How Dopamine Affects Your Finances

From an evolutionary aspect, we humans have mostly existed in a world wrought with hunger, dangers, and limited resources.  We had to work very hard to get what we needed for survival or we’d perish. 

When resources like food were found, the dopamine released in the brain compelled us to seek more.  It kept us motivated to go out and find that next fruit tree, or kill that next animal.

This evolutionary story turned humans into constant seekers, always striving for more, because survival depended on it.  In that way we’re really no different than other animals. 

But as our brains and sophistication grew this constant seeking allowed us to transform the world, literally.  We’re now living in what anthropologists are starting to call the Anthropocene.  Our brains and technology have allowed us as a species to create more abundance than we could ever need or want. 

Much of what we’ve created in this new world is highly addictive such as our modern foods and drugs.  The problem is our primitive wiring is still running below the hood.  And it compels us to keep seeking. 

The things we used to seek to merely survive and that were extremely hard to come by are now two clicks away on a little piece of glass we carry in our pockets.  Or 10 steps away in the refrigerator. 

This is no small problem.

 

Dopamine

Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist and Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University.  She has a best selling book out right now called Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance In The Age Of Indulgence. 

This post is not a book review as I’ve not yet read her book.  But I have listened to Lembke interviewed on four awesome long-form podcasts for a total of about 7 hours.  So I feel I understand the lessons of her research and I learned a lot.  And most of it relates to how we consume things and thus finances. 

Goodreads has a great summary of her book, which also sums up the hours of discussion from her that I listened to and will link to below.

This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting… The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption.

In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain…and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check.

 

The Dopamine Balance

Dopamine is a powerful neurotransmitter.  In short, to stay healthy one needs to maintain a relative balance in dopamine levels, also called homeostasis.  Modern life for most first world people has enabled constant hyper convenient dopamine hits, and thus most peoples dopamine levels are out of whack, and see-sawing all over the place. 

In our environments of abundance, regular dopamine hits come from food and “stuff”, or more precisely consumer goods.  Aka spending. 

You see a cool thing on Amazon, you buy it.  That’s a dopamine hit in and of itself because you’re creating expectation.  Then the thing comes and you get another big hit.  If you like the thing it might continue to give you some more dopamine hits, but research shows it inevitably wanes.  So you move on to the next thing. 

And that’s the hedonic treadmill.  For many this treadmill turns into a shopping addiction.

Substitute food, gambling, porn, video games, or whatever and the result is the same.  The relentless pursuit of pleasure, of that dopamine hit, wanes regardless of the type of addiction.  According to Lembke, the brain desperately seeks homeostasis which creates huge swings and ends up making you sad and depressed.  

This is called the pleasure-pain balance.  Listen to her explain it in this short clip from the Impact Theory podcast.  

 

That my friends is why you feel horrible not just physically but also mentally after binging on that junk food.  That’s why the endless pursuit of bigger, better, and more gadgets and stuff leaves you empty. 

And every time you go back to the dopamine candy jar you feel emptier afterwards.

 

Comfort In Discomfort

A while back I did a silly graphic about the hedonic treadmill.  In that graphic I suggested the difference between a hedonic treadmill and a normal one is, well, a major life decision.  At least when it comes to which treadmill you form a relationship with. 

Regular readers know I post regularly about health and fitness including my cycling, running, climbing, and paddling hobbies.  I used to be obese, and my life became 1,000 times better when I got to a healthy weight and found a marginally talented athlete under the covers. 

I strongly feel that exercise is the fundamental key to our health and well being.  Or as Dr. Peter Attia recently put it “Exercise might be the most potent “drug” we have for extending the quality and perhaps quantity of our years of life.”

It turns out that doing hard things and exposing your body to stressors such as exercise induces a response called hormesis which is good.  I’ll let Dr. Lembke explain in this clip from her appearance on the Modern Wisdom podcast.

 

 

“We have to intentionally and willfully invite pain into our lives”. 

I know you don’t want to hear that, but take it from me, it effing works.

 

To The Hurt Locker

I’m 110% convinced the massive increase in popularity of ultra endurance events like 100 and 200 mile runs and massive bikepacking races across continents is due to the fact that these stressors restore balance in people’s lives. 

More and more people in wealthy countries are seeking healing through struggle and hardship, because life has made pleasure too easy and ubiquitous.  The resulting dopamine imbalance that Lembke described has created anxiety, depression, chronic illness, and whole host of other conditions.  People are finding salvation through hormesis, by stressing the body back to balance.

Or as one competitor in the brilliant documentary The Barkley Marathons: The Race that Eats Its Young put it: “Most people would be better off with more pain in their lives.”

Before you get angry at that statement, thinking “Depression and anxiety are at all time highs, and that was even before COVID. More pain!? You insensitive twit!”  Lembke is using neuroscience to make the case that the epidemics of depression and anxiety are because people are overdosing on dopamine, and not introducing pain in the first place. 

This isn’t a new way of thinking.  The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote “You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must undertake to make something harder.  This notion pleased me immensely. . . . I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.”

 

Takeaways

As I often say in my behavior and psychology focused posts, I don’t have this shit all figured out myself.  I’m with you, on the journey. 

All I know is that I did some battles with retail therapy in the past, and it didn’t work.  With every “submit order” button clicked and package that landed on my porch I got my dopamine, sure as shit. 

But just as Lembke explained, it all went to crap afterwards.  My brain compensated. 

One thing I have figured out is how to introduce regular stressors into my life to get that magical hormesis that, as Lembke explains, rights the ship back to level.  I do that mainly through time-restricted eating, and copious time cycling, running, paddling, and just plain ole’ lifting weights. 

All this matters because a healthy body and mind are far more likely to make the right decisions to achieve financial independence.  And they’ll buy the right kind of treadmill too. 

*Notes: The four podcasts that I listened to Dr. Lembke on and that I highly recommend are: Impact Theory, Huberman Lab Podcast, The Rich Roll Podcast, & The Modern Wisdom Podcast.  She’s a brilliant scientist and like all good ones excels at explaining complex things in easy to understand ways.