How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind

What's inside

Struggling with modern love? Discover advice from a relationship therapist for fresh insights and practical tips for transforming your love life.

Stuck on step one

Have you ever felt strongly about your dreams, but your enthusiasm evaporated when it came to taking action? The gap between wanting and doing can feel too wide to leap, but thankfully, a power player in our brains can help us.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter responsible for reward anticipation. It makes you look forward to good things like chocolate or a kiss, and then your brain stores pleasant memories and motivates you to act this way again.

But what if dopamine — your brain’s personal cheerleader — starts juggling too many pom-poms at once? Procrastination and fuzzy focus sneak in if you get lost in the need for immediate entertainment and distractions. And when you perform fewer tasks, you might start thinking less of yourself. Confidence wanes while apathy and despair enter the picture, and before you know it, you end up sidetracked, fussing over the little things and pushing your big dreams to the sidelines.

Sounds familiar? It's a sign you might benefit from a dopamine detox.

A dopamine detox is a period of abstaining from the quick-fix, high-reward behaviors (like incessant smartphone use) that flood our brains with dopamine. The idea is to make us appreciate more meaningful pleasures in life.

Undergoing a dopamine detox also creates time for reflection. When you declutter your mind, you can take a better look inside. That’s a great way to get closer to your wishes and stay on the right path.

Write down your fears and try to understand what they mean.

Imagine you can create order and peace in your current emotional state. Your level of emotional well-being is invisible, but it’s a mighty bubble that either fills you with energy or weighs you down. Stick around to discover the scientific magic a dopamine detox uses to create a more positive emotional bubble.

Hacking happiness

Your brain is like a city filled with buildings called neurons. These buildings must communicate for you to move, feel, and think. They send messages to each other with chemical substances known as neurotransmitters, which then travel from neuron to neuron, making you feel, know, or do something. Dopamine is one of these neurotransmitters.

Dopamine is not solely responsible for pleasure; its release in response to an event does not necessarily mean it is enjoyable. On the contrary, feeling empty immediately after the reward is common.

Rediscover offline joys, like nature walks, journaling, and art.

Humans seek the stimulation of dopamine through engaging with the world and mistakenly think that this arousal of senses will lead to fulfillment. Remember that day you spent lying in bed, watching Netflix with chocolate crumbs all over the blanket? At times like this, you feel like the world stops, and you need a rest from constantly performing. But how did you feel afterward?

Find balanced, healthy ways to achieve happiness.

Sometimes, being human is tough; you want to hit pause and hide under a warm blanket. We all know these moments, and let’s give them a round of applause for keeping us alive and rested. But constantly escaping reality due to fleeting satisfactions will not fulfill you. It will not make you feel love, connection, belonging, or a sense of purpose. So, take care of yourself by being attentive to your deeper aspirations and desires.

What satisfies you? How does it make you feel? You lose control and focus by pursuing these things for a quick dopamine release. Then, you trade your dreams or time with your loved ones for time-wasting activities like social media. It's a slippery slope of distraction.

Dopamine is an essential element in your evolutionary backpack — whenever you do something beneficial for your survival, it pushes you to repeat it. But society has created new ways to trigger dopamine, and not all of them contribute to our well-being. So, remind all these new dopamine-stimulating inventions who is in command! Don’t miss out on embodying what you value most.

Your life is what you focus on

There are dopamine traps you can fall into by seeking constant stimulation. The more you encourage the release of dopamine, the more you crave it again, which can become an addiction. You can get in a loop of constant shopping, Netflix, sex, work, or alcohol, leading to lost focus, low productivity, and no fulfillment. There are many ways to seek short-term rewards or gratification; it’s no surprise they may trick your brain.

Your focus is so valuable that major corporations want it. Amazon, Facebook, and YouTube strive to steal your attention with sophisticated algorithms. You watch one video, and the app recommends another, trying to keep you there as long as possible. But these algorithms don’t have your best interests in mind; they aim to show you advertisements and make you buy things. Tons of notifications scream at you to stop whatever you are doing and give your time to them. That’s how the dopamine neurotransmitters in your brain are hijacked and manipulated.

Adjusting your focus to concentrate on the right things isn’t easy. Yet, when you act on the knowledge you’ll discover in this summary, you’ll be more powerful than those billion-dollar companies.

Whenever a notification pops up, you expect a like or a message from a friend. You check your emails or YouTube, hoping to find something exciting or fun. And then comes overstimulation and loss of focus.

Limit notifications to minimize constant digital interruptions.

Overstimulation happens when you excessively engage in activities that create bursts of pleasure, anticipation, and reward. The feelings you get from it are incredibly fleeting and short-term, and pursuing goals that give you long-term fulfillment doesn’t feel like fun. Why would you strain yourself for a real reward when the world offers you a bonus at this exact second? The problem with short-term rewards is that they leave you as quickly as sand through your fingers. And then you feel empty. Instead, you can dedicate time and energy to building a sandcastle you value so much that you want to nourish it over the long term.