Vishal D.

This one single article is all you need to be successful at anything. But the problem is that it is indeed the hardest to understand.

You’ve been told dopamine = pleasure. Pizza, social media likes, buying shoes, whatever gives you a “rush.” But science says: dopamine is not pleasure. It’s more about wanting, craving, expecting. It’s the molecule that makes you go after stuff – not the stuff itself.

In a Vanderbilt study, researchers found dopamine spikes even when things are stressful – not just when things feel good.

So if you feel like you need “happiness” to go do something, you’ve got it backwards. You need the fear of missing out, the craving, the tension to move.

Detox Is a Marketing Lie

Do you know scientifically, “Dopamine detox” Is not even a thing! It sounds badass. Delete all apps, isolate yourself, stop stimuli, etc. Dopamine is not a toxin that you can “flush”.
Without dopamine, you will die. Trying to detox is like trying to fast from water.

It’s not detox, call it habit breaking, which is very hard practically ( I can say, “hey, don’t do it for 21 days and boom”. Even the habit takes 21 days to build is also a lie (will talk about it next time).

So basically what they are trying to say is go from High-stimulus to low stimulus. Such as phone reels, junk food to a little boring thing. Again, I can say do it for 7 days and see for yourself, but today, the world revolves around phones; this is not possible for any working man, yeah, if you are a school-going kid, you can try that( even they need phones to study online).

Safe to say, it’s not even practical.
First, dopamine detox is not real.
Second, it’s not even practical for 90% working people.


What if Dopamine stops working?

Simple words – You will die. It’s essential for survival – movement, motivation, mood, sleep.

So what is dopamine?

Do you like new things? New phone, new relationship, new IG filter? That rush you get when something’s fresh – that’s controlled by dopamine. Your brain loves novelty. And every time you hop to the “next thing” without finishing or revisiting, you’re building a reward system that’s craving constant high stimulation.

Monkey experiments confirm this: novel stimuli push dopamine neurons to fire; familiar ones much less. So novelty = dopamine spikes. Familiarity = meh. That’s why old habits or deep work feel boring. Your brain is trained to dislike boredom.

Here’s a truth you didn’t expect:

Dopamine helps forget. Sounds weird, but data from worms (yes, tiny worms) show that when certain dopamine receptors are disabled, worms keep memories too long. They can’t let go. Forgetting is essential to mental clarity.

Life is so ups and downs. Looking around and meeting people, I thing more people are sad than being happy. If dopamine doesn’t work, how this humanity will survive? We need to forget (not in the exams though) our setbacks, heartbreaks, embarrassments, failures.

If your brain could remember every irritating comment, pointless video, every failure, you’d go insane. Dopamine is keeping you sane. Thank you Dopamine!

So, what is the problem with Dopamine?

Doing things that flood dopamine such as social media, sugar, video games, porn too often? You desensitize your brain. The receptors downregulate. It takes more to get the same effect. What used to give joy becomes background noise.

Think about those people who get high, they need more and more stuff later on, that’s the problem.

Then what? You chase bigger, louder stimuli. You scroll more. You quit hobbies. Everything feels dull unless it’s a hit.

Dopamine is everywhere

• In some parts, it helps you focus.
• In others, it makes you impulsive.
• Sometimes it responds to reward predictions (you expect something). Other times it reacts when things are surprising or unexpected.

It isn’t “good” or “bad.” It’s more about learning how to use it.

The Real Fix: Dopamine Upgrades, Not Detoxes

Since detox is mostly mythical, here’s what actually works:

• Habit pairing: Pair boring tasks with small rewards. Let pleasure anchor you to necessary work.
• Novelty modulation: Get novelty occasionally, but don’t make it your baseline. Fade novelty to build tolerance for simpler things.
• Slow dopamine: Exercise, nature walks, creative work, social connection. These release dopamine but not in a freaky overdrive. They rebuild satisfaction in “ordinary.”
• Limit the triggers: Reduce app notifications, social media checking, sugar highs. Let your brain breathe. (Does brain breathe?)

So, have you been craving happiness. Nah!. You’ve been craving dopamine hits. Your brain rewards anticipation more than the thing itself. The longer the wait, the bigger the craving. That’s why you feel the rush before a goal you haven’t achieved. Because dopamine is the need, not the reward.

You don’t need to detox dopamine. You need to upgrade what you chase. You need to rewire the reward circuit so your brain doesn’t give you mini-hits for low value distractions.

Final Truth Bomb

Dopamine will always be part of you. You can’t kill it.

But you can stop being its slave.

Stop chasing external noise → Start engineering your internal reward.

That’s how you win without the hype.

Most important part of the article

Remember when I said “Dopamine makes you go after the stuff” (read again after the stuff). Ronaldo always said, “I am the best player in the world, even when he wasn’t”. (Need more focus here) Told you dopamine is in anticipation, not truly in the actual thing. So, when he said, “he is the best player in the world”. What happened? His dopamine spiked. Then what? Dopamine is the drive. His dopamine pushed him to work like the best player in the world. Be much focused you are missing the point. I said dopamine pushed him.

PUSHED.

When you hear him, you heard wakeup at 4, work, be disciplined, you tried to do that and then you crash on the very first day. You can try thousands of times and you will fail again and again because Ronaldo is being pushed by the brain. You are pushing yourself.

You are thinking you are not disciplined, even discipline need dopamine.

Think about it, why most people are not disciplined (how discipline work is also a lie, next time).

At the end, it’s about what you want. How that want becomes your need. How that need become your obsession. Obsession means that you are imagining all the good stuff in the life you will have when you achieve that particular goal. The feeling…take this part seriously…the feeling of the future is pushing dopamine to release.

You need that magic in your goal so that you don’t have to push yourself to work. Dopamine will do that. You just make the reward so so so so great that your brain want to achieve that more than you.

That’s how you win.

What an article, I have written, Wow! Well, I coach too. Let’s go and change your life.

Bye till then.