Dopamine The Currency of Desire
Look around. Society is filled with highly engineered products that fight for our attention. Every mechanic of social media is invented by the smartest people in the world to make it more addictive. Tristan Harris a former design ethicist at Google talks about how similar the phones in our pockets are as slot machines.
The pursuit of making product addictive concurs in every consumer-based industry. In the food industry, it is sugar that does the job.
Sugar is put into your food to stimulate your appetite and make you eat more. It is also addictive because of stimulates dopamine.
It is put in all sorts of produced food. Just to make you eat more. In bread, pasta sauce, fruit juice, ketchup, yogurt, granola, soup, etc.
Want to avoid it?
What you can do is check the ingredient of every product you own and check for one of these names (spoiler, it can take a while).
Ultimately, such strategies enable food scientists to find the “bliss point” for each product — the precise combination of salt, sugar, and fat that excites your brain and keeps you coming back for more.
The result, of course, is that you overeat because hyper-palatable foods are more attractive to the human brain. As Stephan Guyenet, a neuroscientist who specializes in eating behavior and obesity, says,
“We’ve gotten too good at pushing our own buttons.”
As consumers, we have forgotten what part of the deal we have influence over. Companies have gained so much information over how to push our buttons that gained control over actions.
Dopamine is at the center of this topic. It is the mechanism of desire.
The problem is that we have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
We are a legacy machine working in a very different environment than we were designed for. — Simon Sinek
We Need Dopamine to Survive
Before we start namecalling dopamine, it is good to know why it exists.
In 1954 when the neuroscientists James Olds and Peter Milner ran an experiment that revealed the neurological processes behind craving and desire.
By implanting electrodes in the brains of rats, the researchers blocked the release of dopamine. To the surprise of the scientists, the rats lost all will to live. They wouldn’t eat. They wouldn’t have sex. They didn’t crave anything. Within a few days, the animals died of thirst.
We would never eat if we only waited to get until we got hungry because there’s no guarantee that we would find food so dopamine exists to help us go looking.
The purpose of this dopamine is not to make you feel good, but to learn how to get that reward again.
Dopamine is released in response to receiving unexpected rewards.
When an unexpected reward comes along, the brain says “Whoa I didn’t see that coming.
Hold up, what did we do to get that reward?
And how can we get it again”
Dopamine is Desire, Not Pleasure
Then we need to know about a common misconception: dopamine is for pleasure. Which is partly true. However, the main behavior of dopamine to trigger desire.
In follow-up studies, other scientists also inhibited the dopamine-releasing parts of the brain, but this time, they squirted little droplets of sugar into the mouths of the dopamine-depleted rats.
Their little rat faces lit up with pleasurable grins from the tasty substance. Even though dopamine was blocked, they liked the sugar just as much as before; they just didn’t want it anymore.
The ability to experience pleasure remained, but without dopamine, desire died. And without desire, the action stopped.
For years, scientists assumed dopamine was all about pleasure, but now we know it plays a central role in many neurological processes, including motivation, learning and memory, punishment and aversion, and voluntary movement.
When it comes to habits, the key takeaway is this: dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.
Gambling addicts have a dopamine spike right before they place a bet, not after they win.
Cocaine addicts get a surge of dopamine when they see the powder, not after they take it.
Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation. And whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act.
It is the anticipation of a reward — not the fulfillment of it — that gets us to take action.
Technology and Dopamine
In his talk now famous interview with Inside Quest, Simon Sinek talks about the effect of Dopamine on millennials.
Our cell phones release a chemical called dopamine. It is the reason that when you get a text it feels good. It’s why we count the likes it’s and why we go back ten times to see if our Instagram is growing.
Dopamine feels good it’s why we like it it’s why we keep going back to it. It is the exact same chemical that makes us feel good when we smoke when we drink and when we gamble. In other words, it’s highly addictive.
We have age restrictions on smoking gambling and alcohol but no we have no age restrictions on social media and cell phones. Which is the equivalent of opening up the liquor cabinet and saying to our teenagers “hey, by the way, this adolescence thing if it gets you down…”.
This article is part of my 168 series
Each week has 168 hours. I have the ability to choose to make the most out of these hours. However, I often regret how I spend my time. How can I give more to those things I value and less to those I don’t?
