How Dopamine Is Distracting You From The Life You Want

A month ago I was an avid TikTok user. I was trying to grow my reach on the platform which meant creating 4 videos a day, monitoring the latest trends, and obsessively checking my phone to see how well my videos were doing. I was hooked and it was taking up a lot of my time.

It was disrupting my day and my mood — but I couldn’t stop. I wanted to grow my base and I was willing to let my mood slide for the chase. After all, seeing a video do well was my fix. It didn’t matter how I was feeling, I pushed on creating.

Fast forward to now and I haven’t posted in 3 weeks. Given the nature of the subjects I speak of — personal development and mental health — , and some personal circumstances, I had to stop. I was burnout.

There are numerous things in life that can draw us in even if we aren’t intending them to. Alcohol, sex, our phones, social media, drugs, food, Netflix — you name it, there’s potential. We have relationships with everything in our lives, some good; and some good.

Being aware of the motivating potential of said thing — in my case, TikTok — allows us to be more mindful of when we’re feeling enticed into something that we don’t really want to be doing. I can speak of the countless times I’ve ended up at a party despite not wanting to go out, procrastinating knowing I should do work, eating foods I know I shouldn’t, and sitting aimlessly on my phone.

We’re all prone to distractions.

So what gives? Why do we feel drawn to do things we don’t really want to do, and how do we stop? Neuroscience is complex but having a basic understanding of how dopamine works in the brain will help you remain focused and less distracted with potentially self-sabotaging tasks.

Dopamine In The Brain

Dopamine’s role in the brain is complex and far beyond the scope of this article. All YOU need to know is that dopamine is a brain chemical that has implications on how motivated we feel to do something. I.e, why does the chocolate and confectionery aisle in the shop grab your attention and not the vegetable aisle? Dopamine has a role to play in THAT.

Studies have shown that dopamine is released into specific brain areas BEFORE we do something potentially pleasurable. In essence, it signals to you how good something will feel if you do it. In the example above, we’d assume that sweets have a much greater dopamine association than vegetables do. Dopamine then says “LOOK, that’s going to taste really good, get that”. *From an evolutionary perspective, sugar motivates us more than vegetables do due to their higher energetic potential.

A common misconception is that dopamine is the neurotransmitter that makes you feel good. That is wrong. That prize goes to other neurotransmitters like opioids and serotonin. Dopamine merely signals to you that something COULD be good based on memory and mental state — more on this, later. As John Salamone, professor and long-term dopamine researcher summarises,

Low levels of dopamine make people and other animals less likely to work for things, so it has more to do with motivation and cost/benefit analyses than pleasure itself. — Neuron, Volume 76, Page 3, Novermber 2012.

Now let’s talk about how dopamine is leading the charge in your self-sabotage and stopping you from attaining the life that you want.

When Urges Take Over

Throughout the day we’re constantly having to fight off urges and cravings as dopamine scans our external world for potential rewards. Our ability to resist temptations comes down to our ability to emotionally regulate: That is, TO control the emotions and sensations that arise in our body so that we aren’t pushed and pulled everywhere by how we’re feeling.

Emotional regulation skills are a key predictor of success. The famous marshmallow test is an example of this. In the 1960s, psychologist Walter Mischel asked a group of kids to resist eating 1 marshmallow with the promise of receiving a greater reward I.e, 2 marshmallows, in the future. Some kids ate the marshmallow and some held out for the second one.

Upon revisiting the kids, now adults, some years later, Mischel found that those who showed restraint were more likely to have finished college, attained higher incomes, and were of a healthier weight. The lesson? Larger, more fulfilling payoffs often come later, and we have to be able to resist urges for smaller, more instantly gratifying things as these can cause more harm to us down the line.

Neurologically speaking, the decider between giving in to an urge and resisting one falls on our newly evolved pre-frontal cortex. This is the area that oversees all other areas of our brain and has with it the power of logic. In the example above, it’s the area that will help the child resist the urge for something good NOW in place of a bigger payoff later on.

The ability for us to use and engage this area of our brain when necessary is insurmountable and critical to our success. Without it, we’re no more primal than any other animal that is powered by its impulses.

And yet, as critical as it is, so many of us suck at using it.

Why Many Of Us Struggle With Emotional Regulation

There are several reasons an individual may struggle with their ability to curb cravings but we’ll focus on one point for this article;

Practice.

Many of us suck at regulating our emotions because we’ve never been taught how to do so. This fact is at the center of William Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence: Why It Matters More Than IQ. We’re taught a dozen subjects throughout our education tenure and not one falls on our greatest asset…

Managing our own emotions.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an A star student, if you’re unable to keep your innate urges in check, you’re bound to find yourself in trouble. For example, stress and anxiety have large implications on how we can utilize our prefrontal cortex, and because this area is critical in managing urges arising from the midbrain, unawareness as to when we’re feeling stressed can leave us vulnerable to self-sabotaging behaviors. Like the following,

• Stress eating
• Procrastination
• Using sex for pleasure
• Reaching out to exes we know we shouldn’t be speaking to
• Using/Abusing alcohol and drugs

In essence, we need to learn how to curb these urges by reactivating our prefrontal cortex in times of stress. How do we do this? We do the one thing we’re never taught growing up…

We learn how to be mindful.

For my guide on how to become more mindful check out the accompanying article, I wrote below. Everything we do in life is controlled by some level of motivation with dopamine playing a large role in how this feeling arises within us. Learning to be more mindful helps us control our emotions which in turn places us in better positions to not get driven into self-sabotaging behaviors.

Thanks for reading this article. If you enjoyed it, I’d be very happy if you could leave it a few *claps*. In the meantime, feel free to check out similar articles below.