The Art Of Moderation: How I Outsmarted My Greedy Brain And Finally Got My Life Back
My brain kept convincing me to chase more, more, more — until I finally flipped the script.
Adam Eperjesi | Unsplash It’s not that we’re too ignorant to know certain things things harm us. We all know drinking or doom-scrolling until our brain is nothing but a pickled prunes is bad for us, right?
This happens to everybody who is repeatedly exposed to factors that create heavy dopamine release. It’s not you, it’s your brain. Your brain is a dopamine junkie. You’re not greedy. Your brain is.
Craving the dopamine your drug of choice gives you is pretty much the same as the will to live. It’s the life force, raging through you. Of course, it’s the life force taken to extremes that will seriously harm you in the long run, but it’s important to note that there is nothing wrong with you because you feel this way and act this way. It’s a natural consequence.
And there is a way out. Actually, several ways out. The first one is something that has been very trendy in the past few years and is still talked about today. It’s called ‘the dopamine detox’ or ‘dopamine fasting’. This is not a scientific term, and it’s not a scientific approach either.
The dopamine detox method asks you to set aside a minimum of a day a week where you need to stay away from all the high dopamine triggers. Include here: junk food, social media, listening to music, or talking to friends.
Namely, whatever makes you feel good, stop it. You can live a day without feeling good, can’t you? Of course you can. The only problem is that it doesn’t solve much. The purpose is to let the dopamine receptors in your brain relax from all the overstimulation, and the next day, you’ll allegedly be able to enjoy things that are not so overly stimulating. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. It takes much more than a day for that to happen.
And when you get back to your regular life, the dopamine centers, starved of their usual daily dose, will rebel and ask for even more dopamine to make up for the one you took away that one day you went rogue.
Dopamine is not a drug; it’s a hormone occurring in your body naturally. You can’t do away with it, and imagine you’ll never need it. You need it, it’s part of you.
However, for some people, it works. They are hardcore, they like it when things are tough, and their brain creates dopamine from doing hard things. More power to them; they are my personal heroes, but most of us are not built that way.
So here’s the solution for the rest of us regulars who need to take things slowly and still hope for a great outcome. Yes, we can do it. But through a different system.
The different system is not taking your dopamine sources out of your life completely. And not taking them out at all. But adding extra dopamine sources that can, in time, substitute the ones that are causing you harm.
Take out the negative things in your life, as much as humanly possible: The bad boss, the stressful partner, the mean friend. Make your life easy. If there is something that bothers you, move away from it. There’s no need for details. You know what you need to do and who you need to let go of.
How I outsmarted my greedy brain and finally got my life back:
1. Curate your friend group
Seek out positive support and interaction with friends and family. And I mean healthy positive, looking at the bright side of life, not toxic positive, pretending everything is great when it isn’t. Also, I don’t even need to mention the negative, energy draining, soul-sucking ones: they won’t work, avoid those, and take care of your heart and soul.
2. Meditate
Yuri A / Shutterstock
In time, and if you keep doing it, meditation can be the biggest source of dopamine in your life.
I can tell you from my own experience that there’s nothing that takes me higher than meditation, and I constantly advertise it as the best thing anyone can do. I promise you, drugs are a weak hit compared with what meditation can do. Enter lotus pose!
3. Exercise
Exercise creates endorphins and all good things from the hormone department. The only problem is, it doesn’t happen from the start.
It will take about a month of daily practice for you to truly start to enjoy exercise, but when you do, there’s no going back. You’ll crave it just as much as you crave those overstuffed chili dogs.
4. Create something
A huge, tremendous source of pleasure can come from the act of creation: painting, writing, playing an instrument, name your art. There is a trick to it, though… You need to be good enough at what you’re doing so that the words flow out of your brain or the brush strokes just explode out of your hand.
If I were to start learning the piano right now, it wouldn’t give me much pleasure, because I wouldn’t have that flow that produces dopamine. But if I write something I enjoy and my fingers on the keyboard can hardly keep up with my train of thought, that’s pure pleasure right there.
As you can see, all the things that bring dopamine to your greedy brain but are also beneficial for your life take time to implement. And in the beginning, they’re not that much fun. They can even be annoying or stressful. That’s why it’s so easy to turn to the ones that provide pleasure and relief from the first bite, puff, or scroll.
That’s why it’s important to keep the old damaging ones in your life, try not to go overboard, but start bringing in the new ones one by one until you get the hang of them and they start producing the dopamine you crave.
Once they do, once you start loving the process itself, once your body is healthier, leaner, and more alert from exercise, once your mind is more at ease from meditation, and you feel safer and more at home in this world from your contact with loving friends, you’ll see that the old habits no longer serve you.
It takes time, it’s true, but as long as you treat yourself with love and care and work at your own pace, your escape from the shackles of your greedy brain and taking back control of your life is just a few months away.
What have you got to lose? Nothing but struggle and anxiety.
Mona Lazar is a writer and unconventional relationship coach with words published in Better Humans, Medium, Illumination, The Soulciety, Newsbreak, The Startup, Hello, Love, The Good Men Project, Curious, and others.
