• givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    Yep.

    A big tip that helps is most people aren’t wired to hoard resources, so when we accumulate a lot our brains want to trade that for a dopamine hit which can lead to reckless spending.

    But our brains are kind of stupid, and easy to trick.

    Drop $100 on a fun thing, or go online and make an extra mortgage payment, pay a credit card, or even just deposit it into a savings account.

    Our brain just sees that resources went down, a good thing happened, and dumps some dopamine.

    I only read the original study years ago and never saw any followups.

    But as far as our brains are concerned, the same thing just happened, so it gives the same dopamine.