Understanding Dopamine Can Help Us Create Better Habits

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in our brain’s reward processing systems. When you do something that feels good, it’s usually because of an anticipatory or consummatory reward mediated by dopamine.

Anticipatory reward is the good feeling you get when moving towards a goal. Have you ever noticed that sometimes, the feeling of being about to achieve a milestone is more exciting than the feeling you get when you actually achieve it? Or perhaps the feeling of accomplishment is short-lived, and you quickly move on to your next goal?

That is not to say that achieving something never feels good. Rather, our brain rewards us with dopamine for consumption, too. That is why things taste good, for example. But the reward is short-lived. As soon as you swallow and deliver your brain the energy it desires, what more incentive does it have to keep you happy?

Anna Lembke, the author of Dopamine Nation and a professor of Addiction Medicine at Stanford University, describes how this consummatory reward is precisely what can lead to “couch potato syndrome.” If you are just laying down on the couch, you likely feel more or less neutral. But for the few seconds you chew on that potato chip, you receive a dopamine spike of consummatory reward.

This is why couch potato syndrome can sustain itself even when you are no longer hungry. The first few bites elevate your mood slightly above neutral, and once your brain gets used to its mini-high, the dopamine dip of returning to neutral manifests as a craving for more.

Things get more pernicious when talking about forms of consummatory reward that hijack our brain’s pleasure system: drugs. Opioids, for example, form extremely strong bonds with inhibitory neurons, blocking the firing that normally tells our brains to stop producing dopamine.

Drugs aren’t a problem because they make people feel good. Drugs are a problem when they cause addiction, narrowing our dopamine sources to one destructure behavior, drug use, and disrupting our incentive to enjoy the normal pleasures of life.

It is not a bad thing that we have evolved to chase the greatest sources of dopamine in our lives. We evolved this way because it is adaptive. What is unadaptive is when we receive artificially high hits of dopamine from things that are genuinely not good for us.

Dopamine keeps us craving short-term pleasures, but it doesn’t have to. Eliminating, or even taking periodic breaks, from short-term pleasures in our lives, can allow us to feel more reward from the pursuit of long-term goals.

Things to remember

• Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that governs reward in the brain.

• Impulsive pleasures reward more immediate dopamine than long-term, more meaningful, but more difficult, goals.

• Dopamine resets and delayed gratification are key to optimizing feelings of reward for long-term goals.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/natured-nurture/202209/understanding-dopamine-can-help-us-create-better-habits

Why is it important that we find meaningful and longtime sources of happiness instead of the short-term ones that are not very productive but more intense?

#Neuroscience #Psychology #Dopamine #Addiction