The Dopamine Reset

April is a strange month.

Not just because it’s April, but for a myriad of reasons. April tends to be a very dopamine-heavy month. Like a dopamine rollercoaster when you have that skip-the-line pass – you don’t need to wait long for your next trip. This means that it has the potential for exceedingly high highs (and conversely, very low lows). So, what makes April so special?

You see my podcast has an event every April where we challenge each other to get the most Xbox Achievements. Sure, there’s other aspects to this challenge but we’re all here for the digital crack cocaine that is the Achievement Unlocked sound. As if that wasn’t enough to completely put our dopamine out of whack, we also have Easter with all its guilt-free chocolate and hot cross buns adding to the spikes in both sugar and feel-good chemicals. These two factors alone would be enough to severely hinder one’s baseline dopamine. But it doesn’t end there. Not like it would make a difference if it did. On top of all this, daylight savings comes to an end. The days get darker, and we start to miss out on all that serotonin we’ve become accustomed to during summer as we start to spend all the daylight hours indoors.

So, April is a weird month. The chemicals in our brains are bombarded with stimuli. And then; it just ends. No more achievements every three seconds, chocolate shaped bunnies disappear, and the sun officially sets on another summer past – with all our feelings and thoughts that brings.

Luckily forewarned is forearmed and knowing what’s coming means we can prepare. This month, instead of trying to keep the dopamine flowing as per April’s normal, I will be attempting to reset my baseline. But what does that mean, and why should someone reset their baseline anyways? After all, it’s not hurting you, right?>

Dopamine is thought to be the happy chemical, but it’s so much more than that. It’s the chemical in the brain that is responsible for motivation, muscle movement, our risk-reward-cycle, focus and yes, the feel-good chemical too. Dopamine gives us the drive to pursue outward and exciting goals – it’s the get up and do something chemical. When you have a higher baseline of dopamine, you’re more easily motivated, you’re more focused and you tend to actually pursue the hard things that make life worth living.

Now, when you’re getting little bursts of dopamine from, I don’t know, unlocking an easy achievement let’s say, you have a very quick spike of dopamine and then a very significant drop in dopamine. What is interesting is that the drop tends to be directly proportional to the spike. To illustrate my point, dopamine goes up by 10, then immediately drops by 10. If you unlock another achievement right away, you’ve added 10 dopamine and are now sitting at 0. You can see how this causes a negative trend in your dopamine baseline. In order to get your dopamine up to 10 again, you now need to unlock 2 achievements. This is a very basic example and only pertains to dopamine hits from easy things. The harder something is, the less the spike, but the more gradual the increase, and inversely, gradual decrease.

You can see this if you go to the gym or do other hard exercises. Sometimes getting to the gym is the hardest thing in the world. But after a good workout, you find you are motivated for almost anything. Thats because while you were working out, your body was releasing lots of little bits of dopamine – there was no spike, but a gradual slope. It also helps that dopamine is linked to body movement – the more you move your body, the more your brain rewards you.

Now with April coming to an end, it’s time to bring the baseline back to normal levels. I have found myself super distracted during, and even after, April, and I suspect its due to some bad habits formed during this month. The higher the baseline, the more motivation you have for harder things, and I want to be able to do hard things. Like for instance, writing this blog post was actually quite hard. I felt my focus, my attention, drifting more often than not. And I really don’t like it.

Now, resetting your baseline is both simple and not simple, painful, and yet rewarding. Think of going cold turkey on something like caffeine – yes it sucks now, and for a week you’re not going to be the world’s best company, but the end goal is you’re free to not worry about where to find coffee when you’re on a four-day trip into the outback. There’s a lot of literature out there about how to bring your baseline back to normal, and even elevated, levels. Andrew Huberman has a fantastic podcast and resources on the matter, which I urge you to check out if you’re interested. Art of Manliness has also done a great article and podcast on resetting your dopamine and why you should. So with all this info out there, I am not going to go over everything they cover. Instead, using their teachings, I will tell you what I will be doing.

Viewing Early Morning Sunlight

This is something I started doing a while back. I can’t quite remember when I started it, but when I wake up, I wander into the kitchen and get a drink of D-Aspartic Acid, and then stand by the window, sometimes on the balcony, and look up into the sky for a few minutes. I find this morning sunlight helps wake me up properly, and just increases my motivation slightly. There’s something about seeing the sun rise that reminds you of all the cool things you could get done that day. Maybe it could just be the increase in dopamine..?

Drinking D-Aspartic Acid

Testosterone is the primary motivator for why men do the things men do. It’s been this way since a caveman tamed fire, to present day when a guy gets the courage to say hi to that girl at the bar. And it doesn’t help that over the past few years, testosterone levels in men have been declining rapidly. Pair that with the state of the world, and you can see the whole “weak men create bad times” play out before your eyes. Increasing testosterone also makes sure that physically I do not grow as old as quickly. Testosterone is also a great hormone to help increase focus, drive and just about everything else. Higher baseline dopamine helps with a higher baseline of testosterone and it works the other way too. When one is out of whack, both are. In addition to a lot of other brain chemicals too, so it makes sense to fix the ones you can.

Cold Showers

Now I am not a psychopath, so I don’t just leap into a fully cold shower as soon as my eyes open. No, that’s reserved for the unhinged. And I am not that unhinged already. Rather I start off warm and then flick to pure cold for the last 2 minutes or so of my shower. This has many benefits, with the main one being that I AM NOW AWAKE! Cold showers have many other benefits apart from helping to reset your baseline dopamine, from increased testosterone in men, to improving mental resilience. There’s been a lot of studies on why you should have a cold shower, or so cold-water emersion and I suggest you start here. Just make sure you are not doing it after hypertrophy workouts (IE: lifting the heavy weights like Arnold).

Move More

This kind of counts. When I go into the office, I have a 10 minute / 1 kilometre walk to get to the train station. Sure, it’s not quite getting into the gym and bench pressing a small family. But I think it counts. My body is moving, I am getting steps and I am not wearing my sunnies – so even more of that early morning sunlight is hitting my eyeballs.
I also want to get back into the gym on a regular basis – focusing on my marathon training and flexibility. And spend more time in the sauna. The sauna puts the body under very different stresses not found anywhere else, while also giving the mind the freedom to wonder. You sit, being hot and bored, and that’s where the best ideas come from.

Reading Real Books

Reading is a slow burn. It exercises your attention span muscles, increases vocabulary, and it is generally the best thing you can do for your brain. Studies show that reading printed material is easier on the eyes and harder on the brain. Digital takes some getting used to, but it still doesn’t seem to engage the whole brain quite like print does. Also, physically seeing yourself make progress through a book gives you that effort-reward gradual dopamine rise.

Get Back to Blogging / Writing

It’s been so long since I sat down to write, that I have forgotten how. I used to be able to bang out a great blog post (if I do say so myself) in about an hour. This one here has taken me a few days and I lose focus, come back to it, rewrite bits, start over, and ramble through. And even then, it’s not the best. I also have at least 2 stories in me that I think I can turn into novels, and I really want to pursue that. Add to the list the very long travel blog to finish. Don’t think I forgot about that!

Play and Stick with One Hard Game

Ok, so this may seem like a copout, but I have a very good reason for this. Much like reading, when playing a game that challenges you, you are forced to think. Anything that forces you to think is good overall. Much like doing crosswords, sudoku, and all those types of games are good for you, so is playing a hard game. There’s a lot of contention whether video games truly count, so I’ll just drop this in here. I’ll argue that playing a hard game is much like reading – you’re challenging your brain in many different ways and also learning that sometimes being good is not good enough. Until you are. And the sense of accomplishment that comes from that is nothing to sneeze at.

Delete Twitter and Instagram

Ok so this should go without saying. Social media apps are too easy to sit and stare at for hours on end while feeling bad about yourself. And we as a species are also spending a lot of time on our devices arguing about things that don’t matter. Why are wasting so much time and energy on things that make us feel bad and don’t matter? I’ll be removing these apps from my phone for a while. And while doing this, I have also set up Focus Modes on my devices. Check it out – it’s very cool what you can do!

Monotasking

Humans are not ants. We can do a lot of different things. But we’re not great at doing a lot of different things together. Instead, we excel when we are able to dedicate ourselves fully to one task before starting or engaging with another. Probably the hardest thing here is the temptation to multitask. I mean, our computer could be doing this while we do that, and we could be ironing while listening to podcasts, but what that trains us to do is to not be present. Again, exercising the attention muscle leads to a higher level of dopamine. This is where the Focus Modes are really going to come in useful! If you want to find out more, this fantastic podcast has helped me remember to try be more present.

Do Hard Things

Yes, this is vague on purpose. Because really, what is hard in today’s comfort of the first world? Things that are hard are things we intentionally make hard. Choosing to not take the easy road is something my best self would always do, and when we behave in accordance with what we think our best selves would do, we get a very good shot of dopamine. All thanks to the risk-reward system that it’s a part of.

---

When I started this blog post, I never expected it to be the scientific journal it has become (that’s a joke, but it really happened). The more I looked into resetting my baseline dopamine, the more I added to my list. I made sure to cut out things that I couldn’t turn into habits and some of the more extreme suggestions (like ice baths). Some things I am already doing and somethings I have yet to start. Like I asked Simone to grab Dune from the library for me. There’s a nice fat book to read in printed form. And I still have Twitter and Instagram on my phone for now (hey, I have to tweet out this blog post somehow).

Now it’s time for me to do a hard thing – go out in the cold and rain in search for food. While it’s not that hard in the grand scheme of things, it is harder than sitting inside and eating chips. Of course, I’ll be trying to write about this journey, and I hope you follow along, and hey, if I inspire you to try some of these things, then let me know!