(No.2) Dopamine receptor spa

What I want is hurting me! Wade into the brain bath

Lately, I’ve been trying to eat without watching TV.

I read once when I was living in New Mexico that looking at screens when you eat strains your spleen and leads to Qi deficiency¹. Traditional Chinese Medicine had become a point of interest for me at the time, and this notion paired nicely with my lack of cell reception and perpetually delayed wifi installation. And so I did just that. I sat in the ambient lighting of my adobe rental and ate my meals with no entertainment. My digestion improved, but my spirits flickered just like the candle stick I had lit before me on the table.

Woolly Mammoth (Chicago, IL)

We’re not as good at multitasking as we think. Only 2.5% of us can successfully channel the mind in many ways at once. I’m not one of them. I’m reminded of this every time I eat at work and all of a sudden my spoon pulls up empty.

The benefit of my spleen-warming mealtimes in NM was that I got some good and very devoted dopamine hits from the food in front of me. Eating makes my body and mind happy. But I am—and was—so much happier when I have a little Youtuber on the table in front of me talking about the historic fashion of the new period drama. Why do compounding delights seem to subtract rather than add?

Let’s talk about dopamine. According to the voice of god (WebMD), “It's a big part of our unique human ability to think and plan. It helps us strive, focus, and find things interesting.” Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter that plays a role in how we feel pleasure. But when dopamine receptors are flooded too often, they become resistant. The same stimulus no longer produces the same amount of pleasure.

What we want is hurting us. Or not. Hopefully not.

Overloading our dopamine receptors with pleasurable things like eating dinner while watching TV isn’t a call for shame or immorality. It’s not always bad behavior to do things that are bad for us. Pleasure isn’t evidence in a court. It doesn’t have any ties to character, to right or wrong. Reflecting on pleasurable experiences with guilt can even rewrite a dopamine-waterfall memory into a negative one. So what if—and I say this lovingly—we accepted we were junk? Happy junk.

Humans need time to think. In the book Essentialism—which I admit to only partially listening to on the Libby app—Greg Mckeown says:

“To discern what is truly essential we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep, and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make.”

This concept *essentially* speaks to what we know as the plugged-in people of the 21st century—there is too much. My main takeaway was that we need more space in our day for nothingness. Even children and teenagers have sensory overload available for the taking with the stimulation only continuing to a crescendo as we age.

If you lay down to sleep at night and a cocktail of anxious thoughts combined with a screaming internal monologue keeps you awake, it may be a good idea to try and dedicate more time in the day to “brain wandering.” That debt is hell-bent on catching up with us and it waits in the shadows until we’ve gone quiet for sleep.

It might feel painful to start eating in silence on your lunch break, so start small. Incorporate wandering time into already pleasurable activities. Let your brain think about whatever it wants as you put comfy clothes on after work or browse through the drugstore battery aisle. You might notice random thoughts boil up. Let your mind chew on them and roar and stomp around. Better now than when you lay down on the pillow.

Alright, alright, that’s enough sage advice from me. I sound like a very peaceful person. I’m not. I use these strategies to fall asleep faster at night and toil less with anxiety. And they fail sometimes. But in the spirit of granting your brain permission to pleasurable stimulation, it’s important to also provide the space for a lack of stimulation. This could prove pleasurable over time.

The dopamine receptor spa isn’t what you think. It’s not a brain bath that encourages the denial of screens and podcasts and sweets and all that makes us feel good and happy. It’s about feeling good things without the guilt associated with them. A Saturday morning spent “laying around” could reflect back as lazy rather than fun and restful. Tint the good with shame and you’re only left with shame. The dopamine receptor spa is about the rejection of guilt.

Here is where I argue in favor of the bad thing aka how I don’t think it’s terrible to look at screens all day. Why does every waking minute need to be filled with content and stimulation? It doesn’t. But wondering why we occupy our days with pleasure is like wondering why dogs eat grass. They can and they want to. It might hurt their stomachs but they still do it. They make themselves sick all over our nice wool rugs and we think relatively little of it in relation to the dog’s morality. They’re not considered dim for acting on this compulsion. And we’re not dim to reach for dopamine hits.

Obviously, we can’t oblige our pleasure center’s every demand. I see it like this: we deny ourselves things out of shame or fact. Not scrolling social media during a work meeting is a factual denial of pleasure. Not scrolling through social media at night in bed is a shameful denial of pleasure. The line is blurry. And it’s different for everyone. We live in a society, after all. We have to rein it in.

Those with mental or bodily illness and/or disabilities have a harder time than others with dopamine and therefore require a more rigorous brain spa. Which, ironically, is deploying more gentleness. The result is a rigorous tenderness when confronted with shameful denials of pleasure, so that pleasurable things may have a bigger impact. Less guilt and shame, more pleasure impact.

This post was largely inspired by the below portion of an interview, for which Claire Zulkey of the Evil Witches newsletter speaks to Sarah Wheeler, a “teacher, counselor, school psychologist, and mom of two in California.”

Have you noticed any correlation between screen obsessiveness and ADHD, or is that just a kid thing?

This is an area that we keep learning more about and I'm not the most up to date on it. But there is stuff about how kids with ADHD are more likely to be addicted to screens. If we think of some aspect of ADHD as a dopamine deficiency, which is everybody is getting these hits of good feeling all the time, someone with ADHD might think, “I need more to get those good hits. I need something bigger. I need it to be something I really care about. I don't get that little hit of dopamine when I tidy my socks or whatever.” Screens give everybody that really regularly, and maybe a little bit more for people with ADHD because it's all dysregulated.

Also I think about how much kids with ADHD just get shit on all the time. Imagine then you have this place where no one fucks with you. For older kids, a lot of times they have friends through games that really feel like they're easier friendships than in person. You're just constantly getting reinforcement for things. It just feels regulating and nice. I think it's helpful to just be like, "Oh, this feels nice for them. They're not just like a weird junkie that's abusing whatever, and doesn't want to listen to me.”

If you're really worried about it, I think about, “Okay, it's not going to be screens, but where else can we get them some hits? Are we really thinking about their strengths and what they're good at, and giving them those minutes or hours in the week where they're getting that good feeling and doing the thing that's in their zone of genius?”And when the screens are more social, that can be really good.

What stood out to me was the line, “oh this feels nice for them.” Strip away the guilt from pleasurable activities and there may just be plain pleasure underneath. Too much of a good thing is bad—we know, we know. But why can’t good things stand on their own, resolute?

The brain bath isn’t about less stimulation, it’s about decreasing guilt. There is space in modern society for dopamine to exist as originally intended—to gladden the heart. Wash clean of shame in pleasurable activities. If you garner pure lizard joy from watching TV all day and eating cereal out of the box WITHOUT guilt haunting you after, your pleasure baseline may start to heal. Soon, you might not need as much to feel as good.

Allowing the space to simmer and soak in the good can increase dopamine tone (aka extracellular levels of dopamine). A study in Cognitive Brain Research found a positive connection between meditation and dopamine levels. Cited within this study is a definition of meditation that speaks to the similarity of the “soaking-in” method to meditation, because the core of both is attention without preconceived notions:

Meditation is characterized by “a profound willingness to let go of personal goals or concerns, and an intense absorption of attention to the sensory world.”

So as we’re all trying to intensely absorb the sensory world and soak in the good, we must also make an effort to remove morality from the equation of pleasure. Doing things that feel good is a smart and protective evolutionary advantage. The racism, sexism, and classism that infects our societies like a virus lives to assign immoral value to pleasure. Gentle dopamine is not just for the socio-economic elite. And if you find yourself critical of an underpaid restaurant server yawning as they take orders because they played video games through the night, it’s worth reexamining some productivity biases as well as the age-old empathy technique that goes a little like this: “well I see where they’re coming from.”

So no, what we want isn’t hurting us—it’s hurting our pride.

If we allow pleasurable activities and foods and relationships to stand on their own without shame or guilt, we might feel less hurt. Enter the dopamine receptor spa through mindfulness and rejection of shame. Soak in the pleasure of fun things.

[Fin]

1. I’m purposely not linking any references here because I wasn’t able to find a medical journal that looked sound and relevant enough for me to credit. Traditional Chinese Medicine is sacred and has been bastardized by so many white people that I don’t want to contribute to that any more than I am already, by watering down this principle and serving it to you with a plastic straw. I encourage you to research TCM if you’re interested and consider visiting an acupuncturist.