> Stay up late because I’m wired on caffeine and dopamine from scrolling.
I wish people didn't overuse certain terms. Dopamine has a half life of 2 minutes in the body. It can't possibly keep you up at night.
It's just the caffeine, which in turn has a half-life of several hours. Also below a certain level it's eliminated approximately exponentially, so there's a long tail of residual caffeine.
> Dopamine has a half life of 2 minutes in the body.
May be true.
But doing "rewarding" work encourages your body to emit more dopamine. Some people call it "the flow", others "hyperfocus", but it is a constant stream of dopamine that keeps you doing what you currently do. And you can interfere with the emittance and absorbtion by using caffeine.
Dopamine is more like a particular type of a transistor in a large semiconductor. What this type of a transistor does heavily depends on the area of the circuit. And it's never the only thing that's responsible for an entire high level feature, not by a mile. There are some common correlations, but that's about it.
I have never understood why people feel the need to use terms like "dopamine" in very pop culture and highly unscientific way, instead of just describing the state that they are talking about.
This.
The other day someone told me that they "sense a high concentration of acetylcholine" in me. Thank you, I guess?
Personally, I blame Jordan Peterson. it's not that he used those terms incorrectly (he didn't). It's that the general public interpreted them in a way that went on to live a life of its own.
> It’s just the caffeine
Fair enough if the use of “dopamine” is imprecise, but excessive screen time / doomscrolling / shitposting is definitely enough to wire you awake on its own, without caffeine.
> Dopamine has a half life of 2 minutes in the body.
That's for IV dopamine, used in extreme circumstances. Natural dopamine lasts shorter than that!