Dopamine & Discipline

Is it the ability to do the same thing every day on repeat? Like a habit?

Is there a quality of doing what you don't want? Like an aspect of willpower?

If you have to overcome yourself to make yourself do it, does it have more value? 

Or is it having the resolve to do something? 

Maybe it's about taking responsibility?

Somewhat vague, right? In your imagination it's some culmination of all of these, but nothing singularly definable. When you start to define discipline you realize it doesn't actually exist. It's the culmination of other attributes.

You're up too late, sleep in too long, don't eat enough, don't work out enough, or do your work last minute. So maybe you think the solution is more discipline.

But discipline isn't one thing. Discipline is more of a skill tree, where all items are part of the skill tree but are each their own isolated attribute. Getting better with one attribute on the discipline skill tree does not necessarily advance other attributes. Increasing your skill with the attribute of "Willpower" doesn't mean your "Resolve" attribute grew also. But advancing both Willpower and Resolve build the entire skill tree. Simply wanting to be more disciplined is too amorphous to be useful. But you CAN build the specific skills that make up Discipline.

Because you only have the vague idea, all you have is when you think "discipline" is the feeling of some mature Marine figure who endlessly endures hardships to accomplish his goal. So you just have an emotion to go on. In which case your response is to feel like you're missing something vitally important.

If someone said that you need more willpower, now that's something that can be trained and improved. Responsibility can too. Resolve itself is a choice, so to cultivate it you practice making that choice over and over again. Commitment is another thing you can practice. When you advance each of these attributes, it results in "discipline." But if you chase "discipline" itself, you'll never have it.

The way humans perceive rewards is via the release of dopamine. Dopamine is a type of vital energy that anchors into various parts of the brain. We must be sensitive to dopamine so that small amounts of dopamine produce a lot of motivation. Because the harder something is to do, the more dopamine is required to produce a unit of motivation for that endeavor.

So this vital energy anchors into the brain and manifests as dopamine. Then dopamine anchors into a receptor site (parking spot) and produces a signal that we experience as a reward. The strength of the reward experience depends on the dopamine available + your sensitivity to that dopamine. Sensitivity meaning how many parking spots are available for that dopamine to anchor. If the body is used to overproducing and over-consuming dopamine, it will attempt equilibrium by closing down the receptor sites. Less parking spots means less dopamine can anchor.

Think about playing CandyCrush or some other addictive game on your phone. It is a mindless activity, but you are rewarded a tiny bit every few seconds for exerting very little effort. But eventually it doesn't feel as engaging and rewarding to play.

In other words, the same units of dopamine net diminishing returns. 

Lots of dopamine released in quick succession from too many easy rewards leads to the body downregulating receptor sites in an effort to find equilibrium. Fewer receptor sites means there aren't enough parking spots for that vital energy, and you feel less and less reward sensations. Oftentimes you end up feeling hungry for more and reach for more low effort, low reward dopamine rewards to try and get a hit. 

Activities that require very little effort and give low reward are "dopamine junk food." 

Activities like scrolling, watching tv, playing video games, porn, and binging all give low quantity reward that requires little to no effort. Low quality means the satisfaction doesn't linger long at all.

Watching porn floods the system with easy rewards in quick succession. You then need a greater stimulus to experience the same level of reward experience. Before you know it, you're reaching for stranger and stranger porn every day to try to get that same level of reward sensation. 

Chatting with a friend, sitting in nature, shopping, or listening to mindblowing edutainment might be slightly higher on the reward and take a few units more effort. But they're still really easy to do and the satisfactions doesn't linger.

Activities like conversation, sitting in nature, doing mindless tasks, are all low reward tasks. Because they are low reward, there is low activity in the dopamine receptor. 

Here's the big problem with low effort dopamine junk food:

With downregulated receptors it becomes even more difficult to do low reward tasks. 

You know the tasks of which I speak. The ones you keep putting off. 

But also the ones that will make a difference in your life.

You experience low vitality because so much energy has is spent on low hanging fruit. Often you don't even realize you spent this energy. You're just walking around, frustrated you can't commit and don't have the willpower to take care of things you've been meaning to do.

Because you repeatedly reach for easy rewards, you make yourself completely intolerant of boredom. You constantly give your mind quick dopamine hits. You've trained your mind to eat junkfood nonstop so when you stop feeding it, it gets hungry fast. When is the last time you've waited in a line without immediately checking your phone?

A dopamine detox won't cut it. It doesn't do you much good if you just go back to doom scrolling right after. Your detox isn't worth much if you're just "intermittent fasting" in between binge sessions.

This is why I teach students to "starve their minds." It's an important pillar of the school. 

Your learning system has to be activated. It isn't 'on' by default. Just because you like the idea of learning and have the intention to learn stuff, doesn't mean that the change aspect of learning is operating in your mind. 

You effectively get stuck on intellectual knowledge because having your mind blown is a huge influx of dopamine whereas actually doing the boring practices can never compare to the initial mind blowing experience. So you get the intellectual awareness without it having enough potency to activate the learning centers in your brain that would lead to you implementing your lessons properly and actually learning, growing and changing.

You step on hot coals, it registers as pain, you change by removing your foot. The pain was strong enough to trigger a reaction in the mind to change behavior. 

Physical pain is obvious, but emotional pains can be a lot more subtle. 

If you have pushed emotional pain down because "you can handle it and fix your problems yourself," that pain stays too quiet to activate the change machinery. At the same time that pain lingers in the background, pressurizing you from your unconscious.

If you push emotional pains to the back of your mind by ignoring them rather than acknowledging their message, those pains persist, but at too low a level to activate learning circuitry. Eventually it requires a blow up to bring those emotions to the surface that have built up and suppressed.

As I mentioned earlier, when you feel a negative emotion your frequent recourse is to seek out dopaminergic activities. You'll scroll, the dopamine makes you feel better, and that pesky emotion gets subdued into the background. It remains there, barely examined.

Let's say a "task" of staring at a tree normally releases 2 unit of dopamine. Smoking and doing the same task now releases 9 units of dopamine. That tree just got a lot more interesting.

So low dopaminergic activities, low reward activities, mundane boring activities, are increased in reward value. But as tolerance builds in response to the influx of dopamine, you eventually end up with a -5 base reduction to your stats. So even if the weed is +5 you started at -5 all day long. So now you can't even tolerate boredom at all because you're experiencing it as a -5 hole instead of a 0 or a 1.

Think about this for a second. This is why people think weed makes everything better... because it does. It makes even unrewarding tasks rewarding. BUT like many people have found out, it can also lead to impenetrable stagnation. 

You may still get things done on weed, but it suppresses the feelings you should be having that would catalyze a change in your trajectory. For example, say you have very subtle negative feelings you suppress through smoking. You smoke to habitually make yourself feel better, those moments before smoking or scrolling are giving you an indicator of the emotional pain you're feeling. Maybe that pain is in your relationship, in your life situation, in your depressive stories, in your job, about your parents. But because you shift your reward system around these problems that may be intolerable become quite easily tolerated. You even feel rewarded tolerating something that really should change. This tends to lead to a type of stagnation in a lot of people's lives. Especially if they tank their dopamine sensitivity.

Whether you smoke, scroll, or reach for any other easy dopamine snack, in all cases you are releasing dopamine as a suppression mechanism for the unpleasant emotions you feel. As you lower your sensitivity, the threshhold of pain required to change is never met.

So you may have a desire to change but you cannot seem to do it. Your dopamine is too low to bring forth the emotions you'd feel as pain that would activate the learning center of the brain and allow changes in the hippocampus and limbic system to occur. 

You just don't feel shitty enough to change while simultaneously feeling quite stagnant and shitty.

And you can't feel shitty enough to change because you're too numb. 

You're too mentally noisy, too emotional, and dare I ironically say too undisciplined. It's causing you to seek to numb yourself out. But not necessarily with the usual drugs, it could just be the netflix binge or the hour long doom scroll. Unfortunately no amount of exercise compensates for mental obesity. The reward seeking is automatic, like an unconscious behavior your body utilizes to solve the problem of feeling.

But is the solution to stopping yourself more discipline? "A disciplined person would scroll less" is one belief you might have, but it's still just one belief about a disciplined person and not particularly a verifiable truth. Forcing yourself doesn't repair your sensitivity... it's akin to saying "do you feel this gentle feather on your skin, if not I'll use a knife so you can feel it?" You forced yourself and used a knife, but that doesn't mean you can now feel the feather you're supposed to be able to feel. And more scrolling simply won't get you there.

Is it a willpower problem? You just lack energy for your day because you're not pushing through hard enough, is that what you think? Keep dragging that belief anchor I guess. But the only place willpower comes into play is if you are willing to starve your mind, sit in the mind hunger, and say no to the impulse to consume. And that gets done long enough that the brain is like "well shit I still need a reward, I'll just ramp my sensitivity back up now that I'm no longer getting junk food." It's also why when you cut out sugar, regular food starts tasting better again... the reward value shifted to account for the lower reward foods.

What if your fatigue, brain fog, lack of motivation has nothing to do with something you're not doing, but instead something you are doing that you have to do a lot less of? 

You are wasting your dopamine scrolling first thing in the morning. You're wasting it playing video games too early in the day. You're wasting it chatting with friends before work and you're wasting it having netflix on while you do other tasks. You're wasting it by starting your day with junk food, just like you set your day up to be mediocre by not fueling it well from the start. 

You set the reward tone for your day based on the rewards you get first. If the first rewards are some titties on instagram then you have set the infusion of dopamine to high and the effort is low... that means you're basically starting the day with a snickers bar. There's simply no way writing an ebook that you plan to sell in 6 months will ever be more reward value than that, good luck finding any motivation today.

If discipline is translated as "well behaved"... because you discipline something for bad behavior with the intention of making them behave better. In that case the bad behavior would be consuming junk food first thing upon waking. You have no problem judging a 500lb obese person for scarfing down a cake with breakfast, but you don't see yourself as doing the same thing by picking up your phone first thing in the morning.

But also think in terms of reward threshold. If your first reward choice sets the tone for the rest of the day, then anything harder than what you chose will not be rewarding enough to motivate you... assuming your sensitivity is already low. For example, if a game is giving you fetch quests that take 30 seconds and give you 1000XP each and there's another quest that would take you an hour but only rewards 2000XP, the additional reward will not be perceived as strong enough to get you to do an hour of work when that same quantity of reward can be gotten effortlessly in 1/60th the time. So of course you'll just set the bar at quick rewards for the day, leading to you putting off important tasks and having difficulty concentrating on things you want to get done. Can't concentrate on something if the mind waivers too much due to poor reward management.

Then you can have more play toward the end of the day while making space at the beginning of the day for the necessary pain points to be triggered... because those changes ARE being called for and the sooner we feel them and change, the better our life will be.

If you continue the alternative path you end up draining your reward sensitivity to zero. When it hits zero, it's hard to motivate yourself to do anything, and the stories you tell in your head become more antagonistic. You'll be more likely to isolate, more likely to hide, more likely to put off for tomorrow what you could do today. And temporarily you might smoke weed, amplifying the fun of mundane tasks. And perhaps shaking loose some rigidity temporarily through the introduction of novelty. But over time the sensitivity goes down and the rigidity increases as the body finds balance.

Perhaps you're fully energized, fully motivated, and have no problem getting difficult low reward tasks done. It sounds like you got it handled. 

But for others who can't seem to figure out where all their energy has gone... take a look at your consumption habits. If you are consuming low reward junk, give yourself some new rules. A detox isn't the best choice because that'll just lead to binging later. That's because saying "no you can't do this" makes the reward of doing the thing you shouldn't do that much stronger. It's why forcing yourself to quit your addictions doesn't work, it just makes them stronger. It's why I tell you to give yourself permission to partake, but then choose not to by seeing a bigger picture context where it's clear that partaking doesn't lead you to your desired experience of life.

Just improve your relationship over time and your body will balance itself quickly. There is no need to "reset" your dopamine with a quick fix. Moderation and timing are the keys. Use it a little less and at a later time of day. The biggest burners are tiktok, porn, instagram/twitter, and video games. Netflix, youtube, and attention seeking are not far behind. Shift these to later in the day or dramatically reduce ones that are detrimental to your well being (like porn). 

Remember that drugs like weed make the potency of all of these burners much stronger, like burning a candle wick 5x hotter. By approaching this with moderation you are changing your habits, not just going on a retreat. Retreats and motivational events certainly make you feel hype, but they aren't sustainable. Going cold turkey hoping to fix your dopamine and get right back to scrolling after a week will simply have you sitting right back where you started. 

This is why you create new rules that are easily attainable even if you are dopamine insensitive. Those rules help you establish new values for your rewards and by maintaining these small changes over the days and weeks the experience of your reward system will normalize to that new level. You benefit greatly by experiencing mundane tasks as very rewarding, but that requires tremendous dopamine sensitivity. And sensitivity requires less frequent more subtle stimulation.

Right now your tolerance of mind hunger and boredom is very low. You are intolerant of having nothing to do. However, right now you fill the space of your day with scrolling and junk. If you simply stop doing those things you will leave empty space. You are intolerant of having nothing to do and so empty space will be filled with boredom. So strongly in fact, that your mind will consume the itches on your face by wanting to scratch at them just for a little hit. This is suffering because it is a zero reward state. But by holding the zero reward state, which is very high effort, you create the conditions for your sensitivity to rise. Enter, The Sitting Practice. By being in a zero reward state when your mind wants reward it will ramp up sensitivity to get a reward from somewhere.

You have to experience the reward of putting your phone down instead of the reward of cycling through your automatic series of apps. And then you have to sit in the frequency of mind hunger while your mind magnetically pulls you to open the phone one more time real quick. 

Repeat this enough times that it becomes easy. Then allow it to become a better relationship with technology knowing how it can shift your mental scales. With more of this vital energy and sensitivity available you'll find it easier to apply your willpower and maintain your commitments, though of course not without cultivating them.

Your confusion, lack of motivation, lack of clarity, lack of available energy to persist, lack of ability to endure discomfort, inability to get beyond intellectual understanding into transformation, always overthinking and consuming worries... these are all a result of your reward system being fucked. So you have to see yourself in this paradigm and get sick and tired of your own shit. You don't want to have such low sensitivity that negative self talk is the reward you're stuck on. And you'll have a hell of a time subordinating irrational thought and holding thoughts at bay if you don't have the energy available to feel rewarded in doing so. 

No amount of "wanting to use more willpower" actualizes that willpower into your experience. It just perpetuates the emotional state of wanting, but not having. You end up indulging in shame so that you don't have to see the real emotions you're covering up using that shame. You feel some kind of negative emotion, cover it up with dopamine, then feel shame afterwards to further perpetuate the dopamine feeding loop. 

So you can't fix your guilt or shame by arguing with it, only by subverting that pathway by re-arranging your reward system. You have to stop rewarding yourself for feeling guilt and instead recognize that loop as inactivity in your learning centers, insensitivity to the necessary energies, and a catalyst for you to make small adjustments to the start of your day. 

That way you can save some of that mind fuel and eliminate these unnecessary emotions in order to be able to listen to the quieter ones that have been pushed into the background. When I say don't use your emotions it doesn't mean don't acknowledge their implications and meaning. It just means don't listen to them as if they guide you with wisdom and correctness, don't use them to make choices. Because if you've depleted your sensitivity to dopamine, it's likely those emotions and thought streams are of the low reward variety and will only keep you in the loop you want to get out of.