The neurotransmitter dopamine is eliciting a lot of panic these days. According to books, articles and social media posts, our urge for a quick dopamine hit is why we crave cookies and spend too much time on Instagram. If we keep giving in to these desires, the rationale goes, we’ll never be able to stop ourselves.

“We’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance,” Dr Anna Lembke, a Stanford University, US, psychiatrist, wrote in her bestselling book Dopamine Nation. Consequently, we’re all at risk for “compulsive overconsumption”.

A self-improvement trend often called “dopamine fasting” that emerged in 2019 revolves around abstaining from anything that causes the release of the chemical. The premise is that modern-day entertainments rewire the brain so that slower-paced pastimes are no longer pleasurable.

Videos tagged #dopamine, many claiming to teach viewers how to manipulate the brain chemical, have more than 700 million views on TikTok. One influencer offers a “free list of things that numb dopamine” so that you can “reclaim control over your life”!

Parents are even advised to prevent children from experiencing spikes in dopamine (meaning not to let them play video games or eat junk food) lest the insatiable need for the neurotransmitter increases bad behaviour.

Scientists who study dopamine say these concerns have been blown out of proportion. They “are not necessarily based on actual science of what we know about dopamine,” said Vijay Namboodiri, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, US.

Dopamine is not inherently good or bad. The idea that dopamine produces feelings of pleasure came from early experiments in rodents, and later humans, that found the dopamine system was activated when animals encountered a reward. Food, sex, drugs and social interactions all set off releases of dopamine in the brain, suggesting the neuroche-
mical is linked to any feel-good outcome.

But upon further study in the 1990s, scientists realised that dopamine is more closely related to the anti-
cipation of a reward than to its receipt. Dopamine cau-ses the wanting of something and the motivation to go and get it, not the enjoyment of it.

“What we think it maybe does is something like desire,” said Talia N. Lerner, an assistant professor of neuroscience at North-
western University, US. “It teaches your brain how to predict your needs and try to align your behaviours with those needs.”

A neurochemical that controls desire can sound sinister, but pursuing rewards is not inherently a problem; it all depends on the context. Animals from honeybees to humans developed dopamine systems to motivate them to seek out food and sex in order to survive and procreate.

Kent Berridge, a professor of psychology and
neuroscience at the University of Michigan, US, says, “We wouldn’t have evolved and we wouldn’t have survived, our ancestors, without dopamine.”

Dopamine is also essential for learning. “Dopamine tells you not when something is good or bad, per se, but when it’s better or worse than you expected it to be,” Lerner said. That surge of dopamine helps you update your expectations and potentially modify your behaviour for the future.

A normal hit of dopamine isn’t going to rewire your brain.

Because of dopamine’s role in motivation and learning, the worry is that highly stimulating activities will hijack the neurotrans-
mitter system, such that
it no longer works for smaller, everyday rewards. For someone hooked on video games, the thinking
goes, Monopoly might be less rewarding.

This concern is partly based in science. Prolonged use of drugs that cause huge surges in dopamine, such as cocaine and amphetamine, can cause the brain to shut off some of the receptors that the neurochemical acts on. This so-called tolerance means that more of the drug is required to achieve the same high.

Because video games and pornography can be habit-forming, some researchers — including Lembke — have hypothesised that they might cause similar signs of tolerance in the brain. However, in an interview with The New York Times, she admitted that this theory is inferred from studies of stimulant drugs and that there isn’t currently evidence to back it up.

As a result, Berridge and others have critiqued the idea. One reason is that the amount of dopamine released in response to video games, pornography, social media and junk food is substantially lower than that released in response to addictive drugs.

And while, for some people, video games cause a greater dopamine response than board games do, that doesn’t mean the board game causes a smaller dopamine release than it used to, and it isn’t because of an inherent change in the dopamine system, Namboodiri said. It also doesn’t mean that video game lovers will never want to play board games again. The same goes for eating candy versus eating fruit or watching YouTube versus reading a book.

Addiction is about more than dopamine.

Some rewarding behaviours can cause problems in people’s lives. Although activities like gambling, watching pornography and playing video games don’t stimulate as much dopamine release as drugs do, they can lead to patterns of behaviour similar to those seen in
substance use disorder — namely, continuing the activity despite severe negative
consequences.

But that is the exception, not the rule.

As with most things
related to health, the key is moderation. You don’t have to deny yourself the pleasure to be a good or healthy person.

NYTNS