Overcoming Addictions: Understanding and Combatting Dopaminergic System

Understanding addiction as a neurological stimulation-seeking system, replacing highly stimulating habits with less stimulating activities aids in overcoming addiction.

### Overcoming Addiction: A Neurological Approach
* 🧠 The video outlines a personal method for **overcoming various addictions**, drawing from the creator's experience with addiction to **smoking, alcohol, junk food, video games, and more**.
* 💊 Addiction is explained as a neurological process involving the dopaminergic system, where external stimuli trigger the release of **dopamine in the brain**, leading to **pleasurable sensations**.
* 🔄 The feedback loop of addiction is illustrated, where **immediate pleasure from the stimulus** is followed by negative feelings, but the brain craves **more of the initial pleasure**.
* 🔁 The video emphasizes that the brain's dopaminergic system cannot differentiate between **extreme stimuli (e.g., heroin)** and **less extreme ones (e.g., sugar)**, leading to **similar addictive responses**.
* 🧗 The creator's method for overcoming addiction involves replacing addictive stimuli with **healthier, less intense sources of stimulation**, such as work, socializing, reading, exercise, and cold/hot exposure.
* 📚 Reading, for example, is suggested as a **less stimulating but still beneficial activity** to replace more addictive behaviors.
* 🏋 Exercise is highlighted as the **most effective replacement for addiction**, providing a **high level of stimulation** that can help **counterbalance the removal of addictive stimuli**.
* 🧘 The ultimate goal is to **reduce the brain's overall need for intense stimulation**, shifting towards more **natural, traditional sources of dopamine release**.

I've figured out how to get rid of near enough any addiction you have, and I know that this works because this is what worked for me. What I'm going to be doing in this video is sharing with you how to completely rid yourself of any addictions you might have, whether that could be something like video games. It could be video games, or it could be pornography, or it could be, I don't know, like junk food. It could be caffeine, it could be alcohol, you know, it could be smoking. It could be, I don't know, what else is there? I'd say drugs, but hopefully you're not addicted to drugs, right? But I know that this works because these are some of the addictions that I used to have. You know, I'd smoke, I would drink sometimes, not all that often, but I'd still drink. I'd play video games, watch stupid stuff. I'd be on junk food, eating lots of sugar and seed oils, and then I'd drink lots of coffee. And like, I had all these addictions and and these

addictions kind of have me in their grasp, where I was unable to live without them. And so, what I've been able to do is one by one develop a framework to completely eradicate all of these addictions and regain control over my life, so that no stimulus or external chemical can have a grip on me, on my life. And so, what I'm going to do in this video is share with you my understanding of addiction. Now, disclaimer, I'm not a clinical psychologist, I'm not a doctor. Um, I'm not qualified to give you advice on how to remove addictions, but I can tell you that by removing these things from my life and by getting rid of these addictions, I've become way more successful, way happier, way more fulfilled. And so, maybe right now you're addicted to video games, or maybe you're addicted to junk food, or pornography, or maybe you drink too much, or maybe you smoke too much. I mean, you probably know what your vice is and what your problem is. So, in this video, I'm

going to walk you through how I got rid of them. I'm going to just you know explain my understanding of this, and in doing so, um, this should aid you and help you towards your journey of becoming addiction-free. So, basically, inside of your brain, you have something called a dopaminergic system. Let's see, so you have a dopaminergic system in your brain, and this is a neurological system that exists inside of your brain somewhere, and it basically is defined as a dopamine-seeking system. So, I want to put seeking here. And the problem with people these days is we are drastically overstimulated. Where, you know, if you actually do an audit on your life, is there like a 5-minute window in your day where you are not in some way, shape, or form stimulating your dopaminergic system? For example, ex, let's say you're driving and you're listening to music. Well, that's stimulating your dopaminergic system. Or let's say you're eating and you're putting on loads of mayonnaise or sugar or ketchup or sauces.

or just you know you're eating like a non-stimulating meal like sweet potatoes, but then you're ladling on hot sauce. Well, that's another thing that stimulates your dopaminergic system. And you know, maybe you're working, but you're listening to music at the same time. There's a lot of things that we do where when we do, we stimulate this system. And by consistently, constantly stimulating this system, this system expects lots and lots of stimulation. And so it kind of has this feedback loop where, you know, if we have the system here, you know, and really the way this works if I show you is what does this system look like. My pen's running up, try a different one. What does this dopaminergic system actually look like? Because if you want to cure your addictions, you need to understand how they work. And so what it looks like is like this. This is what a system looks like. So essentially what we have is we have an input, okay, and this is the stimulation. This is the

stimulus. And then here we have your brain. And then we have dopamine. So, dopamine is obviously the chemical that makes us feel pretty good. And so, what's happening is there's an environmental stimulus like sugar, or music, or pornography, or video games, or something or another like smoking, or alcohol. And what that stimulus does is we expose ourselves to it through our five senses, right? Where we allow it to stimulate us through either looking at it, and watching it, tasting it, um, hearing it, you know, whatever, you know, touching it, etc., etc. And so, the stimulus enters our brain, which is then processed by our dopaminergic system. And the outcome of that relationship is dopamine. And then what happens is, well, dopamine feels pretty damn good. This makes you basically feel pretty amazing in the short term, where, you know, you watch the porn and you feel, you know, in the moment you feel good about it. Or you eat the junk food and at the time, you know, you're satisfying craving, it feels pretty damn good. The problem is after

doing these things all these addictions. You don't feel very good afterwards, but in the moment, it feels great. But what happens is a bit of latency elapses here where you know you do it and you feel great immediately. And afterwards, you feel pretty damn bad, you know, you feel pretty shitty, you know, if you just, if you've got a hangover or you know if you, if you, if you feel bad after a cigarette or something. And then latency elapses where a little bit of time elapses. You forget how bad you felt and all the brain seems to remember is the fact that made you feel pretty good. And then what we have is, we have feedback here where essentially what's happening is like now, now that you've experienced this dopamine, you want to experience more of it. And so this is called classical conditioning in your brain, in your behavior where something makes you feel good. And then because it makes you feel good, you want to do more of it. And so really, your entire problem is with the stimulation thing is that you've

just got these feedback loops feeding back around and feeding back around going from you know feeling good back to more stimulus and so this is really what an addiction is and this is how your dopaminergic system works uh on a high level now the problem with this and the problem with um trying to remove addictions from your life is that the dopaminergic system is a universal mechanism and so the diagram that I just drew it doesn't matter if you're um if you're if you're smoking crack off of a spoon or you know maybe you've just eaten like a chocolate bar the same system is triggered the brain cannot tell the difference between the extremity of the stimulation based on what we might perceive ourselves uh based on how we might perceive it so for example you know if you take if you if you inject heroin you might think that's a very bad thing to do and it is but eating you might think eating a chocolate bar isn't that bad and that's

true you know you know because heroin is considerably more damaging to the body than the chocolate bar. However, the heroin and the chocolate bar, they stimulate the exact same system. And the loop that I just showed you, you know, as we pass through the triangle into the output from the input, and then we feed it back around, it's the same system. The same addictive dopamin magic system applies no matter what the stimulus is. And so your brain can't tell the difference between a chocolate bar and heroin. It just all it sees is simulation temporarily feeling good, and then afterwards feeling bad, forgetting about feeling bad, and wanting more of the thing that made you feel pretty good. And so this is why when you, uh, this is why when you quit an addiction, you have terrible cravings and you have real bad like, uh, urges to, you know, go and find the stimulus that originally made you feel good. And so how do we like quitting an addiction in my experience? I've done this many times. I've got rid of

everything I used to when I was younger. I used to watch porn. I haven't watched porn for a long, long time. Um, I got rid of video games. I got rid of like junk food. Like, I got rid of carbs, for God's sake. Like sugar, caffeine, I got rid of as well. Mink coffee, got rid of alcohol, got rid of smoking, got rid of all the, you know, common addictions. And now I live a clean life free of any vice, basically. Um, and so what I found is when you quit, the thing is, it's not deciding to quit. It's the problem. The problem problem is what happens, you know, you decide to quit and then really, like, you know, one to 3 days elapse. You know, the first day you're going strong when you try and quit a behavior and you're like, this is easy. But then by the time you get to like day three, you get all these cravings coming in, all of these urges to start going to seek the stimulus that you originally have. And so

the reason this happens is because this feedback loop is recurring trying to you know bring the S back in. So how do we actually combat this? Well, if we understand that your dopaminergic system is a universal mechanism that cannot um like all at once is stimulation, it doesn't really care where the stimulation comes from. This is the thing about the system, it doesn't care like you know I can I give you I can give you proof of this. So let me explain. So a while ago I quit um sugar and carbs completely. I just completely went on Elimination Diet just doing Carnival and you know the first two 3 weeks of that isn't very fun. You get massive massive Cravings. Your entire metabolic state is fighting for you to eat carbohydrates and it's a very difficult thing to give up probably the hardest thing I've given up is carbs. And when I quit the carbs, my brain like was craving the carbs and the carb you know the the carbohydrate or the sugar like this was

the thing that my brain was pointing at, like I want the carbohydrate, I want the sugar, I want the seed oils, I want the junk food, give it to me now, and this was all I was thinking about. But really, if your first principle is out in this, you could replace this with anything like a game or alcohol, whatever, but the point in the point I'm making here is I was craving carbs, but really, what do the carbs do? Like I'm talking about sugar and junk food here. Really, what these things do is they are a stimulant, they're stimulation, and so I wasn't craving the carbohydrates, although in theory I was, but really at a base level what I was craving was the stimulation associated with the carbohydrates. And so when I quit carbs and when I quit sugar, what started to happen in my life is my brain started to, I started to, I got really strong in the whole carb area where I stopped eating carbs, but then I started

like smoking again, or playing games again, and so every time I used to try to quit something, I'd always pick up another old bad habit. And the reason I would do that is because what my brain was trying to seek is the stimulation, your dopaminergic system. Imagine it's like a child. It's like a four-year-old child, and when it gets bored, it seeks. It's looking for stuff to do, games to play. And when you take one of its games away, that four-year-old child is going to do everything in its power to go and find another thing to keep it entertained. And that's how your dopaminergic system works. So my point here is that when you're removing something that's very stimulating, and something that's held you in its grip, something that's very, very addictive, and you remove it, you're going to crave it. But you're not going to, you don't really want the thing, you want the stimulation associated with the thing. And so, you know, if you're addicted to social media

and you remove social media, you're going to crave being on it. But really, that's not the thing. The action is not what you want. You want the baseline stimulation. And so, using this knowledge and using this understanding, um, of the fact that it's really just stimulation that you're seeking, what you can start to do is you can start to, when you feel these cravings for stimulation, you know, when you feel these cravings here, what you can start to do is you can start to seek healthy, uh, more fulfilling methods of stimulation. And so, what I found is I found a kind of a bit of a hack, a little bit of a loophole in the whole addiction thing here, where when I, whenever I have a craving, I know that I'm just craving stimulation, and I know that the 4-year-old child in my brain, this dopaminergic system, is very immature and very emotional. I know that if I take one of its toys away, I have to give it another toy for it to play with, because if I don't do that

it's just going to scream and kick and scream and kick, and it's just going to consume my entire life, and it's going to be extremely difficult to block out and deal with. So what we want to try and do here, if you want to look at it like this, um, how do I, how do I visualize this. So we've got our, we've got our dop energic system, okay, and this thing is basically always seeking stimulation. And the reason that everyone has it so bad nowadays is because we let this thing run completely rampant. You know, if you just look at your life right now, like you've probably got other tabs open, your phone's probably on your desk, you're probably in some sort of junk food maybe, you know, you got music playing, or you know, you, I don't know, but you, there's probably about, you know, 60 different stimulants that are about to be in your immediate environment in the next 24 hours, um, and you're just constantly making this thing work and so

this dopaminergic system it requires stimulation. And so, you know, over time, if you stop stimulating your brain, it will get used to a reduced level of stimulation. So, this is a level here. But let's say that right now, you know, with your current fried-up brain, that your brain is used to a stimulation level of 100. And by removing one of your addictions, you know, you might be taking away maybe 50 points of stimulation, which means the brain is now half as stimulated as it usually was. And when you do this, the brain is just going to freak out. And so, what we want to try and do to combat the cravings and to combat the relapse into whatever you don't want to do is we want to introduce, we want to reintroduce that stimulation that we lost in some way, shape, or form back into this level. And so, you've got to realize when you're negotiating with your brain, which is basically what you're doing when you're trying to remove an addiction, you have to give it something.

to take something away from it, you can't just take, take, take, take, take, and expect your brain to just not kick up a fuss because you're going to be fighting near enough every morsel of your fiber and being and biology to make. Well, so we have to negotiate with it with this dopaminergic system. It's very irrational, but you can't, and you can't just take them. So when we remove an addiction, we remove points of stimulation. We help you. Them. And so what I found works really well to do this, this, and this is no, this is not like an easy fix. This isn't a miraculous fix, but this makes it significantly easier and more likely for you to actually remove the addiction from your life. And so what I found is that there's a few things in my life that I've been able to use to combat this issue because the point I'm making here is that when you remove an addiction from your life, you're taking away stimulation from your dopaminergic system. And when you do that.

your dopaminergic system isn't going to like euphoric. It's going to kick up a fuss, so we need to give it something in return to calm it down and to make it easier. It's still going to kick up a massive fuss, but you can make it easier. So what we wanted to do is we want to use one of these four things to compensate. So what I've been able to do here is define a few addictions that are actually good for you and that contribute towards a more fulfilling life. And so what I've basically done with my life every time I remove an addiction, I increase one of these things. And so if I want to get rid of, I don't know, I don't really have any addictions anymore, nothing that's too obsessive or obscene. Let's say that I was a smoker and I wanted to quit smoking. Well, I can tell you, like I said earlier, when I quit carbs and sugar, my smoking habit massively increased. I just

started. I went from smoking like one cigarette a week to smoking like 10 cigarettes a day, and the reason that I was doing that is because these, I was CRA. I used to get so much stimulation from junk food and from sugar and from fats and from, you know, unhealthy fats and from all these synthetic salts and stuff. So much stimulation would come from my diet that when I cut that, my brain went haywire, and it started to look elsewhere in my life for stimulation, and I just started chain smoking like half a packet of cigarettes a day. And that's when I figured out that ow, it's not my brain isn't craving, my, I just, it just wants stimulation. And so what I did is I looked at my life, and I looked at what is actually stimulating and what brings me dopamine. Um, just going to put here, I thought, what is actually stimulating that I can use and introduce into my life on a day-to-day basis to bring my stimulation levels up and

negotiate with my doam energic system, and I realized there's a few things I can do so work so right now. I mean, I've been on um, I've been I've been going through like phases of this of this Carnival diet thing where um, the reason I'm making this video is because like I'm still in the process of quitting carbs, and I completely eradicated carbs maybe 2 months ago from my diet, and I still have like I the Cravings that I've had have sort of come and go, but to today and yesterday have been the worst time, the worst Cravings I've had in a long time, like to the point where I'm this close to going on delivery and ordering a Five Guys burger. I'm not going to do it because I I just that's not me, it's not part of my identity. I don't give into impulses and Cravings like that, but the Cravings are real bad. And so what I'm trying to do today right to combat cuz this I I usually don't

work today Sunday to combat these Cravings is. I'm working. I'm making this YouTube video. And because work for me is a me of stimulation, it makes me feel good. It's like, you know, it's, it's problem-solving. It's complex. And, you know, I'm, I'm introducing more work on a day that I wouldn't usually work to a take my mind off the Cravings but B to raise the level of stimulation. And you know, you could argue, yeah, sitting down in front of a camera and making a YouTube video is not very stimulating. And that's right, it's not. You know, because by removing carbs, remember, if I've got 100 units of stimulation with cars in my, my dopaminergic system, and I remove cars, dude, I might be removing like, you know, maybe 40 units of stimulation, which means my brain is now 40% less stimulated, which means it's 40% more likely to just go Haywire. So I remove 40 units, but then if I add work, if I add more

work, then I might actually add maybe 15 units of stimulation. Now, I still have a discrepancy here of 25 units, but at least I've made a little bit of a dent in how difficult it is to deal with those cravings and how likely I am to relapse. And so this is the point I'm making here. This is how you fix this. You're never going to work. Work is never going to be as stimulating as a milkshake. Like, you know, work is never going to be as stimulating as a massive burrito with hot sauce and like guac and tortilla chips and like brownies and stuff like that. Like making a YouTube video is never going to hit my brain in the same way that a perfectly engineered piece of junk food that's been engineered by thousand of scientists. It's never going to hit the same, but it might numb the pain a little bit of getting rid of this. And so work is the first thing that I look to.

introduce when I've got Cravings. The second thing is socializing. You can get a huge level of stimulation from socializing. And so, you know, if I'm going through Cravings, I'll invite friends around. You know, like for example, if I'm in car, I'll barbecue. And I'll just sit and talk to my friends for like hours. Or I'll call people. I'll call my family. And you know, I'll message people. And like I'll I'll just become more social because socializing is a fantastic brilliant way of bringing more do me into your life. Um and and it's a stimulant. And you know, you could argue everyone's addicted to to socializing. But then is a biological imperative really an addiction? Probably not because kind of needed to survive. Otherwise you go insane. And so if I remove something from my life, I'll increase the amount of socializing I do. I remember when I was quitting um video games a long time ago. And like what I would do is I just play Monopoly with my friends all the time.

cuz, I was craving that video game Loop, where I needed the stimulus of the game. So, I just started playing board games and chess. Like, you know, if you want to quit video games, just introduce a game that's not as damaging, right? You negotiate, you remove the big bad thing, and maybe you add something little just to help you deal with it. So, that's the other thing you can introduce: socializing. The other thing that I've been able to introduce that's been extremely useful in terms of entertaining being and keeping me stimulated without my brain going to haywire is reading and documentaries. And specifically, reading stuff that you're actually interested in. So, as of recent, I've been reading a lot of books about people who have conquered the world. You know, I can give you a prime example of this, actually. So, because I'm still going through carbon sugar and seed oil, with rural like, my brain's still haywire, and I'm going through.

get rid of addictions all the time. Like, I don't have many left to get rid of, to be honest. Maybe music, but that's a difficult one to contend with. However, like, you know, I've got this book here. This is Napoleon's biography. This is like an 850-page book. And you can see like, since I quit CS, like, I've made some pretty strong headway into this thing. I'm like on page 600 now. And so, this is another thing that I've been doing to stimulate myself because I can't go to social media, in short form content. I can't go to YouTube 'cause I've got rid of those things. Those are not the things that I want to have in my life. I don't want to, if I'm bored and I'm craving cars, I don't want to go sedate myself with, you know, some short form content. Like, I want to, I want to use that energy to, you know, put it into.

something that I actually find some like trust me reading a biography is nowhere near as stimulating as like going and watching the Sid men play Among Us. Like it's, it's not, it's, it's just a book, right? However, it's still a little bit stimula and that's enough. And so that's, you know, something I've been doing recently, um, is reading. And then the other thing you can do is you can watch documentaries or like old school movies that are like better for your attention span, um, so yeah, you can just introduce reading. Like once again, if I've taken 40 units away of stimulation from my dopaminergic system from that child in my brain. I like I start reading a book, the book might only bring Five Points of stimulation, but it's still enough for me to not relapse. And whether or not you relapse into an addiction and into an addictive state is highly dependent upon how Wild this thing goes in your brain. And by introducing these things all we're doing is making the brain go less

wild and therefore reducing the likelihood that you actually do relax the biggest one there's a little voice cpy there the biggest one the biggest one that I think I've been able to find that helps though is exercise um exercise is probably out of all of these things the most stimulating thing that you can do and so you know what I've been doing recently I mean I exercise regularly anyway with like runs or like calisthenics or whatever but typically with this car withdrawal thing it doesn't hit me until like the evening because throughout the day I'm working and I'm good and if I'm taking a break I just read for a bit but when I don't want to read anymore and when I'm done with work when there's no one around well what the hell do I do well really the only thing that's going to stimulate me more than anything is exercise and so you know long like long distance running or calisthenics or like whatever and you can introduce this thing and you can do more of this and you can do it with a

higher intensity, and the more of this you do, and the more intense you make the exercise, the better you'll feel afterwards. So, you know, exercise is a huge stimulant, and it's a great way of temporarily nullifying the effect of the removal of one of these addictions. And then finally, um, you've got cold and hot exposure. So, did you know that if you take a cold shower, that it's um, as dopaminergically simulating as taking like cocaine? That's not even a joke, but I remember reading this a while ago. I can't remember the statistic. Um, maybe I'm, maybe I haven't thought this through critically enough, but from my understanding, cold showers and cold water is incredibly stimulating for your dopaminergic system in the same way that saunas or, you know, I don't know, maybe you haven't got access to a sauna, but cold and hot exposure, rotating between those two things for a short period of time, is immensely stimulating, and you know is

significantly helpful to introducing stimulus into your life or stimulation into your life. And so really, these things they're not that stimulating. They are stimulating, but stimulation works on the scale of contrast. And so work will never be as stimulating as, you know, being drunk, and socializing will never be as stimulating as, you know, watching porn or playing video games, and you know, reading will never be as stimulating as watching of Doom scrolling through Tik Tok. An exercise will never be as stimulating as, you know, eating loads of crap, and you know, cold and hot exposure will never be as stimulating as, I don't know, like insert addiction here, doing drugs or something, but they are somewhat stimulating. And if you think about it from a, um, if you think about it from a, what would you call it, like a, um, classical standpoint, this was all human beings really had access to for like a long, long time. All of the new age addictions that have come in like video games and pornography and, and you know, sugar and music and like, you know, all of

these really stimulating addictions. They've only really come into play in the last like hundred or so years, you know, like all cavemen really could have done for stimulation was exercise, socialize, and work, and maybe get in like a cold blend every now and then if there was one available. And so it is possible to bring your brain back to a natural state. You just have to undo many years of conditioning, however long you've been alive for. You have to undo all of that neural conditioning, which takes a few years, but I'm telling you this is true and this can work. And what I'm doing at the moment with my brain and with my levels of stimulation is I'm slowly reducing how much stimulation it requires for me to feel like I'm actually having a good life. And I'm trying to centralize that to these things specifically here, which are way more natural, steady, calm, traditional ways of getting stimulation and dopamine. And I think if these were the only things that stimulated you, you'd probably live a way less

chaotic, depressive, anxious life. Imagine if this was the only ways you could get your stimulation from. You can't get it from food or from your phone or from like all of this crazy crap. And like you know you can say Pav might have had alcohol, sure, fair enough. But all I'm saying with this video is that you have a system in your brain called a dopaminergic seeking system. That's probably not the actual like biological term for it, but and this is just from my experience. And that system seeks stimulation, and the amount of stimulation it seeks is dependent upon how much stimulation it's become used to. And so near enough everyone in their life has a level 100 stimulation where they're stimulated through the roof and they can't get enough of dopamine. But if you want to fix this, you have to remove extremely simulating things and try to replace them with less stimulating things. And if you do that for a couple of years, it will be really painful and it will really, really suck and your

entire body and brain will fight you for it. But if you do it and you have the willpower to stick to it, and you also have an environment that supports that, then over time you'll reduce this level of stimulation required. And you'll become way more focused, sharp, calm, steady, reliable, etc., etc. And so that's what I've learned about removing hardcore addictions. I know it works because I've done it myself many times, and I hope this understanding in some way, shape, or form contributes to you being more healthy. Goodbye.

How to fix your life so you can get rich AF

Charlie Morgan

The speaker shares their personal experience of overcoming various addictions, including smoking, drinking, and video games.

They provide a framework for eradicating addictions and regaining control over one's life.

The discussion focuses on the dopaminergic system in the brain and how overstimulation contributes to addiction, offering insight and guidance for those seeking to become addiction-free.

Dopamine is triggered by various stimuli, leading to temporary feelings of pleasure and the desire for more.

The brain's dopaminergic system creates a feedback loop, driving addictive behavior regardless of the stimulus, whether it's drugs or something as common as junk food.

This universal mechanism makes it challenging to overcome addiction and leads to strong cravings during the quitting process.

Overcoming Cravings and Addiction: A Personal Journey

The speaker has successfully eliminated various vices from their life, including porn, video games, junk food, carbs, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and smoking.

They describe the challenge of quitting addictive behaviors, attributing the cravings to a universal dopaminergic system seeking stimulation.

The speaker emphasizes that the craving is not for the specific substance or behavior, but for the stimulation associated with it, comparing the dopaminergic system to a bored child seeking entertainment.

Managing Cravings and Addiction: A Different Perspective

Cravings for stimulation, rather than the specific action, drive addiction, requiring a new approach to managing them.

The key is to replace the lost stimulation from removing an addiction with healthier alternatives.

Negotiating with the brain's dopaminergic system and reintroducing stimulation can significantly ease the process of overcoming addiction.

Cutting out addictive substances can lead to increased cravings for other stimulants.

Finding alternative, positive addictions can help negotiate with the dopaminergic system.

Introducing more stimulating activities, like work and problem-solving, can help combat cravings and balance dopamine levels.

Introducing alternative stimulating activities, such as work or socializing, can help reduce the impact of cravings and the likelihood of relapse.

Engaging in reading, particularly topics of personal interest, and diving into documentaries can effectively keep the brain stimulated while eliminating addictive behaviors.

By replacing the source of cravings with less damaging alternatives, such as playing board games instead of video games, it becomes easier to transition away from addictive stimuli.

Stimulating Activities for Managing Addictive Behaviors

Reading, watching documentaries, and old school movies can help reduce the likelihood of relapse by providing some level of stimulation to the brain.

Exercise, especially high-intensity workouts, is the most stimulating activity to nullify the effects of addiction withdrawal and can significantly improve mood.

Cold and hot exposure, such as taking cold showers or using saunas, can also be immensely stimulating and helpful in introducing stimulus into one's life, potentially aiding in managing addictive behaviors.

The Impact of Stimulation on the Brain's Dopamine Levels

The modern lifestyle has led to an overstimulation of the brain's dopaminergic seeking system, resulting in chaotic and anxious lives for many people.

By gradually replacing highly stimulating activities with more natural and traditional forms of stimulation, it is possible to lower the brain's dependency on high levels of dopamine.

This process is challenging and requires strong willpower, but ultimately leads to increased focus and emotional stability.