Exercises in Dopamine Starvation

I was thinking about last night’s movie, looking at the ceiling while lying in bed. I had just woken up and was enjoying the peaceful time between waking up and getting up. I know, all the things performance gurus tell you not to do.

“Do you think sex used to feel better 10’000 years ago? What about 20’000 or 100’000 years ago?” I asked, still looking at the ceiling as Anastasiya started waking up. In retrospect, perhaps I could have done something about the timing and phrasing.

“Huh? What? Where does that come from? Anastasiya answered while making no effort at veiling her puzzled look.

I wasn’t talking to her. I was mainly just lost in thought.

“I mean: sex is fine, but it hits the same endorphin and dopamine receptors as so many other things like alcohol, drugs, coffee, sugar, porn, and whatnot. Indeed, those receptors must be somewhat fatigued (I assure you I don’t talk like this. This is just a written recount of the conversation)? What if I were to remove all those things for a couple of weeks? What do you think would happen? I continued.

“Oh, Marco, you’re just so weird!” She concluded as she stood up to take a shower.

She had a point. I could indeed have chosen a better timing to have what must have looked like an existential crisis from the outside. 

I had met Anastasiya a couple of months ago at a river bar in the center of Zurich; it was quite unfortunate that she had a flight back home to Minsk only a few hours later. I did not expect to see her again. Still, here she was, on a stopover in Zurich from Minsk to Madrid, becoming the unfortunate accessory to a potential revelation that had nothing to do with her. When did the world become so small? But I digress.

Connecting the Dots

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
—Mark Twain

I waited for Anastasiya to get on her plane before resuming thinking about my little plan. At that time, I had just finished The Paleo Manifesto by the uncannily witty and ever eloquent John Durant. That book has very little to do with tired dopamine receptors or obnoxiously blasé manufacturers of creativity in a quest for dopamine diet. However, it raised a series of questions that rang a bell in my head and gave me perspective.

John asks a simple yet powerful question in his book. He uses the analogy of animals in captivity, inviting the reader to think about what habitat we would craft to keep them healthy and happy. It stands to reason that we’d try to mimic the habitat in which they evolved and to which they became perfectly adapted. For instance, you put penguins on ice with cold water nearby and snakes in green artificial jungles. The same applies to the diets of animals in captivity. At best, you feed them the foods they evolved to eat. It’s quite simple when you break it down to its essence. You feed mice to snakes, you feed leaves to gorillas, and so on.

Since humans are of nature as much as gorillas or snakes, it would stand to reason that human diets, for instance, would be the healthiest at their primal essence. After all, civilization is only a few millimeters thick—a few millennia of civilized living in millions of years of evolution. Yet, some humans think that diet soda and artificial sweeteners or donuts are acceptable foods. Some people even go as far as to call ancestral diets fads or hypes. If eating whole foods that early humans evolved to eat in their original habitat is a fad, then it’s a six million-year-old fad. Also, let’s consider that the concept of eating three meals a day is at best 200 years old, and Pepsi Cola introduced diet sodas in the 1970s. What’s the real fad at the end of the day? 

All that thinking about foods that humans naturally evolved to eat, exercise that we naturally evolved to perform, behaviors that are part of our core being, food restriction and its effect on health—let’s call it our firmware, or our default setup, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

My little brain hasn’t evolved to be continuously rewarded for anything, to get something for nothing continually.

People often tell you that human brains are the most complex thing in nature and this and that… Maybe…  Human brains are also stupid dopamine junkies that don’t know the difference between dopamine generated from effort (good dopamine) and dopamine generated from cheap artificial behavior (junk dopamine).

For instance, in one day, I could eat more sugar, salt, and fat than any of my early ancestors could in one year. The mechanisms that made us binge eat when we found a good and rare source of sugary or fatty food in the wild are not working to our advantage when we put modern refrigerators into the equation. I don’t think so much food is a good thing. I could, in 30 minutes of Instagram or left-handed browsing, see more scantily clad girls than any of my forefathers could have in a lifetime… a lifetime, in 30 minutes or less. I could literally see more naked women on my shabby iPhone in that time than a small tribe of early humans could in their whole lives. All of that, while doing nothing and deserving nothing, mind you. I don’t think it’s a good thing either.

That’s all the thinking my trigger-happy little Portuguese brain needed. Let’s put this freak show on the road!

Dopamine Diet

“If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.“
―Chinese Proverb

The objective was of pure simplicity. I wanted to understand how life, food, and sex felt like to my forefathers. My postulate: there’s too much reward for free in the modern world, and I want none of it. But let’s be honest: I’m not going to pretend I was searching for a metaphysical epiphany (although I found the dark mode of relentless work and productivity). I just suspected that too many short-term rewards would short-circuit long-term fulfillment.

Please notice that I used the word fulfillment and not happiness. There’s no happiness to be found in this, and it’s good. Happiness is overrated. Fulfillment is not. 

If you read Complete Human, you surely grasp that concept when it comes to food. You understand that no amount of mouth pleasure even comes close to the feeling of power, control, and achievement that being lean and strong gives you.

Let’s get into the details of the master plan. First, I figured, let’s decide on a timeline. We know that repeating the desired behavior for 30 days is enough to imprint it into neural pathways and make it the new normal. Ever heard neurons that fire together wire together? That’s what it means. Isn’t that the whole premise of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg too? Let’s go for 40 days, just for the great fuck of it—40 days sounds biblical. I might as well make this sanavabich legendary.

The first thing to be removed will be sex. No sex for 40 days had to be manageable. After all, so many people spend weeks, months, or even years without it. How hard can it be? Then, with sex, I also had to remove masturbation and porn of any kind. I went as far as to delete my Snapchat account and Instagram. Amen! 

I don’t want to sound like a prude, however. Mostly, because I’m quite far from it. I also have very few beliefs that I’m unwilling to throw away when stumbling upon new and better evidence. Porn might be useful or even beneficial in some cases. There seems to be a link between societies with easy access to pornography and reduced violence against women. There are good things to be said about porn. There are also bad things to say about porn. There’s an argument to be made about societal progress coming from the desire to impress the other sex. All of which disappears if you can get a reward by picking up your phone and going to the restroom for a couple of minutes. It starts looking akin to a rat, trapped in a lab box, hitting the sugar button over and over again. I want none of that.

Also, let’s be clear before I give you the impression to be some kind of overzealous ascetic: I watched enough porn back in the days to single-handedly – left-handedly, that is – maintain the whole worldwide industry healthy. I just came to realize that porn should be like heroin. I kind of want anyone to have the right to do as much of it as they wish, but I still think you shouldn’t do any at all.

Alcohol and other drugs need to go too. Not that I drank too much aside from the occasional red wine or used drugs apart from the devil’s lettuce now and again. But still, in my quest for destroying junk dopamine, all of it must go. I knew this one part of the plan was not going to be a problem.

Sugary, salty, and fast foods have no power here. Well, if you read Marco’s Food Mastery (upcoming) or Marco’s Binge Eating Mastery (upcoming), you realize that there is none of those in my diet anyway, aside from cheat days depicted in the latter. All I had to do was remove my weekly cheat days and keep eating dirt and licking stones seven days a week. This is no problem. As a short note, if stopping sugar or any pleasure food seems impossible to you, just think: so does stopping heroin for junkies or cigarettes for smokers. I think you give yourself too little credit. You are the product of at least a third of a billion years of sexual reproduction with constant conflict and resolution, endless choice of the better, most adequate option. You’re the result of it. There’s so much you can do.

Dopamine Starvation: Extra Credit

“Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.”
―Charles T. Munger

I pushed it further by removing artificial laughter. I understand your skepticism: what do I even mean? Hear me out first, decide later. I was talking about porn, sugar, and others as forms of undeserved artificial pleasure before. What do you think TV, Netflix, YouTube, or other digital entertainment are? It’s precisely what it claims to be. It’s digital entertainment. The more you connect with digital real or make-believe people, the less you connect with analog people. It had to go too: more analog, less digital.