Name: Dopamine: The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Unhealthy
Uploaded: 2025-03-06T01:53:13.000Z
Duration: 5 min 18 s
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We all have our little vices, things we can't help doing, even when we know we probably shouldn't.

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Maybe it's a weakness for fast food, staying out with friends later than you planned, or a tendency to watch just one more episode before going to bed.

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We often think of these as guilty pleasures, or even failures of willpower, but they might be better seen as something more basic.

The result of an essential evolutionary process, and in particular, one extraordinarily powerful chemical, dopamine.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical certain brain cells use to communicate with each other.

The brain has dozens of these, but dopamine plays a special role in motivating our behaviour.

Something it's able to do, simply because it makes us feel really good.

We've evolved to receive hits of dopamine for things that will help ensure our survival, making us want to repeat whatever action triggered its release.

You've learned something about how the world works!

Each of these experiences causes a dopamine spike, building positive associations and shaping our habits and desires.

The problem is that evolution is very slow, and this whole motivation and reward system developed over millions of years, when food, friends and fables were relatively scarce.

But all that's changed in an evolutionary millisecond, and our brains haven't begun to catch up.

Instead of hunting and gathering, there's fast food.

Instead of small tribes, worldwide social media networks.

Instead of tales around the campfire, on-demand TV with seemingly infinite content.

This surplus of everything nature has programmed us to crave, pushes our dopamine circuits into overdrive, and as a result, snacking, scrolling and streaming, as we probably all experience, can become habits bordering on addictions.

But these habits aren't just unfortunate byproducts of our evolution, they're also the outcome of deliberate design.

Whether companies sell hamburgers or advertising spots, to maximize their profits they need loyal customers, and one way of getting them is to hotwire people's neurons to keep them coming back.

Fast food chains have been at it for decades, but more recently another sector has been getting in on the action, the tech industry.

As if to show just how blatant this can be, Nir Eyal's 2014 book Hooked is explicitly pitched as a guide to designing habit-forming products.

What he calls the Hooked Cycle has four stages.

First, a trigger, such as an email or notification, gives you a nudge, prompting the action of logging in and using the service, which provides what Eyal calls a variable reward.

And this is where the neuroscience kicks in.

You see dopamine surges after unexpected rewards, and gets weaker when things are more predictable.

So the promise of new posts, episodes and other goodies renews the novelty factor and the neurological response.

The final stage in the Hooked Cycle is investment.

The more time, effort, data or even money you put into the service, the more reason you'll have to use it again.

This cycle can be reinitiated any time a developer likes, simply by sending you a notification.

But soon enough those external triggers won't even be necessary, once a habit has formed, your brain will provide the triggers itself.

In fairness, Eyal says his modelers should only be used to build products that help people form good habits, like exercising.

More recently, he's written about how to be indistractable.

And this is part of a larger trend, with companies like Apple adding features such as time limits on apps to help people try and break the loop.

But it seems reasonable to be wary of solutions offered up by the same companies who benefit from creating the problem in the first place.

The key to this lies in recognising the Hooked Cycle and dismantling it, step by step.

So rather than trying to ignore triggers, remove them by changing settings to receive fewer notifications and reorganising your home screen to make tempting apps less visible or deleting them altogether.

Try substituting something more wholesome, whether that's setting yourself a reading challenge or spending time offline with friends.

This should provide its own variable rewards, and you can allow yourself others, including the occasional indulgence.

A burger now and then won't kill you, and neither will the odd binge watch.

Finally, remember that unhooking is really just learning a different habit.

It'll take time to retrain your brain, so don't be discouraged if it doesn't happen overnight.

Manipulating neurochemistry for profit isn't some unprecedented evil.

It's a sliding scale, with restaurants changing their menus at one end and criminal gambling rings taking people's life savings at the other.

But now that digital devices are everywhere, tech companies have more and more opportunities to get inside our heads, meaning we need to be more aware of what we're doing, how much agency we're exercising, and how much control we might be giving up.