When Dopamine Becomes the Enemy (Your Thursday Three Things for September 4, 2025)
Jon Macaskill
Retired Navy SEAL Commander🔹Men Talking Mindfulness Podcast Cohost (number 3 mindfulness podcast in the world!) 🔹Keynote Speaker🔹Entrepreneur Through Acquisition 🔹 Striving to be a Better Dad and Husband!
We all want pleasure. BUT… our brains weren’t built for the flood of artificial pleasure modern life delivers.
Porn. Social media. Video games. Even food engineered for hyper-flavor. Each one is designed to give you a hit of dopamine but it’s quick, cheap, and addictive.
The cost?
We feel anxious, depressed, and restless.
We lose motivation for real challenges.
We replace intimacy with isolation.
And our baseline happiness drops lower and lower.
This isn’t a small issue… nope. It’s huge! It’s a rewiring of the human brain. And porn, in particular, has become one of the most potent dopamine traps of our time.
But… there’s good news! The brain can be rewired. It’s not easy, but with awareness, discipline, and intentional practice, you can reset your “pleasure pathways” and reclaim real joy, focus, and intimacy.
Three Takeaways on Dopamine, Porn, and Purpose
1. Porn Hijacks the Brain Like a Drug
Porn delivers dopamine spikes comparable to cocaine. The brain then downregulates, leaving you needing more stimulation for less reward. Over time, this leads to compulsion, low motivation, and even sexual dysfunction.
2. Abstinence Isn’t Enough… You Need Replacement
Quitting alone won’t work. You must replace porn with activities that build natural dopamine balance: exercise, creativity, relationships, mindfulness. Otherwise, the vacuum just pulls you back.
3. Authentic Connection Beats Artificial Stimulation
No video, no click, no fantasy will ever match the brain’s natural reward from genuine connection, intimacy, and shared purpose. The path out of addiction isn’t just discipline, it’s rediscovering what makes life meaningful.
🎧 We dove deep into this with neuroscientist Dr. Trish Leigh in our latest conversation on Men Talking Mindfulness:
🚪 Beyond the Paywall
Here are three resources to help you reset your dopamine pathways and reclaim your focus:
If you'd like to read what's beyond the paywall AND every past edition in one place, please consider subscribing here: https://frogmanmindfulness.substack.com
The Dopamine Crew | Increase dopamine = feel better
1wCrazy stuff. With baseline activity so low your brain will be drawn to all of these activities out of your control. Enter…the dopamine seat
Program Manager | Haas MBA | Naval Architect and Engineer
1wAs a dad whose kid just started kindergarten, I can say that this starts with the first day of school now. 80" TV centerpiece in the classroom. My son has watched more TV in 4 days of school than in the last year prior. And the behavioral problems switched on like a light bulb.
Co-Founder of Trillium Ferroics Labs, sales advocate for SwissVault technology
2wWay back in 1985, the National Institute of Drug Abuse discovered that humans process dopamine into morphine. The next three decades led to great scientific progress in neurobiology that grew from that single insight. It is now well established that dopamine and morphine are two halves of the human biological clock. Dopamine prepares us to awaken. Morphine prepares us for bed. Hop a jet and cross five time zones, and our bodies are out of sync with the people around us. Their internal clock tells them a different time of day than ours does. Defying that intermal clock can do much damage to the body. Hitler's blitzkrieg tactics relied on the potent stimulant Methamphetamine aka "Speed" or "Meth". Troops on meth marched halfway across Poland following tanks in 1939. They were exhausted and recovered in a few days. What neither the Nazi leader nor his generals and scientists understood, was that meth does not give the body energy. It deceives the body into feeling like it is not tired. As resources are consumed, the body grows weaker and must rest to heal itself. When the brain becomes sufficiently exhausted, dementia sets in, often accompanied by psychosis. Blitzkrieg failed on the Russian front that way.
Founder of Story Arc | Building Personal Brands That Drive Business Results | Investor & Business Psychologist |JP Morgan’s Top 200 Females in Business
2wLove this. Important reminder to be intentional about consumption. Thanks for sharing.
Keynote Speaker, Author, Educator, Podcaster, Expert in Leadership
2wThe reality for all of us. Be mindful of how you spend your time, energy, and attention...