It makes things worse by attacking our subjective sense of what we should do making us act in ways that makes us worse. When we have no dopamine we have the inverse of a positive state of psychological rewards: apathy (the inability to care), amotivation (the inability to be motivated), anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure). Ever felt like you didn’t want to do something but were happy you did after? That is required to short-circuit the downward spiral: mistrusting your subjective radar and taking leaps of faith. Paradoxically, though, to get out of this feedback loop requires nothing less than fighting your biology by actually doing something. The feeling of having no will is absolutely real: you don’t. Forever.įighting this phenomena is not easy because it is a chemical phenomena. We have a stereotypes of laziness that we use to judge others (another chemical function to explore later) but it is a destructive view because when we turn it on ourself, it doesn’t take something into consideration: the ubiquity and predictability of our paradoxical chemistry.ĭopaminergic systems can wreak havoc by attacking anyone’s will, making them tired and making them feel with absolute intensity that they want nothing more than to take a nap. Not doing things prevents us from getting the chemistry that would make us want to do things. The catch-22 is that we need to do things to get the chemistry to keep doing things. Accomplishing fewer things means less dopamine, less drive – of course you don’t want to do anything! As the feedback loop plays out, lethargy turns into apathy and anhedonia – the inability to feel pleasure or motivation. What is happening is a subjective feedback loop that does it’s damage by convincing you to do what is worst for you. Things that once seemed shimmery start to lose their luster altogether things that once made us sit up and take notice seem barely worth mentioning.
We genuinely want to get some rest because we feel tired all the time. Now we feel that we have almost no juice in the battery, no gas in the tank. Irritation turns to anger which gets in the way of even our remaining goals and we make more mistakes. Setting one less goal becomes setting a few less we sleep in longer and take more naps. You become irritated as you feel yourself become sluggish your mind is less sharp and you observe and remember less. Why? With less dopamine, rewards are a little less appealing, and so is the will to attain them. With less dopaminergic activity, you become slightly less motivated, slightly less yearning for anything that would require action on your part. Whatever reason your slight disengagement, not doing things will procure less dopamine.
Eventually, though, boredom can slip into something else. You just don’t know what to do with yourself, which direction to take, so you try to content yourself with idle distractions. You had a recent tragedy in life and are legitimately grieving. It can start predictably enough: you are in a new town and don’t know anyone. Stumble out of balance for just a moment and the dopamine system will turn a stumble into a crash. The problem with dopamine is that it is fickle.
This is the paradox of a circuit that helps sustain us and a clue to the nature of depression: the downward spiral effect. This in turn means even less dopamine, and as you can see, this little feedback loop looks a lot like toilet water going down a drain. It can make us want to withdraw as our ability to handle what little we do have waffles. Less even emotional resources to deal with things. Having less to do leads to less internal chemistry less internal resources. There is such a thing as an upward spiral, but it has an evil twin.
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