A while ago I said to someone that part of the reason I drank was so that I know how I feel.
I spend a lot of mental energy talking myself out of very simple things. I think of something I could do, which takes a millionth of a second, and then hundreds of but no, what about, yes if, you shouldn’t because, and what not assault me until I freeze. Just stand there as if every choice has a hundred counterbalancing options.
There isn’t a strong enough why behind anything that I can choose to do it.
Except when I’m drinking. When I drink wanting something is generally enough. Wanting a snack, wanting to say something, wanting to tidy up even.
I thought of it as being free from the startling amount of inhibition I apparently carry. But maybe it’s that my dopamine is naturally low and a spike from booze is enough to kick me into the normal range.
I thought dopamine was kind of a bad thing. And it kind of is. Dopamine hits are what makes things addictive. Dopamine can make you want things you don’t like. And the diminishing returns of dopamine can leave you chasing smaller and smaller rewards faster and faster for no pleasure.
Yes, like social media.
But if dopamine were all bad then it would prevent people from procreation and eventually be eliminated by evolution.
Because dopamine is also motivation. I’m reading a book on dopamine now and there’s an experiment referenced in which they calorie-restrict some rats to make sure they’re hungry then impair half the group’s dopamine and give them all access to the same food supply.
The non-altered rats eat back to and above their caloric baseline while the dopamine-deprived rats just eat some. They don’t get back up to baseline, they don’t look to store any, they simply don’t care that they’re hungry.
Addiction is normal motivation that’s been hijacked, so what do we call the opposite?
Maybe that’s why it’s hard for me to do things that I know will make me feel better. Maybe I’m a starving rat with a supply of food but no desire to eat.
But then alcohol, a typical human go to when the present means nothing, gives me a boost of dopamine and then my brain, wanting more, says oh yeah we also wanted to eat and talk and move and stuff.
When booze makes people unhappy it’s usually because there’s a barrier between then and what they want. Or, to coin a phrase, what they now hyperwant – because their wanting system is amped up beyond baseline.
Of course what most people want when they do something that activates their dopamine all they think they want is more of that thing. As Carlin said “Cocaine makes you feel like a new man, and the first thing that new man wants is more cocaine!”
Which is actually a problem I don’t have. Another of the benefits of being chronically unhappy. When everyone else wants to keep drinking or add drugs on it I am quite capable of being satisfied and going home. They are in an elevated state and want to stay up there, I just get up to baseline enough to exhale.
But to climb off my weirdly low high horse I also think it’s why when I do find something that reliably gives me a hit I can become obsessed. When it’s so hard and so improbable to feel good finding something that works makes me feel like I have to stay immersed. Because the other option is returning to the numbness.
So even if I don’t get anywhere near as drunk as some of my friends – or do drugs or smoke – I still fall into the trap of feeling like drinking everyday. Or running too much, buying too much, maybe even posting too much.
On the other hand I’d love it if I didn’t think every pleasurable thing was a sign of character flaw.
Author/Athlete, Thinker/Doer
Alastair's Ego 
[…] is kind of a follow up to Alcohol & Dopamine as I, of course, have more […]