Moving back to Alicante brings with it a few side effects, gentle and transient adaptations. One ( really annoying ) of them, is waking up earlier than I would like to, and suddenly being too awake to have the chance to get back to sleep. This morning was one of those instances, and after a few minutes of sad realization that sleep was not an option, I started to think about what to do next on this Sunday at freaking 6 in the morning.

A few months ago the answer to that question was so ingrained that there was not even a question; grab my phone and pick among the usual suspects, instagram, reddit, or X ( or in most cases, all of them one after another ). But this year I've been more deliberate about two things, not reaching for my for phone first thing as I wake up, and most importantly, not falling for dopamine highjackers. So this morning as I was thinking what to do, it got me wondering, how do I know what I pick next isn't just another, more subtle dopamine hijacker? And that's what I will get into today here. But first things first, a bit of context.

What it is

We have all heard from it, this molecule related to motivation, reward, drive, cravings, addiction, energy levels, and many other vital aspects of life. It's traditionally mostly associated with pleasure but in reality it's more about the expected reward than the reward itself, and also critically it's about its fluctuation alongside the day, its peaks and valleys and how the body reacts to compensate to the abundance of lack of it, on top of what our baseline is.

I will try to ilustrate this with an example that most of us can be familiar with. You sit on the couch, pick up the phone and open Instagram (or any other infinite scrolling app), a funny video pops up, you laugh, you share, you keep going, cooking recipes, nature videos, more memes, you feel great and you keep going. But at some point, it does not hit the same way, you keep going, but there's something off, and there's a bit of discomfort, but you keep going. Eventually, depending on the volume, it just feels off and you feel tired, and exhausted, and the whole color of the day is different... What we experienced here is constant spikes of dopamine on the anticipation of what the next real can be, that nice finding, that good laugh, that shareble video. Spike after spike after spike it builds up... And then our body , that lovely machine that tries to keeps things in balance can only do one thing, lower the baseline to compensate for the spikes, lower and lower, and that my dear friend is the crash is on its way. Eventually when even the spikes do not feel as a spike but bland and boring, you stop and suddenly you experience your new baseline first hand, that unmotivated stated after indulging.

On the other hand we have all experienced how good it feels to hit a new PR in the gym, adding more kms to our max distance, defeating a boss that you were stuck with for a while, passing an exam that you deemed almost impossible, submitting your thesis, organizing a dinner with friends. You did stuff, and you felt good despite the struggle.

Dopamine hijacking

With that crips difference and after taste in mind, it becomes easier to draw a distinction. We are naturally programmed to work in a loop: crave, feel the motivation, move, do stuff that is hard or inconvenient, achieve the goal, feel good, enjoy the reward, rest, and repeat. Go from craving to movement, and you go from "I would like to run" to, "I run some times". Repeat the loop enough times, habit formation arises and you go from; "I run sometimes" to, "I run". Align it with your core values and identity shift takes place, and end up saying; "I'm a runner".

Dopamine hijacking refers to any activity or behavior that tricks the body into producing the rewards without caring or pretending to care about the effort. Rather than explaining trick part of this and the side effects, let me ilustrate it with a similar example. None of us dream of the day we go from "I drink sometimes" to, "I drink", and even less the transition to "I'm a drinker", because that's not even the word we use in modern society for it.

If anyone is interested on the science of this. I strongly recommend this Huberman episode.

Now let's move into the different categories of activities and behaviors that fill this description:

Tier I: The chemical & Biological weapons

There is plenty of data on these. So we have % numbers on how high the highs of these are with respect to our baselines. . As a reference, when we eat chocolate, and we like it, we get a 50% spike, that spike is what makes us think about grabbing another piece when we are not even done with the first (expected reward). Sex for example, produces a 100% spike, doubling our dopamine level.

Now lets move into some of the members of this list:

1. Drugs (Cocaine/Meth/Heroin): 1000%+ spike, hundreds of times higher than what we get to feel on a normal life.
2. Nicotine; causes a sharp, short-lived spike to approximately 115% of baseline. While the spike is higher than alcohol or food, it dissipates quickly, driving the compulsive "chain-smoking" behavior to re-acquire the high. 3.Alcohol: approximately 100% of baseline. Unlike quick spikes, alcohol's effect can be more sustained.
3. Pornography: cheap artificial version of sex with a 100% increase.
4. Junk food: highly palatable foods can be a 50% increase.

When I first saw these, it gave me a lot of compassion with people who deal with substance abuse given its sheer magnitude.

Tier II: The Uncertainty Hijackers - the slot machines

We do not get the spike when we win, we get the spike when we think we are going to win. After tier I we move into activities where the harm is more on the relationship we have with them than the activities themselves.

1. Social Media feed: Instagram, tiktok, youtube, reddit you name it. We love the anticipation before going in, the uncertain of what happened.
2. Other type of feeds: things like refreshing our email, checking the news,opening a dating app to see if we got a match, opening our trading app, the bottom line is clear, we feel it before the activity,and we keep on doing it for the same reason.
3. Gambling: This is now easier to understand; it's literally an unexpected reward machine with fancy colors and lights.
4. Videogames: This can be done with direction and purpose and can be a great hobby (guilty myself) but it can also become an automatic behavior or coping mechanism (also guilty)

Tier III: The cognitive and internal hijackers

These are the most suble ones. I had never seen these activities described in this manner but it all makes more sense now. These rely on our instinct to forage information and our need for identity validation.

1. Moral outrage: this is fascinating. Brain imaging shows that "punishing" our enemy releases dopamine. It feels good to be angry or mad with our rival. This makes sense from a tribe perspective, and probably it's extremely useful in a warfare or real conflict scenario. I can also see how we can make the most of this trick to enjoy even more our movies, tv shows and books, it feels good to despise the villain. The trap is when it happens to us through rage baiting. We enjoy the being mad, and disguise it as needing to stay informed. We also get the feeling of moral superiority. But frankly speaking, most of us do not channel that energy into the real world for change or shape our environment. In reality, we are just being played by algorithms.
2. Rumination Why on earth we replay negative experiences, or fixate on future scenarios ? Well, on both cases we release dopamine to fix them, but, this is the catch, the brain cannot distinguish between fixing fixing, or mentally fixing. So we can see that if the problem is too abstract, or future, or untouchable, we can quickly fall in a loop of rumination dopamine release.
3. The curiosity gap: Falling for rabbit holes, clicking link after link, youtube video after youtube video, seeking information. This is also quite interesting. Our brain sees information in a way as valuable a food, and also the lack of it. If we perceive subjective lack of it, it's the equivalent of hunger. Clicking relieves the pain, so we do it over and over. I am quite guilty of this since recently. LLMs are now way stronger at doing research and web search, I feel that I need to remove the uncertainty constantly, which tends to start a rabbit hole that has a clear beginning but no clear end. The trap is is that on most cases we are really integrating the new information or learning, all it's done in a passive way, not that different from scrolling.
4. The ilussion of productivity & daydreaming This has to be a bug in our software. thinking about achieving a goal, planning about it, talking about it, releases dopamine, in a similar manner as doing, but its nothing more than a comfortable trap disguised as productivity. I love how Chris puts it here.

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Thanks to reading these last two, I could become aware that I was falling for these traps myself. I was in bed reading about dopamine on Gemini, while I was rejoicing in how good it feels to think about writing a blog post about it. So there was only one way out, trying to integrate the knowledge the best that I could, and just sit down and write the thing.

On the next post I will get into how to identify if your baseline is hijacked, examples of what of good sustainable production of dopamine looks like, and why any of this matters at all.