The Dopamine Dilemma

How video games, social media, alcohol, porn and overstimulation hijack your motivation — and how you can rewire your brain to get it back.

In writing about my self-diagnostic discovery of Inattentive ADHD, at some point it dawned on me:

What if constant stimulation and intense novelty-seeking mimic the effects of Inattentive ADHD, and that it is infact not congenital at all?

I discovered the concept of low dopamine tone — and with it, a new understanding of everything from my productivity struggles to my addictions. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a personality flaw. It was something neurochemical. Understanding the system gave me something I could work with.

🎮 Quitting Games, Reclaiming Reward

Video games were my primary addiction for years. Not just a hobby — a full-blown loop I lived in. And now that I’ve quit them completely, I can see it for what it was:

A perfectly engineered dopamine machine.

Games provide:

• Constant novelty

• Instant feedback and rewards

• A sense of control and mastery

• Social interaction and validation

Your brain loves that — a little too much. The result is a kind of dopamine flooding that trains your reward system to expect constant stimulation. Over time, it pushes your reward threshold higher, meaning real-world tasks — reading, work, conversations — feel dull and effortful by comparison.

Quitting games doesn’t just free up time — it frees up dopamine.

And that matters more than I ever realized.

🍷 Goodbye Alcohol, Hello Executive Function

I’ve also quit alcohol. What started as a social relaxant became a numbing tool — and a costly one.

Alcohol disrupts:

• Dopamine balance (initial high → long-term crash)

• GABA and glutamate signaling (the system that manages calm vs stimulation)

• Prefrontal cortex function — the part of the brain responsible for planning, restraint, and follow-through

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Since quitting, I’ve noticed:

• Sharper thinking

• More emotional regulation

• Increased motivation

• Better sleep (which restores dopamine receptors overnight)

In short: quitting alcohol has helped me reclaim executive function, which is everything when it comes to getting things done.

🧠 Was It ADHD… or Just Dopamine Fatigue?

This part really made me stop and think: Was my inability to focus ever really “ADHD”? Or was it just years of dopamine overstimulation from gaming and the internet?

Because here’s the thing — the symptoms of a dopamine-desensitized brain look exactly like inattentive ADHD:

• Chronic procrastination

• Inability to initiate tasks

• Mental fog

• Low motivation for anything without immediate payoff

• Restlessness, but no direction

🧬 Can You Recover Dopamine Sensitivity?

This was the big question I had: If my reward system has been flooded and desensitized, is there a way to bring it back?

The body loves homeostasis (equilibrium). If your internal volume is too loud, the brain turns it down. If you drink lots of caffeine, you become densitized to it - you need your morning coffee just to feel normal. My worry was that by trying to increase available dopamine, I'd further desensitize the system - 1 step forward, 2 steps back.

Thankfully, there are things you can do — but only if you stop trying to “hack” dopamine with constant stimulation, and instead build tone and sensitivity gradually, like a muscle.

Here’s what I’ve found helpful:

✅ Things that Support Dopamine Sensitivity:

• Daily exercise

• Cold exposure

• Digital minimalism

• Sleep discipline

• Protein-rich meals (tyrosine = dopamine precursor)

• Time away from screens

• Structured work and effort-reward loops

• Supplements like citicoline, omega-3s, magnesium, and L-theanine

❌ Things that Sabotage It:

• Doomscrolling

• TikTok/short-form content

• Constant multitasking

• Overuse of caffeine or nicotine

• No sleep structure

• Low effort, high reward stimulation

📵 Digital Minimalism: How I’m Reducing Background Noise

One small but powerful shift: I removed all the red notification dots from my phone.No badges. No little dopamine pings drawing me in. Just clean silence.

I also:

• Deleted addictive apps

• Use “Do Not Disturb” for most of the day

• Have a “no phone before coffee” rule

• Replaced evening screen time with books, music, or walks

This helps me re-train my brain to find novelty in slower things — not just the algorithm’s slot machine.

🧠 The Dopamine Reset Routine

If you're trying to recover from overstimulation — whether it’s games, alcohol, TikTok, or just years of mental clutter — I’ve built a simple daily routine that’s helping me rebuild clarity, drive, and focus.

→ Click here for the printable version of the routine. (I can generate this PDF for you if you’d like)

It’s not perfect. But I’ve gone from hours lost in distraction to long, focused work sessions. I’ve felt bursts of clarity I haven’t had in years. And most importantly — I feel like my brain belongs to me again.

✍️ Final Thought

If you’ve been living in a fog… if you’ve been calling yourself lazy or broken or addicted — maybe it’s not about willpower.

Maybe it’s just dopamine.

And maybe you can get it back.