Skip to main content

Wanting and liking dopamine

How integrated of a person are you? There is a simple way to assess this quickly. Write down everything you do in your life and evaluate it based on several criteria:

 

1. I want to do this (wanting): you get dopamine from it, feel attracted and drawn to it, and motivated.

2. I enjoy doing this (liking): you experience immediate pleasure doing it here and now (serotonin-oxytocin-endorphins), savor the action, and enjoy it.

3. It is useful for me to do this (needing): the prefrontal cortex calculates the long-term results, the outcomes of actions (especially long-term) are important to you, they strengthen your resilience, increase your resources, and promote survival (including social actions, since we survive as a group, not as individuals). Does what I do strengthen or weaken me?

4. I am doing (or not doing) this: do I have something important that I am not doing? Are my useful actions a way to avoid essential actions? Am I doing enough to achieve my goals? Why do I continue to do things that are harmful to me?

Integrity is when all four of these conditions coincide and overlap, when you do the optimal amount, you want to do it, you enjoy it, and it strengthens you simultaneously. Problems occur when something is useful to you, but you don’t want to do it, or it is a harmful habit that you want (are drawn to), but that harms you, etc., when different vectors pull you in different directions. Think about how to balance these processes: dopamine for motivation, mindfulness for pleasure, simulating consequences for calculation, etc.

More about this is in my book “Will to Live”.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Quick stress relief

  How to stop rumination in 30 seconds. Overthinking your thoughts exhausts you and degrades your mental health. Stress is not as dangerous as endlessly scrolling through stressful thoughts. It’s like you’re reliving the stress a thousand times. You need to be able to stop this.😬 The flow of our thoughts is synchronized with the movements of the tongue, hands and eyes. To instantly calm down, you need to stop all muscle movements. So: ✅1. Fix your eyes at one point (the bridge of your nose) and hold them there. ✅2. Press the tip of your tongue against the hard palate and hold it there. ✅3. Press the back of your hands (palms up) to the front surface of the thigh and hold them there. Did you feel it? The stream of thoughts stopped. Enjoy it!     Quick stress relief here and now: 12 Ideas 1. Restore sensory connection: Focus on external stimuli instead of internal emotions. Use the 5–4–3–2–1 technique: 5 things you see, 4 things you touch, 3 things you hear, 2 th...
Read more

Breaking the vicious circle

Nobody wants to be sick and weak. Why then do people make many attempts to change and still fail to do so? One of the common reasons is getting into a vicious circle, which over time worsens health and makes breaking out impossible. A vicious circle is like a swamp—the more you try to get out, the stronger it sucks you in. In this case, it is important to understand where it can be broken, and on which link to act. Thoughtless heroic efforts to change at any cost can only worsen the situation.    In medicine, a vicious circle is a situation where the disorder itself becomes a factor that supports the same disorder. Cause and effect are connected: for example, with blood loss, the blood supply worsens, which leads to heart failure, which worsens the blood supply even further. The same goes for our habits. For example, the worse we feel, the less we want to move. The less we move, the worse we feel. Don't wait for a "convenient moment" or "inspiration"—just star...
Read more