The Dopamine Myth: It Doesn’t Make You Happy
Why your brain’s most misunderstood molecule is about motivation, not pleasure.
If you’ve spent any time online, you’ve probably heard this before: Dopamine is your brain’s pleasure molecule. It’s everywhere. Instagram influencers cite it as the reason we feel pleasure when we eat chocolate. Pop-psychology books link it to happiness, and even major news outlets perpetuate the idea that dopamine equals joy. For example, a Harvard Health article headlined dopamine as "The Pathway to Pleasure." Another article from Psychology Today states that “The brain releases [dopamine] when we eat food that we crave or while we have sex, contributing to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.”
There is solid research that shows that dopamine is released when we crave and even eat food, but just because dopamine fires during ingestion, that doesn’t mean that it is the source of pleasure (correlation does not equal causation). And the closest that I’ve seen to a neuroimaging study of sex was one in which couples had intercourse inside an MRI scanner to visualize the anatomy of coitus. The kicker: the male had to take Viagra to keep an erection long enough for the researchers to achieve clear images. That doesn’t exactly sound like pleasure to me.
Thanks to how the internet works (popularity trumps truth), these ideas get picked up, passed around, and cemented in the collective psyche.
So what is the real story with dopamine?
Dopamine Fires When Things Are Unexpected
The earliest clues that dopamine wasn’t simply about pleasure came from the work of Wolfram Schultz and colleagues in the 1990s. In a now-famous set of experiments with monkeys, his crew showed that dopamine neurons in the brain didn’t just fire when the monkeys got juice (a treat they liked). Instead, dopamine activity spiked when the juice was unexpected. If the juice came out of nowhere, boom: dopamine. If it came as expected, as in, the primates could predict when they would get juiced, there was no dopamine spike at the moment of reward. Instead, the spike had moved—back in time so to speak—to the cue that predicted the juice.
Ok, so what does this mean?
Dopamine isn’t about pleasure. It’s about learning. It’s the brain’s way of saying: “Hey, pay attention! Something surprising just happened. This might be important for survival.” But this doesn’t explain the whole story when it comes to dopamine firing before we get something that we want. Here, the story gets even juicier...
From Surprise to Anticipation
Over time, as the brain learns the pattern that X predicts Y, dopamine starts firing at the cue/trigger (say, the bell that rings before juice), not the reward itself. This shift marks a key feature of dopamine’s role: it transitions from coding surprise to coding expectation. It becomes a predictive signal. Think of it as a motivator that gets us ready to act.
In other words, dopamine isn't about the joy of the juice. It’s about the drive to get the juice.
Extreme examples: When do people feel incredibly driven to do certain behaviors, even in the absence of pleasure? Addiction. Compulsive overeating. Or scrolling through social media long after it stops feeling fun.
Craving ≠ Pleasure
If dopamine were just about pleasure, we’d expect it to fire when we’re enjoying something. But it doesn’t. Instead, dopamine ramps up when we’re wanting something. This “wanting” is what scientists like Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson call incentive salience: a motivational magnetism that makes certain cues compelling. But there’s a reason for this.
Yes, this is where craving comes in.
If we didn’t crave things, we wouldn’t survive. We wouldn’t search for food, seek shelter, pursue social connection, or reproduce. Dopamine evolved to help us do, not to make us feel good. It's tuned not to pleasure per se (though pleasure is part of the learning process), but instead to whatever helps us survive. Otherwise, our caveperson ancestors would simply sit in their cave, reminiscing about the last meal they had as they slowly starved to death (which ironically would be their last meal).
Evolution’s Model of Efficiency
The beauty of dopamine lies in its efficiency. Think of it as our brain’s two-trick pony: one molecule that is used for both learning and drive. First, it helps us notice and learn patterns in our environment (“That bush had berries last time”), and then it propels us to act when the time is right (“I'm hungry. I should go check that bush again”).
Why use a one-for-two molecule? The brain doesn’t have unlimited space or resources. So, it has evolved to make the most of what it has, often reusing the same neurotransmitters like dopamine for multiple, related tasks. This elegant economy means that dopamine can serve as both a teacher (helping us learn what’s important) and a driver (motivating us to act on that information). Giddyup.
This system was incredibly adaptive in environments of scarcity. But in today’s world of abundance, it can backfire. Our brains are wired to crave, even if the “reward” is junk food, porn, or another dopamine-triggering behavior.
Clinical Implications: Separating Drive from Reward
In my clinical work, one of the first things I do is help people unlearn the dopamine pleasure myth. Believing that dopamine is about pleasure sets people up to chase the wrong thing, for example, thinking that if they can just get the next hit of whatever, they’ll feel good. Remember, dopamine isn’t delivering happiness. It’s delivering urge. Think hedonic treadmill here.
Helping my patients learn to differentiate drive from satisfaction is a game-changer. Once they can see that craving is not the same as pleasure, they begin to make different choices. They become less reactive. More in control of their behaviors.
Here are a couple of examples from my clinic and lab:
Smoking
I've had numerous patients fear quitting smoking because they are worried that they will lose the associated joy. I start by exploring with them what exactly the joy is that they're looking for, and more often than not, they talk about getting a break (eg. a smoke break at work). When we unpack it a bit more, they begin to see that getting a break (pleasure) is different than feeding the want of nicotine withdrawal (drive). This gives them a huge opening to still find that pleasure of taking a break, without feeding the cycle of nicotine addiction.
Eating
As I wrote about in The Hunger Habit, when I started working with people who have binge eating disorder (BED), I was shocked to discover that nearly all of them could not differentiate between homeostatic hunger (a fancy scientific term for true, physiological hunger) and hedonic hunger (another fancy scientific term that came into existence a couple of decades ago out of a need to describe the urge to eat that was driven by emotions rather than actual hunger). My lab created a tool that my patients could use to learn to tell the difference between when they were actually hungry vs. having an urge to eat because they were bored, sad, angry, lonely, happy or any other host of emotions that they had learned to associate with eating. In a study designed and led by Dr. Ashley Mason at UCSF, we found that an app-based mindfulness training that began with developing this type of awareness, and then included tools to help people ride out hedonic hunger cravings helped them reduce craving-related eating by a whopping 40%!
This distinction—between wanting and liking, between urge and pleasure—isn’t just academic. It’s a critical tool for behavioral change. And I get a lot of pleasure bringing it into my clinic. You can play with this too. It all starts with curiosity.
A Simple Practice: Notice the Itch
So how do you start noticing the dopamine-driven moments in your own life?
Here’s a tip I often give: Look for the itchy urge—that restless feeling that says, “Do something! Eat that! Check your phone! Buy it now!” That’s dopamine talking. Not because the thing will feel good, but because your brain has previously associated it with pleasure.
In that moment, pause.
Get curious.
Ask yourself: “What do I need right now?”
Maybe it’s connection. Or rest. Or reassurance. Maybe it’s food (or maybe not). The key is not to judge, resist or fight the urge, but to investigate it. To get curious. To step back and create just enough space to see clearly. What are you looking for exactly? Two things: what a craving is driving you to get (what you want) and what your actual needs are in the moment. Needs and wants.
When we ask “what do I need?” instead of being dragged around by dopamine that is screaming at us to feed the want, we start tuning in to what actually nourishes us.
So now, whenever you hear someone call dopamine the "pleasure molecule," you can notice the irritation at internet myth’s being perpetuated and urge to correct them, and use that as a reminder to yourself: Ohh, THAT’s dopamine.
REFERENCES CITED:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/dopamine-the-pathway-to-pleasure
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dopamine
Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal BMJ 1999; 319 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.319.7225.1596
Berridge KC, Robinson TE. Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. Am Psychol. 2016 Nov;71(8):670-679. doi: 10.1037/amp0000059. PMID: 27977239; PMCID: PMC5171207.
The Hunger Habit (Judson Brewer MD PhD, Avery/Penguin Random House, 2024) https://drjud.com/the-hunger-habit/
Mason, Ashley E., et al. "Testing a mobile mindful eating intervention targeting craving-related eating: feasibility and proof of concept." Journal of behavioral medicine 41.2 (2018): 160-173. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10865-017-9884-5
https://profiles.ucsf.edu/ashley.mason
Brewer, Judson A., et al. "Can mindfulness address maladaptive eating behaviors? Why traditional diet plans fail and how new mechanistic insights may lead to novel interventions." Frontiers in psychology 9 (2018): 1418. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01418/full
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/science-behind-dopamine-function
It’s amazing how many decades we have to repeat this.
That Parthian shot. 💯 😄