Who Is Getting Rich Off of Dopamine Discourse?

Behind the Material Girls Episode: Dopamine x Health Capitalism with Jesse Meadows

from Hannah

When Coach first shared the link for Jesse Meadows’ “Dopamine Dispatch” posts, a series within their Sluggish newsletter, I was at once excited and intimidated. Excited because there’s nothing I love more than a smart person shedding unexpected light on a cultural conversation from a perspective excluded by mainstream narratives (in this case a disability justice centred analysis of how we’re talking about neurotransmitters in general and dopamine in particular). Intimidated because I am no scientist, and my own sluggish brain often struggles to cling onto the specifics of the names for things and what they do. 

Fortunately for me – and for you, too, if you’re like me! – Jesse’s work exists in the pleasurable space of synthesis, analysis, and connection. To understand their writing on dopamine, it’s useful to know what dopamine is (or perhaps even more importantly, what it isn’t), but largely as a launching point for understanding the cultural work dopamine is doing as a signifier for all kinds of things that have very little to do with its actual function in the brain. Those things include anxieties about productivity, disability, and drug use, entangled with end stage capitalism’s mandate for endless optimization. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. What exactly is dopamine, and why is it worth listening to at least an hour and seventeen minutes of discussion about it? If your understanding of neuroscience is as foggy as mine, then maybe you’ve also encountered dopamine primarily as a shorthand for “things that make brain go brrr.” I was particularly familiar with it from my brief stint on ADHD TikTok, where it’s generally shorthand for the thing that people with ADHD don’t have enough of, hence their (our?) challenges around task initiation and social media addiction. All of this I had absorbed somewhat uncritically even though I know better, so when I first read Jesse’s work it was like that scene in a Scooby Doo episode where they pull off the monster mask and it’s just the old man who owns the amusement park. 

Here’s how Jesse describes it in the first installment of “Dopamine Dispatches”: 

“Cold showers are a popular piece of advice for getting “healthy” dopamine increases, as opposed to quick “dopamine hits” like looking at your phone, fusing the puritan's advice for moral piety with the drug war's disdain for substance use.

But this metaphor misunderstands the complexity of dopamine, which isn't a “pleasure chemical” at all — you can still feel pleasure without it. Behaviorally, the neurotransmitter has more to do with motivation and avoidance, and has even been shown to increase in situations that really don’t feel good, like losing a fight (in animals) or hearing gunshots (in veterans with PTSD).”

So dopamine isn’t actually making your brain go brrr at all; it’s more like the thing that makes your brain go “what is the cost/benefit analysis of seeking this particular reward.” And even that is a process we just barely understand. 

How hard this news hits you probably has to do with how much of a role dopamine discourse has played in your own life and self-narratives. Dopamine as a catch-all for good-brain-chemicals has come to play an overdetermined role in how we talk about mental health, neurodiversity, addiction, and work ethic. That means it has also been a prime target for influencers, who have taken it up and run with it all the way to the bank. If dopamine is the drug your brain feeds you when you seek out easy forms of pleasure (it isn’t), and if overusing dopamine reduces your brain’s ability to produce it over time (it probably doesn’t), then it follows that a dopamine fast would reinvigorate your brain’s ability to produce dopamine in the long run. As Jesse points out, some stimulants have been linked to dopamine receptor downregulation, but the actual “neurological effect of abstaining from activities you find pleasurable in an effort to “reset” your dopamine baseline … has not been studied with any kind of rigor. This folk wisdom hinges on equating embodied experiences to illicit drugs.” 

It’s crucial to understand how much dopamine discourse is underpinned by anti-drug discourse. Controlling your dopamine isn’t only about maximizing your productivity by optimizing your brain; it’s also about purity and asceticism and cultural anxieties about the “unnatural.” The cultural stigma against drug use and the fetishization of the “natural” that we see in a lot of wellness influencers is dangerous for all kinds of reasons. We could link it to the refusal to provide drug users with safe supply, for example, or to the stigma that makes people less likely to seek out medical support for mental health crises because we’re so convinced that we just need to bootstrap our way to a better brain (I love a cold plunge as much as the next guy, but Zoloft it is not), or the ableist logics behind the anti-vax movement. 

This link between dopamine discourse and drug stigma is what really grabbed and held onto my imagination as I did the research for our episode because it resonated so powerfully with my own complex relationship to drugs. I was raised by hippies with a deep suspicion of mainstream medicine. My mother was a herbalist and homeopathist; simple childhood ailments were more likely to be treated with natural remedies than drugs. Got a cough? Pick some sage from the garden, put it in a bowl with boiling water, put a towel over your head and breathe that good good steam. A cut? Slather it with homemade arnica balm, Polysporin be damned. When my mother was dying of cancer, she eventually refused chemotherapy and radiation therapy in favour of something called Gerson therapy. My own suspicion of medicine followed me into adulthood; it took decades for me to pursue treatment for my own repeatedly-diagnosed anxiety disorder, and I didn’t try recreational drugs until my late 30s, when I picked up a pandemic pot-smoking habit that I’ve held onto and, frankly, really enjoy. But even now I can't fully shake that little voice that says drugs – kush and Sertraline alike – are cheating and that it would be better if I didn’t need them. That says I might not need them at all if I just optimized my brain properly through some combination of herbal supplements and self discipline. 

Disability justice as a framework for understanding the world, my body, and how they interact has been a crucial part of my own conceptual toolkit for unlearning these ideas. I’m particularly drawn to the places where disability justice intersects with anticapitalism and body liberation, which is why I was so excited to come across, via one of Jesse’s recommended reading lists, the 2022 book Health Communism, written by Artie Vierkant and Beatrice Adler-Bolton, two of the hosts of the Death Panel podcast. I in turn knew about Death Panel from my dear friend Zena’s excellent newsletter, so I trusted that Vierkant and Adler-Bolton’s work would be rooted in both health research and liberatory frameworks because that is Zena’s jam. What I wasn’t expecting was the way they linked capitalism and anti-communist propaganda in the Cold War era, the selective (and often arbitrary) demarcation of some drugs as licit and some as illicit, and the expansion of the prison industrial complex during a period of heightened anti-colonial and anti-racist organizing. 

I don’t know about you, but for me a pretty good litmus test for whether an internalized belief is holding me back is to ask: is this literally propaganda invented by a state as an excuse for the mass incarceration of their most vulnerable populations? Or more simply: who is getting rich off this idea? 

We know who’s getting rich off dopamine discourses, and it’s Andrew Huberman. If like me you’re feeling ready to ruin some wellness influencers’ days, then please enjoy this image of our Dopamine episode being featured on Spotify’s “Boost Your Brain Power” shelf. 

Reading List

Adler-Bolton, Beatrice, Artie Vierkant, Phil Rocco, and Jules Gill-Peterson. Death Panel. Podcast. 2018-2024. https://www.deathpanel.net/.  

Adler-Bolton, Beatrice, and Artie Vierkant. Health Communism. London and New York: Verso Books, 2022. 

Meadows, Jesse. Sluggish. 2022-24.

Sharman, Zena. The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory and Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021. 

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