Escaping Dopamine Deception

Rewards can be a powerful part of the habit loop and reinforce behaviors, both good or bad.

Slot machine designers deliberately show you a “near miss” - where the graphics and sound effects are similar to when you hit a winning combination, even though you lost money.

Why?

Because they want to trigger that dopamine hit, and in doing so reinforce the behavior of putting in a coin and pulling the lever. They’re tricky too, offering up the win feeling on carefully crafted random intervals designed to maximize addiction. To get that hit, you’ll need to feed the beast more and more…

Time to arm ourselves with this knowledge and escape this dopamine deception.

Realize that the reason you might scroll for hours on TikTok is because you’re seeking a hit for an even more funny clip, even though you’re draining your energy and time.

Realize the reason you message that old fling when you know you shouldn’t is because you’re seeking some sort of reward. Which might feel good in the moment but leads ten times more drama later.

Rewards drive us to do a lot of dumb stuff!

Short circuit our monkey brains and we won’t be endlessly driven by sneaky situations offering bananas.