When “Alignment” Is Actually Just a Dopamine Addiction
Don’t let it run your show.
Background
Length: 12:13
This voice note was taken from a pop up audio salon I hosted in 2025.
You pivot from offer to offer. You switch strategies every few weeks. You post something, check for likes, and judge yourself based on the response. You tell yourself it's about alignment or intuition, but what if it's actually your dopamine cycle running the show?
In this transmission, I talk about what happened when I experimented with moving from Instagram (instant feedback, quick hits of validation) to Pinterest (90-day feedback loops, no immediate dopamine reward) - and what that revealed about how much of my business was being driven by the need for quick emotional hits rather than actual strategy.
I also share how to recognize when dopamine is making your decisions, how to detox from validation-seeking behaviors, and what it looks like to build a business anchored in mission instead of chasing the next shiny thing.
If you've been bouncing from strategy to strategy or abandoning things before they have time to work, this one's for you.
Transcript
Hello, hello, hello.
I hope you ladies are doing well.
It is beautiful here.
Literally perfect weather.
We've got kind of a spell of fall-ish weather, and I'm not complaining.
Mother Nature is being nice to us after such a hot summer.
So one thing I want to talk about, and I've been trying to write a blog post on this for months, and I just couldn't get in everything I wanted to, and I was like, you know what, let me just drop this in here for my sanctum babes, because y'all are in here, you get the inner circle information.
So I want to talk about dopamine in business, and I think a few of you I've talked to about this.
Dopamine in business.
So what precipitated all of this?
I, in April, moved away from Instagram for a bit, and wanted to experiment with Pinterest.
And really, it had been on my mind for several months, since the beginning of the year, because I have very strong and mixed feelings about meta.
Not really mixed.
I don't like meta, I don't like what they stand for, I don't like what they're doing to our world, but I have a beautiful community on there.
But I've been making moves in my life to de-Google, I don't use any Google products anymore, I was trying to de-meta, that one proved to be a lot harder, and really just big tech in general, trying to find alternatives.
And it's been a fun journey.
But when I was pondering Pinterest, I had a lot of resistance, even though it felt like the aligned move, and I was just going to experiment, you know, I could stop at any point and come back to Instagram, right?
And I realized part of my resistance was around the fact that Pinterest has a very long feedback loop.
Most experts say that when you start seriously giving it a go on Pinterest, you want to wait 90 days before making any decisions to stop, pivot, change, whatever. 90 days.
And that feedback loop is much different than Instagram, TikTok, even email, that are more fast-paced.
You see instant open rates, you see your likes, comments, you see the follower count going up.
And my body was fighting this shift in dopamine that I was going to be experiencing.
I was going to go from being able to open up my Instagram app and get at least one or two comments or likes, or none at all, and be able to judge myself on that, and not have my dopamine hit there, maybe go to threads and post something, right?
I was going to move from all these quick hits of dopamine that were not necessarily moving my business forward, right?
But were, again, giving me those quick hits of dopamine to this longer cycle where it usually takes a week or two for some pins to even get seen.
It takes weeks slash months for certain pins to be pinned, to be clicked.
There is a lot more mystery.
On Pinterest, you're a bit more shrouded.
People are typically looking up specific things, not following people, though they do, right?
The whole interaction and validation, social validation, is different.
You're masked in a lot of ways.
And so it really brought to the forefront for me, that was a really rambling long intro to talk about dopamine in our business and how often so much of what we do in business is run by our dopamine cycles, chasing dopamine.
And so what this can look like is bouncing from offer to offer when you have just, so you launch an offer, it's out in the world for maybe days, weeks, maybe a month, and you don't get the response you want, so you pivot immediately.
Or you land on a different strategy or you're going to start posting here and you keep it up for a little bit and then you fall off.
And you find something else new and something shiny and it gives you that dopamine hit, that illusion of productivity, the illusion of moving forward.
And while experimentation is a huge and inevitable part of business ownership, I'm a huge proponent of it, get out of our heads, take action.
There's a big difference between taking action from your CEO, empress identity, which is not driven by dopamine, right?
It's driven by, though dopamine of course will be involved, it's part of the human experience, but it's driven by strategy, it's driven by intuition.
And says, you know, regardless, irregardless of the validation and the input I'm getting, I'm going to experiment with this for X long, right?
That is so radically different than saying this thing is no longer giving me the emotional and physiological hit that I want from it and I'm going to try something else.
And basing whether or not you are making decisions in your business correctly on that physiological feeling.
Sometimes we call alignment, what we call alignment is really our dopamine cycle.
Like, oh, this feels in alignment, AKA, this is new, fresh, shiny, it's going to give me that hit.
And then when that hit wears out, it's, you know, it's misaligned.
I feel like I'm being called in this direction, right?
You know, I'm a spiritual babe.
We put words on every, you know, we can, we can come up with words that sound great and nice to couch some of our less than stellar behaviors and very human tendencies, which are not bad, which are not wrong, but are not always supportive for us.
And so, um, how we can begin to unhook from dopamine as the major driver in our business is to detox dopamine.
One, honestly, being aware is just enough to have the language and the tools to say, oh, is dopamine driving this decision or my true, you know, brain, body, soul, right?
And then, um, building a life outside of business that is dopamine rich.
I know for me, and this is an ongoing journey because I am voracious for business growth.
I love business.
I love building business.
I love talking about business.
So it's super easy for me to get the sum total of my dopamine from business, especially when my girls are at their dad's house and I don't have them, you know, naturally pulling me away from work.
And so we want to build a life that is dopamine rich, that where we're moving our bodies, we're eating good food, we're enjoying, we're exploring.
And, um, if you have been in your business for a while, trying to make things work, it can, um, like almost like a flower turning towards the light source.
You're, you might look up and see that your life is oriented around your business and you get your dopamine from there and then it ripples out to the rest of your life.
We need to begin the process of turning the flower back to the true light source, which is our life outside of vocation.
Like I fully believe that we are on this planet for the simple, simple task of enjoying and helping others enjoy.
And while our vocation can be a vehicle to do that, the foundation of our life needs to be pleasure period outside of business, outside of vocation, outside of any labels is this foundation of pleasure and joy.
And so building that life, you know, and then I'm taking the steps, the very practical steps to create boundaries where we are seeking dopamine.
So, you know, we want to first create the structure that will fill in the gaps that are going to be created when we're on Instagram less, when we may be deleted off our phones or we hide it from our main, the main screen on our phone.
And so we're not tempted to open it and scroll, um, or where we are creating a sit down, take the time to create a strategy that feels good for creating content.
And we adhere to it, you know, um, and we find outlets, uh, where we can drop our unadulterated thoughts, where we would typically, um, you know, drop that, create a, where we would typically perhaps create a post for that validation without it being necessarily thought out or how it's really impacting or helping our audience.
We might drop those into a voice note to a friend or a voice note to ourselves or putting them in notes, um, really casting a critical eye on the why behind why we're doing things.
And, um, additionally, let me see, let me pull up my note.
There is one other, um, yes.
And then, um, maybe this goes without saying, but oftentimes, sorry, it's a plane.
Um, there, we also want to look at ways that we're leaking dopamine or, uh, ways that we're being depleted, you know, so if you're doing these different things and you're still finding it so hard to really unhook from, um, dopamine being the main driver in your business, you want to take some time to see what is underneath the surface, what is underneath all the movement, all the likes and the comments and the action.
When you get quiet and still, what is the voice that is speaking and do that inner work to acknowledge whatever pain, whatever seem like a belief about lack or separateness or whatever is present that is creating this dopamine deficit and heal that at the root.
And when we, once we do that, we are able to approach our business in a whole new lens where there is this beautiful, rich flow of dopamine, but our business is not driving us, but we are driving it.
And, um, we are anchored in our mission.
We're anchored in where we're going.
We're anchored in both reality and faith.
Um, which I guess those are not mutually exclusive.
We're, uh, yeah, we're anchored in what is here and what is yet to come and we are moved by that and engaging in our businesses, um, from this place as opposed to dopamine looks like, um, recognizing where we want to go, being able to engage our minds, our hearts and our bodies to create the strategy to get there, holding ourselves to a standard, um, to a experimentation phase.
So maybe things truly are not working and it's not about dopamine and we want to tweak something, saying, okay, we're going to try this for 15 days.
I feel like there's probably not very many things in business that are going to yield you good data in 15 days, but whatever, you know, 15 days, 30, 60, 90, and we're going to stay the course, right?
And we're going to have, uh, this, um, beautiful devotion to experimentation, um, that again, is not coming from, I need this to work out this way, um, to fulfill this need in me.
I need people to respond in this way, X, Y, Z, but like, no, this is, this is the path I'm going to walk for the time being.
And at the end, we'll see how it's working, you know?
Um, so dopamine in business, it, it's a big deal.
And I think it's something that doesn't get talked about a lot.
Um, our physiological response to, especially with social media and marketing in that way, we don't want to get caught up in vanity metrics.
There are so many people who are making good money who, um, have just a few likes and a few comments, but what matters is your, um, clarified voice, you connecting with the audience that matters, that is there for what you're offering and that desires what you have.
And, um, honestly, sometimes these people will never even comment or say anything.
And then they'll just pop up in your inbox on a sales call, ready to say yes, you know?
So that's what I have for that.
Let me know if you have any questions, comments, as always, any examples of dopamine in your business.
If you are working through it and feel sticky about it, like feel free to reply and let's talk about it.
I hope you have the most beauteous day and we will talk
This article was written by Edi Oduraa, founder of Via de Oduraa, where we help creative + wellbeing brands scale without losing their soul through fractional COO services.
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