Magical dopamine
Have you heard all these legendary stories about dopamine? Your internal wizard uses it like mana to cast spells, eats chocolates that give him +10 MP per bar, and inevitably falls into the darkness of depression when there is no mana left...
People get one simple number and use it to explain everything. They even spread tips on how to manage dopamine levels through daily routines to boost your productivity. It's a good motivation, but their wordings turn common sense upside down.
Let's get back to the point of evolution where we design our first reality checker, and take a look at the information flow around it. What should happen when you react to something?
You get a piece of data from your sensors, transfer it to your memory, and look for suitable programs. Then you transfer these programs along with related expectations to your CPU cache and execute them. Then you collect feedback, compare it with expectations, and transfer results back into the memory.
The more programs and expectations you find and use, the more feedback you receive, the more data has to be transferred.
Our brains use neurotransmitters to move data around, similar to how our computers use electrons, and dopamine seems to be involved in these particular operations with programs.
Dopamine is information in your data channels. Literally.
Complex actions require lots of data to be transferred. Lots of dopamine. Long-term projects require information transfer to be spread over time. It has to look different. In an overloaded system, processes have to wait for their turn, and we can see greatly reduced activity in some data channels. This is how it works in any computer. Brains aren't special.
Back to the chocolate. Do you have any expectations about it? It's data. You need to move it, and it becomes dopamine.
Depression destroys expectations. Nothing works. Without any suitable programs for everyday situations, you won't have much information to begin with. Your dopamine will go way down.
Flooding the system with dopamine to raise its abstract levels creates a mess. You don't want to do that. But you can create a program that works, and get more data in your channels. More dopamine. It happens by design. No pills required. And no, it's not a sign of a cured disease, not a sacred motivational energy, but simple information that casually moves around your brain.
No magic. No mana. Just a boring data transfer.