A few weeks ago, I was laid up with a cold and didn’t leave the couch for a couple of days. What I did instead was to binge everything. My days looked a bit like this:
📱 Phone pings
🤳 Scroll, scroll, scroll
🍪 Snack
💻 Open another tab
▶️ Netflix / YouTube
🛍️ Online “browsing” (read: cart-filling)
🔁 Repeat
Eventually, the cold had run it’s course. But ooph, my brain felt frazzled. And honestly, I don’t believe it was just the tail-end of being unwell. It was also the inevitable crash after being eyeballs-deep in dopamine for 48+ hours.
And I know I’m not alone. This is something many of us wrestle with every day.
Today, I want to unpack what’s going on in the brain when we’re chasing dopamine, and why it’s so detrimental to our wellbeing. We’ll answer questions like:
- Why do I end up in a 2-hour rabbit hole every time I pick up my phone?
- Why do I feel like garbage after binge-watching a whole season on Netflix?
- Why don’t I enjoy reading / drawing / [insert hobby here] like I used to?
- Why is it so hard to focus, even on things I care about?
But more importantly, this is a call to take back what’s yours.
To reclaim your focus. To reconnect with what truly matters. And to face the systems engineered to hijack your mind – with clarity, agency, and intention.
Dopamine isn’t the bad guy. It helped early life forms move toward food, mates, and safety. But today, it’s been corrupted to chase “likes”, sugar, and online bargains. Our brains just weren’t built for this.
And it’s showing.
We’re All Comfortably Unhappy
We live in a world that’s engineered for quick wins, where pleasure is more accessible than ever before. You’d expect our generation to be the happiest that’s ever lived.
And yet, when we look at the data, we’re more unhappy, anxious, distracted, and emotionally burned out than we were a few decades ago. The fact that this phenomena is especially stark in wealthier countries and younger people is telling:
- Life satisfaction in many high-income countries has declined steadily since around 2010, especially among younger people (World Happiness Report 2024).
- In contrast, low- and middle-income countries have seen a modest increase (World Happiness Report 2024).
- In 2021, only 33% of adults worldwide report “thriving” in their daily lives, a significant drop from earlier years and despite improvements in economic conditions (Gallup poll).
This decline coincides with the rapid expansion of digital technologies. Not just smartphones and social media, but also algorithm-driven entertainment and on-demand everything. Nearly every part of life is engineered for speed, convenience, and stimulation. From next-day delivery and streaming platforms to email alerts and dopamine-driven app designs.
And this (it turns out) is a problem.
Along Comes Dopamine
Dopamine is one of the brain’s “feel good” neurotransmitters. It operates our reward system by inducing feelings of excitement, motivation, and gratification.
To understand how it works, think of a squirrel.
🐿️ + 🌰
When it spots an acorn, its brain releases dopamine. Not just when it eats the acorn, but in anticipation of finding and retrieving it. That dopamine surge motivates the squirrel to keep searching, storing, and returning to the places where rewards are likely to be found. It’s nature’s way of reinforcing behaviours that help the animal survive.
In a balanced system, dopamine helps us strive toward meaningful goals – whether it’s collecting acorns, being a good hunter-gatherer, or finishing that creative project you’ve been putting off.
Cheap Dopamine Crashes The Market
But today, modern life has flooded our system with constant, low-effort stimulation. Aka: cheap dopamine. Social media, ultra-processed food, and bingeable entertainment all release huge amounts of dopamine into our brain with almost zero effort required on our behalf.
These tools aren’t accidental. They’ve been intentionally engineered to hijack our brain’s reward system. From the carefully tuned “bliss point” of sugar, salt, and fat in foods to the infinite scroll of social media feeds, the goal is simple: capture your attention, keep you hooked, and make you consume more.
“Is it really so bad that we’ve found all these cheap and easy ways to max out our dopamine?”
Oh, yes.
Pain and Pleasure: Two Sides of the Same Scale
Ever noticed how, after scrolling, snacking, or binge-doing anything, you’re hit with a dull, joyless crash? Here’s why.
Our brains regulate mood like a seesaw, with pleasure on one side of the equation and pain on the other.
When we indulge in a pleasurable activity, the brain is flooded with dopamine and tilts toward pleasure.
But the brain is also wired to maintain balance. So, a few swipes into your doom-scroll, it kicks off a process called neuroadaptation, the brain’s way of recalibrating after a spike in pleasure. It does this by reducing your sensitivity to pleasure and tilting the seesaw toward pain or discomfort.
In a world without constant artificial stimulation, this cycle had a natural rhythm. After a dopamine spike (say, from finding food or solving a problem) we’d either rest, wait, or engage in another meaningful activity. The discomfort of the dip was mild and temporary, and the brain would gradually return to balance.
But today, we don’t need to wait. More dopamine is just one easy click away. Instead of letting the system recover, we keep reaching for the next hit and driving a kind of emotional arms race: when we hit the system with dopamine, neuroadaptation pushes back harder.
Eventually, what started as a “quick social media peek” can easily spiral into a 2-hour rabbit hole. Not because we’re still enjoying the buzz, but just to balance out the seesaw. Just to feel vaguely “normal” again.
And over time, the brain adapts by radically reducing its dopamine sensitivity. This creates a “dopamine deficit state”, where everyday joys feel dull, focus slips, and cravings intensify. The more we chase quick dopamine, the harder it becomes to feel real satisfaction, trapping us in a cycle of craving, numbing, and burnout.
The consequences are dire:
- Pleasure loses its impact
- Focus becomes harder to sustain
- Motivation drops
- You need more to feel less
One of the truly tragic outcomes of this is that the things that once moved us – art, music, reading, meaningful conversation, a walk in nature – can start to feel muted. It’s not that these things have lost their value, it’s that our overstimulated brains struggle to register their quiet, slower magic.
We begin to overlook the subtle joys in favour of louder, faster rewards. And in the process, we lose touch with what makes life feel rich, grounded, and real.
This Hits Even Harder for People with ADHD
No surprise there!
Compared to our neurotypical pals, ADHD brains tend to have lower baseline dopamine levels, meaning that quick dopamine hits (like scrolling, snacking, or switching tasks) feel especially tempting.
On the flip side, when something does capture interest (like a new hobby, creative project, or problem to solve) the brain can light up and become flooded with dopamine, creating intense hyperfocus.
This rollercoaster isn’t easy to ride. The contrast between stimulation and boredom can feel extreme, making it harder to stick with everyday tasks or resist the pull of quick rewards. That’s why learning to work with your brain’s reward system – not against it – can be such a game-changer.
How to Escape the Cheap Dopamine Trap
Once you understand why you feel miserable, disconnected, and have the attention span of a goldfish, you can appreciate just how important it is to get that dopamine reward system back under your control.
Luckily, the brain is incredibly adaptable. With small, deliberate changes, it’s possible to reset the reward system, reduce overstimulation, and reclaim clarity and focus.
Here’s how (according to dopamine expert Dr Anna Lembke):
Step 1: Abstain
Remember that big neuroadaptation “boulder”, the one pressing down on the pain side of the seesaw and making us feel a bit uncomfortable? The good news is, it won’t stay there forever. Every time you resist the urge to indulge in a dopamine-heavy habit, that boulder shrinks. With consistency, it becomes so small that the system rebalances, and your baseline mood and motivation begin to restore.
One way to achieve this is through a dopamine fast: a short, intentional break from overstimulating behaviours like social media, junk food, or compulsive multitasking.
Start small. You don’t need to go from zero to monk mode overnight. Try putting your phone away for just one hour in the evening. Once you’ve proved to yourself that you can do it (even once) you’ve built a foundation. From there, you can stretch the window, stack new habits, and gradually reclaim your attention.
Step 2: Maintain
Once the system is recalibrated, you’ll want to find ways to protect your precious balance.
A simple and well-researched way to do this self-binding, the practice of designing your environment to support you by placing intentional limits to your “addiction” access.
Examples of self-binding:
- Keeping your phone in another room after 8 pm
- Deleting apps that hijack your attention
- Setting timers for screen use or entertainment
- Only buying snack foods in single portions
- Scheduling “dopamine fast” days or hours
These small acts of constraint can restore a sense of agency and balance.
Step 3: Seek Out Pain
What I mean by this is: do hard things (on purpose).
Remember that pain/pleasure seesaw? It works the other way too. When we engage in activities that require effort – like exercising, meditating, journaling, learning something new, or even the act of resisting an impulse – we tip the balance toward discomfort first.
But then, we’re rewarded with a hit of dopamine. Not the cheap stuff, but the expensive, hard-earned kind. Not only do we feel genuinely good about ourselves, but our reward system is recalibrated in a healthier direction in the process.
By choosing discomfort in the short term, you gain freedom in the long term.
It’s not easy. But it gets easier. And it’s so worth it.
Rewiring with Solution Focused Hypnotherapy
If you feel stuck in cycles of scrolling, snacking, overthinking, or just generally feel out of sync with yourself – it’s not because you’re lazy or weak-willed. It’s because your brain is doing exactly what it’s been conditioned to do.
Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can help. Working with a trained therapist, you can gently calm your nervous system, quiet the noise, and start retraining your brain toward balance. Together, we can tap into your own inner resources, building motivation, confidence, and clarity from the inside out.
And because we work with the subconscious mind, change often feels natural. More calm. More focus. More trust in yourself again.
To find out if this could be a good approach for you, ask me for a free consultation before making your mind up.
Dopamine Nation
Curious to dive deeper?
I highly recommend this talk by Dr. Anna Lembke, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and author of the bestselling Dopamine Nation. Her work is reshaping how we understand (and navigate) the “plenty paradox”: why more access to pleasure is often making us feel worse, not better.
I’m incredibly grateful to her for all I’ve learned ❤️
