#2 Break Your Addiction to Comfort
The pursuit of dopamine will shrink your comfort zone to the size of a microwave. Today’s pleasure-addicted world is using dopamine hits to mask their pain.
Dopamine is a medication. But a medication with more side effects than what is listed in a standard pharmaceutical commercial.s.
Dopamine hits are used to avoid unpleasant experiences. Instead of living with your own thoughts, experiencing boredom or dealing with anxiety head on, you retreat to your phone.
When’s the last time you’ve even taken a shit without looking at your phone? Now you’re playing Candy Crush with double pink eye.
Of course, this is bound to backfire. Avoiding the problem only amplifies it. It’s like allowing a homeless person to sleep outside your home because you’re afraid of saying something. And then the next thing you know he’s sleeping with your wife.
Slowly acquiescing to dopamine trains your addiction to comfort, eroding your discipline. You cede control. You can’t find the motivation to do the important tasks.
Things that are uncomfortable do not produce the same dopamine spikes, so your craving brain avoids them.
Basically, if everybody is trained to experience pleasure, after a while you can’t put up with any discomfort. But discomfort is the only way to grow. Discomfort is a call to arms. A pleasure addicted society is a mediocre one: A society who’s greatest accomplishment is their Fortnite score, instead of their 100 year Cathedrals.
What starts merely as avoidance of pain turns into full-blown addiction to comfort, trapping you in a comfort cage.
A dopamine fast is the long, shit covered crawl that will break you out of this comfort prison.