What is it?
Dopamine is a brain neurotransmitter that makes us desire things.
Brain develops priorities in large part base on how much dopamine it's expecting to get.
Dopamine Detox
Pick one day of the week to refrain one of your high dopamine activities completely, e.g. video games, masturbation.
This kind of detox lets your dopamine receptors recover from the unnaturally high dopamine that's been flooding your brain.
Boredom you may feel from the detox propels you to do other relatively low dopamine things that day, e.g. reading, meditation, learning.
Set Priorities
Avoid those high dopamine and addictive activities as much as possible. Relatively, connect more dopamine to the things that will actually benefit you, like work-out.
Your current high dopamine activities can serve as an incentive to pursue things that actually give you those long term benefits.In other words, use the high dopamine activities as a reward for completing difficult work:
- Track all the low dopamine work you've done in the day.
- After getting a certain amount of tough work done...
- Reward yourself some amount of high dopamine activities at the end of the day.
- Say, for every completed hour of low dopamine work, reward with 15 mins of high dopamine activities at the end of the day.
- The reward cannot be something damaging to your health, like smoking, drinking, etc.
We are all dopamine addicts to a certain extent. And that's a good thing, because dopamine motivates us to achieve our goals and improve ourselves. But it's up to you to decide where you're going to get your dopamine from. Are you going to get it from things that don't benefit you? Or are you going to get it from working on your long term goals? The choice is yours.