Dopamine roller coasters

This dopamine masterclass by Huberman was mindblowing.

I always assumed dopamine was a chemical that makes a reward pleasurable, but there’s much more nuance to that:

• there’s always a baseline setpoint of dopamine in the body.
• when you desire something but don’t yet have it, dopamine will peak, making it pleasurable.
• then dopamine will drop below baseline, making you move to want to achieve the thing in order to relieve the urgh ‘pain’ of the drop
• as you progress along, dopamine peaks when you get cues whether you’re in the right direction
• when you finally reach your goal, dopamine may or may not peak. This was the most surprising to me. There’s this mechanism called the reward prediction error. If your expectations of the experience of reaching your goal are high and the experience was average or even negative, then dopamine actually drops below baseline. If you didn’t have much expectations and the experience surprised you pleasantly, dopamine peaks again.
• dopamine will crash after a peak. The peaks and baseline are not separate: for every peak, there’s a crash. And might take days or weeks to recover back to baseline, depending on the intensity.
• if you keep doing the same dopamine-stimulating activities or try to stack different hacks to stimulate more dopamine, over time we will get more numb to it.

No wonder I often feel empty after reaching a big goal.

Seems like the feeling empty part might be due to reward prediction error. Perhaps in pursuit of a huge goal, I had to psyche myself up, imagine grand ambitions, and envision how happy I would feel when I finally hit it. But that could have racheted the expectations too high, so when the goal is finally achieved and the experience was below expectations, dopamine drops and cue, that empty feeling.

This explained a lot of moments in my life when I worked really hard towards something, only to feel underwhelmed when I finally hit it. Like once when I won gold for a school cross country run. Or when I launched a product that did well on Product Hunt. Sure those few moments immediately upon winning was intense and pleasurable. But fleeting. Next day, the crash comes.

It always made me wonder if all the effort was worthwhile, because if it was, why am I not happy?!

Now I know. It’s only human that there’s a crash, because dopamine worked really hard to get me there. Not only is it natural, I should 100% expect to feel that way and embrace it. Because it’s a price to pay for hitting the goal.

Everything makes sense now.

It probably explains why I have unexplained lows from time to time. Which I often (mis-)interpret as burnout, mental exhaustion, or depressive episodes. It often follows from some intense period of activity – consulting gigs, shipping and launching a product, or going viral on Twitter.

It could all have just simply been a dopamine crash. Nothing more, nothing less.

Nothing broken about my mind.
Nothing about the state of my mental health.
Nothing about needing to ask big questions about life.

Just give dopamine the rest it needs to recover back to baseline, and I’ll be fine.

That’s it!

This gives a whole new perspective on the roller coaster ride so often associated with startups and indie hacking. And also how I should also maximise joy on this indie hacking journey… even while I try to hit $5k/m revenue goal.

Because we’ve known all along, it’s not just about the destination, but the journey. Now we have neuroscience to prove it.