The Thing Everyone’s Doing
You know that moment when you realize everyone has suddenly started talking about the same obscure thing? That’s been the dopamine menu for the past few months. If you’ve somehow missed it, here’s the premise: you make a list of activities organized by how much effort they require and how much dopamine reward they deliver. Low effort, low reward activities in one column. High effort, high reward in another. The idea is that when your brain is fried and can’t make decisions, you pick something from the appropriate tier instead of doom-scrolling for two hours wondering what you should be doing.
The concept exploded on TikTok last year, and I mean exploded. We’re talking eight hundred million views under the #dopaminemenu hashtag by early 2025. That’s not hyperbole—that’s just where we are now. People were creating color-coded Notion templates, filming their dopamine menus, organizing them by season. It became a whole thing. A Notion survey showed that dopamine menu templates got downloaded over a million times in the last quarter of 2024 alone, making it basically the second most popular wellness template after habit trackers. Which tells you something about where we’re collectively at with decision-making.
Why This Actually Made Sense to Try
I have ADHD. I got diagnosed as an adult, which is common enough that it barely registers as interesting anymore—there are an estimated 366 million adults with ADHD globally now according to a recent Lancet Psychiatry ADHD prevalence meta-analysis. It’s not exactly niche anymore. One of the things nobody tells you about adult ADHD diagnosis is that suddenly all these small frustrations get a name. Like decision paralysis. Like the fact that choosing between forty different activities feels harder than actually doing any of them.
What made the dopamine menu interesting wasn’t that it was trendy, but that psychiatrists were actually backing it. Dr. Ned Hallowell, who literally wrote the book on ADHD (okay, he co-authored ADHD 2.0, but you know what I mean), called it “CBT in meme form” in an interview with ADDitude Magazine on dopamine menus. The concept aligns with established behavioral activation therapy, which meant this wasn’t just wellness theater. It was actual behavioral science wrapped in a TikTok bow. A survey from CHADD found that forty-four percent of adults tried some version of structured leisure planning after seeing it on social media, and sixty-one percent of those people reported less decision fatigue. Those are decent numbers. Decent enough that I thought: why not?
What I Actually Built
I made my dopamine menu on a Sunday morning like a reasonable person and then spent way too much time color-coding it. Low effort activities included things like scrolling Reddit for exactly fifteen minutes, making tea, taking a bath, listening to music. Medium effort stuff was reading a book chapter, calling a friend, going for a walk. High effort activities were things like writing, reorganizing a room, cooking an actual meal. I was very proud of this menu. It felt organized. It felt like I had my life sorted. I printed it out and everything.
For about three weeks, I actually used it. Every time I felt stuck, I’d look at my menu and pick something instead of melting into decision paralysis. It worked, too. I wasn’t wasting two hours figuring out what to do with myself. I was just doing something. The decision fatigue was noticeably lower. I felt more productive, less anxious. This was vindication. The internet had provided a solution and it had solved something.
Where It Got Weird
Then I noticed something embarrassing. The activities I kept reaching for were all the low effort ones. Every single time. Never the medium. Basically never the high effort stuff. I would look at “high effort” and think about it the same way you think about doing your taxes, something you acknowledge exists but will definitely do later. So I paid attention. I started tracking which activities I actually picked, and it was almost comical. Bath, tea, Reddit scroll, music, repeat.
And here’s the thing that stuck with me: that wasn’t a bug in the system. That was exactly what the system was supposed to do. I was supposed to meet myself where I was at. If my brain couldn’t handle high effort that day, fine. Pick something else. That’s the whole point of the dopamine menu, judgment-free activity selection.
But I kept using it for eight weeks because something about the pattern bothered me. And slowly, something became unavoidable. The embarrassing part. I wasn’t actually struggling with decision fatigue. Not really. Not most days. What I was actually doing was giving myself permission to do only low-effort things and calling it productive self-care. The menu became my excuse. I was using a legitimate tool as a prop in a story I was telling myself about why I wasn’t doing the things I actually wanted to be doing.
What Changed After I Admitted This
The dopamine menu wasn’t wrong. It’s a genuinely useful tool and I think it’s genuinely helpful for people with actual executive dysfunction. But for me, it became a way to avoid confronting the real issue, which was that I’d gotten comfortable with doing easy things and I was scared to push myself back into harder things. That’s not a dopamine problem. That’s a motivation problem. Which feels like a different thing entirely.
So I stopped using the menu as my script and started using it more honestly. I’d check it when I was truly stuck, but mostly I tried to notice when I was reaching for the low-effort column out of habit versus genuine need. And it turned out I could actually handle more medium and high effort things than I’d convinced myself I could. They were just scary because I’d gotten used to not doing them.
I think this is why I’m writing this out now. Because the viral dopamine menu is genuinely useful, and I don’t want to trash something that’s actually helping people. But there’s also value in admitting that sometimes tools work great until they become excuses. The embarrassing truth I discovered about myself was that I’m really good at that. At taking something helpful and turning it into a comfortable avoidance pattern. If you’re using a dopamine menu and you notice yourself only ever picking the easy column, maybe check in with yourself the same way I had to. Maybe you’re genuinely fried and need easy things. Or maybe, like me, you’ve just gotten good at talking yourself into staying small.