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Hi Zenith Catcher, “When a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” — Viktor Frankl
2016: As an 18-year-old, I was short-term oriented, chasing the quick dopamine. Engaged in one-night stands, drank too much alcohol, smoked cigarettes, scrolled on social media, and watched porn. A miserable existence. Distracted by pleasure. 2025: Today, at 27 years old (I’m turning 27 today ;) ), I work out 5x a week, eat a healthy diet 95% of the time, take cold showers, sleep at consistent bedtimes 8 hours, read daily, started 3 businesses, published 190+ podcast episodes, and will soon finish my master’s degree at a Swiss elite university. In other words, I’m now feeling pretty content with my life. What did I change? Compared to when I was 18 years old, one of the major shifts I made was to replace artificial, toxic dopamine sources with natural, productive dopamine boosters.
The consequence of this multitude of habit replacements is that I decreased my dopamine baseline significantly. This, in turn, led to the fact that I experience way more “healthy” stimulation from productive pursuits. Let me give you an example. When I engaged in destructive short-term oriented behavior, my baseline of dopamine was pretty darn high. I need a lot of brain stimulation to kick my brain into gear, so to speak. And the viciousness of this was that I always needed more and more of this poisoned stimulation coming from alcohol, cigaretts, and short-term mating to get myself motivated to do anything worth persuing. If I did not have this stimulation, I would procrastinate. When I picked up healthy habits (as previously outlined), I started step-by-step to reduce the bar of dopamine necessary to get my brain engaged in a productive pursuit/healthy habit. As a consequence, I started to love doing the hard work. Learning for months for university, working on my business 12 hours straight, reading daily for 60 minutes, and recording weekly podcasts became almost effortless. The pleasure now came from healthy, productive stimuli. The key to success with dopamine is… To embrace living a “boring” life. (Quite frankly, it’s not boring at all, but for the sake of driving the point home, let’s label it like this.) By boring, I mean sticking to your healthy and productive routines, habits, rituals, and pursuits. Things like eating healthy, working hard on your career, or hitting the gym. In other words, the habits that 99% of people are not willing to do because they perceive them as boring, or they are not willing to sacrifice junk food, Netflix, etc., to attain a better life. Fair enough. Do whatever you want and what works best for you, but please don’t complain if you don’t have what other people have achieved. Goal achievement is, by nature, sacrificial. All this to say that doing the boring, repetitive, hard “stuff” is what makes your life worth living. By decreasing your dopamine baseline, you will start to experience so much joy from the details of life. The feeling is best described as when you don’t listen to music for 7 days straight, and then on the 8th day, you put on your earphones and listen to your favorite song. You will experience this song as intense as ever before. The “boring” stuff will become the salt in the soup, the sparkle in life, the things you genuinely love because they make you a better human being. How do I start to lower my dopamine baseline?
This process can help you get the first step into a life coined by healthy dopamine sources. If you have this ” dopamine fast, ” the thing you start the next day (Monday) becomes heavily associated with reward. The next day, when you pick up work, the likelihood of getting joy from work (or anything else you previously labeled as hard) is higher. Obviously, this is not a 1-day transformation, but it can help you to get the ball rolling. But bear in mind that “replacing “is the key. If you just get rid of an old habit but don’t replace it with a new, better one, you will presumably fall off the bandwagon (at least, this happened in my case many times). If you want to dive deeper into the concept of dopamine baseline and how to lower it, I suggest watching these 2 videos:
I hope that helps. Have a productive week! Much love, Nicola PS: I do a podcast where I pretend to have a Swiss accent (wink). 180+ episodes online about high performance and business. You can subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. This week on the Catch The Zenith Podcast:#189: Logic, Values & Dopamine. Listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or my Website. Inspiring Things This Week:Book: Inspired by tech entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant’s quote: “I would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read every single book out there,” I’ve started rereading my third book of the year—one I’ve already read before. Right now, it’s 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. This book is truly a masterpiece. The principles outlined in it have had a profound impact on my life. Click here to get a copy. Goal Hack: People set themselves lofty goals—and that’s great, more power to them. I’m one of them too. But what most forget is that if you set a big goal, you also need to ask yourself: What will I give up to achieve it? When I wanted to get in shape, I gave up mindlessly scrolling on social media while lying on the couch. So, ask yourself: What are you willing to sacrifice to reach your desired goal? Quote of the Week:“You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued.”
– Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, renowned psychologist, author, and online educator. Video Recommendations: |
