How dopamine relates to addiction
Ever thought about dopamine and it's relation to addiction? I got the answers you've been asking for
Did you ever feel like on top of the world after achieving something you worked hard for? Or the feeling you get while gaming in the evening? Or, how good watching porn felt just before you came?
The reason for you feeling “good“ in situations like these is - Dopamine. Here is a summarized deep dive explaining the feel-good hormone.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter - a chemical released by neurons (brain nerve cells) to send signals to other nerve cells. It has several important functions in the brain; including regulation of motor behavior, pleasures related to motivation, and also emotional arousal. Notably, the addiction scientists Volkow and Koob found that any type of addiction cannot develop without high, but brief, bursts of dopamine in response to an activity. This ranges from doing cocaine to simply consuming porn. Combine that with the fact that sexual arousal and orgasm induce far higher levels of dopamine and endogenous opioids than any other natural reward, and you understand why porn addiction develops.
So, any action that brings you forward and is good for you is rewarded by the release of dopamine. At the very least, that is the idea. However, even tough porn isn’t beneficial, it gets rewarded by a dopamine hit. Why?
It is crucial to understand how your neurotransmitters work and to internalize the following hard truth - pleasure does not equal pleasure.
You are not build for porn
Take a look at the first questions of this article. Every described scenario releases dopamine and generates pleasure. However, to quote the great Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius: “the man […] mastered by pleasure, seems somehow more self-
indulgent, less manly“. That is why you need to distinguish between positive dopamine and negative dopamine. One rewards you for hard work, exercising, and eating smart and healthy, while the other (still the same transmitter) encourages you to eat junk food, play video-games, and jerk off while watching porn. Dopamine does not distinguish between actions benefiting one and such that can ruin you.
Why is that? Put short; our brains are thousands of years old and since 80.000 - 35.000 years have not changed much. Put in perspective, high speed internet, and with it porn, social media, and video games is only a few years old.
Pornhub launched in 2007, that’s less than 18 years ago. Our brains are at least 35,000 years old. We are not built for this.
Let me give an example; a man a thousand or even just 50 years ago needed to go out, look groomed, talk to an attractive woman, seduce her, go on a date with her, and then – finally, have sex with the intention to reproduce. Then the brain rewards him with a hit of feeling excellent. However, all you need today to trick your brain into releasing similar hits of sexual dopamine, is to open the internet and jerk off alone in your basement. Or, as I wrote in my previous article:
“The harsh reality is that nowadays an average 13-year-old has seen more nude women than all of his ancestors combined.“. Let that sink in.
Therefore, porn is a so-called “supranormal stimulus.” This term, introduced by Medicine Nobel prize-winner Nikolaas Tinbergen, refers to an exaggerated imitation of a formerly natural stimulus, which evokes way more dopamine than the original stimulus it imitates. As a renowned neurosurgeon put it: “Tinbergen originally found that birds, butterflies, and other animals could be duped into preferring artificial substitutes designed specifically to appear more attractive than the animal’s normal eggs and mates.”
Ho to reboot your reward system
Now, is there a way to reboot your brain's dopamine level back to normal?
As any addiction develops, cues and triggers, such as hearing a porn star’s name, spending time alone, or a mental state associated with past use (boredom, rejection, fatigue, etc.) can lead to sudden surges of dopamine release and urges. Such conditioned responses may become deeply ingrained and can bring on strong cravings even long after someone quits using porn.
It is hard to reset the brain and quit an addiction also because neuroplastic alterations are nearly identical for both sexual conditioning as well as chronic use of drugs. Porn addiction is real. Again, the reason behind hits of dopamine or any other feel good transmitter is to reward positive behavior. Therefore, here are two easy steps starting the reboot of your reward system back to normal.
1. Eliminate Tinbergens supernatural stimuli
It is not enough to just reduce your screen time by 30 minutes. This step needs to be a radical cut in your life. I cut jerking off, porn, social media and gaming out of my life and reduced the time I spent on my phone to 1-2 hours daily.
Do hard things, achieve hard things. Challenge yourself
2. Find pleasure in simpler things
This could be grooming, time with friends, sports, reading, spending time outside, podcasts, studying, eating healthy or (yep, actually) healthy sex.
This probably is one oft he most important steps coming to the NoFap lifestyle!