There is a baseline level of dopamine which is generally circulating around your body which determines your mood and how you’re feeling.
When you crave something really desirable, you experience a peak in dopamine level, post which the baseline level of dopamine drops.
How Dopamine Is Released: Locally and Broadly
Taking supplements for Dopamine might not be the best idea because while it may make you feel more excited and motivated about things, it will also make that motivation very short-lived.
This is because the excitement or motivation does not depend on the height of the peak, but the height of the peak relative to the baseline.
If you increase the baseline and increase the peak, you will not experience more pleasure.
Fast and Slow Effects of Dopamine
When dopamine is released, it will bind to the next neuron and will set up a cascade. This is a slower process.
Your experience of life and your level of motivation and drive depends on how much dopamine you have relative to your recent experience.
Activities That Increase Dopamine
Chocolate causes a 1.5x increase.
Both pursuit and act of sex causes 2x increase.
Nicotine increases 2.5x and it is very short-lived.
Cocaine increases it 2.5x times and amphetamines increase it 10x times.
People who like exercise will experience 2x times increase and those who don’t like it experience little to no increase in dopamine.
Regular ingestion of caffeine increases regulation of certain dopamine receptors, which means it makes you able to experience more of dopamine’s effects.
Pursuit, Excitement and Your “Dopamine Setpoint”
After we reach a peak in dopamine, a drop in baseline occurs, and it always takes a little while to get back up to our stable baseline.
The stable baseline is our dopamine setpoint.
Your Pleasure-Pain Balance & Defining “Pain”
If we really like chocolate and eat a piece of it, we experience pleasure but then there’s a little bit of pain that exceeds the amount of pain, and it’s subtle.
We experience that pain as wanting more of that thing (chocolate in this case).
This pain is coming from the lack of dopamine that follows.
Addiction, Dopamine Depletion and Replenishing Dopamine
When someone pursues a drug or an activity that leads to huge increases in dopamine, and afterwards the baseline of dopamine drops because of depletion of dopamine in the readily reusable pool, they start feeling lousy and try to pursue the dopamine-evoking activity to get the peak again. Not only does this not give them the peak but also drop their baseline even further.
What should I do if I experience a drop in my baseline level of dopamine because of engagement with an activity or substance? The way that you replenish the releasable pool of dopamine is to not engage in these dopaminergic behaviours. The first 14 days are the hardest.
When people live a “work hard play hard” lifestyle, there are a lot of dopamine evoking activities spread throughout the week. This might include drinking on the weekends, going for a swim some time during the week, work and exercise during the week. This person might get burnt out after a few years because he is spiking his dopamine so many times during the week that his baseline is progressively dropping.
How To Ensure Your Best Dopamine Release
The key lies in intermittent release of dopamine.
We should not expect or chase high levels of dopamine release every time we engage in these activities.
For activities that you’d like to continue to engage in over time, start paying attention to the amount of dopamine and excitement and pleasure that you achieve with those, and start modulating them somewhat at random.
That might be removing some dopamine releasing chemicals which you take prior to the activity. For example, if you like taking a pre-workout or coffee before you work out to make it more pleasurable, try working out sometimes without that. This should be random.
If you enjoying doing something socially, maybe you try sometimes doing it alone.
If you enjoy listening to music while in the gym, maybe you try working out sometimes without the music.
Smart Phones: How They Alter Our Dopamine Circuits
We achieve a great dopamine increase that comes from a smart phone (being able to communicate by call, text, share pictures, social media). However, it does not have that same fulfilling aspect to it every time. It seems to remove the excitement and the pleasure of the very activities we’re engaged in.
Try removing multiple sources of multiple sources of dopamine release from activities that you want to continue to enjoy or want to enjoy more.
For example, try removing your phone from the room in which you work out.
Stimulants and Spiking Dopamine
People should not use stimulants every time they study or workout.
The exception here is caffeine because it makes the dopamine released by the activity more accessible.
Other stimulants like energy drinks and pre-workout contain things that are precursors to dopamine. This means that even if you don’t engage in the activity, just ingesting them alone cause a spike in dopamine. Over time, that will deplete your dopamine.
Intermittently spiking your dopamine (if you do it at all) is the way to go.
Stimulating Long-Lasting Increases in Baseline Dopamine
Cold water exposure causes a 2.5x increase in the baseline levels of dopamine.
The advantage here is that this causes a very steady rise over a few hours.
Tuning Your Dopamine for Ongoing Motivation
If you get a peak in dopamine from a reward, it’s going to lower your baseline and the cognitive interpretation is that you didn’t really do the activity because you did the activity, you enjoyed it because of the reward.
The neural mechanism of cultivating a growth mindset involves learning to access the rewards from effort.
You have to tell yourself that this effort is great and pleasureful, even though you might be in a state of pain from exercise or exhaustion.
If you do a very hard thing for that end goal that comes later, not only do you enjoy the process of what you’re doing less, you actually make it more painful and make yourself less efficient at it because you’re no longer accessing dopamine.
Quitting Sugar and Highly Palatable Foods
If you ingest something that you like, it tastes good to you. But if you eat something that’s even sweeter or more savoury and then go back to the food you ate previously, you don’t like it as much.
Highly savoury foods are making more bland/whole foods taste less good, atleast for a while.
All it takes is a short period of time, even just days of not consuming highly palatable foods for bland/whole foods to taste better.
Pornography
The intensity of pornography can negatively shape real world romantic and sexual interactions.
Any activity that evokes a lot of dopamine release will make it harder to achieve the same level and certainly a greater level of dopamine through a subsequent interaction.
Avoiding Melatonin Supplementation and Avoiding Light 10pm-4am
Melatonin supplementation is not recommended as studies have shown a significant drop in dopamine as hour after supplementation.
Viewing bright lights between 10pm-4am has been linked to decrease in dopamine for several days.