”Life was better as a kid”

I as many others, often feel that life has become grayer over the years.

Colors aren’t as vibrant, sounds aren’t as crisp and life doesn’t fill you with that same excitement you once had.

And nothing feels quite the same.

I used to believe this for such a long time. I had accepted that this was just how life was. It started out bright and joyful, and then lost its zest as you took on more responsibility.

”Reality just had to hit you at some point.”

But every time I start feeling this way — I think back to a few months ago. To the time I spent all alone out in the woods. Disconnected from everything I thought made life — life.

• Technology

• Family & friends

• Society and routines

I remember how painfully boring and uninteresting everything was. The itch in my body to go do something was killing me. To watch a movie, get on my phone or call a friend.

But I endured.

And after a few days, I made a heartfelt discovery…

Life was still there.

And it was just as full of joy, inspiration and motivation as was when I was a child.

It all led to one crucial realization.

If you’re not enjoying life anymore, it’s not because its gone somewhere — it’s because you’ve become blind to it.

And as I got back to the city and looked at the people around me — I realized that this was just most peoples’ way of life.

Including my own.

They accept the state of zero joy, inspiration or motivation to do anything as something normal. They had lost touch with that positive force of life that made it worth living.

The question of enjoying life seems like an infinitely difficult problem to solve. And to some extent — it is.

But when I actually followed the problem, most of it went back to just one molecule…

Dopamine.

And that’s just what we’re going to talk about today.

But as usual, let’s start by setting the scene.

Why You Can’t Enjoy Life

The average person does’t enjoy life.

He gets through it.

The joy, inspiration and motivation he once had as a child is long gone.

His entire life is a dreadful chore with the occasional intermission of pleasure to keep him sane. He spends his days with resentment, feeling like life has slipped through his fingers.

Blind to his own potential.

Deaf to the joys of the world.

You don’t enjoy life because you’re desensitized to it.

There is a positive force all around you.

One carries the joy, inspiration, motivation you need to do great things in this world. And you’re connected to it by one molecule.

Dopamine.

It’s the molecule that gets you to act, work, pursue, enjoy and live.

But due to cheap pleasure, overstimulation and just the way the modern world is structured — you’ve been robbed of this connection.

Constant overstimulation depletes your dopamine stores and fries the receptors that were supposed to notice it — making you numb to its effects.

And (as most people already have) you end up in a state of dopamine resistance.

You can no longer connect to the positive force of life. And so doing anything at all with it becomes a pain in the ass.

• You lose your optimism and immediately cave to hopelessness as soon as something negative happens.

• You become reliant on junk food, constant entertainment and social stimulation to keep you from falling into depression.

• You can’t focus on the things that are important to you. Your mind instantly wanders to thinking about food, sex or your favorite TV show. And your life stays unlived.

• You don’t have any real motivation to do anything with your life. You couldn’t care less about taking care of your health, build meaningful relationships or contributing anything to the world.

But out of all the negative effects of dopamine resistance and depletion — I think this is the worst one:

You lose the ability to enjoy life.

Like a nerve end that has become blunt to the outer world — you become deaf to the positive forces in life.

You no longer enjoy the chirps of birds outside the window, the friendly conversation with a stranger or the simplest musical composition.

You have to constantly stimulate your brain with caffeine, social interaction, highly palatable food and entertainment just to not sink into depression. It’s like you’re treading water with each hit of pleasure to keep you from drowning in a sea of hollowness.

Finally, you sink below the surface. And many suicides have happened because of dopamine resistance and depletion.

What you need to realize:

Life hasn’t gone anywhere.

It’s gotten a bit more difficult sure. All worthwhile games do.

But it's still as full of joy, inspiration, motivation and optimism as it was when you were a child. And if you don’t feel it, it’s just because you’ve become numb to it. You’ve lost your connection to the positive force of this world.

And that’s why you can’t enjoy life.

But the positivity is still there.

You just have to learn to see it.

To sharpen your ears and to open your eyes.

And to become sensitive to life again.

Sharpening Your Experience

Dopamine sensitivity:

Your degree to which you’re able to enjoy life.

The more dopamine you have and the more sensitive you are to its effects — the more you will connect to the positive and active force of life.

• Focus

• Optimism

• Motivation

• Life sensitivity

• Momentum and motion

Let me paint you a picture.

With a good control over your dopamine, you can easily focus on tasks and activities. Because you always have that forward sense of motion you can tap into.

Deep work, exercise and difficult things become easy(ier).

Secondly…

You have the optimism to believe that your problems are soluble.

• Relationship problems

• Mental limitation

• Financial restrictions

• Health conditions

And then the motivation to actually go solve them (which goes for your goals as well)

Thirdly, the more dopamine sensitive you become, the more sensitive you life you become. Not in the way that glass is sensitive to collision. But in the way that your eyes are sensitive to the light around you.

And finally, because dopamine is the molecule of motion (mental AND physical) you easily get going towards your goals (and also have a hard time stopping).

To put it another way:

The amount of dopamine you have in your system, and to the degree to which you are sensitive to it — will determine the happiness, and indirectly, the quality of your life.

Alright.

So you want to take control of your dopamine.

But first you have to understand a little about how it works.

Picking Berries 20 000 Years Ago

Imagine this for a moment.

It’s 20 000 years ago. The sun is about to set and you are in desperate need to find something to eat.

Suddenly, you notice this shrubbery in the shadows. And as you get closer, you notice that it’s full of blueberries. Your heart jumps and you feel a rush of joy and excitement.

But then those feelings quickly disappear. And you suddenly feel a strong pull towards picking the berries.

With every berry you pick, you get a small sense of joy followed by a tiny drop in well being. You get some pleasure from having picked the berry, but then you feel a sense of tension that can only be relieved by picking another.

When you’ve finally emptied the shrubbery, you rush back to the camp.

Arriving at the camp, you’re welcomed with open arms because of your berry success. You get a giant rush of joy and wellbeing, followed by a tension to go out and help your friends and family once again.

And around we go.

This is how dopamine works:

It increases when there is a possibility for more dopamine (in this case, seeing the berry bush). This gives you a sense of joy and motivation. Then it drops to being a little bit lower than it was before you imagined that possibility. This makes you want to get back to that sense of joy you felt, and you go chase the dopamine increasing activity (picking the berries)

Dopamine drives you to move, scavenge and hunt because you want that good positive feeling. You want to close the gap between the joy you felt before and the joy you feel now.

And if used constructively, this is how you do anything great in life.

But most people are unfortunately exploited by that very same mechanism. And they have that ability for greatness forfeited as a result.

Not because it’s their fault…

But because that’s just how the modern world is structured.

Let me paint you a picture.

There are 3 parts to dopamine you need to understand.

1. Baseline

2. Current level

3. Sensitivity

Let’s go through them all, using the berry picking example to make it all clearer.

1. You have a baseline of dopamine.

This is how much dopamine is normally in your system. It’s sustained by the continuous creation of dopamine inside your neurons. The height of this baseline, determines your amount of joy, motivation and inspiration to act.

For example, people with ADHD and ADD have a very low baseline level of dopamine, which makes it extremely hard for them to focus on something that doesn’t tickle their fancy. Because they don’t have that same level of dopamine.

Before you saw the berries, you had a baseline level of dopamine. And it was this baseline that even got you away from camp. It was what got you to go looking for food in the first place.

This is why having a relatively high baseline of dopamine is crucial for doing anything at all.

2. You have a current level of dopamine.

This is how much dopamine you have in your system as of right now.

The height or depth of this level in comparison to your baseline and previous peaks — will determine how much pleasure you feel.

• Above baseline = Happy

• Below baseline = Not so happy

As an example: A person with a high baseline won’t feel the same pleasure from watching TV as a person with a low baseline would.

3. You have a degree of dopamine sensitivity.

This is how sensitive your brain is to dopamine.

The more dopamine sensitive you are, the more you will feel its effects. Even without giant peaks in dopamine, you can still feel extremely motivated, happy and fulfilled from just being very sensitive to dopamine.

A Yogi can enjoy a cup of tea as much (and even more) than the billionaire popping champagne on his yacht, because he is just that much more dopamine sensitive.

How dopamine sensitive you are depends on how healthy your dopamine receptors are and how much dopamine you’ve experienced in the past.

Let’s say that before going out to pick berries, you just had a good time with your wife. When you then found the berries, you wouldn’t feel the same sense of joy you would have, had you been a celibate that particular day.

Because the dopamine peak you get from finding the berries, will be compared to the amount of dopamine you’ve felt previously.

And if you had experienced a gigantic amount of pleasure before going out scavenging, seeing the berries wouldn’t produce enough dopamine to even get you to pick them,

How much dopamine you have doesn’t matter if your brain can’t detect it. This is why dopamine sensitivity is the degree to which you’re able to enjoy life. It is THE connection to the yang of life (as we’ll get into in the next section.

Here’s where the problem comes into the picture.

Today it’s easier than ever to perversely misuse the mechanisms of dopamine.

Dopamine has become cheap.

You no longer have to kill a boar, raise a family or build a village to get a giant peak in dopamine. You have a next to unlimited dopamine stimulation supply at your finger tips. Social media, porn, junk food.

And these cheap activities (as in they don’t cost a lot of energy), can easily rob you of the ability to enjoy life.

Let me explain.

Your baseline level of dopamine is maintained by your neurons’ ability to produce it.

But there is a limit to that.

If you just crank out more and more dopamine with cheap and easy methods:

• Junk food

• 3 cups of coffee

• Hours of entertainment

• Repeatedly consuming pornographic content

You are depleting your dopamine stores.

At some point, you can’t crank out any more dopamine. And you fall into a depressed state where you don’t want to do anything at all. You don’t have any dopamine left and not even those cheap dopamine activities will bring you pleasure.

Furthermore, if you’re always spiking your dopamine, everything else that doesn’t spike it as high — will feel utterly and completely boring to you. Because your mind always wants to get to that high level of dopamine again.

If you’ve just watched a movie, eaten a bunch of processed sugar, drunk 3 cups of coffee and talked to a friend — going to do some work will feel like torture.

Finally, the more dopamine you’re producing, the more you’re frying your dopamine receptors. You eventually end up dopamine resistant and life becomes an apathetic blend of chores and gray experiences.

And you end up losing the ability to enjoy or even move through life.

Great thing in life require investment and hard work over time. Something you never get by chasing immediate pleasure and dopamine.

Enjoying life doesn’t come from chasing pleasure. It comes from being sensitive to the joys around you. It comes from creating your own fulfillment. Because true enjoyment can only be found in discipline (see the letter on flow).

I want to stress this point:

Dopamine isn’t bad.

It’s the key to doing anything in life.

The problem is that it’s so easily taken advantage of. Advertisement, social media and corporations are all pulling on this mechanism as much as they possibly can.

And so the world belongs to those who can control their motivations and desires.

Your future will be determined by how well you control your dopamine.

• How high you can keep your baseline

• How well you can balance your current level

• How sensitive you can remain to its effects

Now that you understand a little bit about how dopamine works.

We’re ready to get into the tools.

Embracing The Yang Of Life (3 Principles Of Dopamine Economics)

Yang:

”The masculine active principle in nature that in Chinese cosmology is exhibited in light, heat, or dryness and that combines with yin to produce all that comes to be” - Oxford languages dictionary

You can think of dopamine as the yang of life.

It’s what gets you to move, act and shape the world around you.

And of course there needs to an inactive force too (which we talk about here). But in this letter we’re focused on motion, positivity and action.

And I’ve put all the most effective tools into 3 categories:

1. Building income

2. Raising baseline

3. Sensitizing yourself

Let’s dive in.

1. Building Income

The positive force of life is un-graspable.

But dopamine is very much so.

If you want control over your life, you need a positive dopamine flow. You need to produce more dopamine than is depleted.

And so the 1st step to dopamine management is building your dopamine income.

Because there really is no other place to start.

There are 3 parts to it:

1. Resources

Dopamine is created in 3 steps.

Phenylalanine —> Tyrosine —> L - Dopa —> Dopamine

Phenylalanine and Tyrosine are both nutrients found in food. And they’re the building blocks for all of your dopamine stores.

And so logically, you need to get enough of these in your diet to fuel dopamine production.Let me give you some inspiration.

Phenylalanine:

• Tuna

• Eggs

Tyrosine:

• Raw dairy

• Red meat

2. Energy

Anything and everything requires energy.

So does producing dopamine.

The process that’s in charge of this is your metabolism. I won’t go into it here (because I’ve done so A LOT already) so check out this letter instead:

”Read this if you want to stay at 12% bodyfat permanently”

(After you’re done with this one of course :))

3. Production

To set this whole process in motion, you need a well functioning production.

These are the 4 most important points to follow:

Fix your gut — Your gut is where most of your neuro-chemicals are created. It’s the factory that drives the production of everything that makes your brain function. And that includes dopamine. And just as a real factory won’t create quality products if the workers are treated like garbage, the micro bacteria in your gut won’t either. Avoid; gluten, artificial sweeteners, stress, too much coffee, seed oils, processed foods. Embrace; raw milk, raw cheese, fermented foods, meat and saturated fat. And most importantly… check out the letter on gut health going through this and infinitely more here.

Get the right vitamins — For dopamine production to take place, you need the right set of vitamins. More specifically: Vitamins D, B5, and B6. Try to get the majority of your vitamin D from the sun (if you can) and your B5 & B6 from organs like liver. (Because most supplements are BS)

Mitigate oxidative stress — Oxidative stress plays a big role in the degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in diseases like Parkinson’s. It’s just not something you want if you care about living a full and positive life. So get your antioxidants (berries, citrus fruits, cacao) and check out the last section in our letter on metabolic mastery.

Reduce stress — Aside from making you go unconscious and preventing any change in your life, stress also disrupts dopamine production. This happens because stress hurts the health of your gut and because it drives more of the tyrosine in your body to become adrenaline and stress chemicals instead of dopamine. No bueno. I talk more about it in the letter here.

Sleep your ass off — During sleep is when all your dopamine is created. Make sure you’re getting enough time and quality. Check out the last letter on circadian rhythms, ”You were meant to get more out of your day”.

(That was a lot of links)

If you hit all these 3 points:

• Resources

• Energy

• Production

You will have a solid dopamine production.

But with great powers come great responsibility. And you need a way of managing it as well.

2. Managing Baseline

It doesn’t matter how much money you make if you’re spending it like an idiot.

In the same way, managing your baseline is all about balance.

You don’t want it swinging all over the place. That’s the same as being bipolar. One second you’re the happiest and most driven person on earth, the other the most defeated, beaten down and depressed.

You want it moderately high and stable.

The higher and more balanced your baseline level of dopamine is, the more motivation, drive and positive force you will feel on a sustained basis. And the way you achieve this is by following a few principles:

1. Don’t chase pleasure for pleasure’s sake.

When you’re always chasing your next high, everything in life that doesn’t give you that same amount of dopamine, will seem painfully boring in comparison.

You won’t really have the motivation to work if you’ve just eaten a bunch of junk food.

Furthermore, after you come up, you also go down. After every hit of pleasure, you fall back down below your baseline and start feeling down and depressed. And after a while, you’ll be dopamine depleted and incapable of feeling joy. No bueno.

Follow Musashi’s words and engage in pleasures naturally, don’t chase them.

And put the things important to you (exercise, work, education) before the more pleasureful ones (socializing, eating, entertainment.

2. Be frugal with rewards.

When you reward yourself after having done something difficult consistently, your brain starts to see the reward as the point.

And you stop being able to enjoy the activity itself. If you only workout because you treat yourself to a meal afterwards, you’ll stop producing dopamine from your workouts.

Another point is when you’ve accomplished something like running a marathon, reaching a business goal or an important personal even (marriage, birth etc.) — don’t celebrate like there’s no tomorrow. Because then there won’t be. 

Your baseline will drop for a period of time and you’ll lose the positive force. I’m not saying to be stone faced and cold as your child is being born. But if you want to keep your happiness and fulfillment after some great thing happens, don’t celebrate like a madman.

Crack a smile, nod your head and feel proud of yourself.

3. Fuel your baseline

Just as there are sharp rises in dopamine, there are slow rises as well.

These types of dopamine increases have effects that can last for several hours. This serves as a great tool for increasing motivation and joy to be sustained for entire days.

Some ways of doing this are:

Exercise — Have you ever gotten out of the gym and feeling like you could have been there forever? That’s dopamine talking. And it happens because exercise increases your baseline level of dopamine for an extended period of time. This goes for all types of exercise. They just have to be difficult enough and still not take everything out of you. So do some calisthenics in the morning or go for a run. And you will get a wave of motivation to carry you through the day.

Cold exposure — Cold exposure have been shown to drastically increase dopamine levels for 2 hours past the exposure. If you don’t have access to a cold plunge, I’ve found that a cold shower works pretty well too. You could make a case for not doing it everyday (cold adaption), but I like it too much not to do it 1st thing in the morning everyday.

Sunlight — If you’re not already getting out in the sun as much as possible… what are you doing? It is crucial, let me repeat that — it is CRUCIAL for optimal health. And is there any surprise that it boosts dopamine through your whole day? Check out the letter on photosynthesis to learn more.

4. Reset your baseline

Throughout your day, you will have natural dips in your baseline.

At around noon or after intense mental or physical activity, you will feel out of gas. Your dopamine is pretty much depleted.

But there is a solution.

Lay down on a bed, or the couch and do 20 minutes of meditation or yoga Nidra (search for NSDR on YouTube). Studies have shown that this replenishes your dopamine baseline.

And you get back your connection to that positive force in the later day too. Something I’ve found works is taking walks without headphones too.

Now you’re pretty much set for mastering the yang of life.

But there is one last (and crucial) step.

And unless you get this right, none of the previous ones will matter.

3. Sensitizing Yourself

Dopamine sensitivity:

The ability to enjoy life.

You might have a lot of dopamine. You might even have a high and stable baseline. But if your brain can’t detect it — none of it matters.

You’ll never feel that positive flowing force.

If you ever want to connect to the joy, inspiration and motivation around you — you need to desensitize yourself to dopamine.

Here’s how:

1. Supplements

There are a few supplements that makes you more sensitive to dopamine.

Caffeine — Caffeine prevents adenosine from binding to its receptors. And because one of adenosine’s functions is to prevent dopamine signaling release — when you inhibit it, it creates a higher sensitivity to dopamine. In other words, more dopamine is released by the same stimulus. Just remember that caffeine is a double edged sword. And chronic use moves you towards a place I call ”caffeine hell” (but we’ve already talked about this).

L - Theanine — Anything that increases GABA (the “sush” molecule of the brain) and makes you less stressed will probably increase dopamine. This is because dopamine and adrenaline are created from the sam substrate. When you’re less stressed, less of L-dopa is turned into adrenaline and more into dopamine. Is my best theory at the time. (Although I could be wrong). In either case, L - theanine has been shown to increase dopamine. Get it in green tea or in higher doses through supplements.

2. Stimulus detoxing

You’ve probably heard about ”dopamine detox”.

And as much as I don’t like the name (because it’s completely backwards) — it’s still a pretty great tool.

When you’re doing a dopamine detox, you’re not engaging in activities that spike your dopamine to extreme amounts.

As a result:

• You don’t get those nasty drops in baseline

• You maintain a high baseline level of dopamine

• And more effortful activities become enjoyable again

But you don’t have to go overboard.

You don’t have to renounce survival, become a monk and move out to the mountains.

You can structure your day in a way to both manage your dopamine economics AND enjoy the occasional peaks in dopamine. Because at the end of the day, those peaks are what makes life rich.

So here are a few tools to implement in your daily life:

Hide your phone after waking — As soon as you wake up, you’re as sensitive to dopamine as you’ll ever be. You have the strongest connection to that positive force as you ever will have during the day. This is when you should do your hardest tasks, combining difficult ideas, doing hard research or any other difficult task you want to get done. But when you immediately look at your phone after waking, you ruin it. You become dopamine resistant again. And your whole day becomes a battle. No bueno. So immediately after waking, resist the urge to check your phone and go hide it, then go about your day until you feel that you’ve got enough done. Then go ahead and check it. But you’ll realize that it isn’t that fun anyways.

Complete your survival without stimulus — You don’t need to watch something every time you eat. You don’t need to go on social media while you’re taking a shit. You don’t need to listen every time you need to go somewhere. When you’re always adding stimulus to your life, you make it impossible difficult to live it without it. When you’re always working out with pre workout, music and friends, doing it alone, with no music or stimulants becomes a pain in the ass. Embrace some silence, it’s good for you.

Business before pleasure — This is how you take advantage of the positive force that dopamine connects you to: schedule your hardest and most important tasks before engaging in dopamine spiking activities. That was a mouthful. If you want to watch a movie, go see some friends or do anything else that will spike your dopamine — schedule it at the end of your day. After you’ve gotten what needs to be done — done.

Your Foundation For Enjoying Life

Contrary to what most people think…

Life hasn’t gone anywhere.

The positive force of momentum you felt as a kid is still there. You just have to learn to see it.

And when you do that, the motivation, inspiration and joy you thought was gone comes knocking.

You regain your connection to that positively flowing force and life becomes something to enjoy again.

The way you get there is by fixing your dopamine economics:

Build your income with:

• Resources: Tyrosine & Phenylalanine

• Energy: Improving your metabolism

• Production: Fix your gut, reduce stress, get your vitamins

Manage your baseline by:

• Not chasing pleasure

• Reseting your baseline often

• Fueling your baseline

• Being frugal with rewards

Sensitize yourself with:

• Supplements (Caffeine, L - Theanine)

• Stimulus detoxing

And enjoy the flowing and positive force working in your favor for everything you want to do in your life.

That is all.

Thank you for reading, subscribe to the newsletter down below (unless you want to miss future posts) — and I’ll see you in the next one.

- Simon