dopamine detox” and “dopamine fasting” now. There is little research and there are a lot of crack bugs on this topic, but I do think that something can be discovered by trying my own routine. My current way of doing things is undoubtedly not very good, so I think it’s hard to find a better way all day long.
Follow the experiment, or join my public experiment log.
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*My understanding is that the word “depletion” here is an analogy. Our bodies don’t use up too much pamine. Our dopamine receptors are desensitized. “Juice” is not dopamine, but dopamine sensitivity.
