Dopamine

What Is the Natural Job of Dopamine?

Dopamine is the good feeling that a reward is at hand. It’s your brain’s signal that a need is about to be met. Dopamine releases energy to help you step toward the reward. Each step closer stimulates more dopamine, but the good feeling stops once the need is met. To enjoy more, your brain scans for the next opportunity to meet a need. Dopamine motivates us to keep meeting needs by making it feel good.

In the state of nature, you had to forage constantly to survive. Dopamine motivated the quest. Once physical needs are met, dopamine motivates you to meet social needs. Natural selection built a brain that cares urgently about the survival of your genes. Dopamine rewards you for behaviors linked to what biologists call “reproductive success.” A good hair day sparks your dopamine if you perceive it as moving you toward a social reward.

Why Is Dopamine Blamed for Bad Choices?

People often get excited about things that are bad for them. That’s because the brain defines your  “needs” with neural pathways built from your own past dopamine. Big dopamine surges in your past built big neural pathways that produce big motivation today. Your biggest dopamine pathways were built in your youth because a young brain has more myelin, the brain’s road-building material. So things that met a need in your youth spark your dopamine today. Yikes! It’s not easy being a big-brained mammal.

To make matters worse, our conscious brain is not aware of the chemicals and pathways that shape our response to the world. Your conscious brain tries to help by coming up with “good” reasons to justify whatever makes you feel good. It’s easy to blame external forces for the things you do for dopamine when you’re not aware of the internal process. It’s easy to persuade other people that external forces are to blame because they’re not aware of their internal process either.

How Can You Manage Your Dopamine?

It takes work. It’s hard to redirect the electricity in your brain because it flows so easily into those old pathways. Making a new choice is like trying to divert a river into a soda straw. To succeed, you need to develop a new pathway, and that’s a chicken and egg problem.

The solution is repetition. Each time you repeat a new choice, the new pathway builds. But how can you get yourself to make the new choice before the pathway has developed? Reward yourself each time. Then the pleasure of the reward gets linked to the new choice. Healthy rewards include hobby time, watching comedy, and the coffee or dessert you would have had anyway. (Don’t have that treat until you practice your new habit!) With repetition, the new choice becomes your new normal.

FREE Resources on Dopamine

Substack: You Have Power Over Your Dopamine

Video: Make Peace with Dopamine

Podcast: Urge Surfing

Graphic: Why You Can’t Stop

Blog: Score! Dopamine! Repeat

National Geographic: How to get high on your own dopamine—naturally

Dopamine in 1 minute (as relevant to love). Credit: Convicts

Complete details on how to do this are in my book, below. A fast introduction to dopamine and 3 other happy chemicals is in my free 5-day Happy Chemical Jumpstart.