Bored, unmotivated and exhausted would be the 3 magical words to describe how I've been feeling for the past few months. Things such as eating a bar of chocolate, watching a movie or playing a round of call of duty did not seem to bring me the joy it once did. I would wake up, tired, move through the day, tired and at the end of the day, I would throw myself onto the bed, tired. Turns out, the reasoning to the above lies in an old malayalam banana talk which goes, “ അധികമായാൽ അമൃതും വിഷമാണ്” which roughly translates to “ even nectar which is most divine, when taken in excess, is poison". And that is exactly what I've been doing, I've not been having one bar of chocolate but 10, I've not been playing one round of call of duty but until I could finally get back at the 9 year old on the other side and I've not been watching one movie but binging 2 whole shows with 10 episodes of 50 minutes each.
And the culprit causing all of this? Dopamine. Dopamine is the very reason why you feel pleasure, which would explain why you feel good after having something sweet, drinking booze or playing a video game, this combined with the fact that your body likes to choose the path of least resistance such as hitting the snooze button rather than going for that morning run or getting take out over a a home cooked meal creates a rather dangerous combo. Let me try to explain this with the chocolate example. One morning you wake up late to work, since you don't have time to make breakfast, you decide to have the chocolate in your fridge, thanks to the human brain being wired to liking sugar, you like the chocolate over your regular breakfast hence getting that dopamine kick and what was supposed to be a one day thing, continues for much longer. One could argue what the problem is, if having that chocolate makes you happy but as time passes we crave for more, the one chocolate is your new normal and you crave more and you tend to react to this craving in three ways;
Satisfying the craving by having more by which you waste your time, money or health depending on what you're craving for.
No action taken, you enjoy the dopamine trigger in the same amount and quantity making you more irritable eg: think of an alcoholic who doesn't have the money to buy another beer although his/her body craves it.
Cutting of the craving.
At the end of the day, what happens most often is that your brain is so often pumping dopamine that you stop enjoying everything you once did beacause it's below what your brain considers your default happiness level. The end goal here is to seek balance, to get rid of that addiction and to do things that we really don't want to sometimes because that is the very first step to not get the addiction in the first place. I would sincerely urge anyone who has made it till here to go through the concept of dopamine fasting as well, although it has not been scientifically proven, it has been effective most of the time.
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