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Instant vs Delayed: The Dopamine Cycle

Dominic Medford
2 min readMay 6, 2024
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Have you ever uploaded a story on Instagram and kept refreshing the page to see who has seen your story.

Spent hours working on an article to then post and spend the next few hours obsessing over the responses that you are hoping to and do receive on your work.

This cycle of creating, posting, and receiving feedback is a process that we as creators crave deeply.

It doesn’t matter if you are a teenager constantly posting Instagram stories to receive validation from friends or a world-renowned author who toils away in obscurity for years on end to write and then publish a book that will enter the zeitgeist and become part of the human lexicon in time and memorial.

These two people are not different from one another, all that separates them is their desire for dopamine at different speeds.

The sliding scale between an instant dopamine rush and a prolonged wait to receive a greater payoff of dopamine is something worth considering.

It is also clear that the volume of dopamine released depending on the effort that you put in before the result is hard to measure.

How are we objectively able to determine that the author's dopamine rush after publishing will be…

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Dominic Medford
Dominic Medford

Written by Dominic Medford

Law and Political Sciences student in Australia who dabbles in writing about his thought processes in his spare time with the hope that it can be insightful.

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Thanks for sharing this useful and informative piece of writing!