Every habit has, and every ritual has, a beginning, middle, and end. So too, do both behaviors have a trigger, then a reaction, a response, and then a reward. The reaction is to dopamine (triggered by something in either our outer or inner landscape). The reward is returning to the daily routine and reflecting on how we are changed.
Let’s say we feel like eating a doughnut every day in the afternoon. We go eat the doughnut and we return to our work and we assume that the doughnut is our reward. But actually, the doughnut is the response. We’re usually mistaken about what our rewards are, because we are motivated by Big Dopamine.
Truly, the real reward, the Little Dopamine healthy reward, is a chance to get a little exercise, a breath of fresh air, to meet with some friends or someone new, to get on the phone, to play a little game, etc. The Little Dopamine rewards are infinite, as infinite as we are unique as individuals. These are qualiadelic rewards.
When a habit becomes an addiction, however, the reward is exactly what we expect it to be. It is the doughnut. The Big Dopamine fix. The material reward has taken over. The body wants the reward and the body gets the reward.
We have to go back to our youthful, Little Dopamine days in order to remember what the original rewards were when we started, before the addiction took control of us. It was things like being around certain people. We laughed or commiserated, had good conversations, and we kept going to unique and different places while searching for new qualia and hits of Little Dopamine.
The mind created the discontent and the suffering and the mind can undo it. Again, the chances to notice new qualia are as infinite as uniqueness of individuals on the planet.