Building better dopamine habits

Imagine you’re trying to lose weight. You try out a bunch of fancy workouts, join group classes, and get a gym membership but nothing seems to work. You push yourself harder, but the results just aren’t there.

Eventually, you feel frustrated and give up. Weeks pass by, until you realize you missed a crucial piece.

This might seem obvious in this context but we fall into similar pitfalls with work. You want to do good work and you try a lot of productivity tricks to do that. However, nothing seems to work because most advice fails to address the root cause behind your inability to work deeply.

In addition to working harder, you also need to build a better dopamine diet to support your mind. Dopamine is the brain’s reward chemical, and it drives motivation, focus and pleasure. Everything that you do: working, scrolling through Instagram, or simply thinking about someone you like, taps into this reward system.

Just like you need a healthy diet to stay physically fit, you also need a healthy dopamine diet for doing good work.
Achieving this involves controlling two factors:

1. Quality
2. Frequency

I. Quality

Not all dopamine releases are created equal. You can get dopamine from a variety of sources but the quality controls whether you feel energized and fulfilled vs unfocussed and tired.

To me there is a very clear difference between high quality dopamine and low quality dopamine.

You should make a similar list for yourself. The best way is to try different activities and simply observe how they make you feel.

Of course, you want to maximize your consumption of high-quality dopamine. But if it were that easy, we’d all be the happiest versions of ourselves.

Personally, I find myself consuming junk dopamine a lot more than I’d like to admit. I think this is because junk dopamine is everywhere and it requires no effort to consume.

However, in times of craving, I hope you can convince yourself that doomscrolling might not give you the satisfaction it promises. It’ll probably leave you feeling worse, just like ordering Chinese takeout. Sometimes, it might just be better to make a salad, even if it takes more effort.

II. Frequency

As someone with a really bad appetite, what has helped me tremendously is to avoid snacking. Snacks are generally unhealthy, and also lower your hunger for a proper meal. More importantly for our discussion, snacking also lowers the fulfillment you get from eating a proper meal. A big pot of pasta just doesn’t seem as enticing if you were binging Chips Ahoy an hour ago.

Dopamine snacking presents the same problem. Every time you reach for your phone, you’re snacking on small hits of dopamine in the form of texts, notifications and reels. Not only are you diminishing your appetite to work, you’re also making real accomplishments feel far less fulfilling.

You should temporarily starve yourself of dopamine, not only because you are working right now, but also because it will be a lot more fulfilling when you finally let yourself have fun.

When I first tried this out, I immediately felt a lot happier with the little things in life. Solving a bug in my code actually gave me happiness, rather than just being permission to finally browse Instagram.

I feel most productivity advice misses this aspect as well. You’re effectively told to starve yourself of all happiness, but that’s about as sustainable as fasting is for losing weight. You should keep eating, just the right amounts at the right frequency.

Implementing these principles in daily life

Step I: Work

Find out hours in the day when you work well, and try to consistently make yourself work in those time slots. For me this is 8AM to 12PM and 2PM to 6PM.

If you find yourself unable to make yourself work on certain days, try not to crash. Do something else that you still consider “healthy”. It’s alright to skip a day at the gym, but that shouldn’t mean you crash out and eat 3 big macs.

A helpful game I like to play on days like this is trying to see how long I can go without snacking on dopamine. It turns out to be a lot easier than forcing myself to work and even if I don’t end up working, it allows me to enjoy the little things in life, like making tea and listening to the Beatles on vinyl.

Step II: Restraint

As you work, your mind will make desperate attempts to distract you from whatever you’re trying to make yourself do. This is because your mind hates doing hard things and just wants to protect you. If you’ve tried running, this is just like your brain telling you you’re tired just 1K in, when you know you can run 5K just fine.

Whenever you feel like distracting yourself, pause to observe your emotions. This might not be easy, especially if you’re used to distracting yourself at any given opportunity. You can encourage this by keeping your phone, and other distractions, away from you. That extra 1 minute should be enough for you to notice what you’re trying to do.

Ask yourself, “Why do I want to distract myself so badly?” and just sit with the urge for a bit. Nir Eyal calls this surfing the urge and quite often you’ll feel this urge dissipate after a few minutes, just like a small pang of hunger would.

Tell yourself that you will allow yourself to have fun, for an hour even, but later, when the time comes, not right now.

Step III: Recover

When you're done with your work, allow yourself to have fun. To do all the other things you've wanted to do through the day. Were there people you couldn't talk to? Call them up! Are you hungry? Go make a meal for yourself.

A disciplined work routine also includes the discipline to stop when the time comes.

Final Thoughts

I’m not asking you to eliminate all dopamine from your life. Dopamine is good for you, and you deserve to be happy.

All I’m asking is for you to recognize that you have a choice. You can decide what kinds of dopamine you want to consume and how much, instead of accepting whatever defaults life throws at you.

I believe this will help you lead a lot more fulfilling lives, while still making meaningful progress on your work.

If you liked this blog, I would love to hear from you! Feel free to mail me. Tell me which parts resonated with you, or if you tried this out and how it went.
Thanks for reading :)