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Instant vs Delayed: The Dopamine Cycle
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…
