Dopamine Maxxing: When Chasing the Next Hit Stops Feeling Good

When you wake up, you grab your phone and see the morning notifications—several messages, new reels, new notifications. You have your coffee and then eat something sweet. By lunchtime, you’ve switched from emails to TikTok, to online shopping, to a new playlist, to food delivery, and have collected dozens of small digital rewards. 

The world has become very good at rewarding the brain so quickly these days. The constant search for stimulation is better known as “dopamine maxxing“, and admittedly, I’ve also been sucked in by it. Yet even though the name sounds appealing, dopamine is not simply the brain’s “pleasure chemical,” and having more of it is not necessarily better. 

Dopamine functions as a neurotransmitter and is associated with motivation, learning, movement, attention, and the pursuit of rewards. A major role of dopamine is helping the brain determine what is worth pursuing. In their landmark 1997 study “A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward”, Schultz, Dayan, and Montague showed that dopamine neurons react strongly to rewards that are unexpected and, as a result of learning, start to respond to signals that predict those rewards.

That’s to say, dopamine is not merely concerned with pleasure; it’s also closely linked to anticipation, teaching us to look for what might be rewarding ahead.

The reward system was developed in an environment in which obtaining rewarding experiences usually involved putting in some effort, like searching for food, building up relationships, exploring, competing, creating, or achieving something.

Today, many rewards can be released with just a few taps on a smartphone.

Social media provides novelty along with likes, messages, comments, entertainment, and social validation. According to a study entitled “The Power of the Like in Adolescence” published in the journal Psychological Science in 2016, adolescents who viewed their own photographs in an Instagram-style format accompanied by a large number of likes showed greater activity in brain areas associated with reward processing, such as the nucleus accumbens.

Digital content is designed to be unpredictable, which makes it particularly addictive: you can’t tell whether the next swipe will bring something funny, interesting, flattering, shocking, or entirely forgettable, which is why we keep swiping.

Food also has an effect on overlapping reward systems. Foods that are highly palatable—those containing refined carbohydrates, fat, salt, and a strong flavor (primarily processed and fast foods)—are very easy and accessible to eat. In a randomized controlled trial published in Cell Metabolism, scientists at the National Institutes of Health discovered that participants who ate an ultra-processed diet took in about 500 more calories each day than when the same participants ate a diet that was only lightly processed, even though the two diets were matched in several nutritional aspects.

Now add to this gaming, online shopping, pornography, streaming, gambling sites, notifications, and the variety of entertainment that is available 24 hours a day. It’s not just that these activities ‘release dopamine’, since many normal experiences also involve dopamine.

Concern arises when everyday life starts to revolve around quick, repeated, low-effort rewards.

Technically, no (yeah, I’m surprised, too). The term ‘dopamine addiction’ is not considered to be a valid medical diagnosis, and dopamine is, in fact, necessary for normal brain function, so you should not and cannot attempt to get rid of it. However, reward-linked behavior can become compulsive.

Neuroscientists Berridge and Robinson draw a significant distinction between “liking” and “wanting.” Their influential paper, “Liking, Wanting, and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction,” states that dopamine is mainly associated with incentive salience—the motivational drive that makes us want or pursue something—while the pleasure of liking a reward involves a partly different set of neural systems.

This helps explain common modern experiences, such as opening an app without consciously deciding to, checking your phone even when nothing especially interesting is there, or snacking even when you’re not hungry.

Because rewarding signals are repeatedly encountered, the connection between a trigger and a behavior becomes stronger. A notification shows up, and you check it. When you feel bored, you scroll, and when you’re stressed, you order food. In the end, the cue itself can cause the desire to obtain the reward.

Sleep can also affect dopaminergic function. A study involving humans in The Journal of Neuroscience, titled “Evidence That Sleep Deprivation Downregulates Dopamine D2R in Ventral Striatum in the Human Brain”, showed that there were changes in the availability of dopamine D2/D3 receptors following sleep deprivation, together with a decrease in alertness.

So, if we’re continually tired, constantly stimulated, and live in an environment where rewards are easily available, self-regulation will probably become even more difficult.

Not literally. You can’t get rid of dopamine in the brain because our nervous system needs it constantly. Instead, the aim should be to control how frequently we are exposed to strong reinforcing cues and the extent to which we respond automatically.

We can all start by restoring friction. Switch off the notifications that aren’t essential.  Keep the phone away during meals. Make it a bit more challenging to use the apps you’re constantly on. Don’t make each quiet moment a time for scrolling, snacking, or entertainment.

Do one rewarding activity at a time. If you eat your dinner in front of Netflix and at the same time checking Instagram, several layers of stimulation will be competing for your attention. Enjoy your meal and just simply eat. Take a walk with your phone in your pocket. Finish one task before starting another source of entertainment.

Consider sleep to be an integral part of reward regulation rather than something added on later. When sleep, physical activity, and regular eating are stable, they can reduce the physiological conditions that make it harder to manage impulsive reward-seeking.

Mindfulness helps, too; a recent systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled clinical trials found that mindfulness-based interventions led to a small but significant decrease in the intensity of food cravings. 

Most importantly, choose rewards that involve active participation rather than passive consumption, such as exercise, cooking, reading, learning, creating, having meaningful conversations, praying or meditating, spending time outside, or finishing something you’ve been putting off.

The solution to overstimulation isn’t a life devoid of joy. It’s a kind of life where pleasure needn’t come in intervals of a few seconds.

A healthier way of interpreting dopamine maxxing is not to seek even more intense ways to stimulate the brain, but to retrain ourselves to tolerate anticipation, effort, boredom, and delayed gratification and to rediscover rewards that take time to earn.