This topic has been posted to death, but it worth it

 What is dopamine? It's a neurotransmitter used to reward your good behavior (IDGAF about its other uses now).

Imagine a caveman wandering around all day for food and finally hunted a beast, his body will experience a dopamine rush rewarding him happy for his hard work.

His brain also register what he just did in 'fruitful work' category so he will do this again & again.

So what you do? 

You play games, you watch porn, listen to music, drink, eat junk food ...Why? So you can get a dopamine rush that the poor caveman spend all the day working hard to get(let alone risking his life). You're stealing his hard work.

So should we care about a now-dead caveman?

No, but listen, when you did these things you instantly reward yourself for doing almost nothing (easy dopamine), so now you don’t need to work hard to get anywhere in your life. It's all here, a click away from you, why bother?!

Why ask that girl out when I can watch perfectbody girls on porn sites, or just tease some on social media.

Why invest in yourself or go to gym/ build social skills when you can dress like the world CEO in GTA

Remember the brain is not good at differentiating between real and virtual.

And that's when all started to fuck up.

We have no motivation to do right things that get you somewhere in real life, you feel down all the time, actually activities that were once interesting and engaging are now lame and dull because you are now desensitized, it's the reason why addicts crave more ‘easy dopamines’, even these become not enough to get the thrill, so they crave more intense forms of it

Can you live with only easy dopamine? Yes you can, but unless this is your role model, it’s not the best idea.

What can you do?

Don’t escape. Fix your current situation and do something now (even the slightest) on the path to what you really want to be in life, don’t go the easy short term way, always choose what benefits you in the long term.

Go a week free from all these artificial pleasures, replace them with productive activities, want to play game? read a book instead. want to go on social media? Go out and socialize instead. Try to force yourself on this for a couple of days, with no “easy dopamine” at all, I promise, your brain will reset its natural state, you become more social, confident, basically you get reward doing what you find hard and tedious now.

Try to make the boring work rewarding by any means, look, willpower is not enough, yet. At least it’s not for one whose entire life revolves around ‘EDs', you still need dopamine anyway, so let’s take studying as example, you can make it more rewarding by making flashcards, you turn them to find that your answer is right => feel rewarded, or by explaining what you just studied to friend or family, they understand it => you feel rewarded, you make a to-do list and physically check every item you finish => you get rewarded => your brain is happy. It’s just a hack to trick your brain to release that necessary chemical to make you love and continue the work. You get the idea, apply it on every aspect of your life you want to develop. After a while, your brain needs no hacks anymore, it gets used to the work.

Want to show how science proved what I said, but just trust me.