Dopamine out, Willpower in.
The plague of our age: dopamine obsession. So what is the remedy?
I think we’ve all learned by now that dopamine can make working hard for the reward that comes after hard work even more difficult. What if I told you that dopamine might also make us less inclined to work hard in the future? Let’s see how an experiment previously conducted confirms this sentence.
Children in kindergarten draw because they love drawing. In the experiment we will examine, researchers take these children who love to draw and begin rewarding them for each picture they draw, usually a gold star or something that a young child might find rewarding. Then they stop giving them the gold star, and they find that the kids’ inclination to draw on their own goes way down. However, this was an activity that children intrinsically enjoyed and loved doing before receiving a reward.
The result of the experiment also supports this conclusion; Even when we reward ourselves for something, we tend to associate less pleasure with the actual activity that evoked the reward. If we get a spike in dopamine thanks to a reward, this reward lowers our baseline level and our consciousness interprets that we are doing this activity for reward, not pleasure (hello growth mindset).
Nowadays, philosophies such as loving yourself and accepting every situation have become so fashionable; Unfortunately, when this type of content was not expressed correctly, the generation that consumed them could not adopt and apply these philosophies correctly. Everyone loves themselves right now. So how real is this? It doesn’t matter what I say or show to those around me, if my discomfort with my weight makes my stomach ache when I lay my head on the pillow at night, isn’t it hypocritical to give messages of “I love myself” when I wake up in the morning? I am an unemployed person and if I have tied many of my dreams to getting a job, how correct is it to say that I enjoy my unemployment? The worst part is, after a while, we get so used to this game that we find it easier to suppress our discomfort. No one has a problem with the fact that hundreds of repressed things are growing like an avalanche behind the messages that I am happy with myself.
Some people see David Goggins as a classic soldier, a relentless motivational speaker. For me, it’s not exactly like that. David Goggins says that if you are uncomfortable with your weight, you should look in the mirror and accept that you are fat because acceptance opens doors of development for us. Only we can exert the greatest influence on our own lives. We don’t need dopamine for this. We need to accept the truth and take action. This does not mean that we should eliminate self-compassion from our lives. The important thing is balance. Find your balance. If it is wrong to say “Stop, I must have self-compassion for myself now” against everything, it is equally wrong to say “Stop, I must writhe in pain until I achieve this goal”.
You may remember the kindergarten children at the beginning of the article. If they did something they enjoyed for the sake of the reward, they stopped enjoying that thing. So, if the thing that will help us reach our goals is not a reward, what is? Willpower of course. In their experiments and research, neuroscientists reveal that willpower is very important in achieving goals, and the interesting part is that they find that we can enlarge the part of the brain related to willpower, which we call “Anterior middle cingulate” by doing those actions we’ve never wanted to do. For example, if you hate going for walks, great. Go for a walk every day, it will increase your willpower. There’s a little trick here; If you start liking that event at a given moment, it will start to not affect your willpower. The only rule is to repeat the behaviors you don’t want repeatedly.
Well, if you’re done with dopamine detox, you can start increasing your willpower by doing those actions you’ve never felt like doing!
