Every time we stimulate dopamine, even through relatively "innocuous" behaviors like checking our email, we activate something called the pleasure/pain balance in our brain.
Our evolutionary design assures us that we will NEVER feel satisfied enough to not keep (hunting, looking for mates, finding greener pastures, etc) seeking.
So, in order to ensure that never stay satisfied, every time we push the "pleasure button" there is ALWAYS an equal and opposite "PAIN" response.
Our brains literally produce endogenous pain in order to keep the "balance."
However, many of us, instead of feeling that momentary pain and allowing homeostasis (and thus true satisfaction) to return, hit the pleasure button again - MORE - in order to escape that momentary discomfort.
Think of refreshing your FB feed, "binge watching", one more cookie, one more drink, etc.
There is NEVER an amount of MORE that will be satisfying because we are designed for this pleasure/pain balance, and the MORE we seek the pleasure, the MORE we activate the pain.
The HUGE IRONY is that the only way to actually feel satisfied is to SAY NO to ourselves, to say, "ENOUGH", to feel the discomfort of the pain of wanting more, and to ALLOW it to dissipate through simply waiting and NOT consuming MORE. 

For more innocuous things, this return to homeostasis usually takes 1-3 minutes. 


If we learn to STOP, say NO, and ALLOW that craving for more to dissipate, THEN we will feel ACTUAL SATISFACTION as the brain comes back into balance. "Ahh, that was just right, that was enough. I feel satisfied."
The big problems come when we chronically hit the more button (in tons of tiny moments throughout the day, and/or in more obvious ways with more obvious addictions) we grow TOLERANCE to the good feelings (i.e. we need more to feel the same amount of pleasure), and when we follow the impulse to keep hitting the more button to try to feel better, we can get to the point where the pleasure/pain balance becomes totally whacked out and we develop the INABILITY to feel pleasure at all, and get stuck in PAIN. (Anhedonia is the technical term for this, aka, hardcore “depression”).
With the ubiquitous “dopamine” stimulation rampant in modern life, the brain, in a manner of speaking, prefers to "save energy" and therefore stops producing the good feeling, motivation chemicals endogenously, because "it" posits, "Oh, I’m getting all the dopamine and more I can handle anyway, I might as well stop making it myself."
Without restoring the natural pleasure/pain balance, we get to a point where we have these micro-moments of addiction withdrawal throughout the day, our brain sends a message that "something is wrong" because there IS SOMETHING WRONG: we aren't endogenously producing the feel-good, motivation chemicals we need to thrive and heal and we are craving another hit of dopamine.
THEN, we associate all sorts of stories/reasons about why we don't feel good/motivated, why we feel anxious, frustrated, numb, tired, inattentive, etc.... we ruminate on these stories and create MORE of the same (the thinking/feeling loop) all the while we habitually turn back to the dopamine stimulating behaviors (trying to feel better) that may be the underlying cause for the chemical imbalance in the first place.
We go around putting out fires that don't exist (all the stories and rationalizations for why we THINK we feel bad) and we fail to simply reset/restore the pleasure-pain balance and return to a natural state of ease and equanimity.
These dynamics are becoming more and more pervasive as our brains have access to more "dopamine" stimulation in a single day than we had for our entire lifetimes during most of our species' evolution.
This pleasure/pain balance is something ALL modern humans must master, lest we too become a part of the zombie apocalypse.
Make sense?
P.S. I tend to put "dopamine" in quotes because ANY claims of a single cause/effect are naive. So, I use the term more symbolically. And, for sure, "dopamine" is not only activated by screens. We are toying with the pleasure/pain balance all the time and usually, the results aren't that fun ...
You can read more about this in "Dopamine Nation" by Dr. Anna Lemke out of Stanford.
My overall point is that I find myself and many others often rationalizing elaborate "reasons" why we don't feel good without checking off known boxes that will dramatically improve the way one feels even if there is "a justifiable condition": more exercise, better/more sleep, less "dopamine", more meditating, breath control, more time in nature, improved mindset, prosocial connections, increasing tolerance to stress, etc.
We tend to want to stay focused on the problem (which makes sense neurologically) instead of creating solutions... and, even if there is a real problem, focusing on creating solutions is a far more effective way of working with it.
Creating solutions simply works better than fixing problems, and either eliminates the problems altogether or puts us in a much more resourceful state to navigate the problem more skillfully.
