The feelgood rush of dopamine sometimes becomes too irresistible for us to manage.
Let’s agree on one thing: Not everything that is permissible to us is beneficial to us.
As it is written by the apostle Paul in the Bible, 1 Corinthians 6:12:
“I have the right to do anything,” you say — but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything” — but I will not be mastered by anything.
In another version, his writing is translated as:
“Everything is permissible for me,” but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me,” but I will not be mastered by anything.
Well, Paul was focusing primarily on sexual immorality. But yet, there are certain habits in life (beyond sex) that we do allow ourselves to be controlled by. For sure, there are many drug addicts and sex addicts out there — too hooked onto the feelings that the drugs or the sex acts bring to them, and they end up being trapped by it and unable to escape.
However, there are other bad habits out there, which we may not even realise have pervaded that deeply into our lives until it is too late.
Avarice, for instance, is one’s addiction towards material or financial gain.
Gluttony, for instance, is one’s addiction towards delicious foods.
And that’s the problem when these “good” or “permissible” things give us that feelgood feeling — it’s a dopamine rush!
The chemistry of addiction
As it is said in this research article about dopamine (DA):
However, it has been demonstrated that DA is involved in the hedonic component of reward. Several lines of evidence show that the receipt of rewards evokes an increase in DA activity; however numerous conditions exist for which this does not hold. Several hypotheses have been proposed to draw a different mechanism. For example, it has been suggested that activity changes in DA neurons encode an error in the prediction of the time and amount of immediate and future rewards (the prediction error hypothesis), therefore, the DA activity is hypothesized to indicate that the immediate or future prospect for reward is better than expected.
Dopamine brings about a pleasurable reward high. The article goes further on to explain that:
For the most part, one’s motivation is to return to the rewards experienced in the past, and to the cues that mark the way to such rewards. It is primarily through its role in the selective reinforcement of associations between rewards and otherwise neutral stimuli that DA is important for such motivation. Once stimulus-reward associations have been formed, they can remain potent for some time even after the reward has been devalued by the absence of appropriate drive states such as hunger or thirst, or because the DA system is blocked.
When we do something and get a dopamine reward (or high) out of it, we tend to want to return back to doing that thing consistently to get that same dopamine rush.
However, the balancing of the frequency of those acts with the dopamine highs will determine how addicted to the act one can be.
When is an addiction an addiction?
We don’t need to have addicts around us to know what an addiction is like — we can see how badly their withdrawal symptoms are hitting them, exaggerated as it may be, even on television or the movies.
We see how drug addicts end up shaking and shivering. Pleading for the drug even as they are forced to go cold turkey. All these cold turkey symptoms are also signs of dopamine agonist withdrawal syndrome (DAWS), which is defined as:
a severe, stereotyped cluster of physical and psychological symptoms that correlate with dopamine agonist withdrawal in a dose-dependent manner, cause clinically significant distress or social/occupational dysfunction, are refractory to levodopa and other dopaminergic medications, and cannot be accounted for by other clinical factors. The symptoms of DAWS include anxiety, panic attacks, dysphoria, depression, agitation, irritability, suicidal ideation, fatigue, orthostatic hypotension, nausea, vomiting, diaphoresis, generalized pain, and drug cravings. The severity and prognosis of DAWS is highly variable.
The dopamine rush that addicts seek is one of the major reasons behind these withdrawal symptoms. In Parkinson’s patients, a lack of dopamine neurotransmission has been implicated, and this lack of dopamine stimulation can also contribute to a lack of motivation and symptoms of depression.
When dopamine agonists (drugs that stimulate dopamine activity) are used on Parkinson’s patients, their motor coordination is improved. However, some of them will face severe withdrawal symptoms from DAWS when dopamine agonist therapy is reduced for them. And that forms the biochemical basis of an addiction right there!
Do we face any form of the “anxiety, panic attacks, dysphoria, depression, agitation, irritability, suicidal ideation, fatigue, orthostatic hypotension, nausea, vomiting, diaphoresis, generalized pain, and drug cravings” symptoms when we have to cut the frequency of our interactions with an activity that brings about a dopamine high?
Because doing just about anything can bring about a dopamine high, depending on how our brain classifies an activity within the rewards system.
I will admit that I personally did face certain addictions in life before (and still do face a different set of challenges today).
Driving Uber and hunting for big unicorn surge fares? Check. Seeing a triple digit payout on a single trip always warmed the cockles of my heart. I lived and breathed the surge. It became a game of strategic positioning just to get the dopamine rush.
Watching pornography as a teenager? Check. Even when my mind thought that it was meaningless and I ought to get out of it. The dopamine rush, though…
Obsessing over women? I’d use to want to do anything for my crushes. Even if they didn’t reciprocate anything in return. It was a terribly one-sided, one-way relationship that was terribly unhealthy from a psychological and an emotional standpoint.
I was addicted to all that. And more.
Because what an addiction tells us, really…
Is that we have gotten our priorities all mixed up.
Do I want to be obsessing over my next article going viral, or can I take it easy to focus on other things that matter?
Do I want to be chasing after the wind (Ecclesiastes 1:14) for something that I cannot take with me to the grave when I’m dead? So what if I can come up with a $1000 article but I drop dead the next day (Luke 12:16–21)?
Do I need the recognition or the attention that badly?
And when the priorities aren’t right, our moral compass gets affected. When the moral compass is affected, the risk of slipping into other addictions can become much greater.
In the same way, do we want to be addicted enough to a wrong kind of behaviour such that we end up repeating the same mistakes and hurting ourselves all over again?
But how much can we control our activities and our lives to prevent that from happening? Self awareness and an understanding of our strengths and weaknesses are key here!
If you like the content on this post, do feel free to scroll down to the bottom of the page where you can subscribe to this site and receive notifications when new posts are up!
This article was originally published on Medium.
Comentarios