Dopamine And Your Brain AudioChapter from Dopamine Detox AudioBook by Nick Trenton

Dopamine detox, biohacking your way to better focus, greater happiness and peak performance, Every single person reading this book will share one thing in common: they inhabit biological bodies. But there is something else they may or may not possess, and that’s the ability to think consciously about their physical wellbeing. This awareness allows them to take proactive steps to strategize and improve on their life, no matter what kind of body they’re working with. “Biohacking” is broadly defined as any attempt to improve, upgrade, or enhance the biological realities of human life. Originally, biohackers were renowned for DIY experiments with drugs, gene editing, or body modification techniques that fell far outside of conventional science and medicine. In time, however, ordinary people also acquired a taste for embracing their power to use science to improve on what nature endowed them with. In the chapters that follow, we’ll be exploring three key areas in which the art of “biohacking” has been practiced, and several everyday ways that you can use these principles to your own advantage.

Thankfully, you don’t need to go to extremes to make drastic changes to your longevity, mood, mental faculties, self-discipline, and overall vitality. Whether it’s a good sleep schedule and the right supplements, or a completely rebooted dopamine system, we’ll explore practical and proven techniques for making the best of your life, here and now. If you could do one thing to improve your life drastically, what would it be? There are countless books out there on self-discipline, productivity, self-esteem, purposeful living, emotional resilience, and more. But could there be something that underlies all these separate behaviors, attitudes, and mindsets? Well, yes. Maybe the secret ingredient for a life that is disciplined, focused, proactive, and balanced is simple: dopamine.

As neuroscientists gain a more sophisticated understanding of the physiological correlates of our mood, our cognition, and our behavior, it becomes clear that any serious change to our lifestyle must include a change to our biology. For a biohacker, the neurochemicals -- hormones and electrical connections in the brain -- are akin to the programming in a computer; if we can rewrite the code at the back end of our own biology, we can influence the programs we run. Understanding the effects of dopamine on the human experience requires a bit of a perspective shift. Think of yourself as both the machine and the programmer – you are able to consciously control your own experience if you understand the rules of its operation. In layman’s terms, the brain is a neurochemical machine that operates according to a variety of hormones and neurotransmitters, which can be thought of as chemical messengers or instructions for the body. In a literal way, they are the concrete expression of your reality. For example, every time you feel love, disappointment, fear, or frustration, there is a precise neurochemical state in your body associated with the experience.

Imagine this: you discover a new restaurant. It opened near your workplace, and you look forward to trying the food it offers. You go in and have a bite, and it’s marvelous. You feel enchanted and enamored e. Yet, even if the restaurant continues to provide excellent food on every visit, little by little, it will become less exciting because it becomes routine, and your brain knows what to anticipate every time. There is no novelty, no surprise, and the dopamine associated with this restaurant and its meals drop. Dopamine always has us looking for something more and something novel rather than what we are accustomed to.

Social media engages us in a way few other things can and have an impact on our dopamine systems. Social media offers a never-ending stream of content, some of which can prove valuable, funny, and enjoyable. We never know when we will come upon something great, and that helps keep us engaged. Social media is also, well, social, which makes its appeal even stronger - we crave approval, connection, and affection, and social media can provide social stimuli that signal recognition or validation in the form of likes, retweets, comments, and so on. Our dopamine systems can, essentially, be hacked by social media. We never know when to expect a notification or a fun video or something else. This ensures that we are never accustomed too much, and the novelty effect remains.

In essence, this is the same trick that casinos use to keep people coming back. We can find the same mechanism in things like lotteries and raffles that allow our brain to anticipate a reward to come but not a certain one. The engineers of such sites are aware of these processes and design their interfaces specifically to target this weakness in our biochemistry. In other words, there is money to be made from exploiting the brain’s reward system, thereby getting people hooked on the cheap and endless “reward” of the 24/7 news cycle and never-ending content. But it’s not just unscrupulous mega-corporations that train our brains toward addictive behavior. We can find a similar tactic in play in toxic relationships, when our partner might give us the love and affection we crave, but only sometimes, which keeps it unpredictable. Cognitive psychologists have long understood that this intermittent reward keeps us more engaged than if we had a more consistent stream of positive outcomes.

Have you ever met someone who was so used to toxic relationships that they felt bored and uneasy when they found themselves in a happy, healthy one? You can bet that they had dysregulated dopamine. Uncertain rewards delivered on a random basis can keep us hooked better than consistent reward programs, and social media designers, game designers, and other professionals know it well. Many aspects of the modern world take advantage of this “flaw” in our neural programming to keep us hooked against our best interests and disrupt the regular flow of dopamine, making us favor certain activities. Other things can have an impact on the dopamine system in the brain. Drugs are a clear example, as many substances that become addictive hijack the dopamine pathways and make the brain release a lot more dopamine, to the point where other stimuli, like everyday pleasures, are no longer enough to make them active. People who develop substance abuse problems might find themselves unable to find pleasure elsewhere, only through increasingly high doses of their drug.

We can find similar effects from risk taking behaviors, some forms of sexual behaviors, and others, which makes our brain accustomed to higher levels of dopamine and make the behaviors hard to quit even if they become disruptive to our normal life or put us at some sort of risk. Higher dopamine levels can make it harder for us to enjoy regular activities. They push us -- because of the way our dopamine systems work -- to strive for more and increase the intensity and the novelty associated with our day-to-day situations, which is not always feasible, productive, or even safe. Many people find themselves unable to quit social media or casual gaming, even when it stands in the way of their goals and dreams. Instant gratification, the appeal of predicting a reward soon to come, is hard to manage. It’s why we fail to follow through on behaviors we know are good for us, and why we keep doing things we know are not in alignment with our values. In other words, we’re dopamine junkies!

The problem we will tackle here is the issue of having too much dopamine. But what is the problem with this? Isn’t dopamine good? Its functions are more complex than just reward or anticipation. Too much dopamine can make it hard for us to focus, especially on things that do not offer quick and easy stimulation or those goals we need to work for. We become easily bored and see our attention span decreasing and withering away, so we struggle to engage with things that are longer or more challenging or take time to pay off. High dopamine can contribute to undesirable behaviors, like acting on impulse or being more irritable and aggressive or euphoric, which can also make us make poor decisions.