Think of dopamine as finite resource to spend on activities
We usually think of dopamine as a feel-good chemical we get from specific activities, without considering that dopamine production has limits. What if we reversed our thinking to dopamine-first, that it’s a finite resource we can spend on activities?
Dopamine is known as the motivation and reward chemical in the brain. There are others as well, and it’s more complicated than that, but for the context of this article let’s think of getting (releasing) dopamine as feeling good and motivated. It’s a good enough proxy.
In our daily lives we try to feel good as much as possible. The more we feel good the better. Nothing wrong with that, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Nobody wakes up thinking “today I want to feel shit”.
The body, however, can’t produce an endless amount of dopamine. The brain operates via a self-regulation process called homeostasis, meaning for every high, there’s a low. Regardless how amazing our lives are, we will have down phases. They’re impossible to avoid.
Instead of trying to avoid down phases, which is a losing battle anyway, how about we control from which activities we get our dopamine, i.e. high phases?
