Introduction

After some long day(s) of trading, do you feel mentally exhausted?
If the answer is affirmative, keeps reading this blog post as you're about to learn a few gems that are going to change your trading and life forever.

Let's dive-in talking about Dopamine and why regulating it must be a priority.

What is Dopamine?

Dopamine is a type of neurotransmitter. Your body makes it, and your nervous system uses it to send messages between nerve cells.

That's why it's sometimes called a chemical messenger.

Dopamine plays a role in how we feel pleasure.
It's a big part of our unique human ability to think and plan.
It helps us strive, focus, and find things interesting.

With the science being now out of our way, you might wonder why I mention a neurotransmitter in a trading blog.

Actually, Dopamine regulation and how creative/smart you are with everything in LIFE are extremely correlated.

Stop triggering your Dopamine

Brainwashed people don't have any self-control and can't resist their brain asking for sugar, coffee, alcohol, unhealthy food, watching that movie, anything giving them immediate pleasure. (fapping including yes... don't do it)

Your brain wants his dopamine and doesn't know if what triggered dopamine is good or bad for you unfortunately.

I agree that donut, cigarette and caffeine intake smell/feel amazing; how can stuff being that good could be that bad for us?

Nothing related to health here - I'll only talk about the effects on your brain and overall mood.
Not resisting your dopamine "calls" comes with a huge cost for your trading.

Regarding trading, checking the asset price of your trades every 5 minutes is also you not resisting much your dopamine calls ordering you to stop the pain of NOT KNOWING what the market is doing to YOU.

You're probably fatigued at the end of the day/week because we're constantly on social media, checking our trades too often, drinking too much coffee, eating poorly, and so on and so forth.

Your governments allow those companies to not disclose the effect as I suppose... they're very generously compensated to let that go - as also it makes us dumber and more dependent. (#theory #complot)

Not learning how to control yourself lead to the following effects:

• Not being in a good mood until you'll get that source of immediate pleasure
• Not finding pleasure in your work, trading, social life
• Not being creative at your work/trading (mostly coming from the lack of pleasure

I have been through a process of dopamine detox recently cutting all social media, coffee, sugar, movies... basically everything that is not for my businesses.

I also worked out twice a day to keep my mind busy mostly - I ended up enjoying it and put some solid muscles since I started this experiment 2 months ago

I'm probably one of the few who enjoyed the COVID lockdown to try something new and get myself detoxed from all this crap.

This was incredibly hard - especially for coffee.

After 5 days though, I slept better, and I started to find an immense pleasure with my work, trading, being with my friends, family, even talking with strangers.

I became in a strange way too happy all the time.

Nothing could be further from the truth..

Call me crazy but that's how life should be...

After 2 weeks, I didn't feel any need for coffee, sugar anymore

My overall awareness and focus improved also.
Not needing those drugs to feel "myself" provides a liberating feeling that cannot be expressed with words.
You'll really have to experiment for a few days (sorry I meant weeks) to understand what I'm talking about.

The hardest part for me was cutting off the caffeine intakes - oh gosh... I was really dumb and unable to focus for 5 days straight.
Replaced it with some placebo like hot water, tea, decaffeinated beverages -preventing any headache.

By the way folks, if you stop consuming something and this gives you headaches and PAIN.

Then, it's a FOOKING DRUG and you've been brainwashed to think this is something your body and mind need.

Coming back to trading, having a great trading system helps a lot reducing the time spent on charts and the number of decisions we have to make.

Being a "dopamine zombie" is, in my opinion, the main reason the majority of traders keep losing at trading.
Unexperienced traders tend to check their charts too often when they don't trust their systems and themselves.

Conclusion

With my trades, I force myself to check them as less as possible.
I set my orders, exits, make my plan before entering the trade.

The goal is avoiding me to check the charts too often, triggering my dopamine too often and ending up as a "dopamine zombie".

From my experience, cutting all addictive substances from your life is going to have tremendous effects on your trading.

Don't take my words as granted, just experiment - what's the worst that could happen really?

No one ever got their life worse by cutting off those dopamine calls.

Once your life is in order on that front, then you may start focusing back on your trading.

Of course, trading and cutting your dopamine calls is a mistake as you need a clear mind to trade.

I did that mistake... so listen to make when I say it's ok to stop trading for a week... the time to get your body and mind on track.

Thank you for reading - I hope this was helpful.