on dopamine

the past few days have felt like i’m moving through peanut butter on all levels.

the first of the week went really well for me. i met a huge goal, aced an interview, and generally felt great! and then the calamities happened.

nothing like new and horrible, but internally, every system that can be going haywire, is.

i can’t focus on anything anyone is saying longer than a few minutes.

no food tastes good.

i am exhausted.

my pain levels have skyrocketed.

i have a laundry list of things i need to do, and SOON, and my brain just. won’t. do. them. when i think about doing the thing, it’s like everything clouds up in there and my neural networks turn into cotton wads instead. no brain cells can touch each other today.

i am in dopamine debt. for every high high, there is going to be a pretty low low. and it’s taking basically everything in me to write this down.

when most people think of dopamine, they think of it like a drug. they think of it in the form of “hits,” like when you’re scrolling social media or play games, you get hits of dopamine and it makes you happy. and then they can chase it like a high. that’s not how it works.

dopamine is in your body circulating all the time. it surges and dips, depending on what you just did and what you’re immediately expecting to do. it behaves in pretty predictable ways, and affects literally everything you do. it’s not just the pleasure chemical, but it also controls your focus, motivation, it propels you into action. it is the chemical that prompts you to seek reward. it is not the chemical that tells you that you like the reward—that’s a whole nother system.

you have your baseline dopamine, that is always around. if you’re constantly SEEKING reward, it’s probably pretty high and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

there is an upper limit to how much dopamine your body can produce at once. so if your baseline is high, the difference between your peak dopamine levels in a surge and your base isn’t much. and then rewards don’t feel as good, because the difference between peak and baseline needs to be significant for it to feel satisfactory.

it also means that when you’re in a dopamine deficit, it feels so. much. worse. it has more room to fall, and then it takes time for you to recover.

i have a very sneaky suspicion that burnout and dopamine deficits are very closely linked. the recommended recovery steps are the same.

get enough sleep. go outside. do the things that help you feel like yourself. have an orgasm. take a shower. i can remember none of these things while in this deficit state.

so— when i recover, an action plan is in order. i need to write down all the stuff that Healthy Dopamine Levels Me loves to do. i need to plan to care for myself ahead of time, and then like also actually do that. i meant to take a day of rest after all the hullabaloo this week and it didn’t work out.

and now i’m here. laying in bed, talking about how much this sucks. explaining it to you so that you’ll know and so that maybe i will remember next time.