Got addictive behaviors? Try a Dopamine Diary

Interesting idea. Courtesy of:

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Quote:

If you're ready, willing, and able to keep a dopamine diary for six months you can dramatically improve your life. A few minutes a day is all it takes to learn why people waste valuable time scrambling to score the same neurotransmitter that keeps chimpanzees doing what they do. Time that you can use to make yourself happier, healthier, wealthier, and wiser. Like humans, chimpanzees obsess over, what Abraham Maslow called, deficiency needs for food, sex, safety/power, acceptance/approval/attention, and esteem/status. Maslow's deficiency needs correlate with the dopamine-induced survival behaviors that helped our predecessors survive and reproduce. Unlike chimpanzees, our forebears figured out how to score gratuitous dopamine by using drugs, gambling, religion, delusions, deceptions, and money. Money is especially popular because it can be easily converted into drugs, food, sex, power, acceptance, attention, status symbols, wagers, and other dopamine triggers. For the first time in history it's possible to outsmart a brain chemical that continues to help ‘dumb’ animals survive but turned primitive Homo sapiens into dopamine puppets. Deprogramming thousands of years of inherited, unconscious, and irrational behaviors starts with noticing, acknowledging, and questioning dopamine-induced deceptions. That's where keeping a dopamine diary comes in.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/23mH673