Dopamine Is Destroying Your Life (Here’s How To Take It Back)

If there's just one thing that I can recommend to you to implement into your life to achieve more success, it will be to optimize your dopamine baseline levels. And now you might already be triggered to close this video because there are no quick cuts, no edits, no animations. It's just the raw and pure information. But this is actually the information that you need to become the better version of yourself. So I promise you, if you stick around to the end, you will at least have learned something to become that version. My name is Jim Ebelhard and throughout my life I struggled a lot with dopamine, with addicted behavior like gaming and this later on transitioned into life of the party. But up until a few years ago I basically flipped this around and started getting addicted to the grind and to optimizing my health and my business. And the reason I am able to do that is because I learned how dopamine and the brain works. I've done a lot of research from reading books, listening to podcasts, scientific papers. And I'm going to break all of that down into some simple concepts that I will explain in this video. So let's dive in. I spent most of my childhood sitting behind that desk playing those video games. And it's not so strange that I got so hooked on these games. Because those games literally are designed to release as much dopamine as possible. And it's not just those video games, it's basically the whole society that is arranged in a way to expose you to high dopamine stimuli. It's from the social media algorithms that are exposing you to these crazy dancing cat videos or the processed foods in the supermarkets that are full of sugar. And it's all coming down to dopamine. That's what's keeping you hooked, and that's also how those companies are making their money. In fact, dopamine is so important that during studies on mice, what they found out is if you block the dopamine receptors of mice and they don't receive dopamine anymore, they basically just starve themselves till death. That is how important dopamine is. Because when it comes to achieving success and committing and doing something, if we check out this list, so decision-making, conditioned learning, focus and attention, goal-directed behavior, Reward processing. All those things are very important when it comes to actually achieving something. And that's also what I learned during the studies that I did when I basically was done with just being addicted to bad things like video games, partying, socials, bad foods. So I learned how this works and I learned how you can use this in your advantage to basically transition from this to this. And this is a quick intro of me, and I don't want to brag, I just want to show you what is possible when you optimize your dopamine levels. And maybe you're also struggling with some of the things that I just mentioned, or you just want to understand how to achieve more success. Well, this is me as being a part of the T500, which is the top tech talent under the age of 30 in the Netherlands. And I'm in there because I run a company called Seamless Agency. We're a digital agency. I'm renting the top floor of this building together with both my brother and my best friend, and the three of us are learning together, growing together, and having fun here while grinding on our business. And this was a picture of me last January where I was traveling the world. I was here in Phuket, and I was also actually training for an HIROX event, which is an elite sports event. And I'm able to do all of these things because I learned how to optimize my dopamine levels? Okay, so the first thing I want you to understand is there are natural ways to spike your dopamine and artificial ways of spiking your dopamine. And this is really important to understand. Why? Because the artificial ways, they are most of the time bad. They are designed by companies to basically spike your dopamine in an unnatural way. And this is also what is causing a lot of pain in the long term. And let's explain that by using this concept called the pain-pleasure balance. It's something that I've learned from Dr. Anna Lembke with her book Dopamine Nation. So what we have to understand first is that your brain and body are constantly optimizing for homeostasis. And I will keep this really simple. This is all science-based, but to simply explain this, I am showing you this scale where we have pleasure versus balance. And what we should understand is, because our bodies and brains are constantly optimizing for homeostasis, they are basically balancing out pleasure versus pain. And what this actually means is that as soon as we add artificial dopamine on the pleasure side, so for example checking social media, it won't take very long before the scales will balance itself by adding pain. So starting off, you open your Instagram, you start scrolling, and you see this crazy dancing cat video, and everything is fun, and you instantly feel that dopamine. And then it won't take very long before you also see a video where you compare yourself to someone that's having a very successful life and you will receive pain, you will receive anxiety. The anxiety starts kicking in and you will start having self-doubt, doubting yourself. So this is just how it's built in. It is always the fact that as soon as you hit pleasure from something artificial, there's a pain that you will receive from it as well. And it's very important to understand that. And this is just an example with social media, but you can probably easily fill in the rest for yourself. And this is really different with a lot of those natural behaviors that naturally spike your dopamine, because there most of the time you take the pain upfront, and that is why you receive more pleasure in the long term. There's also a nice and interesting quote from Nafal Rafiqant where he states: "If you have the option to choose between pain in the short term and pleasure in the long term and reversed, always go for the pain up front." Why? Because most of the time that is actually what will move the needle. So if we take an example like meditating. Most of us struggle to sit with our thoughts for a couple minutes. This is taking pain. But if we start to do that, we afterwards receive the pleasure. Because we are actually able to focus more and feel calm and peace of mind. So very important to understand natural, artificial, and how this automatically, naturally balance out by biology. Now the next concept that I want to dive in is explaining to you how addiction works. And I'm explaining this because almost everyone at some point in their life has struggled with some kind of addiction, being it social media or sugar or any of these activities. And To explain this to you, I will take the most extreme example that comes up right now, which is cocaine. And why this is so important to understand? Well, the way it works is the more fast something releases dopamine, the more addictive the behavior is. So if we take cocaine, it means it almost instantly rises your dopamine levels to close to 100%, so the maximum. What this means is because this behavior instantly spikes so fast, this means it's more addictive. So the more fast it releases, the more addictive it is. And then we move on to the next concept, which is the steep drop effect. The more steep a curve is, so the more quickly dopamine releasing something is, the harder and the lower the drop will be. So because this is such highly stimulating in such a short amount of time, it means that as soon as the drugs work out you will basically instantly drop below your baseline. So below what you are naturally. And that is why you feel very bad and you want more of the drugs. And that is also if we check to the, compared to this homeostasis again. The more we take, the more we also need later on. So it starts with just a small amount of the drugs and then you will need more and more and more to receive the same amount of pleasure. Which is also causing more more pain. And while this is quite an extreme example, it works the same way with, for example, scrolling social media or eating junk food. So very important to understand steep drop and how addiction works. Now let's see how this might be impacting your daily routine. So for most of us, a day starts and we instantly check our phone. So we receive social media alerts and we wake up with natural baseline around 50%. We check that phone and it instantly spikes, and then we already start dropping below baseline. And then we are naturally moving up again. Then we are having, for example, a very sugary lunch, which will mean that we also will instantly spike again and then drop again. And then it moves up. And then at night we basically, um, yeah, decide to play some video games or watch some Netflix, and then it will spike again. And then drop before we go to bed. Which also means that we will probably wake up with baseline levels that are very low. Because our baseline is dropped because of this high stimuli in the night. So this is an example of how to not do it. Why? Well, even though those things might feel good in the short term, it will result into you working, for example, in those drops. Because you wake up, you check your phone, then it spikes, then you go to work. And you feel really bad because your dopamine is way below your baseline. And then you actually have to do the things that matter while your dopamine levels are really messed up and low. And then as soon as you hit lunch, you naturally recover it and then you mess it up again. So after lunch you have to work in a drop again, again, and you already basically wake up with a messed up level because at night you decide to also do these high-stimuli things. And don't get me wrong, it's completely fine to sometimes put in one of those artificial things. I mean, no one's perfect and don't try to be that, but it's very important to understand how those things are messing you up. Now let's give an example on how you can actually optimize your day in a way that it is actually achieving natural dopamine increases that are actually helping to bring you further. So one of the first things I want to mention is how important good sleep is. So good sleep in the night will already cause you to wake up with maybe something, uh, yeah, a number that is higher than your average baseline when you have a bad night of sleep. So going to bed on time and also deciding to not watch Netflix just right before bed or game just before you go to bed because that will impact your sleep. So if you do this, decide to do it just in the afternoon maybe, and then give yourself some rest before you go to bed. Now let's move back to a full day. So starting your day with a cold shower, this is actually absolutely such a game changer, and this really feels like a glitch in the matrix in terms of how effective it is. Well, why? Because cold showers literally increase your dopamine levels by up to 300%. For up to 4 hours. So the interesting thing with cold showers is that instead of spiking from artificial things, it is naturally, and you have to take the pain up front. And because of that, what happens is cold shower, if you take it in the morning, you naturally start to increase your dopamine levels instead of spiking really high. And now instead of having to work because you're already messed up by the social media likes and everything. You're basically able to work while the dopamine levels are rising from the cold shower. So after this, it is lowering again a bit. So that is already such a game changer. And at first it was really uncomfortable. I, to be honest, I already do this for like 4 years every day and I couldn't live without cold showers now because I just feel so much better when I do it. And then at lunch, instead of taking that sugary lunch again, which will make us spike and then drop, we decide to eat unprocessed foods. So really raw organic foods, just some vegetables, eggs, or meat. Any kind of foods that are not processed and not highly in sugar will basically result into maybe spiking a little bit and dropping a little bit, but not like this extreme spikes that you have from those highly processed foods. And then Imagine we want to take a break here. Normally maybe you would scroll again, but this time we decide to, for example, go for a walk or we decide to meditate. And this will also result into maybe first lowering your dopamine a bit because you don't want to actually walk outside. Maybe the weather is not good or you don't really feel well. So this will lower the dopamine levels, but then afterwards it will start spiking again. So this is really an example of how you can optimize it. And then coming home, instead of like gaming, watching Netflix, or maybe pornography, or whatever, whatever, whatever you're doing at night, read a book. Because this is again something that will naturally cause your dopamine levels to be optimized. And then you can get some good rest and then wake up with a dopamine level above your baseline already because you didn't get that high stimuli. And then one of the final things that I want to dive into is detoxing and multi versus mono behavior. So let's start with multi versus mono. So what this means is it's also called dopamine stacking, which is important to understand because it is something that a lot of people are doing, stacking dopamine. And to give again quite an extreme example, you could be maybe decide to eat eat some junk food at night while having some Ben Jerry's and also scroll your phone while watching Netflix. So this is really like causing you to get a huge, huge spike and then feel completely drained and destroyed afterwards. Maybe you recognize it if you ever combine those things, you always start to feel regrets afterwards and you feel really bad. So that's an extreme example, but We can also look at this with a more not extreme example, which I also did a lot while I wasn't aware of what multi versus mono actually means. So my example was working out in the morning. So working out in the morning is a great way to optimize your natural dopamine levels. And by working out, you start first taking the pain, so you lower a bit, and then you start feeling better, better, better. Also releasing the nice chemicals. But what I started doing is I started to basically stack the workout with a lot of other things. So I took a lot of pre-workout, and together with that pre-workout, I was listening to very loud and aggressive music. So what happened is I was basically transitioning something that is good and natural into still getting like that huge spike and then dropping afterwards again. So that is what is stacking things of dopamine. And Being aware of that will also help you. Now the final concept we are going to dive into is dopamine detoxing. And this is the most extreme one. And you can do this on a micro and on a macro level. So on a micro level is optimizing your day for dopamine. And that is what we just explained already in the daily routine. It's basically being aware of when you do what kind of behavior. So deciding that you, for example, only watch Netflix in the afternoon. That you don't check your phone in the first hour because the first hour is also the most important in terms of your dopamine baseline. Or maybe you decide to only eat junk food on the weekends. Or that is just like the basics of things that you can easily optimize. Now you can also take it to the extreme, and this is something that honestly changed my life. It is quite extreme and I don't always do it, but there are periods where this helps me so much. It's basically, it's basically almost fully detoxing from all artificial negative things that are impacting your dopamine baseline. So no socials, no junk foods, no alcohol, no gaming, no Netflix, nothing. Just living for, for example, for a week. I recommend you to do it at least 3 days. So skip all the things in the weekend like drinking alcohol with your friends and all that stuff. And I promise you that it will be very hard at first, but you don't have to do this for a very long period. It is basically, you can see it as like a hard reset. So doing this, after a couple of days you will feel a shift and you will feel so much better. Like I literally could watch the sunset again and be peaceful, calm in my mind, have the focus, and get so excited to actually work because there was no external artificial stimuli that messes with my brain. So when I still do this, I arrange my days where I just do things like this. And then I do that for like a week. And the first 3 days are not really nice. The first day is horrible because you feel really bad because your brain is used to getting this high stimuli dopamine from those artificial things. But trust me, every day it gets better. And if you do that, for example, for 1 week I promise you, your life will change. You will feel so much better, you will feel so much more peaceful and focused to do, to actually work on the things that matter. So I still do this a lot of the times. Whenever I feel like I need it, I do it. And most of the times I do it for around a week, but you can of course experiment with whatever works for you. Okay, and that was it for today's video. Thank you so much for staying till the end, that really means a lot to me. Now, if you need more help, you can check out the links below in the description. If you like this video, it would be very nice if you can maybe leave a like, also subscribe to the channel. That will help both me and the algorithm to find more people that want to optimize their life. Thank you so much for being here, and for now, I wish you a wonderful day. Goodbye.