Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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The philosopher Aristotle (...) looked at all the things we do for the sake of something else and wondered if there was an end to it all. (...) Is there anything we seek for itself only, not because it leads to something else? Aristotle decided it was. He decided there was a single thing at the end of every string of Whys, and its name was Happiness. Everything we do is for the sake of happiness."

I ask myself in such contexts what influence meditation, mindfulness, and positive psychology might have on the neurochemistry of the brain and, in this case, especially on the essential little helpers that make our emotional spectrum so manifold, wonderful, irresponsible, and prone to lunacy. Initially, dopamine was seen simply as a way for the body to produce a chemical called norepinephrine, which is what adrenaline is called when it is found in the brain." Why is it so hard for these authors to really trust that someone is actually interested in their topic and realize that they don't have to constantly lure the reader into stupidity? Yes. I am looking at you too, David Eagleman. He found that a slower form of information, books, was the antidote to his information overload. So he made them part of his routine again. According to McGuire, "Reading books again has given me more time to reflect, to think, and has increased both my focus and the creative mental space to solve work problems." So now we've given some meat to this thing that we call the pleasure-pain balance, and now it should make perfect sense why if you take something or do something that leads to huge increases in dopamine, afterward your baseline should drop, because there isn't a lot of dopamine around to keep your baseline going. Fortunately, most people do not experience or pursue enormous increases in dopamine leading to these severe drops in baseline. Many people do however, and that's what we call addiction. When somebody pursues a drug or an activity that leads to huge increases in dopamine, and now you understand that afterward, the baseline of dopamine drops because of depletion of dopamine, the readily releasable pool; the dopamine is literally not around to be released, and so people feel pretty lousy, and many people make the mistake of then going and pursuing the dopamine, evoking the dopamine-releasing activity or substance again, thinking mistakenly that it's going to bring up their baseline, it's going to give them that peak again.

Understanding why we do the dangerous and unhealthy stuff is the roadmap to creating the best possible life. So for people that hate exercise, you can think about some aspect of exercise that you really enjoy. However, I will caution you against saying to yourself, I hate exercise, or I hate studying, or I hate this person, but I love the reward I give myself afterward. Later we're going to talk about how rewards given afterward actually make the situation worse. They won't make you like exercise more or studying more. They actually will undermine the dopamine release that would otherwise occur for that activity. Chocolate, they didn't look at milk versus dark chocolate, but chocolate will increase your baseline level of dopamine 1.5 times, okay? So it's a pretty substantial increase in dopamine. It's transient, it goes away after a few minutes or even a few seconds. I'll explain what determines the duration in a minute, but 1.5 times for chocolate. Sex, both the pursuit of sex and the act of sex increases dopamine two times. So it's a doubling above baseline. Now, of course, there's going to be variation there, but that's the average increase in baseline dopamine caused by sex. Later I will talk about how the different aspects of the so-called arousal arc, the different aspects of sex, believe it or not, have a differential impact on dopamine. But for now, as a general theme or activity, sex doubles the amount of dopamine circulating in your blood.

Now, that's a lot of language, but basically what we call this is the mesocorticolimbic pathway. This is the pathway by which dopamine influences motivation, drive and craving. It involves structures that some of you may have heard of before, things like nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex. This is the pathway that really gets disrupted in addictions, where in particular drugs that influence the release of dopamine, like cocaine and methamphetamine, we'll talk about those drugs today. They tap into this pathway. But if you are pursuing a partner, a boyfriend or girlfriend, if you're pursuing a degree in school, if you're pursuing a finish line in a race, you are tapping into this so-called mesocorticolimbic pathway. This is the classic reward pathway in all mammals. I now understand why something that I enjoyed so much had become less pleasureful for me, and there's a deep, deep satisfaction that comes from understanding, okay, there wasn't anything wrong with me or what I was doing, or anything at all. It was just there was something wrong with the approach I was taking, which was layering in all these sources of dopamine and dropping my baseline. For this very same reason, I caution people against using stimulants every time they study, or every time they work out, or every time that they do anything that they would like to continue to enjoy and be motivated at. There's one exception which is caffeine, because I mentioned before, if you like caffeine, that actually could be a good thing for your dopamine system because it does upregulate these D2, D3 receptors, so it actually makes whatever dopamine is released by that activity more accessible or more functional within the biochemistry in the pathways of your brain and body.Not only does it not give them a peak, their baseline gets lower and lower because they're depleting dopamine more and more and more, and we've seen this over and over again. When people get addicted to something, then they're not achieving much pleasure at all. You can even see this with video games. People will play a video game, they love it, it's super exciting to them, and then they'll keep playing and playing and playing, and either one of two things happens, typically both. First of all, I always say addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. So oftentimes what will happen is the person only has excitement and can achieve dopamine release to the same extent doing that behavior and not other behaviors, and so they start losing interest in school, they start losing interest in relationships, they start losing interest in fitness and well-being, and it depletes their life.

Ironically the dopamine circuits in the brains of humans have been responsible for the staggering heights of accomplishment and achievement but will also (paradoxically) bring about the demise of said humans. And eventually what typically happens is they will stop getting dopamine release from that activity as well, and then they drop into a pretty serious depression. And this can get very severe and people have committed suicide from these sorts of patterns of activity. But what about the more typical scenario? What about this scenario of somebody who is really good at working during the week, they exercise during the week, they drink on the weekends? Well, that person is only consuming alcohol maybe one or two nights a week, but oftentimes that same person will be spiking their dopamine with food during the middle of the week. Now we all have to eat, and it's nice to eat foods that we enjoy. I certainly do that. I love food, in fact. But let's say they're eating foods that really evoke a lot of dopamine release in the middle of the week. Creativitatea reflectă creierul în forma sa cea mai elevată. Boala mintală este opusul.” Cel mai interesant capitol mi s-a părut cel despre creativitate și nebunie. Se vorbește despre saliență, vise, boli, modele mentale artă și altele, toate prin prisma dopaminei.

E un sentiment al anticipării că viața e pe cale să devină mai bună. Circuitele ei nu procesează experiențe din lumea reală, ci numai posibilități viitoare imaginare. Hm, cum ar fi să-mi iau o înghețată după ce termin de scris aici. activities and things that we ingest. All of us have different baseline levels of dopamine. Some of this is sure to be genetic. Some people just simply ride at a level a little bit higher. They're a little bit more excited, they're a little bit more motivated, or maybe they're a lot more excited or a lot more motivated. Some people are a little mellower, some people are a little less excitable, and some of that has to do with the fact that dopamine doesn't act alone. Dopamine has close cousins or friends in the nervous system, and I'll just name off a few of those close cousins and friends. Now, what was interesting is after subjects got out of this cold water, that dopamine increase was sustained. And I know nowadays many people are interested in using cold water therapy as a way to increase metabolism and fat loss, but also to improve sense of well-being, improve cognition, improve clarity of mind. There's something really special about this very alert but calm state of mind that seems to be the one that's optimal for pretty much everything except sleep. But for all aspects of work and for social engagement and for sport, that highly alert but calm state of mind really is the sweet spot that I believe most of us would like to achieve. And this cold water exposure, done correctly, really can help people achieve that state of mind through these increases in dopamine that last a very long time.

Once we understand that dopamine is a driver for us to seek things, it makes perfect sense as to why it would have a baseline level and it would have peaks, and that the baseline and peaks would be related in some sort of direct way. Here's what I mean by that. Let's say that you were not alive now, but you were alive 10,000 years ago and you woke up and you looked and you realized you had minimal water and you had minimal food left. Maybe you have a child, maybe you have a partner, maybe you're in an entire village, but you realized that you need things, okay? You need to be able to generate the energy to go seek those things, and chances are there were dangers in seeking those things. Yes, it could be saber-tooth tigers and things of that sort, but there are other dangers too. Dopamine is a chemical produced by our brains that plays a starring role in motivating behavior. It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise, and, importantly, when we have successful social interactions. In an evolutionary context, it rewards us for beneficial behaviors and motivates us to repeat them. And this is very important. How satisfying or exciting or pleasureful a given experience is doesn't just depend on the height of that peak. It depends on the height of that peak relative to the baseline. So if you increase the baseline and you increase the peak, you're not going to achieve more and more pleasure from things. I'll talk about how to leverage this information in a little bit, but just increasing your dopamine, yes, it will make you excited for all things. It will make you feel very motivated, but it will also make that motivation very short-lived. So there's a better way to increase your dopamine. There's a better way to optimize this peak-to-baseline ratio. You don't do the exercise and expect dopamine to arrive through some, what we call, exogenous source as well. You might think, "Well, that sounds lame. I want to continue to enjoy exercising." Ah, but that's exactly the point. If you want to maintain motivation for school, exercise, relationships, or pursuits of any duration and kind, the key thing is to make sure that the peak in dopamine, if it's very high, doesn't occur too often, and if something does occur very often, that you vary how much dopamine you experience with each engagement in that activity. Both books really focus on these dopamine schedules and the relationship between these peaks and baselines of dopamine. In Dr. Lembke's book and when she was on the Huberman Lab podcast, and other podcasts, she's talked about this pleasure-pain balance, that when we seek something that we really like or we indulge in it, like eating a little piece of chocolate, if we really like chocolate, there's some pleasure, but then there's a little bit of pain that exceeds the amount of pleasure, and it's subtle, and we experience it as wanting more of that thing.The first one is a really tragic situation that occurred. This was in the '80s. There was an outbreak of what looked like Parkinsonian symptoms in a young population. So many of you heard of Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is a disease in which people initially start to quake, can't generate smooth movements. They'll have issues with speech, sometimes cognition as well. There are examples like Michael J. Fox, which are early onset Parkinson's. Typically, it hits people a little bit later in life. There's a genetic component, but there is this question, and there's always been this question, whether or not certain lifestyle factors can also create Parkinson's. And some years ago, there was a situation where street laboratories, illicit laboratories, were trying to make a drug called MPPP, which is an opioid-like compound. It's a bit like heroin, and heroin addicts seeking heroin went out and bought what they thought was MPPP. When we binge on pleasurable things, homeostasis means “our brain compensates by bringing us lower and lower and lower,” says Lembke. Each time the thing becomes less enjoyable, but we eventually become dependent on those stimuli to keep functioning. We spiral into a joy-seeking abyss. The digital world enables bingeing on a previously unseen scale because there are no practical limitations forcing us to pause. With substances, you eventually run out of money or lines of cocaine (even temporarily), but Netflix shows or TikTok feeds are indefatigable. Often you needn’t do anything: the next hit automatically loads on your screen. Her stories have the power to transform your life' Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Epinephrine, also called adrenaline, is the main chemical driver of energy. We can't do anything, anything at all, unless we have some level of epinephrine in our brain and body. It's released from the adrenal glands, which ride atop our kidneys. It's released from an area of the brain stem called locus coeruleus, and its release tends to wake up neural circuits in the brain and wake up various aspects of our body's physiology and give us a readiness. So it should come as no surprise that dopamine and epinephrine, aka adrenaline, hang out together. In fact, epinephrine and adrenaline are actually manufactured from dopamine. There's a biochemical pathway involving dopamine, which is a beautiful pathway — if ever you want to look it up, you could just look up biochemistry of dopamine, but what you'll find is that L-dopa is converted into dopamine. Dopamine is converted into noradrenaline, norepinephrine, it's also called, and noradrenaline, norepinephrine, is converted into adrenaline.