There’s a particular scene in an early episode of the Simpsons that I found especially relatable, as a ten-year-old whose main interest was candy. Bart and Lisa wake up the morning after Halloween, so miserable from eating sweets that they can’t even look at their candy pile. When Marge suggests giving the rest of it to needy children, they protest, flop onto the candy pile to protect it, and begin miserably eating more.

I had noticed by then that the deliciousness of candy was highly variable. The first Twizzler or mouthful of Nerds tasted the best. The delight fell off steadily after that, although I would almost always finish whatever I’d bought with my allowance.

At that age, my candy consumption was usually only limited by my budget. However, I knew from Halloween’s annual windfalls that you could eat enough candy to reach a state where the magic is basically gone, and all that remains is a harsh sugariness. It’s clear the party’s over, yet some part of you still wants to continue gobbling toffees and Tootsie Rolls.

This is because, even though pleasure is basically gone by then, eating another candy still gives a faint hint of the initial deliciousness. It’s like you’ve already squeezed all the juice out of an orange or a lemon, but you can always give the empty rind another hard squeeze, and wring out one more drop.

I was thinking of this analogy as I was trying to break away from my phone the other day. I had done my usual rounds (email, social media, sports scores), exhausting the novelty of each app, but I still found myself hunting for a bit more stimulation before putting it away. I checked the weather again, then email again, and ended up joylessly scrolling Reddit for so long that I could see the algorithm straining to find new posts from my usual topics. Eventually I did break away, after wasting so much time I don’t even want to say.

I’m sure people vary in how susceptible they are to doomscrolling or chain-snacking (I am very susceptible). But if you can relate to the above scenario at all, you might have noticed that after taking one of these pleasures to its point of exhaustion, you feel personally drained. Motivation and initiative have cratered, and it’s hard to get yourself to jump into something productive. The mind is hunting for something easy and gratifying – like picking up the phone again.

My understanding is that this drained state is what it feels like to have depleted your supply of available dopamine, a neurotransmitter central to the brain’s reward system. Engaging in novel and instantly gratifying activities, like snack-gobbling and phone-scrolling, causes dopamine release, and, if you keep at it, depletion.*

Like a laboratory rat who hit the food-pellet button too many times, soon there’s no reward to be had, and you end up demotivated, unfocused, and moody, until your reward system can recover.

Juicing the Lemon

The lemon-squeezing analogy above is from psychiatrist Alok Kanojia, who goes by “Dr. K” to his audience of technology-addled Zoomers and Millennials. He says that for people who struggle with motivation, dopamine is something that can be managed intentionally, by structuring your day differently.

As someone prone to motivation collapse (and who apparently has compromised dopamine circuitry), my ears perked up at this possibility.

Essentially, the lemon metaphor goes like this. (Dr. K stresses this is a loose analogy, and I stress that I’m just sharing my interpretation of it):

Assume you begin the day with a full, unsqueezed lemon, having allowed the dopamine system to recover during sleep.

When the lemon is full, any squeeze of the lemon is going to cause a large release of dopamine. Highly dopaminergic activities (such as checking all your favorite apps first thing) squeeze the lemon particularly hard, creating a massive dopamine release, which reinforces the behavior that triggered it, and significantly depletes dopamine reserves.*

The more dopaminergic the activity (i.e. the more forcefully that activity “squeezes the lemon”) the less dopamine you need to have in reserve in order to engage with it. That’s why it’s always easy to pick up your phone or eat a snack, even as you become more depleted by the end of the day, while less dopaminergic activities (such as work, exercise or problem-solving) usually need to be done earlier, while you can still get yourself to do them. More effortful activities, whose rewards are further away in time, require a fuller lemon to generate sufficient motivation.

When dopamine gets bottomed out from too much squeezing, it can feel impossible to do anything but continue to madly squeeze the lemon, because the reserves don’t exist to motivate anything harder. This is how a person can feel “locked in” to doomscrolling, Oreo-munching, gaming, or channel-surfing, unable to break away. People with ADHD are even more prone to this locked-in state, because the dopamine system is already compromised.

Ideally, you want to keep your dopamine reserves as high as possible for as long as possible each day. You particularly want to avoid making any massive lemon-squeezes early in the day, which is exactly what you’re doing if you go straight for the smartphone upon waking.

What would be optimal, according to Kanojia, is to get up and go straight into something effortful and productive. This will conserve dopamine reserves, and keep motivation available for effortful activity for more of the day.

Starting with effortful activity is always going to be harder than picking up the phone and scrolling in bed, but it will make the day easier on the whole, and avoid the motivation collapse that leads to wringing the lemon dry with snacks, entertainment, or other forms of self-stimulation.

An Experiment

All this has got me thinking. For those of us who keep our phones on the nightstand and look at them first thing: is this just a minor compromise, something we’d be slightly better off avoiding, or are we basically eating candy for breakfast every day? Are large swaths of the population hobbling themselves right from Moment One each day?

I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than a minor mistake in my case. I didn’t always fall into these motivation sinkholes – that began in the last few years. My guess is that my device habits worsened at some point (during lockdown?), which led to an even worse-than-usual dopamine situation, which led to more phone use, even worse habits, and so on.

For my 38^th experiment, I’m going to test out the above dopamine management idea, and see if I perceive a subjective difference to motivation and focus.

Again, I don’t have any real understanding of how neurotransmitters work, and I don’t know how accurate my metaphors are here. I’m just going test out Dr K’s recommendations above, along with a few other dopamine-management practices, for a month, and see how it affects my days.

Primarily that means not using my phone at all for the first few hours of the day. Not before I meditate and do some work at my desk. After that, using it consciously and sparingly, avoiding apps I tend to get caught up in, along with any other behaviors that seem to squeeze the lemon early and often.

Most other recommendations fit a theme of avoiding “cheap dopamine” as much as possible. Default to effortful things, confronting the necessary discomfort, especially early in the day. Find a way to respond to unpleasant emotions that doesn’t involve easy gratification (i.e. go for a walk instead of snacking or unlocking your phone).

The other practice I intend to try is cold exposure. I’m going to spend a few minutes, a few mornings a week, taking a cold shower or bath. This supposedly causes slow, lasting increases in dopamine, and has other health benefits. Also, I’m just curious how unpleasant it will be.

This is all just an informal experiment to see what happens. There are a lot of “dopamine detox” and “dopamine fasting” ideas out there right now. Research is scant and there’s a lot of crackpottery around the subject, but I do think there’s something to be discovered by experimenting with my own routines. The way I currently do things is undoubtedly not great, so I don’t think it will be hard to find a much better way through the day.

Follow the experiment, or join me, on my public experiment log.

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*My understanding is that the word “depletion” here is an analogy. Our bodies don’t run out of dopamine; our dopamine receptors become desensitized. The “juice” is not dopamine exactly, but dopamine sensitivity.