Is anyone else’s dopamine system completely erratic?

[Acquiescence]

One day I’ll wake up and everything is hell. Complete and utter anhedonia, mental health destroyed, no motivation or will to do anything. It’s a slog to just get through basic daily tasks.

Then another day I’ll wake up and everything feels fucking fantastic. Just the act of getting up and ready instills this extreme sense of anticipation and excitement. Music sounds euphoric. Food tastes amazing. Sights and sounds are brighter and clearer.

I can’t for the life of me figure out wtf is the cause of this. Time, age, location, employment, social life, health, bp awareness… basically any and every possible confounding factor you can think of has changed over time and day to day, and yet under so many different configurations of those factors I’ve felt this oscillation. From my earliest memories till now.

If only I could feel “switched on” 24/7 365, life would be so much consistently better

 

[LTNUser]

You're just bi polar

 

[Wexilarious]

To fix this, start sleeping without a pillow and on your back

 

[Acquiescence]

You're just bi polar

Could be.

I should clarify though that obviously I’m not entirely impervious to external factors. If things are going shit in general, I’ll feel like shit and vice versa. Zoomed in, the peaks and troughs of my mood have extreme swings, but zoomed out, things are pretty consistently correlated with positive/negative external factors. Not gonna cope with “it’s all in your head brooo”, I wouldn’t be as invested in my surgery plans if I thought it was that easy.

I suppose there probably is something pathologic going on. But the problem is, so much of the negatives of my mental state are related to either general pessimism about the human condition (which I think is perfectly rational) or bp related topics (which is just measurable, objective reality), and whether my surgery gamble will work. Don’t think I can neatly parse out pathology from what’s simply brutal truths about life, especially to a psychiatrist, without describing both in heavy detail. And I really, really don’t wanna burn up hard earned money just to get professionally gaslit by a bluepilled normie (I get plenty of that already, especially because I was autistic enough to open up to my family about my surgery plans jfl)

So the tl;dr for me I guess is wageslave for surgery as always, in order to boost the general level of mood over time, even if the moment to moment extremes will still happen. Not much else you can do that’s worthwhile QOL-ROI wise once your basic needs are met, imo. Except for early retirement, but that requires an order of magnitude more dough, so I don’t even think about it

 

[StupidHedonist_INTP]

I suppose that pain made you more sensitive to pleasure and that pleasure made you desensitised to pleasure again, and the cycle goes on forever.