We’re on the final week of August of Aurelius. I hope you all have enjoyed the content so far. In this last week, I will giving you a rundown of my favorite biohacking tips.
Biohack Tip 1: Dopamine Detox
This has to be my favorite biohack and one worth starting with off the bat. Let’s get started.
What is Dopamine?
You know when you get that Instagram like and it feels good? That’s dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical in your brain responsible for motivation and reward. It’s a messenger between your brain cells, emitting a signal to the brain whenever it expects or receives a “reward.”
Stare at this photo below. Does it make you tingle inside?
What about this one?
This is modern day cocaine. Even something as simple as these photos can prepare your brain for a dopamine hit. If only it would get you to focus on this article like you do on your Instagram…
Let’s be honest. Despite all our human progress, we’re still fairly simple creatures. At our core, we are primal. We do things because they feel good.
That is how habits are created. Your brain is incredibly neuroplastic. Reward and reinforcement condition you to act in specific ways. If you do something once and receive a positive response, your brain will want to do it again.
But in our pleasure-addicted world, the search for the ultimate dopamine hit can become a nightmarish treasure hunt for nothing but fool’s gold.
Dopamine Gone Wrong
Dopamine itself is not the culprit here. Without dopamine, you’d have no motivation. They can be genuine and beneficial. They’re evolution’s way of saying you’re onto something good, promoting your own survival or even propagating the human race (or, as we like to call it, sex).
Dopamine is the whip that your genes use to get you to do things.
Until fairly recently, dopamine hits were always coupled with some evolutionary benefit. It took hard work and accomplishment to get a dopamine rush.
The Instagram notification of hunter gatherer times was the appearance of an elephant to kill for lunch. The pornography was a woman in bed. Both of these things increased your likelihood of survival. And as we well know, surviving is great.
The problem is that dopamine can be hacked for the wrong purpose.
Today, most dopamine hits bring no real benefit.
Instead, they are exploited as a mechanism to suck more time and revenue out of you. Facebook uses neurochemical techniques to make you more addicted. For example, they vary the frequency of notifications to keep you surprised and coming back for more (brain science shows that variable reward increases the addictive potential) .
Yes…this is why you keep getting random notifications when your Crazy Aunt posts a new photo.
And because dopamine hits today don’t produce a biochemical benefit, you never reach satiation. Here’s an example:
Hunting for a juicy cut of steak would give hunter gatherers both a dopamine hit and nutrient satiation.
Going to the nearest convenience store and bingeing on sugar only gives you the dopamine.
Because the hit is so easy to obtain, you never feel satisfied and Over time, you tolerance threshold increases, which makes it even harder to satisfy yourself next time you’re seeking a hit. And just like that… a vicious cycle that turns you into a dopamine addict.
Like a toddler with a lighter, this is a recipe for disaster.
Slowly but surely, you begin losing your ability to feel happy and motivated by real, meaningful things. Why make love to your partner when you can update your instagram profile to boost engagement?
Congrats: you have officially discovered the easiest way to destroy a society.
Rewiring Your Brain: Monkey vs Human Brain
Every time you get a dopamine hit, you’re rewiring your brain.
Willpower is a muscle even if it’s weaker than Charles Barkley’s golf game for most people.
You know that voice in the back of your head telling you not to do drugs? Not everybody has that.
There are two main neural systems that regulate decision making:
- Your Monkey brain – dominated by the amygdala (if I got a fancy degree from Harvard, I’d refer to this as the A-System )
- Human brain – dominated by the prefrontal cortex (sometimes called the I-System )
The Monkey brain is concerned with maximizing immediate reward, while the Human brain is focused on maximizing long-term reward.
This ability to consider the long-term ramifications of our actions is indeed what sets us apart from the monkeys . It’s the reason why you’re able to make it this far in the blog post instead of throwing poop at people on the streets like our herbivore ancestors.
But this monkey brain still lives inside of you. And if you don’t tame it, it will master you like Gepetto mastering Pinocchio.
Imagine you’re staring at a candy bar. The internal struggle begins. The battle between your monkey brain and your human brain. The monkey inside of you sees the candy and all it can think about is the rush of sweetness you will get as soon as you bite into it.
“I need that candy. I need it more than anything in the world,” you say to yourself, “that candy bar will change my life.”
On the other side of the spectrum, a properly trained human brain will fight back: “Fuck that. I’m going to feel like crap after. It’s not worth it. I need to stick to my diet.”
You thought Evander Holyfield vs Mike Tyson was a big fight…? This is bigger. More than just an ear will be bitten off…
But if you don’t train your brain, it will lose. The brain is a muscle like any other. Without the proper regimen, it will have no strength to fight..
Instead of exercising self-control, most people are pounding dopamine bars. Instead of building the willpower muscle, they’re causing it to atrophy away. It’s like showing up to the gym and stuffing your face with donuts in the locker room instead of lifting weights.
Too much dopamine causes the balance to shift too far in the monkey direction: the amygdala is hyperactivated and the prefrontal cortex is hypoactivated. Every time you do this, you’re strengthening the strings of your monkey puppet master.
The short term-focused systems dominate. You’ve muted your human brain, and this creates massive feedback loops. The more you give into the monkey brain, the stronger it becomes.
This is why if you struggle with willpower in one aspect of your life, it’s unlikely you’ll have pristine discipline in another.
Can you remember the last time you saw a cocaine addict reading books and meditating?
Other Side Effects of a Dopamine Addiction
Man’s worth can be measured by things upon which he sets his heart.
––– Meditations 7.3
This shift towards the monkey system has massive consequences. It doesn’t just create addictive behaviors – it reshapes your whole life.
Just like physical obesity is from junk calories, mental obesity is from too much dopamine. You’ve stuffed your brain with junk and it’s incapable of functioning properly.
According to AJAC, a veteran personal trainer and mens self improvement writer:
“Mental obesity is dopamine addiction, the mind is trained to say “yes” to everything that is presented to it. This inevitably slows down and halts higher level thinking, and turns people into social media addicted zombies.
Their minds become controlled by infotainment, and the same way a physically obese person obsesses over food, they obsess over checking every feed and have intense anxiety over missing out on anything.”
Some other side effects include:
- Short attention span – Studies show that the attention span of an average student has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. Chimpanzees have an attention span of 20 seconds. There you have it – humans are less focused than monkeys.
- Cluttered mind
- Anxiety – Constant dopamine makes you upset when you’re not getting it. Do you feel a constant state of depression and anxiety? It may be because your dopamine bar has been reset too high and your brain is addicted. You’ve got a heroin addict living inside your head.
- Instant gratification addiction – Only looking for immediate results.
- Dysfunctional personality styles: Excessive social media has been shown to lead to dysfunctional personality styles: narcisissm, shyness, need for confirmation, constant negativity and low self esteem
What is the antidote?
Stay tuned. Tomorrow we’ll find out.
