I think it’s very different from the way I usually see it referred to
I’ll bet you’ve heard of dopamine (frequently called the “feel good” hormone). It’s mentioned all the time, in anything to do with happiness. So much so that, at first, and for a long time, I got the impression that the two were almost synonymous. Wrong. And it bothers me that that association (happiness = dopamine) continues. Hence this short blog post, to get the subject out of my system. And I’m simply an amateur interested in the subject, and I know nothing about it in any professional capacity. That said, here’s what my reading tells me.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical messenger in the brain. Is it produced when we’re happy? Yes it is. But it’s not what actually gives us those strong feelings of euphoria. Those are endorphins, a form of body-produced (and non-addictive) opioids. Dopamine is also produced, and rather than generating feelings of pleasure, it comes before the pleasure, driving the anticipation of that pleasure.
But the opioids are short-lived. The dopamine stays longer, and while it’s not addictive in itself, it drives us to want to repeat the pleasure-giving activity. So it’s a driving force, a motivator: do it again, do it again. In some of us, some of the time, it leads to addiction.
The way I think about it, I see dopamine more as the input chemical, and opioids as the outputs. I think of dopamine as being produced after pleasure as a reminder of that pleasure, hence the driving force to reproduce it.
Of course, inevitably (this is the brain we’re talking about), everything is far more complicated than that. In addition to dopamine and endorphins, there are also seratonin (a mood stabilizer) and oxytocin (generating social, even love, connections with others) – the four “happy hormones,” as they’re often collectively called.
But I don’t think of dopamine as the “makes me feel good” hormone. I think of it as the “drives me to make me want to feel good” hormone.
(As you can guess, I’ve been into this stuff ever since understanding that happiness is typically highest in our later years, when we coincidentally happen to be retired: hence, in my mind, some connection between retirement and dopamine.)
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I have written about retirement planning before and some of that material also relates to topics or issues that are being discussed here. Where relevant I draw on material from three sources: The Retirement Plan Solution (co-authored with Bob Collie and Matt Smith, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009), my foreword to Someday Rich (by Timothy Noonan and Matt Smith, also published by Wiley, 2012), and my occasional column The Art of Investment in the FT Money supplement of The Financial Times, published in the UK. I am grateful to the other authors and to The Financial Times for permission to use the material here.