Understanding the difference:
You might wonder why playing video games makes you feel much better as compared to studying for your next assignment. You may wonder that playing games for three hours isn’t just as much tiring as is studying for 3 hours. Is it because recreation is fun? Is it because it’s simple? Is it related to some sort of science?
Even though you know that studying, working and all such productive stuff is incredibly helpful in the longer term, you rather prefer to scroll on Instagram or Facebook than to turn the pages of your assignment. You might have noticed that why focusing on a PS4 game (that you like) is much easier than concentrating on the book for same amount of time. This dilemma might strike people with simple answer that one activity is ‘EASY’ while the other activity is ‘HARD’.
You also might have met people who clearly seem to have no problem with studying or concentrating on the stuff which may not be that easy for you. This brings us up to our new question that why tackling these things is easy for someone, while it is clearly hard for the rest. To answer this question, we have to dig into Science.
Dopamine:
As a few might have guessed, the magic whip here is ‘Dopamine’. Dopamine is coined as the ‘pleasure molecule’ but the fact is that Dopamine harnesses the desire for things. The infinitive wish to get more of what you may like is due to presence of this chemical. This desire motivates us to get out of the bed and do the work (from the easiest to the hardest).
Power of Desire!
If you second guess the inevitable power of human desire that is stimulated by this chemical, you must continue reading. This claim is corroborated by a series of experiments that scientists conducted a few years back.
The scientists implanted a set of electrodes in the mouse’s brains to guarantee their claim of influence of desire in a living being. They kept the rat near a lever, such that, whenever the rat pulled the lever, a machine would generate an electrical impulse in the brain of mouse which would trigger the release of dopamine in the mouse brain. This led to a development in a desire that was so strong that the rat would pull the lever over and over for hours just to suffice its carving for dopamine.
The rats would deny other survival preferences such as sleep, food etc. and would keep the cycle of pulling the lever. It was ultimate exhaustion which would stop them from pulling that lever.
To the other side of the experiment, scientists just reversed the whole concept and this time they deprived the mouse of any kind of dopamine release and the results were utterly threatening as the rat became so lethargic and hopeless that getting up to get water became unbeatable like climbing the hills barefoot and that it wasn’t worth the effort. They wouldn’t eat, they wouldn’t mate as if all craving had just vanished out of the blue. However, if the food was placed directly into the mouth, the rat would enjoy the food as it did before. It was just lack of motivation that would prevent rat from doing any kind of work.
Along with hunger and thirst, the dopamine plays a key role in our will to eat and survive.
Effect of dopamine level:
Those experiments might seem like extreme cases, but the observation claims that similar results are seen in humans.
The priority of an activity is largely influenced by the amount of dopamine it releases. Often the activities with lower dopamine levels are below on the priority list.
If the brain knows that there will be an immediate reward for an activity than it will prefer to do it over any other activity that does not bear such short-term reward. This could be easily complied by your choice of a can of Coca Cola over Aloe Vera juice (Seriously, who would take Aloe Vera!). Every time you are going to drink the Cola, the brain releases Dopamine signaling you that you will feel better and you must have it. Possibly, you might end up throwing up everything else in your stomach (it wasn’t needed).
Your brain doesn’t care if high Dopamine levels might be damaging to your body. It just craves for more.
A typical example of this damaging nature of brain is of a drug addict. He knows that what he might take today will harm his rest of the life, but the important fact here is that brain needs more dopamine.
Yes, that is true! Besides making you high, cocaine, heroine and other such drugs release unnatural amounts of dopamine in your brain, leading as principal reason of addiction. Although everything releases some amount of Dopamine (imagine the satisfaction of drinking water after an hour or two workout routine) but the highest dopamine release takes place when you receive a random, unexpected reward (you might find yourself extravagant after scoring a good rank in the test).
Why should it concern me?
Well, in today’s world we are exposing ourselves to myriad numbers of dopamine releasing activities. We might not even know before we start getting addicted to it and falling in the loop (say, of endless scrolling over Instagram). Some other examples of the activity when we get ourselves high dopamine strikes unknowingly is watching YouTube, playing video games, and eating junk food and as you might guess watching pornographic visuals.
Brain anticipates a reward with each of such activities and we always feel an unusual drive for doing them over and over. This captures the same reason why we constantly check our mobile phones or keep the track of our notifications.
We eventually turn out to be those rats, looking for the very next opportunity to pull the lever, demeaning the consequences.
Hey Dude, I have control over my body; don’t judge me by my internet usage, it’s just some fun. Really, is it so?
The body’s biological system of ‘Homeostasis’ tries to regain the default structure whenever an imbalance occurs in the body. But when it is continuously fed by the similar imbalance, it shifts its default value to a newer default value (routine alcohol takers don’t get high in the first shot). This leads to higher craving of dopamine as the receptors have been viciously damaged by the activities of addicts. It’s no more different than your desire to spend more time in front of the screen, playing games, watching T.V. shows, or watching internet pornography. Formation of this new ‘tolerance’ will just push the limits to a next level.
The problem occurs when these new dopamine levels create a greater setback to the things that you already do not prefer to do in the first place- they just don’t release enough dopamine after all.
This the very same reason that supports the scenario that a drug addict might quit more easily in real life than a normal healthy person. The other things just do not matter to them as they just crave to do things that can fill up their dopamine can up to unnatural levels. Their dopamine desire is just so high that a normal life can’t outscore it. This is not just for the drug addicts, people using a lot of smartphones, internet, and pornography fall in the same category too. Nothing else is much enjoyable to them. They are like the rats in the previous experiment. Once their dopamine levels are high, lower ones do not suffice their demands.
How do I prevent it? Can it stop?
The answer is
Dopamine Detox
As you might have guessed by now, Dopamine detox will be the process of reducing the overflowing levels of dopamine in brain.
The extreme approach might be to stop the usage of anything that is really pleasurable to you. You will make a list of activities that you think drive your dopamine levels high and other of the activities that you do not like to take interest in. In case if you are a drug addict, a doctor is strongly recommended as you might have developed a physiological and psychological dependence of the drug and any extreme measures can lead to fatal changes in the body.
Hopping back to our original ride, let’s talk about detox. For one day you will try to have minimum amount of fun.
Being Sad For One Day Will Make All Others Better
Key to be Happy is being Sad:
Some of you might question the viability of this method. Imagine this to be something like sleeping on the floor for next few months, this hard surface becomes your new normal. Now try sleeping in the bed with the usual mattresses, you either feel that it is incredibly soft or might not be able to even sleep. But then, you find yourself in a place where you have to sleep in a damp area, you will find that uncomfortable soft bed is way better. It is all about setting new preferences.
This is what dopamine detox does. It starves you of all such pleasures and then gives you a new default, which would then help you to suffice with low dopamine levels from those uninteresting stuff. Surprisingly, the hard stuff now becomes desirable and hence what we can say ‘EASY’.
In simpler words, you are so bored that even less interesting stuff seems to feel great.
A lesser extreme version of this is that you pick a day in the week when you will not access any kind of pleasures, be it mobile, laptop, junk food, internet pornography etc. This would weekly revise the dopamine levels in your body and make your receptors healthy once again to take in great pleasures from those low dopamine works.
This can even increase your overall productivity as you would now do the activities which you generally left earlier, as they weren’t much attractive.
Although high dopamine levels are normal and healthy for say once in a week but you must focus on directing your high dopamine counts to other activities which might actually benefit you (like physical exercises, reading novels, etc). This might be an incentive to work on things that actually help in longer term.
A report by Sashit Vijay
Waoo.. What a great article. You guys are really creative and passionate to make kota journey a beautiful one. You motivate us to study, you help people to solve their issue, be it a coaching, mess or whatever. I thank whole team of IHOIK specially Vanshika. This page was really needed on our life. I wish, i knew about this page before. Once again thank you very much IHOIK team.