The Dopamine Ladder
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Model: scribe_v2 | Transcribed: 2026-10-10T18:20:57.195852+00:00
Machine transcript — uncorrected. Speaker labels are local to this recording and do not identify people.

[00:00:00.100] Speaker 1: [gentle serene music] This is Seeking Minima. So I'd like to talk about a concept that I call the dopamine ladder, and I have used this concept to dramatically improve my life and catch myself before engaging in some really destructive behavior. So here's how it works. Imagine a ladder, right? And every rung on this ladder represents a level

[00:00:35.160] Speaker 1: of stimulation. Okay? So at the highest level of the ladder, you're gonna have activities that are incredibly stimulating, and at the lowest rung, you're gonna have very low-stimulating activities. So here, let's run through some examples. So at the very top, you're gonna have something like drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll. Ideally, all three at the same time, right? Right down from that, I don't know, roller coasters with supermodels. Right? You can walk down from here. Below that, I don't know, TikTok. [laughs] Somewhere beneath that,

[00:01:10.360] Speaker 1: um, you have other things. By the way, by, by I mean stimulating, I mean dopamine-stimulating, so not necessarily sensory-stimulating. Right? So the prospect of a winner- winning lottery ticket is incredibly dopamine-stimulating, but it's just a piece of paper, right? It's not sensory-stimulating. So that's what I mean. Dopamine is the craving chemical, essentially. It has a lot of purposes in your body, and I'm not gonna pretend to know everything about it or go into great detail. But the purpose is it's the chemical that makes you want things. It's the ma- it's the chemical that makes you want to do things.

[00:01:46.140] Speaker 1: Specifically, it's also the chemical that makes you crave things. So this wanting is not always good. Craving, in this case, I'm gonna say is wanting something addictive or not being able to stop yourself from wanting, even when it's self-destructive. Okay. So a little farther down the ladder, written down a couple here, we've got chatting online, you know, maybe cheap, vapid text chat. Then we have web browsing, TV shows, maybe trashy TV, and then, I don't know, something less trashy. Game of

[00:02:21.040] Speaker 1: Thrones, right? It makes you pay attention. And then you've got really artsy TV. We've got movies. Then beneath that, we've got podcasts. Then beneath, on a rung beneath that, we have passion work. On a rung beneath that, we have fiction audiobooks, nonfiction audiobooks, really important fiction audiobooks that you know you should be listening to, but, eh, you can't quite bring yourself to do. Beneath that, you got a physical paper book. Maybe we got the Kindle right above that. You can kinda see where this is going. So you've got a big spectrum. Super stimulating at the top,

[00:02:56.180] Speaker 1: really low stimulation at the bottom. I have found that human beings will rise to the highest permissible rung of the dopamine stimulation ladder all on their own. Now, those of us with ADHD [laughs] will tend to rise higher, faster, um, and that is a, that is a separate conversation. But this is a problem that all of humanity has. Now, what stops you from getting to the simultaneous drug, sex, and rock 'n' roll ladder is perceived

[00:03:31.080] Speaker 1: penalty, right? You can't do that very long before you're dead, [laughs] a- as evidenced by lots of musicians. So there's a negative incentive not to go higher, but that's often not enough. So let's go ahead and remove the things that are obviously either unattainable or completely unsustainable, or we're just not willing to do them for some other moral, ethical, or it feels bad reason. All right, so now you're kind of, like, a couple rungs down. We tend to rise to the highest

[00:04:05.640] Speaker 1: permissible rung of the dopamine ladder. By default, this is what we do as a species. This is just how we work. I'll go into a little bit more why in a second now, but just take me at my word for now. So what does that mean? It means, left to our own devices, we will rise to the TikTok rung, and we will do TikTok for as long as it is stimulating dopamine. And then when it's not, or we just can't take it anymore because it's hurting us in

[00:04:40.480] Speaker 1: some way, then we'll move on to either something on the same rung if we can, or if we have to, something a little bit lower. Okay. Why does this matter? Who cares? Here's why it matters. The way dopamine works, and by the way, Andrew Huberman has a fantastic dopamine episode. Most people have watched it who care about the topic. If you haven't, I highly recommend it. The podcast is Huberman Labs. That's, I don't know, rung three or four on the dope. When you do something that's really

[00:05:15.520] Speaker 1: highly stimulating, what happens is your dopamine spikes, and then it goes down. Way down. In fact, below your average, below your baseline. Remember, this is the chemical that makes you want to do things, makes you feel motivated. When it dips below the baseline, you feel like trash. You will feel depressed, completely unmotivated. Um, it just feels bad. A lot of things start going wrong. And what you will want is another hit to get you back up because you feel bad. You will literally have to stimulate

[00:05:50.320] Speaker 1: yourself from the outside in. You can't really make enough of it on your own. You have to go do things in the world. You have to, to push the button. Your brain can't push the button itself. It has to have some external stimuli push the button for you. It has to have TikTok. It has to have a text message notification. Or, you know, ideally, it has something on the lower part of the, the ladder. So when you partake of things that are very highly stimulating of dopamine, you crash your dopamine well below the baseline, baseline. The more you

[00:06:24.850] Speaker 1: whipsaw back and forth, the lower your average baseline dopamine gets. It gets lower and lower and lower and lower till you're just sort of bouncing off rock bottom here. There's a lot of people stuck in that, just sort of smacking off the rock bottom over and over again. TikTok, depression. TikTok, depression. [laughs] I gotta go to work. I guess I'll go to work. What's interesting is the moment you remove the

[00:06:59.790] Speaker 1: highest rung of the ladder, what happens is ... Say you remove TikTok from your phone. "I'm done with this crap. I'm not doing it anymore." What happens is trash TV is now suddenly very appealing. [laughs] "I guess I will watch this reality TV show. I just didn't have the motivation to watch it before, but now I will." Until you remove that rung. [laughs] You move one lower, right? I don't know, it's Game of Thrones, right? Cool. Finally. I'll go watch Mad

[00:07:34.750] Speaker 1: Men. Something like it, right? I don't know. I'll watch Breaking, Breaking Bad. Until you remove that rung of the ladder. "Well, fine. I guess, I don't know, I'll go listen to a funny podcast." If you just keep taking away the rungs of the ladder, you cannot climb any higher. This is by self-restraint, essentially, for those of you who have it. And for those of us who don't, we have lots of other tricks that I will not go into in this episode. Suffice to say, if you are not allowed, for some reason, it's not permissible to climb higher on the

[00:08:09.490] Speaker 1: dopamine ladder, the highest rung becomes very appealing to you. This principle is true no matter how low the highest rung is. That is why this is a fascinating tool and concept. So if you remove all the rungs above passion work, audiobook, thoughtful podcast, reading a physical book, doing my job, suddenly those things become incredibly pleasurable and very desirable. Because

[00:08:44.390] Speaker 1: before, when TikTok was available way up here, you could not even dream of doing those things until the penalty for not doing them was so high that, "Fine, I guess I'll do my job." That's how that happens. When you have things lower on the dopamine ladder, they don't spike your dopamine very much. Whoop, whoop. It's very sustainable. It doesn't harm your baseline dopamine. In fact, that level of stability tends to make your baseline dopamine go up or recover to a healthy amount,

[00:09:19.850] Speaker 1: to the point where you're just kinda motivated and happy and chill and good, like, basically all the time. So when you start taking those rungs out of the top, you can't climb any higher. You never spike your dopamine, so you never crash, so you're never totally exhausted. Your baseline dopamine's pretty much always good. You're never bouncing off rock bottom. You have a very chill, happy existence. But this isn't happen- this doesn't happen by default. Now, a lot of people have enough

[00:09:54.470] Speaker 1: self-control to be able to do this, where they can have TikTok on their phone and not completely fall apart. Many of us cannot do that. So for those of us who can't, that's today's lesson. This worked really well for me. I just remove all the top rungs of the ladder. Not only, I remove the middle rungs of the ladder. I don't even, like, listen to podcasts except on weekends. I have rules for everything, and it seems insane from the outside, but this is why. Because my highest

[00:10:29.390] Speaker 1: rung is so low, it's so low that the thought of practicing violin actually sounds kind of fun. Reading a book about the history of humanity or agrarian societies, oh, okay, I could do that. I never would have dreamed of doing those things before I removed the other rungs. Because if they were there, I would be chatting online. I would be watching a TV show. I would watch, I would just do vapid web browsing. Sure, I'll use social media. Until you get to drugs, sex, and rock and roll, and it's all over. Because that's the kind of

[00:11:04.210] Speaker 1: brain I have, and a lot of other people are like this sometimes, even if they're not like it all the time. Think about this principle the next time you find yourself just feeling, like, trash, unmotivated. Start removing rungs from the dopamine ladder. You know what the higher rungs are. Here's how you know. If you're thinking, "Ugh, I really don't wanna do exercise, cooking, chores, read that book, do that homework. I really don't wanna do those things," that's because you have

[00:11:39.250] Speaker 1: too many rungs above it. Just start knocking them out. How do you know what the higher rungs are? It's what you want to do instead. [laughs] Pretty much. And, uh, yeah, that's basically it. Whatever it is you want to do instead of the thing you wish you could do, that is a higher rung on the dopamine ladder. Just remove it, and keep removing them until, "Well, dang, this homework is actually pretty interesting. That book was pretty cool. I'm glad I read that." It works for me. It works for my kids. I see this every time with them.

[00:12:14.250] Speaker 1: They will If video games are available, they'll play video games. If video game time is up, they will watch TV, like vapid TV shows. If they're not allowed to watch vapid TV shows, they'll watch longer, more thoughtful TV shows. If those are removed, they will watch movies, the kinds of movies they've seen before that are super familiar because they spike that dopamine. If I remove the Minions and more movies and I force them to watch something with a long plot line and characters that actually

[00:12:49.018] Speaker 1: talk, they'll watch that. If I remove all electronics, suddenly playing with toys inside seems like fun. If I say, you can't play inside. I'm not going to play with you. You've been inside for too long. Get out of here. Suddenly, playing outside seems like a lot of fun. What's very interesting is whether it's them or me, we cannot even enjoy things on the lower rungs of the dopamine ladder. And that is really what you're giving up. If you

[00:13:23.678] Speaker 1: insist on keeping your higher rungs, and if you don't have a brain like me, congratulations, I guess you don't need to worry about this video. But when I have higher rungs available to me, I cannot even enjoy the lower rungs. Sitting down with a book is painful. It's just straight up misery, right? But when reading a book is the only thing available to me, it's that or stare at a wall. Reading a book is pretty interesting. What's more is I actually enjoy it again.

[00:13:59.078] Speaker 1: And not only is it healthier for me, but I like being able to enjoy reading a book. I like being able to practice the violin without it being painful to start, painful during, watching the clock. When can I be done? I just want to enjoy it. And I have found that removing all the rungs above where I want to spend my time to be one of the most effective methods of controlling my own motivation and happiness. I hope it works for you.