Dopamine in big amounts is toxic to our brains... or minds and psychology in general. But if you just use one neurotransmitter, it's a crazy rat level lifestyle. Everything suffers including your sleep, eating habits and you can't think straight and see more than 5 minutes into the future. Addiction centers are fully booked in my city.
I was living dopamine driven lifestyle for about a decade and that's characterized by "quick satisfaction", "quick results", "fast, strong hits". I attempted to open 3 companies and I took part in 10 projects all of which failed due to false assumptions that business is a quick journey for cash like a seasonal work.
What people can do is think about their kids, what they're going to have 20 years later and forget about competition because most competitors think like business is a rat race meanwhile it's about providing genuine value, so you get some energy in form of a currency like USD or Bitcoin. It's possible to even imagine the future 200 years later and that's where we should look instead of thinking of the next 20 minutes all the time.
Dopamine is a funny one actually. It's a bit misunderstood.
It's the "reward centre" of the brain, but, dopamine isn't released as the "final" reward on completion. This is why we don't get a mega dopamine rush after we finish a video game. We get a sense of achievement, but it's not dopamine.
Dopamine is actually the "Keep-going" part of the brain, and its job is to keep you going until the end by giving you mini-rewards along the way, precisely because in the real world you don't achieve your end goal that fast, so you need the mini-rewards.
The problem in the modern world is most apps and games are setup to take advantage of this. The infinite scroll for example tricks the brain into thinking we are GETTING somewhere important and each thing it sees on the infinite feed is like a reward for going along that path.
In reality, the infinite scroll is leading us nowhere. It's an infinite dopamine track.
What then happens is you train your brain to get too many dopamine rewards. This depletes your dopamine(although not for as long as you'd think, it comes back fast), but what it's doing is training you to expect dopamine quickly. I'm not sure the exact mechanism involved in this. The brain is quite complex, but you are training your brain to get dopamine too quickly and too easily, and the parts of your brain that strengthen when you practice persistence and patience are depleted.
When you cut out as many of these types of infinite dopamine tracks as possible and work on patience your dopamine pathways become useful again.
This is why many of the posts I've written about success focus on planning and breaking things down.
Ie, 10 year plan, 3-year, yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, then your tasks for the day.
You are creating your own dopamine track as you tick off your progress, right down to the day's 3-5 important tasks. You get addicted to completing your own dopamine track, but your dopamine track is slower and requires more patience and more effort, which makes it much harder to go from scrolling on facebook to doing hard work in business or any other field.
And it doesn't work unless you plan. You can't just set a goal and try to work. You just won't get the dopamine.
There's a reason why World of Warcraft is so easy to play for 30 hours without sleeping. It's because it sets up a super easy dopamine track for you. You have your yearly/quarterly/monthly/weekly/daily/hourly/minutely in the form of all the achievements in the game. You hit a mob, and you get an animation/damage number(first dopamine hit), when you kill it you get another dopamine hit from the death animation + experience, when you kill a few, you'll get a reward in the form of better gear, when you kill more, you get a reward in terms of a level, which brings you more rewards in terms of skills/talents. Every few levels you get rewarded by being able to go to new zones, after enough levels and on and on and on.
You need to replicate this within your business and studying by trying to gamify your life as much as possible, but in business the rewards do come much slower, that's why it's best to NOT play games, use facebook/youtube, because these weaken the parts of the brain responsible for persistence/patience and train it to need stronger rewards.
You should get a good strong dopamine hit just from the act of completing a few rows of a spreadsheet without the need for the shiny animations/new dagger dropping
