The Magnetized Man

There is something known as reward prediction error (PRE). This is one theory on how dopamine is released in the brain or “fires” in the brain. You have a baseline of dopamine firing in the brain. When you do something and you get a bigger reward than your brain expects, your brain fires more than the baseline. When you do something and get exactly what you expected, your brain fires no dopamine aka it stays at baseline. And when you get less than what you expected, your brain dips below baseline. 

This is one of the reasons why religions instruct you to acknowledge that everything good and bad comes from God — not people or events or systems. Sure, those entities can be a conduit and you can make an informed decision about whether to keep those entities in your life, but believing good feeling is coming from your job or your partner makes you start to enter a sense of fear and anxiety about losing those things…which often makes you lose them faster.

This brings us to why obsessively chasing the things that you want — to the detriment of your body and relationships — usually makes it harder to get. You’re chasing a specific outcome within a specific timeline based on no experience. You don’t get that outcome, and that signals to your brain that this isn’t worth the movement and the effort. Dopamine is about wanting, moving, and motivation. It’s not about liking and feeling good. So when your brain doesn’t get what it was expecting, it dips below baseline.

By the way, gratitude can help here. If you’re grateful for what you did accomplish, even if it’s small, there’s a greater chance that you’ll try again. Gratitude boosts serotonin and dopamine. 

There’s also the matter of psychological reactance. When people feel like their choices are being restricted, they have a strong emotional reaction. When we want something really badly, we’re limiting our choices, which causes our bodies to react. To make ourselves safe again, we wind up pushing it away. 

This is why when we get close to getting what we want, we sometimes push it away — like the meme of the man digging for diamonds.