So, this is some pretty interesting shit about dopamine.
The whole thing is worth watching, but the gist is that dopamine is the chemical of motivation and reward, and modern life is great at giving us easy, fun ways to stimulate the release of dopamine by triggering the reward center of the brain.
Which has the potential to turn us into dopamine junkies. We become addicted to the easy dopamine and become dependent on it, and develop a tolerance to our own dopamine so that other, potentially better for us activities that are not as immediately rewarding – like exercise, eating healthy, doing creative work, and so on – can’t possibly compete and so we find ourselves unable to find the motivation – aka the dopamine – to do them even though we know we “should”.
The solution, accord to the video, is to fight dopamine tolerance with the occasional “dopamine detox” where for 24 hours, you skip all of your usual high reward activities, like playing video games, scrolling social media, masturbation, and so on, and do other thing like taking walks or exercising or doing any of the other “ought to” things that normally don’t appeal to you but might just be better than nothing now.
The idea is to let your dopamine receptor dry out and drop some of that nasty resistance so that life becomes more rewarding again.
This is a potential cure for the modern malaise where everything is blah, nothing seems worth doing, and you haven’t the motivation to do anything productive.
Of course, actually doing it will suuuuuuck, especially at first. You will be very bored and your dopamine receptors will be screaming their little heads off for their usual high calorie diet and you will want to cave in so badly.
But your reward at the end will be a much happier life. So, worth it. Maybe.
I am very interested in this entire line of thinking. It seems like a very clear-minded and practical approach to getting us back to our happy place.
It seems especially good for us depressives. I’ve talked before about how we the depressed all end up addicted to once source of reward or another as we desperately try to maintain a healthy dopamine level by hitting that lever as fast as we can like thoe poor little rats.
Man we humans do some fucked up things to animal.
Anyhow, the idea of taking a break from our high-reward addictions for 24 hours seems like it would work to me.
But you don’t need to start there. Start with just an hour. One hour where you are consciously choosing to take your power back by saying “no” to the incessant demand of your spoiled brat dopamine receptors.
You can increase the duration over time. When one hour becomes too easy to be fun, go for two, then three, and so on.
Right now, I have a lot of emotional calculations going on in my head. I know the healthy part of me want to try this because it senses this could really help me but of course, the sick part is whining and looking sad and clutching at my video games.
I will talk myself into it somehow.
More after the break,
The quest for nachos
It was a long and perilous journey, but at last, we have arrived.
It started around a month ago. I was craving nachos. It was time to order some food. So thought, White Spot has nachos and as I recall they are quite good.
Look up White Spot on DoorDash. No nachos. Maybe they had them once but they keep drifting upmarket and nachos are peasant food, Don Juno.
He really gets around, Don Juno.
Then a couple weeks later, I remember my nacho craving. So this time I look up the DoorDash page for Little Mexico Cantina, one of the only Mexican places around.
It’s in Steveston.
They, alas, were closed. Nerp! So once again, I got something else.
Week after that, I thought I had it licked. Taco Del Mar! Surely a place with taco in th name has nachos.
Nope! They had a very nice rice-bowl kind of thing – kind of a Mexican donburi (Don Buri?), but no nachos.
Finally, tonight I thought, “I know… Boston Pizza! They have potato nachos at least!”
So I pull up the DoorDash page for Boston Pizza and they don’t have nachos either… or anything else besides bottled iced tea.
I shitteth thou not. The only thing on the DoorDash menu was four entries for various brands of bottled iced tea.
Clearly things be fucked up at the Dash. If I was Boston Pizza I would be mighty steamed up about it. It makes them look bad.
Then again, maybe there’s been a catastrophic financial meltdown at BP and they have decided to focus on their most profitable product line, and that’s bottled iced tea.
But probably not.
So no dice with Boston Pizza. And my lust for nachos was raging out of control. How could this crisis be resolved without social chaos or loss of life??
Oh right. Denny’s.
I knew damned well THEY had nachos because I got them there on occasion. They are typical family restaurant nachos which means they are good but not great, but at this point, I wasn’t in any position to be fussy.
So that’s what I ordered, along with some onion rings, which I had also been craving.
Now all the onion rings and half the nachos have been eaten, and I am sated. Whatever dark god that demands the occasional Mexican meal has been placated and finally the village can sleep in peace.
My Denny’ nachos came “some assembly required”, which is pretty common in delivery these days. Makes things way easier to deliver and lets people put things like nachos together to their own tastes.
NBD. Plus, I am pretty sure I got more “nacho meat” (how many wild nachos died….) this way and that’s my fave part of nachos, so it Saul Goodman.
He’s friends with Don Juno.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.