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Wanting and liking dopamine

How integrated of a person are you? There is a simple way to assess this quickly. Write down everything you do in your life and evaluate it based on several criteria:

 

1. I want to do this (wanting): you get dopamine from it, feel attracted and drawn to it, and motivated.

2. I enjoy doing this (liking): you experience immediate pleasure doing it here and now (serotonin-oxytocin-endorphins), savor the action, and enjoy it.

3. It is useful for me to do this (needing): the prefrontal cortex calculates the long-term results, the outcomes of actions (especially long-term) are important to you, they strengthen your resilience, increase your resources, and promote survival (including social actions, since we survive as a group, not as individuals). Does what I do strengthen or weaken me?

4. I am doing (or not doing) this: do I have something important that I am not doing? Are my useful actions a way to avoid essential actions? Am I doing enough to achieve my goals? Why do I continue to do things that are harmful to me?

Integrity is when all four of these conditions coincide and overlap, when you do the optimal amount, you want to do it, you enjoy it, and it strengthens you simultaneously. Problems occur when something is useful to you, but you don’t want to do it, or it is a harmful habit that you want (are drawn to), but that harms you, etc., when different vectors pull you in different directions. Think about how to balance these processes: dopamine for motivation, mindfulness for pleasure, simulating consequences for calculation, etc.

More about this is in my book “Will to Live”.
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