
Dopamine Ruins Your Motivation - fromzerototop
https://medium.com/@fromzerototop1/how-dopamine-ruins-your-motivation-2f476cd96e9a
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jstarfish
Was really hoping there would be more substance to this. It's about as helpful
as the solution to depression being "just stop feeling sorry for yourself!"
Little better than the Protest Song-- "the world's going to shit, everything
is awful, but all you have to do to fix it is...<mumble mumble mumble>."

That said, it's not wrong, just seriously low-effort and underwhelming. The
same advice applies to healthy living-- ideally you want to reduce "cheap"
dopamine hits (sugars, fats, etc.) and replace them with the rush you'd get
from exercise. Some (can't speak for all) rehab clinics put patients to work
doing menial physical labor (gardening, etc.) around the grounds for this
purpose-- the intent is to replace their synthetic drug-based dopamine
cravings with a self-generated and sustainable alternative. If nothing else it
gives you something to do for a few weeks to get your mind off of the malaise
that comes with withdrawal.

In the end, if you're feeling lazy and bored, no amount of advice from
underqualified and overprivileged yahoos on the internet is going to get you
off your ass enough to do something about it. There's a reason people end up
in these ruts to begin with.

~~~
brundolf
> In the end, if you're feeling lazy and bored, no amount of advice from
> underqualified and overprivileged yahoos on the internet is going to get you
> off your ass enough to do something about it.

I disagree that the content is worthless just because it doesn't have a lot of
depth. Everyone knows that sugar is bad for you, but the idea that short-term
dopamine - even when the activity doesn't have other obviously-negative side-
effects - can be actively harmful to your mental health is a very
counterintuitive one that I'd never thought about before, but which makes a
lot of sense once presented.

~~~
jstarfish
> Everyone knows that sugar is bad for you

I'm sure they do, but that's the logic that has led to all manner of ill-
advised diets. _Too much_ sugar, especially refined sugar, is bad for you. You
_need_ sugar in your diet for quick-burning energy. Avoiding all sugar and
only eating proteins is going to leave you lethargic and unmotivated as shit
because protein requires more calories than carbs to break down. You may as
well be trying to digest a brick. There's a reason every American Thanksgiving
ends with a bunch of tired guests.

Hamburgers come with buns. Steak is often served with potatoes. Chicken is
often served with rice. Burritos are wrapped in tortillas. The latter in all
cases is a serving of carbohydrates...glorified sugar in all cases, and
necessary to keep you awake and moving so you can break down all that protein.

> but the idea that short-term dopamine - even when the activity doesn't have
> other obviously-negative side effects - can be actively harmful to your
> mental health is a very unintuitive one

Why is this unintuitive? Lazy people seek the most-immediate form of
gratification available; that's literally the definition of laziness. Doing
this repeatedly erodes your neural pathways to the point where your routes to
dopamine rewards are artificially limited because longer (and more
sustainable) paths simply cease to exist.

The real trick to beating it? Constant mental stimulation through
establishment of new neural pathways. Exercise helps. Amphetamines do too (but
will permanently ruin your ability to self-correct-- consider it nothing more
than a clinically-administrated addiction). Travel. Learn a new language.
Learn a new skill. Interest level does not matter; if it's something different
than what you're used to and you can derive even the slightest amusement from
it, you're creating new routes--even partial ones--to those sweet chemical
rewards.

Scheduled/structured activities are greatly underrated-- being dragged into
new activities and situations forces you out of your narrowly-defined set of
paths and creates new ones that yield new rewards (and anecdotally, I suspect
this pattern of constantly-seeking new stimuli may go a long way toward
staving off degenerative brain disorders).

But the article doesn't even _try_ to address any of this. It's literally a
bunch of fluff culminating in "hey incels, just stop beating off." Yes, sound
advice, but for the intended audience advice alone doesn't cut it, otherwise
obese people enduring years of shame and torment would be sufficiently
motivated to get off the couch. Once you've lost it, _the problem is with
finding the motivation to even get off the couch in the first place_ ; it's
even more hopeless for those who let this get to the point of clinical
depression (and who now have _two_ problems). At some level you end up with
such impossibly-diminished returns that it takes external intervention to be
able to even _think_ about acting on pithy advice-- either antidepressants,
gastic bypass, whatever.

~~~
tofurocks
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "amphetamines permanently ruin your
ability to self correct"? In what way?

~~~
jstarfish
The anti-drug propaganda you were taught in grade-school was at least somewhat
true.

Basically after prolonged stimulant [ab]use, your brain stops "caring" about
natural rewards because they're so insubstantial in comparison to synthetic
ones. Like a captive-bred animal, your brain no longer appreciates its own
procurement of rewards because it has been trained to be hand-fed cocaine-
battered filet mignon.

I'm not a psychiatrist or neuroscientist so my understanding is limited and
based on anecdote and experience, but I've never met a career meth-or-coke-
abuser who found happiness in anything once they went sober. The cravings
never go away; they literally need the drugs just to feel anything more than
melancholy and they are always irritable and underwhelmed without them.

There is some argument over whether dopamine receptors repair themselves; I
don't know if this is true, but if not that then there is _something_ else
permanently lost to amphetamine usage.

------
hector_ka
I find the biggest demotivator for me is alcohol.

~~~
11235813213455
For me it's cigarettes, I mean smelling cigarettes smoked by people around,
not me. There's surely some psyche behind, I've associated this smell and
cigarettes with death

------
anoncake
TLDR: To fix your self-discipline problems, just fix your self-discipline
problems.

