Dopamine

In the previous newsletter, we discovered a new awareness. I talked about our continual search for magic and life to get something outside of ourselves. This something eventually leads us to overconsumption. For some reason, we are so convinced that we need something outside of ourselves to make us happy inside of ourselves.

 But what is causing this? What is the reason that we keep consuming, we keep buying, often even with the result of material rotting away on our shelves. What is the reason that we keep buying all this new stuff and that we keep falling for these tricks again and again?

 There are two main reasons for my option:

1. Dopamine

2. Insecurity

 And of course, if there are reasons that lead our behaviors then there will also be fixes to that behavior. That fix is a little something called Mastery.

In this newsletter, we will be primarily looking at dopamine. In the following one, we will be looking at insecurity and then finally we will be looking at Mastery, a truly fascinating subject.

What is dopamine?

 Dopamine is a hormone and a type of neurotransmitter that is made within your brain. It is made within all of our brains and how lucky we are for that indeed, otherwise we wouldn’t be undertaking much action at all.

 Dopamine is also known as the pleasure-seeking hormone. This means that it gets created as we are seeking pleasure, but it is also created as a reward for doing a pleasurable activity.

 Dopamine feels good, it makes you feel high. The high that they often describe when taking a drug, when smoking a cigarette, or after some good sex is because of an elevated dopamine level within the human body.

 I mentioned that dopamine is a pleasure-seeking hormone, now why is this important?

Understanding that it gets created when we seek pleasure, or rather when we do something that at the end of the road will have a reward for us will help us understand the cause of our problem.

 We can get as much dopamine from anticipating certain activities as we can get from the activity itself. For example, when we have sex our dopamine will increase anything from 50% to 100%, that is a huge spike in dopamine! But while seeking sex our dopamine can increase up to 50%. This spike in dopamine is caused by the anticipation of the future action, and so our brain will make dopamine to motivate us.

The dopamine balance

In her book The Dopamine Nation (highly recommended). Anna Lembke describes that dopamine will work as a type of balance (see the picture below).

We can imagine it as a balance that we first fill up with things that will give us pleasure, such as chocolate, social media, gaming, or in our case shopping for magic products and hunting for new secrets and miracles.

 The balance will only remain on the pleasure side for a while, but it wants to be in balance. So before you know it the “pain gremlins” will start climbing on the balance and they will try to balance it out. Eventually, our sense of pleasure disappears and the balance starts to tip towards the pain side of the balance, where it will remain for a while.

The best way to make the balance go back into balance is to not engage in high dopamine rewarded behaviors, to let the pain run out, sit with it, and eventually we will be back in balance and able to enjoy life.

 Usually, these shifts in pain and pleasure are fairly small. But they do become noticeable when we’re overconsuming a behavior. More pleasure will mean a bigger crash into the pain side.

 Of course, as humans we don’t like to be in pain, so we will try any behavior possible to get us out of the pain side of the balance and back onto the pleasure side. Ironically enough this “quick way” of doing things will only leave us on the pleasure side for so long and eventually, we will need even more gremlins to outweigh the even higher spike in pleasure that we just created. This cycle of behavior can be considered an addiction once it becomes problematic. But this is not why we’re here today.

 Putting the two together.

Good so now we understand that dopamine helps us to seek pleasure, and we also understand the dopamine balance. Of course, both of these subjects are a bit more complex and nuanced than I’ve described them above, however, this will be the basic level of understanding that we will need for this newsletter. I do however highly recommend DR Lembke’s book.

Dopamine helps us to seek pleasure and also gets created from pleasurable activities such as eating, sex, and spending meaningful moments with loved ones. Basically, dopamine tells us that something is good for us (usually) and that we should engage in this more often. 

Dopamine is also a big motivator to do those things that are good for us. Without dopamine, we might not even do anything. Research on rats has shown that rats from whom the dopamine receptors were removed in their brain would not seek food, not even if the food was in close reach of them. When the food was placed in their mouths, they would still eat it, however, they would not go out there and seek for the food.

 Since dopamine is responsible for part of our motivation that means that it also helps us do difficult things. In the case of studying magic, it will help us after about 10 minutes of studying, when our brains start to make dopamine so that we can be more focused, enjoy studying more, and be more motivated to study in general. This is all because we tell ourselves that it’s good for us and that we know we will be happy and fulfilled with the result at the end of the tunnel. Once we’ve finally mastered a trick or a sleight there is a great reward of dopamine and satisfaction there. A feeling that can’t be described with any words.

I said earlier that dopamine usually gets created for us to do activities that are usually good for us. But, in our day and age we’ve become very good at hacking dopamine, social media companies started hacking it by giving us our rewards of likes, shares, and comments in a layered fashion. Meaning the comments won’t all come in at once. This means that we will never know what waits for us when we open the app, and usually because of this when we open the app there will be a spike of dopamine once we see other people their appreciation of us.

I assume that this creates dopamine because, within groups of people, we would want to reward ourselves with dopamine when we’re engaging in behavior that builds connection.

All of this means that we get quite some dopamine while scrolling on social media, something that will then tip our scale towards the pleasure side of things and we will only need more dopamine on the pleasure side to not feel the pain. Of course, this is only a momentary fix. 

The application.

Now that we have all the technical stuff out of the way we can start focusing on the application. Some of you might have already connected the dots on what this has to do with the magic market and others might not. It's all alright.

 We all started in magic for different reasons, we have different stories, but, one thing that we all have in common is that we can remember how good those first moments were when we finally learned some new magic. That great thirst to keep learning more and those great moments when we finally got to know secrets and methods that seemed impossible to all of us for ages. This feeling was the best, we got to learn so many new things, and of course, many of these concepts were new to us. We didn’t even have similar concepts, because we simply didn’t know anything.

 Then later those secrets started to be harder and harder to find. We realize that many principles are neighboring each other, or are even being combined to create beautiful illusions.

With it being harder and harder to be fooled, it also became harder to get dopamine from learning secrets, there are simply fewer secrets that we don’t know about.

And so we really like to see it when a magician has an effect that we can’t figure out, that completely fools us. In some way, we want to be fooled. But the only thing that we want more than being fooled is to be fooled and then be told the secret so that we can have another dopamine hit. 

Many of us are just buying magic for the secret. To find out the workings behind a trick only satisfies the need to know. Often we don’t even buy the trick to learn from it or to later apply the principle to different projects that we’re working on (if we’re working on any projects at all). 

Now that is one side of the story, buying magic because we need to know how something works.

 The other side of the story is with the magician who wants to be a better magician but doesn’t really know how. What’s even more, they’d prefer to be the best magician in the world without ever working for it. They’d like to buy a trick that’s easy to master and fools the heck out of everyone that it’s shown to. A war on mastery, or as I’ve said earlier, a war on magic.

This is one of the reasons why we keep seeing tricks that are easier and easier. “self-working, no skill required, anyone can do it”. Is that really what you want to be known for? The fact that the only difference between you and your audience is that you spend the 50 euros to buy the secret?

And then there is the group who genuinely wants to study magic and they believe that this next book or download will teach them all the lessons on how to be great. That it will elevate their magic to the next level just by simply watching it.

This fantasy of what you can be and how people are going to react to you (social appreciation) can be a great factor for dopamine. And so when you’re feeling a bit burned out from drinking the night before (high levels of dopamine) or when you’ve been scrolling social media for a while (high levels of dopamine) you decide that you don’t want to be in pain and that you want to better yourself. You go to your magic shop's website and you see the new product pass by that will teach you all the lessons that you need to know. A new revolutionary secret that will bring you to the next level.

This realization of “this will make me better” then gives you plenty of motivation to buy the actual product and then once you’ve bought it you will be high in dopamine. Of course, at that moment you have no time to watch the product and so you delay that a day, or a few hours. Only to later discover that the product doesn’t give you as much excitement and dopamine as you expected and so you go on savaging for another project to fulfill that dopamine high.

There is nothing wrong with buying magic to enjoy it, or with buying magic at all. I recently bought the new reprint of the Johnny Thompson books and they are some of the best investments I ever made. The books are gorgeous and the material is detailed and amazing. I can see why so many loved Johnny and his approach to magic.

But the thing that we have to be careful about is that we’re buying something because we really want it. Not because we think that we need it. That period when we need it is very small. It’s so small that it might not even last the whole day. That feeling is fabricated anyway.

So next time that you’re going to buy a magic product honestly ask yourself if you need it, and why you’re buying it. If the answer is that it will make you a better magician or that it will revolutionize your magic, then ask yourself if that’s true.

“yeah but Vanishing Inc. says that it’s a revolutionary principle”, I doubt that. In the magic market, we are finding a new revolutionary principle that going to put magic on its head every single day. How revolutionary is it really? The double lift was revolutionary. The one-ahead principle was revolutionary. But, these are not things that came out weeks after each other for years and years. Things are often not as revolutionary as we really think. We are paying not only with our money but also with our time and attention. We can do wonderful things, only if we are conscious of our resources and we set our minds to it. 

In the next letter, we will be looking at strategies to build self-awareness and truly improve our magic. Yes, it will take work, but at the same time, it will be work well spent.

-Rico

This newsletter is part of our Merry Month of Meditations series, bringing to you 10 newsletters in December in total!

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The schedule for the upcoming letters looks as follows: