Notes from the model.
Short essays on dopamine, motivation, recovery, and what we're learning as people use Myo.
- Choosing a tool
What to look for in a dopamine tracker
Most apps in this category make a claim that isn't possible. Five questions that separate a real model from a streak counter with neuroscience words on it.
- Symptom
How to enjoy things again
Not a protocol and not a reset. What the reward literature actually suggests when things have gone flat — including the parts that are slow and the parts that aren't your job to fix alone.
- Mechanism
Effort is the variable nobody tracks
Dopamine turned out to sit closer to effort than to pleasure. That single relocation changes what a "good day" means — and it's why Myo never tells you to want less.
- Symptom
Everything feels boring after scrolling
That specific flatness in the hour after you put the phone down has a name and a mechanism. It's also the most useful signal your reward system gives you.
- Mechanism
What a dopamine baseline actually is
The phrase gets used constantly and defined almost never. Here's what it means if you take the reward literature seriously — and what it can't mean.
- The correction
Why the 30-day challenge fails
Not because you lack discipline. Because a fixed-length challenge encodes assumptions about the mechanism that turn out to be wrong.
- Mechanism
Your feed is a variable-ratio schedule
The most powerful reinforcement schedule known to behavioural psychology was mapped in 1957. Your phone runs it by default, and the cost isn't in how much you use it.
- Symptom
When nothing feels enjoyable anymore
The flatness is real and it has a mechanism. Here's what the literature says is probably happening — and the point at which this stops being a self-help question.
- Mechanism
Wanting and liking are different systems
You can want something intensely and enjoy it barely at all. That isn't a character flaw — it's two dissociable brain systems, and only one of them sensitizes.
- The correction
Is dopamine fasting real?
The short answer: the behaviour can help, the explanation is false, and the difference matters more than it sounds.
- Mechanism
The second process: why it stops hitting
Tolerance isn't your brain running low. It's a second, slower process getting stronger every time you repeat the first one. Solomon and Corbit worked this out in 1974.
- The correction
You can't detox dopamine. You can rebuild a baseline.
Dopamine detox is built on a chemical claim neuroscientists reject. The reward system doesn't drain and refill — it moves a setpoint. Here's the fifty-year-old science, and how we built it into a model.