Back in the 1980s, the so-called “serotonin hypothesis” became part of pop science. The theory was simple: low serotonin, bad; high serotonin, good. Then, with the advent of the internet, serotonin discourse spiked. Memes gave us serotonin, apparently. Sunshine? That gave us it, too. Sure, doing MDMA would deplete it, but dropping 5-HTP supplements would sort us out. Go stroke a cat! Pop some pills! Eat more bananas! Serotonin became a shorthand for ecstasy.

But the myth of this elixir soon dissipated. The chemical, after all, is mind-frazzlingly intricate. “It’s implicated in everything, but responsible for nothing,” neuroscientist Barry Jacobs once quipped. The idea that low serotonin causes depression began to fade; studies showed that you could reduce levels in healthy people and they would, miraculously, remain happy. The serotonin comedown had begun.

Now, we’ve moved onto a stronger high: dopamine. “Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in the reward response to pleasant experiences and pleasant stimuli,” Ciara McCabe, Professor of Neuroscience, Psychopharmacology and Mental Health at Reading University, explains to Dazed. The vital chemical messenger also modulates our mood, motivation and movement. It’s also anticipatory, meaning that we experience it before whatever it is we’re excited for. Like serotonin, it’s become known as the “happy hormone”; a precursor to pleasure. Low dopamine has also been linked to depression, which is why millions of people in the USA are prescribed Wellbutrin XL (a dopamine reuptake indicator). 

And right now, we can’t get enough of the stuff; from beauty to music, drug trends to social media, we’re all dopa-fiends. Most recently, scores of users on TikTok have been compiling their own “dopamine menus”. It began when Note to Self podcast host Payton Sartain posted a clip about compiling a list of feel-good things to keep you emotionally satisfied. It spread across TikTok and has picked up over the past couple of weeks, with thousands of creators showing off pages from their “junk journals” featuring cute, multi-coloured illustrations and coquettish calligraphy. 

“The idea is to create a list of activities or hobbies that boost your mood, presented in the style of a restaurant menu. It’s meant to be an alternative to mindlessly scrolling through your phone,” says Isabella Oggioni, a popular TikTok creator who has served up her own dopamine menu. “The categories are: appetisers (quick activities, which take five to ten minutes), entrees (longer activities, 45 minutes or more), sides (things you can do while multitasking), and dessert (a reward after completing a challenging task),” she explains. Think going for sushi, taking a bath, hitting the gym or a quick scroll through Pinterest.

McCabe has noticed this uptick in dopamine-themed discourse. “With the advent of what might be considered new ‘addictive’ pastimes such as looking at TikTok or Instagram, dopamine seems to be back in the news,” she notes. Oggioni agrees: “I think part of it is due to this growing focus on mindfulness and self-care. My generation also tends to label things and join movements – just like we saw with Brat Summer. Maybe now we’re entering Dopamine Autumn.”

And while we’re talking Brat, it’s hard not to see our limelit summer as an extension of our collective obsession with dopamine. Brat was all about bumping powders and rushing on club classics, and more and more young people are swapping serotonergic drugs (like MDMA) for dopaminergic drugs (coke, namely). We’re not searching for love in the smoking area anymore, but someone’s ear to chat off instead. 

Musically, it’s not just Charli who’s on a dopamine buzz. “I really wanted the record to feel like a dopamine hit. I wanted it to feel energetic,” Dazed cover star Normani said this year of her much-anticipated album Dopamine. And FKA Twigs’ new EUSEXA album and concept – which is akin to the feeling of “right before an orgasm” according to Amelia Gray – sounds pretty dopamine-inspired, too.

Beauty and fashion are wired, as well. After the hangover of the pandemic, “dopamine dressing” became a big thing, seeing us try to wear as many outlandish colours and out-there prints as possible to find some joy. Now, “dopamine beauty” and its mood-boosting maquillage has been heralded by the likes of Vogue as the latest make-up trend. 

It’s also become popular to try to quit dopamine. Now that we’re all aware that, supposedly, scrolling through TikTok on our phone for hours on end has got us “hooked” to dopamine, “dopamine fasting” has taken off. The opposite of the veritable feast of the “dopamine menu”, it encourages us to switch off and reset our reward system by abstaining from super-stimulating activities. The messaging is confusing: are we meant to be seeking out dopamine, or detoxing from it? 

With the advent of what might be considered new ‘addictive’ pastimes such as looking at TikTok or Instagram, dopamine seems to be back in the news 

A decade ago, British clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell wrote that dopamine was “the Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters” because it was linked to salacious stories in tabloid articles and gave “editors an excuse to drop some booty on the science pages.” Red-top papers, he noted, would do things like declare that “cupcakes could be as addictive as cocaine” because they apparently led to a surge of dopamine.

But it’s far more complex than this. Bell noted that dopamine isn’t merely a “pleasure chemical”, as it has lots of other functions in the brain. It also is released even when you get an uncomfortable near miss (like losing a bet or blowing your freshly racked line of gear all over the floor), rather than the thing you want. It means that dopamine is more linked to getting close to a reward (to encourage you to try again), rather than the reward itself. So, dopamine isn’t necessarily something pleasurable.

It’s true that it can often motivate us to find pleasure. “It does play a key role in responding to pleasure and over time to the anticipation of the arrival of that pleasure,” McCabe says. But, to reiterate, it’s not pleasure itself.

But how about avoiding dopamine? Is that not good? “Dopamine is not the problem itself. The problem is when one feels addicted to a certain thing, be that a mobile phone or a piece of cake,” McCabe says. Abstaining from the reward doesn’t reduce the levels of dopamine, it just changes how it is activated. Instead, we would need to distance ourselves from the triggers that activate the initial dopamine – such as having our phone near us – in order to have a meaningful effect.

Any notion of resetting the brain, McCabe says, is “nonsense for the time being” and a total unknown. “If you really did ‘detox’ from dopamine and flush it out of your body, you’d probably be dead within minutes. At the very least, you’d be completely non-functional,” neuroscientist Dr Dean Burnett told Dazed last year.

Once again, it all stems from pop science creating a “concept creep” where dopamine and pleasure become the same thing. Since the 1960s, low dopamine has been linked to depression. But, like the serotonin hypothesis, this simple approach has been widely overturned and while dopamine likely plays a role in depression, things aren’t so clear cut.

It’s not really our fault for conflating dopamine, which is often a precursor to pleasure, with pleasure itself: pseudoscience can spread like wildfire on TikTok, and the truth about the inner workings of our brains is pretty complicated. There’s an argument to say that our confusion over dopamine’s function is doing actual damage; aside from making neuroscientists incredibly mad, our misunderstanding of brain chemistry could be making us unnecessarily stressed.

Equally, though, all this dopamine chatter can still be helpful if it gets us talking about mental health and addiction. Oggioni thinks it’s oversimplified, but can still encourage contentedness. “If this trend encourages people to incorporate positive habits into their daily lives, I think it’s a valid and helpful concept,” she says. So for now, if taking a break from social media or hitting the gym is making you feel good, don’t rush off and change what you’re doing. Enjoy it while it lasts.