The prefrontal cortex, you know, the part of the brain that is still developing in teens that makes them more impulsive from time to time? Yes, that one. Well, it oversees our reasoning, comprehension, creative problem-solving, focusing, and self-control. It is a precious little part of our brain that needs protection and nourishment in order for us to function well, excel, and perform in life.
Dopamine, or the reward chemical in our brain, is the chemical messenger that processes and rewards pleasurable behavior. Dopamine can positively or negatively affect our prefrontal cortex and working memory. For example, in Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, the author, Anna Lembke, discusses how the addiction cycle is perpetuated by constantly consuming and then needing a dopamine-releasing, high-reward drug or behavior to avoid pain. She writes, “We are all now vulnerable to prefrontal cortical atrophy as our reward pathway has become the dominant driver of our lives.” Dopamine, while natural and important, can also be the enemy of the brain when overproduced (and over-consumed) due to drugs, gambling, food, sex, exercise, and/or social media.
If not abused or misused, dopamine is essential to our brain’s functioning. When a modest amount (not a ton) of dopamine increases in the prefrontal cortex, it helps our executive functioning skills, i.e., we have better reasoning, comprehension, creative problem-solving, focusing, and self-control.1 When I said a modest amount of dopamine, I meant that. There is an optimal level of dopamine that floods our brains, so we perform well, and our working memory is improved, but if that dopamine influx is too high (aka drugs) or too low (aka depression), then the opposite (and negative) effect happens in our brains.2
Agency, in its most basic definition, is to have choice and control over one’s actions and the resulting consequences of those actions. For Henry David Thoreau, moral agency was based on our individuality and fulfilling our agenda along a kind of perfection continuum.3
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion, as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, nor weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
From Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, 1971, pp. 323–24
In other words, one’s life may be constructed from within. Thoreau’s poetic, creative, and spiritual “inner eye” is how the self develops toward its own personal fulfillment. A culture restricting one’s freedom is the biggest threat to one’s ability to thrive. Freedom from civilization’s constraints (such as inequality, social media, and technology, for instance) essentially will allow us to flourish.4
In psychology, agency is one of the central goals of therapy. Therapists want clients to feel they have a sense of control over their lives and have faith in their own ability to handle conflict and change. We also teach our children agency, for example, to make decisions for themselves and act toward creating the life they want. In short, having agency is central to good mental health and building the life that you want.
Research shows that if we increase our agency, resulting in positive feedback, we change and increase the dopamine levels in our brains, positively affecting our pre-frontal cortex or working memory and problem-solving.5 So, practicing our agency, in a sense, increases our executive functioning skills.
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