Do you ever feel like you are addicted to email or twitter or
texting? Do you find it impossible to ignore your email if you see that there
are messages in your inbox? Do you think that if you could ignore your incoming
email or messages you might actually be able to get something done at work? You
are right!
The culprit is dopamine — Dopamine
was "discovered" in 1958 by Arvid Carlsson and Nils-Ake Hillarp at
the National Heart Institute of Sweden. Dopamine is created in various parts of
the brain and is critical
in all sorts of brain functions, including thinking, moving, sleeping, mood, attention, motivation, seeking and
reward.
Pleasure vs. seeking — You may have heard
that dopamine controls the "pleasure" systems of the brain: that
dopamine makes you feel enjoyment, pleasure, and therefore motivates you to
seek out certain behaviors, such as food, sex, and drugs. Recent research
is changing this view. Instead of dopamine causing you to experience pleasure,
the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine
causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases your general
level of arousal and your goal-directed behavior. From an evolutionary
stand-point this is critical. The dopamine seeking system keeps you motivated
to move through your world, learn, and survive. It's not just about physical
needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes
you curious about ideas and fuels your searching for information. Research
shows that it is the opioidsystem (separate from
dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.
Wanting vs. liking — According to
researcher Kent Berridge, these two systems, the "wanting" (dopamine)
and the "liking" (opioid) are complementary. The wanting system
propels you to action and the liking system makes you feel satisfied and
therefore pause your seeking. If your seeking isn't turned off at least for a
little while, then you start to run in an endless loop. The dopamine system is stronger
than the opioid system. You tend to seek more than you are
satisfied. Evolution again — seeking is more likely to
keep you alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor.
Dopamine loops — With the internet,
twitter, and texting you now have almost instant gratification of your desire
to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a
few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type your request into
google. Want to see what your colleagues are up to? Go to Linked In. It's easy
to get in a dopamine induced loop. Dopamine starts you seeking, then you get
rewarded for the seeking which makes you seek more. It becomes harder and
harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, or stop checking your cell phone
to see if you have a message or a new text.
More, more, more — Interestingly brain scan
research shows that the brain has more activity when people are ANTICIPATING a
reward than getting one. Research on rats shows that if you destroy dopamine
neurons, rats can walk, chew, and swallow, but will starve to death even when
food is right next to them. They have lost the anticipation and desire to go
get the food. Although wanting and liking are related, research also shows that
the dopamine system doesn't have satiety built in. It is
possible for the dopamine system to keep saying "more more more",
causing you to keep seeking even when you have found the information. How many
times have you searched for something on google, found the answer, and yet
realize a half hour later that you are still online looking for more
information?
Unpredictability is key — Dopamine is also
stimulated by unpredictability. When something happens that is not exactly
predictable, that stimulates the dopamine system. Our emails and twitters and
texts show up, but you don't know exactly when they will, or who they will be
from. It's unpredictable. This is exactly what stimulates the dopamine system.
(For those of you reading this who are "old school" psychologists,
you may remember "variable reinforcement schedules". Dopamine is
involved in variable reinforcement schedules. Another reason these schedules
are so powerful).
Pavlovian cues — The dopamine system is
especially sensitive to "cues" that a reward is coming. If there is a
small, specific cue that signifies that something is going to happen, that sets
off our dopamine system. So when there is a sound when a text message or email
arrives, or a visual cue, that enhances the addictive effect.
140 characters is even more addictive — And
the dopamine system is most powerfully stimulated when the information coming
in is small so that it doesn't full satisfy. A short text or twitter (can only
be 140 characters!) is ideally suited to send your dopamine system raging.
Not without costs — This constant
stimulation of the dopamine system can be exhausting. And the constant
switching of attention makes it hard to get anything accomplished. Can you do
anything to get out of a dopamine loop? Or prevent getting in one in the first
place?
Turn off the cues — One of the most
important things you can do to prevent or stop a dopamine loop, and be more
productive is to turn off the cues. Adjust the settings on your cell phone and
on your laptop, desktop or tablet so that you don't receive the automatic
notifications. Automatic notifications are touted as wonderful features of
hardware, software, and apps. But they are actually causing you to be like a
rat in a cage. If you want to get work done you need to turn off as many
auditory and visual cues as possible. It's the best way to prevent and break
the dopamine loops.
What do you think? How do you deal with dopamine loops? Are
you willing to turn off your cues?
Here's the research reference:
Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, What is the role of
dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience?: Brain
Research Reviews, 28, 1998. 309–369.
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