Your brain has been hard-wired by the forces of natural selection to seek basic rewards such as food, safety, shelter, reproduction opportunities, social acceptance, warmth, and a sense of a meaning and purpose in your life. All of these basic rewards are essential to maximise the organism fitness which is the probability of longer survival and more reproduction opportunities. In the market economy, everything is marketed as a super stimulus reward that your brain is hard-wired to seek. Every super stimulus in the market economy is presented in a way that mimics and magnifies these innate basic rewards, making them look huge, attractive, and inescapable. You are surrounded by a bombardment of these super stimuli that you cannot escape, whether in public spaces or inside your thoroughly penetrated house, thanks to the tools of social media and its derivatives.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter responsible for directing the human behaviour towards seeking a reward, predicting its occurrence, and following cues that may be unconsciously linked to this reward. A beautiful female in a advert for anything can act as a cue to a reproductive reward for a male viewer, and an image of a happy group smoking together can be inferred as a cue to social acceptance reward and so on and so forth. It is essential to know that in the brain's motivation control neural system the dopamine network occupies almost 90% of the anatomical size and functionality of that system. As we said earlier the dopamine is responsible for wanting and seeking the reward such as when you feel that you long for or crave a bite of chocolate or a scoop of an ice crem. On the other hand, a smaller neural network, responsible for liking and enjoying the actual meeting with the reward such as feeling the sweetness and the delicious taste of eating chocolate, occupies the remaining 10% of the brain's motivation control neural system in terms of anatomy and power.
However, modern life in the market economy is turning everyone into a kind of a dopaminergic zombie, powerless to protect their brains from the flood of magnified super stimuli that trigger hardwired basic instincts of wanting these flashed rewards. This leads to a significant neurochemical and anatomical disturbance in the brain’s homeostasis (i.e. the brain’s internal balance), which manifests itself by what is called the supersensitization of the brain's wanting neural circuit, making it on high alert constant hyperactive mode like an incessant radar scanning its biosocial environment for any cues that may hint at potential rewards. This imbalance situation will lead to overpowering the minute neural circuit of liking, while most of the neural computational power within the motivation network system in the brain is preoccupied in the wanting dopaminergic phase of motivation. In this condition the individual will suffer from diminished ability to enjoy the actual reward even when it is reached while wanting and craving the rewards and their cues become ends in themselves not stepping stones for meeting the actual rewards and enjoying this reunion.
To illustrate this situation of a dopaminergic zombie you can imagine an individual who has been longing for a delicious meal in a boutique five-star restaurant for his lunch. But when he sits at the table to eat this meal, he can't stop thinking about what nice meal he should get at dinner while he is hastily gulping his current meal unconsciously without any sense of joy. Or you can envisage a gambler who lost a fortune but cannot cut his losses and go home and insist on chasing the unstoppable dopaminergic want to seeking a potential reward that he rationally knows that is statistically very improbable to happen. Or you can visualise a handsome teenager boy who has been chased by a lovely girl but when he sits with her for the first time, he cannot stop thinking about the next pornography scene that will be released soon on his favourite mobile app. Actually, the examples of the dopaminergic zombies in our daily lives are endless.
The repeated stimulation of the dopaminergic circuit within the brain creates exhaustion and a tiring effect when the cumulative negative outcomes build up and majority of potential rewards viewed in the biosocial sphere do not materialize. This can lead individuals to become disheartened, disengaged, and depressed. Additionally, the brain tries to adapt and compensate for the flood of dopamine generated by these flashy rewards cues everywhere by reducing the number of dopamine receptors in the brain, in a mechanism termed compensatory desensitization. This process will eventually reduce interest in activities that do not generate huge surges of dopamine, such as ordinary stimuli that our brains have been sculpted to seek for maximizing the organism fitness in terms of survival and reproduction, including connections with others and self-care. In this situation, only manufactured super stimuli in the market economy can overcome the dopamine desensitization barrier by generating huge surges in dopamine activity in the brain. The vast majority of these super stimuli are part of the destructive addictive practices whether they stem from classical addictive drugs or other behavioural addictions such as addiction to social media, gambling and pornography.
This situation of compensatory dopamine desensitization can be described as the underlaying cause of the pandemic of collective anxiety and depression worldwide. Recent research shows that addiction to social media and smartphones has led to an increase in GABA neurotransmitters levels in the brains of people addicted to smartphones and social media. The GABA neurotransmitters suppress the activity of dopamine in these individuals' brains as a physiological compensatory mechanism against the flood of dopaminergic super stimuli that incessantly bombard the brains of these people. Moreover, this phycological process is correlated with certain clinical scales seen in the bodies and behaviours of those addicted people to smartphones and social media. These include increased levels of impulsiveness, depression, anxiety and insomnia, along with low sleep quality which are the widely spread clinical symptoms of the global dopaminergic pandemic. In other words, now only super stimuli are sufficient to motivate a dopaminergic brain which has been chemically and anatomically modified to ignore normal stimuli and only respond to the massive ones that are refined and magnified by the advertising and marketing techniques in the market economy where everything is up to sale.
We are experiencing a pandemic of dopamine toxification, turning every human being into a suffering dopaminergic zombie. This situation is dangerous, horrific, and unsustainable. It could be responsible for the exponential decline in human productivity, severe decrease in human attention span, pervasive feeling of insecurity and unhappiness, along with a general sense of hopelessness, helplessness, and anxiety all around the globe.
There are no easy solutions for this pandemic that creates dopaminergic zombie human beings. The only solution is to change the essential factors driving this pandemic, which is turning everything in our lives into a marketed and advertised super stimulus reward to be sought and acquired. We may need to work hard to reverse this vicious cycle and revive the meaning of subtle rewards that cannot be bought and sold in the market economy.
Achieving this is not an easy task and requires structural and functional changes within the society. It cannot be accomplished by a single person but needs to be done collectively.
Nonetheless, we may try to touch on some practical tools that can help our brains to fight back and defend our existence and right to sanity, rather than being turned into dopaminergic zombies.
One of the most commonly used and widely prescribed practices is mindfulness. The term "mindfulness" has been loaded with many meanings, that reached far spiritual horizons. However, the simplest scientific understanding of mindfulness is the purposeful act of focusing mental powers on the actual existence in the moment without being distracted by the chaotic noise of the surrounding stimuli. In other words, mindfulness is the conscious effort to feel and cherish the current existence in the moment without drifting to thoughts about the future and potential rewards in a dopaminergic drive. There has been extensive coverage of the notion and practices of mindfulness. It may be prudent to try some of it and choose which approach is more convenient for your needs.
If you are unable to practise mindfulness due to difficulty concentrating your thoughts on one thing and connect thoroughly with your existence in the moment, you can try another approach, which may seem easier and more encouraging. This is the practice of the sense of flow.
The sense of flow can be defined as doing something you enjoy, losing track of time, and immersing yourself in the activity. This could be any hobby, simple or complicated, such as dancing, singing, writing, playing a sport, or walking in nature. Anything that you enjoy and feel you can lose yourself in it could be your key to reaching the sense of flow.
The other important step you can take is to think thoroughly about the purpose and the meaning of your life. You can try to dig deeper into what you define as a meaning and purpose in your life and ask yourself a very basic and fundamental question: Are these really the purpose and meaning of your life, or are they just stepping stones to another purpose? For example, money or wealth cannot be a purpose, as they are just means to achieve something else. They are leverages, tools, but not ends in themselves. The same rule applies to many other illusions in life that may seem, from the outset, to be purposes and meanings for the lives of many of us.
It may be sensible to think about something that, when you do and get involved with, makes you feel genuinely happy and satisfied. You should not feel happy because you are complying with convention, customary rules, or what is common. It may be wise to remember that what is common does not make it real, genuine, or right.
Another approach you can pursue is to connect with the hardwired, innate tendencies in your brain to ignite the power of the powerful and precious neurotransmitters of the liking neurocircuit, which is responsible for the sense of joy, happiness, contentment, connection with others, and unconditional love. We can mention here three types of these neurotransmitters.
The first is the endocannabinoids. These are responsible for a deep sense of contentment and happiness. They can be nudged into action in the brain by practising the art of cherishing what you have, such as being healthy and fit, and even the fact that you are alive, without aspiring for the endless list of what you don't have. Sometimes we forget the value of the priceless and invaluable privileges we have in our lives. Paying attention to these will augment the brain's power to secrete more endocannabinoid neurotransmitters.
The other type of neurotransmitters we can try to boost in our brains and bodies is oxytocin. This is triggered by the act of connecting positively with others, in addition to being able to offer unconditional love that is far from the possessive and romantic love we often experience. It is a tender, merciful, warm, and caring connection with others without expecting any return or reciprocation. Unconditional love is rather innate and hardwired to your instinctual default interaction mode with the closest social circle around you. Family is the easiest and simplest place to foster the oxytocin neurotransmitter and get it to flourish naturally in the brain by practising boundless kindness and unconditional love.
The third neurotransmitter that we can work to nurture in our brains is serotonin, which is enhanced and secreted abundantly when we genuinely feel that we are doing good and when we feel appreciated and respected by others. It is strongly correlated with our feeling of being socially accepted and genuinely sensing the verbal and non-verbal appreciation and gratefulness of real fellow human beings when we do good deeds.
Apart from that, we need to remember that all dopaminergic motivational routes, when they become excessive, are detrimental to your health mentally and physically. They are like addictions, which come in various types, shapes, and manifestations. If we want to cure our brains from the detrimental and tormenting effects of the dopamine overdrive and the extinction of the liking neural networks, it could be prudent to abstain from all types of triggers of dopaminergic excessive behaviours. We can start by abstaining from ubiquitous triggers like social media and extend that to every aspect of dopaminergic behaviours, including addiction to caffeinated beverages, smoking, vaping, alcohol, pornography and the socially unacceptable addictions like drugs.
We need to remember that being addicted means being driven by the untamed, excessive urges of the dopaminergic wanting section of the motivation system in our brain. Any type of addiction will make us primed for many other types of dopaminergic overdrive. Therefore, abstention from all routes that facilitate dopaminergic overdrive is prudent if we want to recover the independence of our brains and resurrect our normal sanity, which has become hard to maintain in the modern world of market economy as we discussed earlier.
It is always better to abstain from all types of triggers of excessive dopaminergic wanting. In this regard, it is important to utilize the power of the most powerful computational section of our brains, the prefrontal cortex, which provides us with the capability of logical thinking. Practise the art of time travel exercise by always imagining the feelings and emotions you will have after obtaining and acquiring any reward you have been working hard to reach. If the time travel feeling does not seem like it will bring happiness, joy, contentment, or what the Greeks used to call eudaimonia, then that means what you are envisaging as a reward might not be a reward, but an illusion created by your hyperactive dopaminergic system which you may have to tame and tone down to allow for the minuscule liking neural network to manifest itself and guide you to the real sources of happiness, joy, contentment, satisfaction and wellbeing in your life.