If you have a business, then you know getting attention and eyeballs on your work is critical for keeping your business afloat.

Attention is how you grow your audience and start to convert folks into paying customers. And as much as folks say you can skip the social media to do that, I'm of the mindset that in today's economy, you do have to have some level of presence on social media to be discoverable to more folks.

So lately, I've been working on finding my bare minimum when it comes to social media. I'm the most present on Threads and Linkedin and sometimes I share things on Instagram.

I've been sticking with Threads for almost 3 months now and I've been doing Linkedin for a month and guess what? It's working. I'm getting and keeping attention.

My reach has gone up on Threads by over 10,000 views and on Linkedin by over 1,000 views. This is really great. More people are finding me and paying attention to what I'm saying and what I'm offering.

And now I'm in the place where I'm ready to start converting that attention to trust, either by having them join my newsletter or maybe even becoming a member of my legal community lowercase legal for freelancers and consultants.

Social Media and Dopamine

But here's the problem with this newfound attention: it creates the worst kind of dopamine hit, especially for the dopamine-starved ADHD brain.

We already know that social media is designed to be addictive so we stay on it longer. It's designed for us to doom scroll, engage in fights with strangers who are often bots, and to prevent us from leaving the platform to actually learn more about the people we follow and what they offer.

None of that is new. But what's important to me as a person with ADHD, is that every time you get likes or positive comments on social media, your brain produces dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter associated with motivation and rewards. ADHD brains have been shown to have a kind of dopamine dysfunction where we have lower levels of dopamine, which can make it hard for us to get motivated and focus and it often makes us impulsive (because we're on the hunt for a dopamine hit).

If you're putting two and two together then you know that likes on social media can provide that dopamine hit and help us raise our dopamine levels and feel good. It's easy for folks who struggle to get enough dopamine to start relying on social media likes as a way to get more and more dopamine.

So we keep posting and keep checking for likes so we can get our reward.

It can quickly spiral into a loop where you spend hours a day on social media getting hit after hit, lose track of time, and all sense of what you wanted to accomplish that day.

Now, I haven't quite fallen off of the edge, but for the past couple of weeks, I have been noticing how alluring it feels to go ahead and give in.

So I'm in the process of creating some cadences for myself where I disengage my brain from the dopamine cycle of social media and replace it with healthier dopamine hits that actually support my wellbeing.

How I Realized I was in a Dopamine Slump

If you don't know me well, then you may not know that I'm introverted. It's not that I don't like to leave the house; it's just that when given a choice, I'd usually rather be home.

I like my couch. I like my books. I'm an excellent cook. I love sweatpants and athleisure and I do all my workouts on Youtube.

I can spend a lot of time by myself and not realize that I haven't socialized. I know this isn't healthy so one of my tiny improvements for my personal life this year is going to one social outing a week that's not co-working. I haven't been doing a good job with this particular goal so I started adding it to my Games (it's a manifestation practice I learned from my friend Bianca).

So last week I went to an event called Pages in the Park where a bunch of women who like to read met up, exchanged books, chatted, read, and ate snacks. It was glorious and I felt amazing afterwards.

A couple of days later, I took a private pilates lesson with a pilates teacher-in-training for free. It was a warm, breezy spring day and I noticed that while I was walking down the city streets to the studio, I started to feel like my old self again.

Later, when I was journaling, I noted the difference in my mood that those dopamine hits had provided. Being outside, exercising, spending time with other people, and reading. All of those things were rewarding and pleasure-full for me. And importantly, they didn't have the downside of doomscrolling on social media.

In that moment I realized I needed to be more intentional about where I get my dopamine hits from so I'm receiving the feeling of being rewarded for activities that are actually nourishing and supportive for my wellbeing.

It wasn't a huge wake up call, but it was a really nice quiet invitation from my brain and body that said "we could be better about this and it would make a big difference."

So now I've got a new cadence experiment. I'm learning how to have a healthy relationship to dopamine.

The Dopamine Experiment Parameters

As I mentioned earlier, dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and rewards.

Some things you can do to improve your dopamine regulation are:

• Exercise
• Meditation
• Creative hobbies like drawing and painting
• Dancing
• Listening to music
• Spending time outside
• High quality sleep
• Balanced diet

I'm pretty good at the balanced diet piece. I've been struggling lately with getting good sleep because my business is stressful at the moment and romantasy novels are an addicting form of escapism, but I'm working on it.

So those things won't be the focus of my experiment. Instead, I'll be focusing on replacing social media time with more nourishing dopamine activities.

3 Changes I'm Making to Shift my Dopamine Consumption

One change I'm already working on and figuring out how to measure is to ensure that I'm spending equal time for my business on active and passive marketing channels. Passive marketing channels don't subject you to the same doom scroll cycle and so I'm hoping that committing to spending an equal amount of time on them will help me break the cycle a bit.

The second change I'm working on is keeping my phone off in the morning so I'm not tempted to jump on social media first thing for a dopamine hit. I did this for the first time the other day and candidly, it took me a minute to start my day. I felt temporarily depressed due to the sudden lack of a dopamine jolt. I replaced the time with a mobility routine to get my body moving. Once the pollen dies down, I'll probably go on a morning walk as I know that has made a huge difference in my mental health in the past.

The third big change I'm making is adding a specific kind of social outing to my Manifestation Games. I'm changing the type of outing each week so that it's something creative, outdoors, or deeply connected to a favorite hobby of mine. Last week it was Pages in the Park. The week before it was a long morning walk with a group of women in the city. This week it will either be a Write Night at a local bar or the Arts Festival this weekend.

But either way, I'm ensuring that my weekly social outing has layered dopamine hits: nature, a hobby I find pleasurable, and people. Because this is the kind of dopamine I want to train my brain to get addicted to and seek out.

What I'm Tracking

As I make these shifts, here's what I'll be tracking:

Time Spent on active/passive marketing channels: Because I want to ensure that I'm dong just as much work on passive channels to ensure that there is long term attention for my business, I'll be actively tracking time I spend on active channels so I can make sure I'm making equal effort on passive channels. The short-term payoff of active channels like Threads and LinkedIn is so tough because the likes literally trick you into thinking you're making a lot of headway. But I'd rather get 1,000 eyeballs on my website through organic search traffic than 1,000 views on my Threads post any day.

So far today, I've spent 47 minutes on Threads and Instagram and 45 minutes on this blog post.

Days per week I stay off of social media in the morning: This one is critical. I used to be so much better about staying off of social media in the morning and late at night, but lately, all the attention has been puffing up my ego a little too much, lol. So I'll be keeping track of how many days a week I'm able to start my day with something other than social media.

Candidly, this morning was a fail, bahaha. We'll try again tomorrow, but I probably need to attach a reward to this particular shift to motivate me to stick to it.

Quality Social Outings: This one is big for me. I'm so focused on building community this year and finding people who like to do things that I like to do. So focusing on going to events where people like to read, write, hike, eat good food, do pilates, practice yoga, and create and enjoy art is a big focus. The thrill of doing my favorite things with people who also like to do those things is the best high ever and I plan to enjoy it often. So right now I'm at 1 social outing a week, but if my introverted self gets crazy, maybe I'll get up to 2 a week, especially since it's Gemini season (one of my two seasons where I am genuinely social during the year).

Conclusion

Okay, so that's my plan for building more nourishing dopamine hits into my days and weeks. I'm excited to see how things change in terms of my mood, my sense of accomplishment, and my overall enjoyment of life.

I'll try to do a report each month on this to share how I'm tweaking things and what changes I'm noticing.

In the meantime, let me know: how are you managing your relationship to dopamine and the reality of having a social media presence for your business?

I always love to hear how people are thinking about this in their own lives.