a day writ in dopamine
a day writ in dopamine
j1.0 jumps out of bed with low tonic dopamine and checks his emails, socials and crypto to spike phasic and get some energy. He slams back a coffe and puts on his running shoes then does a threshold effort which will be the highlight of his day. He manages to pull his tonic dopamine up a bit with all the phasic surges.
He heads to work and bashes out emails like a bat out of hell; his job is high pressure and big stimulation. Finished by 11 and going for a hard bike ride now because he’s feeling the dip. He crashes and sleeps for an hour after lunch.
Waking up he irritably goes and picks up his kid from the bus stop, rushing back so that he can get his hyperfocus on. Then it’s 6 hours of art and loud music, consuming cannabis to pull his d up and avoid redlining at all costs. He barely registers dinner and gets back to cutting wood before the pots leave the table. He breaks it all up with spurts of online gaming which he hates but loves and god damn is it stimulating.
The phasic bursts are the only thing seeing him through the day. Before bed he checks his crypto and emails again and when he lays his head on the pillow he has a spinning ball of steelwool in his mind, carved by the crazy variability of his dopaminergic tone.
He has a broken night of delayed sleep, waking twice. He gives up on bed altogether at 4am. All the sleep has done is consolidated some of the tangled, barbed routes carved by the phasic-heavy day. At times he has night sweats but he doesn’t know why.
He wakes up a little refreshed, with some of these rules consolidated, and goes at it again, harder and faster.
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j2.0 wakes up and writes. He exports the dust which has settled in his mind overnight and clears a few of the grooves carved by the phasic spikes in his REM sleep, consolidating the lessons of the last wake-cycle. He then goes for a walk or sits and meditates to warm up his dopaminergic tone, being careful not to do anything too stimulating in the first hour after waking. He sees his son off to school with a smile.
After this he checks his emails, does whatever needs doing for the day, and goes for a bike ride. j2 is pretty lucky in that j1 solved his financial problems for the time being, but he could be doing work at this point and would be ok. Nothing too high-pressure though.
j2.0 still likes computer games but notices they make his dopaminergic tone unstable so tends to go for a walk after 30 minutes of playing to settle down. After 5 minutes of walking he feels noticeably calmer. He will probably move away from super-hard platformers and on to slow-paced RPGs. j2 is becoming aware of how these things affect him.
He picks up his kid from school with a smile and then sits watching him play in the park while translating the teachings of the Buddha to passively encode his brian with new thought-processes. He effortlessly cooks dinner, washes the pots, has a great chat with his boy, cleans the toilet, and goes into unwind mode.
He maybe does some easy art for 30 minutes to export the day, hums in the bath for 15 minutes and then does 30-45 minutes of calm sitting meditation. At 9pm he lies down with his son and falls asleep in 10 minutes. He wakes once for the toilet but the sleep is peaceful and he gets up slow, feeling refreshed.
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j1.0 did not know how phasic dopamine impacts tonic dopamine.
Phasic spikes were all he knew. His tonic dopamine had become so low through years of high-volume living that the only way he could feel alive was by artificially pulling it up through stimulation. This includes the incredibly stimulating past-time of ruthlessly tearing yourself apart with your internal monologue. j1 could not function without periods of hyperfocus because it was the only way he could keep from redlining, which is quite literally hell. Sleep was but an understaffed cleanup crew.
j2.0 knows how these things work.
He knows that tonic dopamine will decrease if you strike phasic too many times. He sees that you need to export the lessons of the night and warm the system up, do your stimulating activities in the middle of the day when tonic dopamine is naturally highest, and then calm your system down in the evening. Sleep is no longer a cleanup crew but a real consolidation. The day is no longer a case of frantically punching the water to make more waves. Instead he turns on the taps and fills the tank.
If you make too many phasic waves in the pool of tonic dopamine, it spills out.
You end up with less overall dopamine to play with. You feel awful. You make more waves to try to end it. You feel worse.
What you need to do is:
1 - export your thoughts first thing in the morning
2 - regulate and use rhythmic motion or meditation to increase the dopamine in your tank
3 - do stimulating activities around the middle of the day
4 - cool down in the evening
It’s that simple. It’s not easy to break the chain if you are stuck in the phasic loop, but tomorrow is a new day.
If this is your first time trying it, I’ll make it easy:
Wake up, pick up your phone but do not check emails or socials, put on your shoes, walk for 20 minutes while texting yourself.
Try it. See how you feel.
Over time you can make it so that your tonic dopamine is equal to or higher than the phasic spikes you currently rely on. You will feel good over the entire course of the day, and your head will not be full of bees when you lie down to sleep.
Make sure you warm up and cool down; that’s all.
/jb202509261103