Dopamine Distraction Loop

Welcome to Stretch—I’m Charlotte, a Breath Science and Body-Oriented Coach. My mission is to live my life to the fullest potential of my brain and body, and to inspire you do the same.

"I carefully plan my focus time, but the moment a new idea strikes, my planned work and good intentions… out the window."

I was talking to a potential client about this, and I knew exactly what he meant.

I’ve spent years battling distractions—not just the obvious ones like social media or emails, but the ones that live inside my own head.

• The sudden urge to look up a random fact

• The need to rethink a decision I already made

• The impulse to start something new because it suddenly feels urgent

Every time I try to focus, something else fights for my attention. And it’s not just a bad habit—it’s how my brain is wired.

The good news? I’ve largely trained my brain out of this through breathwork.

Every single breathwork session is like a mini practice round before the real work. When you can stay focused on your breath, you can stay focused on your task.

First you need to understand the basic role of dopamine

Your brain’s dopamine system is not about pleasure—it’s about wanting.

Dopamine is what makes you crave and chase things—ideas, distractions, novelty. It’s what gives you the urge to check your phone, even when you just put it down. It’s what makes you urgently want to research something, even if it has zero relevance to what you’re doing in that moment.

Here’s how it works:

1. In its baseline state, when you’re just sitting around, dopamine neurons fire at a consistent low-level rate of 3-4 times per second—a biological rhythm that maintains your normal attention state.

2. When something unexpected happens—a notification, a new idea, a thought about something unrelated—dopamine surges to 30-40 firings per second.

3. This creates an intense feeling of craving. You must check, switch, chase the new thing.

This is the neurochemical root of distraction.

Your brain isn’t trying to sabotage you. It’s simply wired to pursue novelty—because, from an evolutionary perspective, noticing new things meant survival.

But in today’s insane world? This dopamine-driven chase means your focus is constantly hijacked.

Focus → unexpected stimuli → dopamine surge → urge to act → distraction

And again, this is important to understand:

Dopamine is not about pleasure. It does not care about making you feel good. It only cares about making you move and take action.

This means that acting on the distraction doesn’t give you the pleasure or satisfaction you think it will. It just resets the loop, making the next distraction even harder to resist.

So how can you disrupt this loop? That’s where breathwork comes in!

Breathwork is not just relaxation—it’s focus training

Most people think breathwork is just for relaxation. But it’s actually one of the best tools for training focus.

It’s about learning to sit with discomfort—the exact same skill you need to stay on task when your brain is craving something else.

Here’s what happens when you practice conscious breathing:

1. You’re sitting, with your eyes closed, trying to focus on your breath.

2. You feel the urge to check your phone, fidget, move—that’s the dopamine surge.

3. Instead of acting on it, you watch it. You recognize, this is just my dopamine system doing its thing.

4. You bring your focus back to your breath. You sit with the discomfort of not acting on the craving.

5. Like a wave, the urge builds, peaks, and then dissolves.

6. You repeat this over and over.

It’s a very visceral process. Sometimes, it takes actual physical effort to stop myself from moving. The impulse to act—to check my phone, to stand up, to do something—feels overwhelming.

But I stay still.

And that moment is where the rewiring happens.

Each time you resist acting on a dopamine surge, your brain changes.

Each time you stay focused instead of shifting, you’re strengthening neural circuits for impulse control.

There is plenty and plenty of research to back this up:

• A study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that breath-focused meditation increases gray matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)—the brain region responsible for attention and impulse control. (Fox et al., 2018)

• Another study in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews showed that slow, controlled breathing downregulates the Default Mode Network, the brain network associated with mind-wandering and distractions. (Zaccaro et al., 2021)

• Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has emphasized how training interoception (awareness of bodily sensations, including breath) helps regulate impulsivity and control distractions by strengthening connections between the prefrontal cortex and limbic system.

Of course, none of this happens overnight. This takes practice. 5-10 minutes per day at least. The cool thing is that you will start noticing small shifts pretty quickly, after a couple of weeks.

Translating this into your every day

Can you see how every breathwork session is like training for real life?

• The moment you feel the pull to check your phone, switch tasks, or rethink your plan, you recognize: dopamine surge!

• You observe the craving without reacting (remember: there will be no satisfaction)

• You stay with your task

• You watch the urge fade

Each time you do this, you can pat yourself on the back, knowing you’re slowly but surely strengthening the neural circuits for sustained focus.

Now, I said at the start that I’ve largely trained my brain out of this dopamine distraction loop. This doesn’t mean I don’t get sidetracked or distracted anymore. I do, all - the - time.

But I’ve learned a very important distinction:

Focus isn’t about getting rid of distractions. It’s about seeing distractions for what they are:

Temporary dopamine surges that can be observed, not obeyed.

If you could use some help building a consistent breathwork practice, reach out!

Some extra thoughts…

• I’ve written before about dopamine and how desire ≠ happiness. Understanding this distinction is incredibly helpful to manage urges.

• What all of this work does is helping you build what neuroscientists call response flexibility – the ability to pause between stimulus and response. The ability to check in with yourself first, and make a conscious decision whether responding to this stimulus is necessary. Reminds me of the wonderful Viktor Frankl quote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

• The book that really got me thinking about my ability to focus and stay on track: Deep Work by Cal Newport. Huge wake-up call: if I want to thrive at work and in life, training my focus is not just a nice to have, it’s an absolute necessity.

🙌 How else I can support you

A one-on-one 8-week Breath Science and Body-Oriented Coaching Program. This program is designed to help fast-moving professionals build resilience and manage stress through science-based breathing and body awareness techniques. It’s for those who don’t want to slow down—just recover better and go deeper. Will Z., Managing Director at a NYC Investment Bank, called the program “one of the best decisions he’s made.” 

FREE Body-Oriented Coaching Session. As part of my Body-Oriented Coaching Certification at The Somatic School, I need to complete a number of coaching hours. So I’m offering 1-hour coaching sessions to anyone interested in experiencing this type of coaching. No sales pitch, no strings attached. Just one hour focused on you, and a challenge or question you’d like to make progress on.

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