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The dopamine content in everyday products is rising, and AI just spiked the concentration again.

Sign-trackers get hooked on cues like notifications and badges, and most apps are built around them.

ADHD brains need more dopamine to feel anything, which makes the marketplace especially dangerous for them.

Psst. Hey. Come here. I've got something you're going to love. Personalized. Potent. Guaranteed to make you feel good, at least for a little while. First one's free.

Psst. Hey. Come here.

I've got something you're going to love. Personalized. Potent. Guaranteed to make you feel good, at least for a little while. First one's free.

You've probably accepted that offer a dozen times today without realizing it. The product is dopamine, and the dealers are everywhere:

Pinging your work friend to make fun of the speaker during a Teams town hall. Placing a five-dollar live bet on Messi to score the next goal. Letting your kid buy a Roblox skin if they make their bed. These are product features designed, tested, and shipped to sell you more dopamine per second.

And the latest dealer may be the scariest one yet.

Artificial intelligence (AI) discovers your specific reward pattern and adjusts in real time. Virtual companions and assistants figure out what makes you feel smart, understood, and validated, and it gives you more of exactly that. It reformulates itself around your individual brain chemistry. And they're designed to be so delicious for your brain.

As I teach workshops for corporate clients around the world, I feel the pressure to drip more and more dopamine into my sessions. Bigger and brighter pictures on the slides. Fewer and fewer words. Shorter and shorter sessions. Less time for deep reflection, more pressure for punchy takeaways. Gamify it!

Psychologists have identified two distinct ways of buying in the dopamine market.

Sign-trackers get hooked on the signals. The ping. The red badge. The pull-to-refresh. Their brains attach the dopamine to the cue that promises a reward. They're the ones who keep checking their phone even when there's nothing to check, who feel something when the slot machine whirs even before any money appears. The cue becomes the drug. Researchers link sign-tracking to a higher vulnerability to addiction, gambling, and impulse control disorders, because the dopamine marketplace is almost entirely engineered around cues like bright icons, notification sounds, and autoplay. If you're a sign-tracker, the sellers have built the whole store around your specific weakness.

Goal-trackers are different buyers. They care about the actual payoff. The notification doesn't pull at them. The ping is just information. They show up when the thing they actually wanted is on offer, and they leave. The marketplace has less grip on them.

Most people are somewhere on a spectrum between these two. But you know which way you lean. You feel it every time your phone buzzes.

If you have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), your reward system is running underpowered at baseline. Ordinary things don't register as interesting. The world feels beige. And that makes the marketplace's high-purity products almost irresistible, because they're the only things that break through. ADHD brains need more dopamine to get the same hit as neurotypical brains.

You can't train yourself into being a goal-tracker any more than you can train yourself out of ADHD. But you can change how you shop.

The dopamine dealers are everywhere, so learn to be a better shopper.

Savor it. The marketplace wants you shopping fast: scroll, tap, next, more. Slow your own shopping down. Finish what you already bought before you pick up the next thing. Let the song end before you skip to another. The same dopamine goes further when you're not already shopping for more.

Bundle it. Shop for dopamine that comes wrapped around something real, like a skill you didn't have before, a relationship that deepened, a memory you'll actually return to, a body that's a little stronger than it was yesterday. When it's over, make sure it leaves you with something besides the feeling.

Choose it. Did you decide to shop, or did the store come to you? There's a big difference between the dopamine you went looking for and the dopamine that got served to you by an algorithm that knows exactly what you can't resist. One is a purchase. The other is something slipped into your drink.

Know your dealer. Where did this dopamine come from? Did a machine figure out what you can't resist? Buy from humans with good intentions. When a product is free, the dopamine is the business model.

Take our Online Behavior Test

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Sometimes you pay in dollars, and sometimes you pay in attention. Either way, know the price.

Colaizzi, J. M., Flagel, S. B., Joyner, M. A., Gearhardt, A. N., Stewart, J. L., & Paulus, M. P. (2020). Mapping sign-tracking and goal-tracking onto human behaviors. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 111, 84–94.

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