The Dopamine Story Is Too Convenient

A friend who moved from Bali to Amsterdam wrote to me this week. She struggles to enjoy the life there. Another friend tried to resettle in Australia and could not stay. The framing in both messages was almost identical: maybe Bali is a kind of drug. Maybe the brain gets hooked on the stimulation and dopamine of an island full of events, beauty, and community, and once you leave, you are in withdrawal.

I have heard this framing many times from clients, friends, and people who pass through here. I understand why it feels accurate. But I do not think the dopamine story is the right one. I think it misses what is happening.

The Dopamine Story Is Too Convenient

Calling Bali a drug is a culturally familiar move. It locates the problem inside the person who left, treats the longing as a craving that should be resisted, and reassures everyone else that the place was an illusion. It is the same logic we apply to most uncomfortable longing. We pathologise the want rather than examine what was being met.

The neuroscience of reward is real, but it is not the right lens here. Dopamine surges occur in response to novelty and unpredicted reward, and they habituate quickly. If Bali were a dopamine machine, the people who live here for years would feel less and less, not more and more, attached to the place. What I notice is the opposite. The longer people stay, the harder it is to leave. That is not the signature of a dopamine loop. It is the signature of something the nervous system has been receiving over time.

What the Nervous System Was Actually Doing

The work of Stephen Porges on polyvagal theory, describes how the autonomic nervous system continuously scans the environment for cues of safety or threat through a process he called neuroception. This scanning is automatic and pre-cognitive. The body reads tone of voice, facial expression, pace of movement, ambient sound, and rhythm of social interaction, and adjusts its physiology accordingly.

A nervous system that lives for an extended period in an environment with slow pace, communal rhythm, daily ritual, and proximity to nature receives a steady stream of safety cues. The dorsal and ventral vagal branches settle into a different operating range. The default state shifts. The body stops bracing as its baseline.

Bruce McEwen's work established that chronic environmental demand accumulates in the body through repeated activation of cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and inflammatory systems. The reverse is also true. Sustained environmental safety allows allostatic recovery. The body unwinds at a level deeper than mood.

Co-Regulation Is Not Optional

Ed Tronick's still-face research demonstrated that infants regulate their physiological state through moment-to-moment attunement with a caregiver, and that the loss of this attunement produces measurable distress within seconds. Decades of subsequent work, including research by Ruth Feldman on biobehavioural synchrony, has shown that co-regulation does not end in infancy. Adults continue to regulate through social and environmental contact across the lifespan.

This is the part of the conversation that is missing when we talk about Bali as a drug. The nervous system is not designed to regulate in isolation. It regulates through contact - with people who are themselves regulated, with environments that are not demanding constant vigilance, with rhythms that are predictable enough to let the body rest.

Why Leaving Feels Like Grief, Not Withdrawal

When someone leaves a place that was holding them through co-regulation and returns to a place that does not, the body recognises the absence. It is the loss of scaffolding the nervous system had started to use.

Grief is the more accurate word. The body knows what it now knows. It has felt what it feels like to be met by the environment, and it cannot unfeel that. Going back to an environment that does not meet you in the same way is not a failure of will or a sign of addiction. It is the nervous system noticing the gap between what it now knows is possible and what it is currently being given.

Research on environmental psychology, including Roger Ulrich's 1984 study in Science on the recovery effects of natural views from hospital windows, and the broader literature on nature exposure and stress recovery summarised by Gregory Bratman and colleagues in Science Advances in 2019, has consistently shown that environments affect physiological state in measurable ways. The body does not separate self from surrounding. It reads both as one continuous field.

What Was Being Met

For most of the people I work with who describe this longing, the things being met in Bali were nervous system needs that most modern environments do not provide.

Community that does not require you to perform productivity to be welcome. Pace that does not punish slowness. Daily ritual that returns the body to itself. Proximity to nature that does not require planning. People around you who are not constantly bracing. A culture that treats embodiment and presence as normal rather than as a wellness purchase.

None of this is exotic. It is what humans evolved inside of for most of our species history. The strange thing is not that people miss it. The strange thing is that we have built so many environments that do not provide it.

The Saying Is True, And So Is the Other Thing

There is a saying that we bring ourselves everywhere we go. It is true. The internal world travels. Unhealed patterns do not stay behind at the airport. Anyone who has moved countries hoping geography would do the work knows this.

And it is also true that the ground we stand on shapes which version of ourselves can come forward. A nervous system that lives in chronic activation cannot access the same internal range as a nervous system that lives in regulation. Environment does not replace inner work. It conditions what inner work is possible.

Both are real at once. The question is not whether Bali is a drug. The question is what your nervous system was receiving there that it is not receiving now, and what it would mean to take that as information about how you actually need to live.

For some people, that means coming back. For some, it means rebuilding the missing elements wherever they are - community, ritual, pace, nature, co-regulation. For some, it means grieving that what was met there cannot be reproduced and finding a different relationship to the loss.

There is no clean answer. There is only the recognition that the longing is data, not pathology, and that the body has been telling the truth about what it needs all along.