Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.260 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.880 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.480 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.320 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.380 | Today, we are going to talk all about dopamine

00:00:18.160 | and what drives you to do the things that you do.

00:00:21.160 | We're going to talk about motivation and desire and craving,

00:00:25.480 | but also how dopamine relates to satisfaction

00:00:29.160 | and our feelings of wellbeing.

00:00:31.040 | And of course, any discussion about dopamine

00:00:33.580 | has to include a discussion about the potential

00:00:36.300 | for dopamine-induced addiction.

00:00:39.440 | Indeed, dopamine lies at the heart of addiction

00:00:42.000 | to all things, but today we are mainly going to focus on

00:00:45.960 | how what we do and how we do it

00:00:49.320 | and how we conceptualize those things

00:00:52.160 | leads to changes in this amazing molecule

00:00:55.200 | in our brain and bodies that we call dopamine.

00:00:58.160 | I'm going to teach you what dopamine is and what it is not.

00:01:01.640 | There are a lot of myths about the molecule dopamine.

00:01:04.000 | We often hear about so-called dopamine hits.

00:01:06.560 | Today, we are going to dispel

00:01:08.060 | many common myths about dopamine,

00:01:09.980 | and we are going to talk about how dopamine actually works.

00:01:13.180 | We're going to discuss the biology of dopamine,

00:01:15.760 | the psychology, we will discuss some neural circuits,

00:01:18.640 | and a really exciting aspect of dopamine biology

00:01:21.600 | are so-called dopamine schedules.

00:01:23.880 | In other words, we are going to discuss

00:01:25.280 | how things like food, drugs, caffeine, pornography,

00:01:28.920 | even some plant-based compounds

00:01:31.000 | can change our baseline levels of dopamine,

00:01:33.880 | and in doing so, they change how much dopamine

00:01:36.300 | we are capable of experiencing

00:01:38.680 | from what could be very satisfying events

00:01:42.040 | or events that make us feel not so good

00:01:44.180 | because of things that we did or took prior.

00:01:47.060 | So I promise you it's going to be a vast discussion,

00:01:50.800 | but I will structure it for you,

00:01:52.320 | and you'll come away with a deep understanding

00:01:54.580 | of really what drives you.

00:01:56.080 | You will also come away with a lot of tools,

00:01:58.520 | how to leverage dopamine

00:02:00.480 | so that you can sustain energy, drive, and motivation

00:02:03.280 | for the things that are important to you

00:02:04.680 | over long periods of time.

00:02:06.680 | Before we dive into the meat of today's discussion,

00:02:09.720 | I'd like to share with you a fascinating result

00:02:13.200 | that really underscores what dopamine is capable of

00:02:16.040 | in our brains and bodies and underscores the fact

00:02:19.100 | that just through behaviors, no drugs, nothing of that sort,

00:02:22.860 | just through behaviors, we can achieve terrifically high

00:02:26.560 | increases in dopamine that are very long

00:02:29.080 | and sustained in ways that serve us.

00:02:32.200 | This is a result that was published

00:02:33.420 | in the European Journal of Physiology.

00:02:35.500 | I'll go into it in more detail later,

00:02:37.120 | but essentially what it involved is having human subjects

00:02:40.720 | get into water of different temperatures.

00:02:43.880 | So it was warm water, moderately cool water,

00:02:47.280 | and cold, cold water.

00:02:49.200 | Had them stay in that water for up to an hour,

00:02:52.120 | and they measured, by way of blood draw,

00:02:55.000 | things like cortisol, norepinephrine, and dopamine.

00:02:58.320 | What was fascinating is that cold water exposure

00:03:03.540 | led to very rapid increases in norepinephrine and epinephrine,

00:03:08.360 | which is also just called adrenaline.

00:03:10.680 | It also led to increases in dopamine,

00:03:13.460 | and these increases in dopamine were very significant.

00:03:16.840 | They kicked in around 10 or 15 minutes

00:03:19.380 | after submersion into the cold water,

00:03:21.420 | and I should mention the head wasn't below water,

00:03:23.100 | it was just up to the neck,

00:03:24.860 | and the dopamine release continued to rise

00:03:29.500 | and rise and rise and eventually reached

00:03:31.400 | 250% above baseline.

00:03:33.800 | Now, what was interesting is after subjects got out

00:03:36.880 | of this cold water, that dopamine increase was sustained,

00:03:40.940 | and I know nowadays many people are interested

00:03:42.980 | in using cold water therapy as a way

00:03:45.460 | to increase metabolism and fat loss,

00:03:48.260 | but also to improve sense of wellbeing,

00:03:51.400 | improve cognition, improve clarity of mind.

00:03:54.600 | You know, there's something really special

00:03:56.100 | about this very alert but calm state of mind

00:03:59.280 | that seems to be the one that's optimal

00:04:01.460 | for pretty much everything except sleep,

00:04:03.980 | but for all aspects of work and for social engagement

00:04:07.620 | and for sport, that highly alert but calm state of mind

00:04:12.000 | really is the sweet spot that I believe most of us

00:04:14.460 | would like to achieve, and this cold water exposure,

00:04:17.180 | done correctly, really can help people achieve

00:04:19.900 | that state of mind through these increases in dopamine

00:04:23.300 | that last a very long time.

00:04:25.100 | So I will later detail the specifics of that study,

00:04:28.440 | what it entailed in terms of how long the variations

00:04:31.860 | that different subjects experienced,

00:04:33.700 | as well as how to limit the amount of stress hormone,

00:04:36.300 | cortisol, that's released as a consequence of the cold water

00:04:40.180 | and we will also talk about compounds,

00:04:41.980 | supplements that people can take in order

00:04:44.100 | to increase their levels of dopamine should they choose.

00:04:47.500 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:04:49.960 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:04:52.820 | It is however, part of my desire and effort

00:04:55.060 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:04:57.860 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:05:00.580 | In keeping with that theme,

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00:09:58.260 | So let's talk about dopamine.

00:10:00.000 | Most people have heard of dopamine

00:10:01.560 | and we hear all the time now about dopamine hits,

00:10:04.260 | but actually there's no such thing as a dopamine hit.

00:10:08.260 | And actually the way that your body uses dopamine

00:10:12.220 | is to have a baseline level of dopamine,

00:10:15.540 | meaning an amount of dopamine

00:10:17.120 | that's circulating in your brain and body all the time.

00:10:20.340 | And that turns out to be important

00:10:21.840 | for how you feel generally,

00:10:23.560 | whether or not you're in a good mood, motivated, et cetera.

00:10:26.760 | And you also can experience peaks

00:10:29.080 | in dopamine above baseline.

00:10:31.500 | This has a very specific name in the neurobiology literature,

00:10:35.280 | so-called tonic and phasic release of dopamine.

00:10:39.380 | And I'll explain what that means in a couple of minutes.

00:10:41.420 | But if you remember nothing else from this episode,

00:10:44.380 | please remember this, that when you experience something

00:10:48.380 | or you crave something really desirable,

00:10:51.740 | really exciting to you, very pleasurable,

00:10:54.300 | what happens afterwards is your baseline level

00:10:58.380 | of dopamine drops, okay?

00:11:00.740 | So these peaks in dopamine,

00:11:03.320 | they influence how much dopamine

00:11:05.100 | will generally be circulating afterward.

00:11:07.380 | And you might think, oh, a big peak in dopamine,

00:11:09.340 | after that, I'm going to feel even better

00:11:11.340 | because I just had this great event.

00:11:13.380 | Not the case.

00:11:14.340 | What actually happens is that your baseline level

00:11:16.980 | of dopamine drops.

00:11:18.220 | And I will explain the precise mechanism for that, okay?

00:11:21.340 | In the neuroscience literature,

00:11:23.340 | we refer to this as tonic and phasic release of dopamine.

00:11:29.160 | Tonic being the low level baseline

00:11:32.240 | that's always there circulating,

00:11:34.920 | released into your brain all the time.

00:11:37.220 | And then phasic, these peaks that ride above that baseline.

00:11:41.440 | And those two things interact.

00:11:43.160 | And this is really important.

00:11:44.940 | I'm going to teach you the underlying neurobiology,

00:11:46.500 | but even if you have no background in biology,

00:11:48.420 | I promise to make it all clear.

00:11:49.660 | I'll explain the terms and what they mean.

00:11:52.020 | And I'm excited to teach you about dopamine

00:11:54.220 | because dopamine has everything to do

00:11:56.340 | with how you feel right now as you're listening to this.

00:11:59.100 | It has everything to do with how you will feel

00:12:01.300 | an hour from now has everything to do

00:12:03.320 | with your level of motivation and your level of desire

00:12:06.320 | and your willingness to push through effort.

00:12:08.860 | If ever you've interacted with somebody

00:12:10.880 | who just doesn't seem to have any drive they've given up,

00:12:14.640 | or if you've interacted with somebody

00:12:16.120 | who seems to have endless drive and energy,

00:12:18.880 | what you are looking at there in those two circumstances

00:12:22.020 | is without question a difference in the level

00:12:26.020 | of dopamine circulating in their system.

00:12:28.920 | There will be other factors too,

00:12:30.840 | but the level of dopamine is the primary determinant

00:12:34.820 | of how motivated we are, how excited we are,

00:12:37.900 | how outward facing we are and how willing we are

00:12:40.600 | to lean into life and pursue things.

00:12:43.140 | Dopamine is what we call a neuromodulator.

00:12:45.500 | Neuromodulators are different than neurotransmitters.

00:12:48.060 | Neurotransmitters are involved in the dialogue

00:12:50.600 | between neurons, nerve cells,

00:12:52.680 | and neurotransmitters tend to mediate local communication.

00:12:56.260 | Just imagine two people talking to one another

00:12:57.980 | at a concert.

00:12:59.220 | That communication between them is analogous

00:13:01.820 | to the communication carried out by neurotransmitters,

00:13:05.120 | whereas neuromodulators influence the communication

00:13:08.560 | of many neurons.

00:13:09.600 | Imagine a bunch of people dancing

00:13:11.220 | where it's a coordinated dance involving 10 or 20

00:13:13.720 | or hundreds of people.

00:13:15.480 | Neuromodulators are coordinating that dance.

00:13:18.420 | In the nervous system what this means

00:13:19.940 | is that dopamine release changes the probability

00:13:23.240 | that certain neural circuits will be active

00:13:26.280 | and that other neural circuits will be inactive, okay?

00:13:29.880 | So it modulates a bunch of things all at once.

00:13:33.020 | And that's why it's so powerful.

00:13:34.160 | It's shifting not just our levels of energy,

00:13:36.240 | but also our mindset, also our feelings

00:13:39.760 | of whether or not we can or cannot accomplish something.

00:13:44.360 | So how does dopamine work and what does it do?

00:13:46.720 | Well, first of all, it is not just responsible for pleasure.

00:13:50.100 | It is responsible for motivation and drive primarily

00:13:53.240 | at the psychological level.

00:13:54.520 | Also for craving, those three things are sort of the same,

00:13:57.560 | motivation, drive, and craving.

00:13:59.200 | It also controls time perception.

00:14:01.160 | And we will get deep into how dopamine

00:14:03.920 | can modulate time perception and how important it is

00:14:07.600 | that everybody be able to access increases in dopamine

00:14:12.040 | at different timescales.

00:14:13.480 | This turns out to be important

00:14:14.720 | to not end up addicted to substances,

00:14:16.720 | but it also turns out to be very important

00:14:19.000 | to sustain effort and be a happy person

00:14:21.120 | over long periods of time,

00:14:22.400 | which I think most everybody wants.

00:14:24.680 | It certainly is adaptive in life to be able to do that.

00:14:27.880 | Dopamine is also vitally important for movement.

00:14:31.260 | I'll explain the neural circuits for dopamine and mindset

00:14:35.000 | and dopamine and movement in a moment,

00:14:37.540 | but in diseases like Parkinson's or Louie's body's dementia,

00:14:42.540 | which is similar to Parkinson's in many ways,

00:14:45.780 | there's a depletion or death of dopamine neurons

00:14:48.240 | at a particular location in the brain,

00:14:50.160 | which leads to shaky movements, challenges in speaking,

00:14:54.400 | challenges in particular in initiating movement.

00:14:57.580 | And because dopamine is depleted elsewhere too,

00:15:01.620 | people with Parkinson's and Louie's,

00:15:03.960 | excuse me, Louie body dementia also experience drops

00:15:07.300 | in motivation and affect, meaning mood.

00:15:10.140 | They tend to get depressed and so on.

00:15:12.800 | When those people are properly treated,

00:15:15.380 | they can, not always,

00:15:17.300 | but they can recover some fluidity of movement,

00:15:20.360 | some ability to initiate movement.

00:15:22.120 | And almost without question,

00:15:23.980 | those people feel better psychologically,

00:15:26.820 | not just because they can move,

00:15:28.020 | but also because dopamine impacts mood and motivation.

00:15:31.640 | So what are the underlying neural circuits?

00:15:35.400 | For those of you that are not interested in biology

00:15:38.020 | and specific nomenclature, you can tune out now if you want,

00:15:40.860 | but it's actually pretty straightforward.

00:15:42.600 | You have two main neural circuits in the brain

00:15:45.580 | that dopamine uses in order to exert all its effects.

00:15:50.580 | The first one is a pathway that goes from this area

00:15:54.540 | in the what's called the ventral tegmentum.

00:15:56.820 | That's a fancy, but ventral just means bottom

00:15:58.940 | and tegmentum actually means floor.

00:16:01.060 | So it's at the bottom of the brain

00:16:02.860 | and it's the ventral part of the floor.

00:16:04.540 | So it's really low in the back of the brain,

00:16:06.300 | the ventral tegmentum,

00:16:07.780 | and it goes from the ventral tegmentum

00:16:11.540 | to what's called the ventral striatum

00:16:14.100 | and the prefrontal cortex.

00:16:15.340 | Now that's a lot of language,

00:16:16.500 | but basically what we call this

00:16:17.820 | is the mesocorticolimbic pathway.

00:16:20.260 | This is the pathway by which dopamine influences

00:16:24.400 | motivation, drive, and craving.

00:16:27.220 | It involves structures that some of you

00:16:28.720 | may have heard of before,

00:16:29.640 | things like nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex.

00:16:32.900 | This is the pathway that really gets disrupted

00:16:35.620 | in addictions where in particular drugs

00:16:39.300 | that influence the release of dopamine

00:16:41.180 | like cocaine and methamphetamine,

00:16:42.580 | we'll talk about those drugs today,

00:16:44.060 | they tap into this pathway.

00:16:45.580 | But if you are pursuing a partner,

00:16:49.460 | a boyfriend or girlfriend,

00:16:50.420 | if you're pursuing a degree in school,

00:16:52.400 | if you're pursuing a finish line in a race,

00:16:54.780 | you are tapping into this so-called

00:16:56.260 | mesocorticolimbic pathway.

00:16:58.340 | This is the classic reward pathway in all mammals.

00:17:03.340 | The other pathway emerges from an area in the brain

00:17:06.820 | called the substantia nigra,

00:17:08.660 | so-called because the cells in that area are dark

00:17:13.560 | and the substantia nigra connects to an area of the brain

00:17:17.060 | called the dorsal striatum.

00:17:18.420 | This is not surprisingly called the nigrostriatal pathway.

00:17:22.480 | For those of you who have never done any neuroanatomy,

00:17:24.460 | I'm going to teach you a little trick right now.

00:17:26.340 | Everything in neuroanatomy,

00:17:27.720 | the first part of a word tells you where the neurons are.

00:17:32.420 | And then the second part tells you

00:17:33.580 | where they are connecting to.

00:17:34.760 | So when I say nigrostriatal pathway,

00:17:37.300 | it means that the neurons are in the substantia nigra

00:17:39.340 | and they connect to the striatum, nigrostriatal pathway.

00:17:42.520 | So while it's a lot of language, there is some logic there.

00:17:46.240 | So we've got these two pathways,

00:17:47.660 | one mainly for movement.

00:17:49.860 | This is the substantia nigra to dorsal striatum.

00:17:53.020 | And we've got this other pathway,

00:17:55.620 | the so-called mesocorticolimbic pathway

00:17:57.280 | that's for reward reinforcement and motivation.

00:17:59.920 | I want you to remember that there are two pathways.

00:18:03.740 | If you don't remember the two pathways in detail,

00:18:05.940 | that's fine, but please remember that there are two pathways

00:18:08.740 | because that turns out to be important later.

00:18:10.600 | Now, the other thing to understand about dopamine

00:18:12.700 | is that the way that dopamine is released

00:18:16.180 | in the brain and body can differ,

00:18:19.460 | meaning it can be very local or it can be more broad.

00:18:24.460 | Now, most of you have probably heard of synapses.

00:18:27.460 | Synapses are the little spaces between neurons

00:18:30.620 | and basically neurons, nerve cells

00:18:32.220 | communicate with one another

00:18:33.860 | by making each other electrically active

00:18:36.280 | or by making each other less electrically active.

00:18:39.780 | So here's how this works.

00:18:40.620 | You can imagine one nerve cell and another nerve cell

00:18:43.080 | with a little gap between them, a little synapse.

00:18:45.660 | And the way that one nerve cell

00:18:47.760 | causes the next nerve cell to fire,

00:18:49.880 | what we call fire really means to become electrically active

00:18:52.600 | is that it vomits out these little packets,

00:18:55.500 | what we call vesicles.

00:18:56.440 | They're little bubbles filled with a chemical.

00:18:58.880 | When that chemical enters the synapse,

00:19:01.720 | some of it docks or parks on the other side

00:19:04.940 | in the other neuron.

00:19:06.320 | And by virtue of electrical changes in the,

00:19:10.140 | what we call the postsynaptic neuron,

00:19:12.400 | that chemical will make that neuron

00:19:14.460 | more electrically active or less electrically active.

00:19:17.540 | Dopamine can do that like any other neurotransmitter

00:19:20.960 | or neuromodulator.

00:19:22.440 | So it can have one neuron influence another neuron,

00:19:25.960 | but dopamine can also engage

00:19:28.240 | in what's called a volumetric release.

00:19:30.460 | Volumetric release is like a giant vomit

00:19:33.580 | that gets out to 50 or a hundred or even thousands of cells.

00:19:37.820 | So there's local release, what we call synaptic release,

00:19:40.480 | and then there's volumetric release.

00:19:41.960 | So volumetric release is like dumping all this dopamine

00:19:44.720 | out into the system.

00:19:46.260 | So dopamine is incredible because it can change the way

00:19:50.180 | that our neural circuits work at a local scale

00:19:52.860 | and at a very broad scale.

00:19:54.780 | And for those of you that are only interested in tools,

00:19:57.280 | like how do I get more dopamine?

00:19:59.120 | Let me tell you, this part is really important

00:20:01.740 | because if you were to take a drug or supplement

00:20:05.600 | that increases your level of dopamine,

00:20:07.560 | you are influencing both the local release of dopamine

00:20:11.700 | and volumetric release.

00:20:13.840 | This relates back to the baseline of dopamine

00:20:16.160 | and the big peak above baseline.

00:20:18.920 | And that turns out to be important.

00:20:20.480 | And I'll just allude to why it's important.

00:20:23.200 | Many drugs and indeed many supplements that increase dopamine

00:20:29.520 | will actually make it harder for you to sustain

00:20:32.300 | dopamine release over long periods of time

00:20:34.780 | and to achieve those peaks that most of us are craving

00:20:37.960 | when we are in pursuit of things.

00:20:39.680 | Why?

00:20:40.640 | Because if you get both volumetric release,

00:20:43.540 | the dumping out of dopamine everywhere,

00:20:45.340 | and you're getting local release,

00:20:47.220 | what it means is that the difference between the peak

00:20:49.540 | and baseline is likely to be smaller.

00:20:52.820 | And this is very important, how satisfying or exciting

00:20:57.820 | or pleasureful a given experience is

00:21:00.700 | doesn't just depend on the height of that peak.

00:21:03.880 | It depends on the height of that peak

00:21:05.840 | relative to the baseline.

00:21:08.060 | So if you increase the baseline and you increase the peak,

00:21:12.360 | you're not going to achieve more

00:21:14.080 | and more pleasure from things.

00:21:15.760 | I'll talk about how to leverage this information

00:21:18.840 | in a little bit, but just increasing your dopamine,

00:21:22.800 | yes, it will make you excited for all things.

00:21:25.220 | It will make you feel very motivated,

00:21:26.960 | but it will also make that motivation very short lived.

00:21:31.240 | So there's a better way to increase your dopamine.

00:21:34.700 | There's a better way to optimize

00:21:36.260 | this peak to baseline ratio.

00:21:38.260 | For now, what we've talked about

00:21:39.420 | is two main neural circuits, one for movement

00:21:42.020 | and one for motivation and craving with dopamine.

00:21:45.040 | And we've talked about two main modes of communication

00:21:47.880 | between neurons with dopamine.

00:21:50.460 | One is this local synaptic release.

00:21:52.920 | One is more volumetric release.

00:21:56.500 | And in the back of your mind,

00:21:57.600 | you can relate this back to again,

00:21:59.200 | this baseline versus peaks above baseline.

00:22:02.240 | So that's a description of what we would call

00:22:04.000 | the spatial effects or the spatial aspects of dopamine.

00:22:08.920 | I said, this connects to that, that connects to this.

00:22:11.120 | You can get local or more broad volumetric release.

00:22:13.920 | What about the duration of release

00:22:16.140 | or the duration of action for dopamine?

00:22:19.020 | Well, dopamine is unique among chemicals in the brain

00:22:23.300 | because dopamine unlike a lot of chemicals in the brain

00:22:26.640 | works through what are called G protein coupled receptors.

00:22:29.480 | And for those of you that are about to pass out

00:22:31.120 | from the amount of detail, just hang in there with me.

00:22:32.960 | It's really not complicated.

00:22:34.980 | There are two ways that neurons can communicate

00:22:38.240 | or mainly two ways.

00:22:39.480 | There are a third and a fourth,

00:22:40.660 | but mostly neurons communicate by two modes.

00:22:45.620 | One are what we call fast electrical synapses,

00:22:48.960 | ionotropic conduction, all right?

00:22:51.360 | You don't need to know what that means,

00:22:52.280 | but basically one neuron activates another neuron

00:22:56.320 | and little holes open up in that neuron and ions rush in.

00:23:00.700 | Sodium is the main ion salt by which one neuron

00:23:05.160 | influences the electrical activity of another neuron

00:23:07.240 | because sodium ions contain a charge, okay?

00:23:10.140 | There are other things like chloride and potassium.

00:23:12.480 | If you're interested in looking this up,

00:23:13.680 | just look up ionic conductances in the action potential,

00:23:17.180 | or I could do a post on it sometime

00:23:18.700 | and we could go into detail,

00:23:20.520 | but just understand that when neurons want to

00:23:22.360 | influence each other,

00:23:23.400 | they can do it by way of this fast ionotropic conduction.

00:23:26.520 | This is a really quick way for one neuron

00:23:29.600 | to influence the next.

00:23:31.920 | Dopamine doesn't communicate that way.

00:23:34.240 | Dopamine is slower.

00:23:35.680 | It works through what are called

00:23:36.600 | G protein coupled receptors.

00:23:38.520 | So what happens is dopamine is released

00:23:40.580 | in these little vesicles that I've mentioned before,

00:23:42.560 | get vomited out into the synapse.

00:23:45.040 | Some of that dopamine will bind

00:23:47.300 | to the so-called postsynaptic neuron.

00:23:49.400 | It'll bind to the next neuron.

00:23:50.760 | And then it sets off a cascade.

00:23:53.300 | It's kind of like a bucket brigade of one thing

00:23:55.240 | getting handed off to the next, to the next, to the next.

00:23:58.020 | It's G protein coupled receptors.

00:24:00.360 | And anytime you hear about these GPCRs

00:24:02.120 | or G protein coupled receptors,

00:24:04.360 | pay attention because they're really interesting.

00:24:06.620 | They're slow,

00:24:07.880 | but they also can have multiple cascades of effects.

00:24:11.120 | They can impact even gene expression at some level.

00:24:14.320 | They can change what a cell actually becomes.

00:24:17.240 | They can change how well or how poorly that cell

00:24:20.560 | will respond to the same signal in the future.

00:24:23.960 | So dopamine works through the slower process,

00:24:26.760 | these G protein coupled receptors.

00:24:28.420 | And so its effects tend to take a while in order to occur.

00:24:32.780 | This aspect of dopamine transmission is important

00:24:37.800 | because it now underscores two things.

00:24:39.460 | One, there's two pathways for dopamine to communicate,

00:24:42.520 | one for movement, one for motivation and craving.

00:24:44.660 | There's two spatial scales at which dopamine can operate

00:24:49.020 | synaptically or volumetrically.

00:24:51.220 | And dopamine can have slow effects, really slow effects,

00:24:56.220 | or even very long lasting effects.

00:24:58.280 | And it even can control gene expression.

00:25:00.880 | It can actually change the way that cells behave.

00:25:03.460 | One thing that's not often discussed about dopamine,

00:25:05.520 | but is extremely important to know

00:25:07.900 | is that dopamine doesn't work on its own.

00:25:11.040 | Neurons that release dopamine co-release glutamate.

00:25:15.880 | Glutamate is a neurotransmitter,

00:25:18.540 | and it's a neurotransmitter that is excitatory,

00:25:21.200 | meaning it stimulates neurons to be electrically active.

00:25:24.760 | So now, even if you don't know any cell biology,

00:25:28.680 | should start to gain a picture that dopamine is responsible

00:25:31.920 | for movement, motivation, and drive.

00:25:34.340 | It does that through two pathways,

00:25:35.720 | but also the dopamine stimulates action in general

00:25:39.680 | because it releases this excitatory neurotransmitter.

00:25:41.960 | It tends to make certain neurons that are nearby,

00:25:45.880 | or even that are far away because of volumetric release,

00:25:48.240 | it tends to make those more active.

00:25:50.080 | So dopamine is really stimulating.

00:25:52.240 | And indeed, we say that dopaminergic transmission

00:25:56.320 | or dopamine tends to stimulate sympathetic arousal.

00:26:00.600 | Sympathetic doesn't have anything to do with sympathy.

00:26:02.680 | It's just simply means that it tends to increase

00:26:05.880 | our levels of alertness.

00:26:07.300 | It tends to bring an animal or a human into a state

00:26:10.780 | of more alertness, readiness, and desire to pursue things

00:26:15.100 | outside the confines of its skin.

00:26:17.400 | So if I were to just put a really simple message

00:26:21.040 | around dopamine, it would be,

00:26:22.800 | there's a molecule in your brain and body

00:26:24.880 | that when released tends to make you look outside yourself,

00:26:29.880 | pursue things outside yourself,

00:26:32.620 | and to crave things outside yourself.

00:26:36.620 | The pleasure that arrives from achieving things

00:26:39.080 | also involves dopamine,

00:26:40.460 | but is mainly the consequence of other molecules.

00:26:43.840 | But if ever you felt lethargic and like just lazy

00:26:46.620 | and you had no motivation or drive,

00:26:48.280 | that's a low dopamine state.

00:26:50.480 | If ever you felt really excited, motivated,

00:26:52.960 | even if you were a little scared to do something,

00:26:55.680 | maybe you did your first skydive

00:26:57.040 | or you're about to do your first skydive

00:26:59.000 | or you're about to do some public speaking

00:27:00.500 | and you really don't want to screw it up,

00:27:02.820 | you are in a high dopamine state.

00:27:05.600 | Dopamine is a universal currency in all mammals,

00:27:08.900 | but especially in humans for moving us toward goals

00:27:13.660 | and how much dopamine is in our system at any one time

00:27:17.640 | compared to how much dopamine was in our system

00:27:20.520 | a few minutes ago and how much we remember

00:27:24.220 | enjoying a particular experience of the past.

00:27:27.740 | That dictates your so-called quality of life

00:27:30.740 | and your desire to pursue things.

00:27:33.260 | This is really important.

00:27:34.180 | Dopamine is a currency

00:27:36.160 | and it's the way that you track pleasure.

00:27:38.620 | It's the way that you track success.

00:27:40.360 | It's the way that you track whether or not

00:27:42.540 | you are doing well or doing poorly.

00:27:44.920 | And that is subjective.

00:27:47.000 | But if your dopamine is too low,

00:27:50.340 | you will not feel motivated.

00:27:52.000 | If your dopamine is really high, you will feel motivated.

00:27:55.360 | And if your dopamine is somewhere in the middle,

00:27:57.760 | how you feel depends on whether or not

00:27:59.680 | you had higher dopamine a few minutes ago or lower dopamine.

00:28:04.160 | This is important.

00:28:05.760 | Your experience of life and your level of motivation

00:28:08.800 | and drive depends on how much dopamine you have

00:28:13.480 | relative to your recent experience.

00:28:17.080 | This is, again, something that's just not accounted for

00:28:20.560 | in the simple language of dopamine hits, okay?

00:28:23.760 | A simple way to envision dopamine hits

00:28:26.860 | is every time you do something you like,

00:28:28.320 | you eat a piece of chocolate, dopamine hit.

00:28:29.920 | You look at your Instagram, dopamine hit.

00:28:31.640 | You see someone you like, dopamine hit.

00:28:34.280 | All these things described as dopamine hits

00:28:37.540 | neglect the fact that if you scroll social media

00:28:40.640 | and you see something you really like, dopamine hit.

00:28:43.740 | Sure, there's an increase in dopamine,

00:28:45.800 | but then you get to something else

00:28:47.640 | and you go, "Hmm, not that interesting."

00:28:49.680 | However, had you arrived at that second thing first,

00:28:53.520 | you might think that it was really interesting.

00:28:55.880 | If you had arrived to that second Instagram post

00:28:59.540 | three days later or four days later,

00:29:01.560 | you might find it extremely interesting.

00:29:03.940 | Again, how much dopamine you experience from something

00:29:07.260 | depends on your baseline level of dopamine

00:29:09.320 | when you arrive there and your previous dopamine peaks, okay?

00:29:14.320 | That's super important to understand,

00:29:16.600 | and it's completely neglected

00:29:18.120 | by the general language of dopamine hits.

00:29:20.180 | This is why when you repeatedly engage in something

00:29:23.680 | that you enjoy, your threshold for enjoyment

00:29:27.140 | goes up and up and up.

00:29:29.040 | So I want to talk about that process,

00:29:30.960 | and I want to explain how that process works,

00:29:33.060 | because if you understand that process

00:29:34.840 | and you understand some of these schedules and kinetics,

00:29:37.760 | as we call them around dopamine,

00:29:39.000 | you will be in a terrific position

00:29:40.840 | to use any dopamine-enhancing tools that you decide to use.

00:29:44.560 | You'll be in an excellent position to modulate

00:29:46.860 | and control your own dopamine release

00:29:48.760 | for optimal motivation and drive.

00:29:50.960 | I realized that was a lot of information

00:29:53.360 | about the biology of dopamine,

00:29:55.000 | sort of like trying to make you drink

00:29:56.480 | from the fire hose of dopamine biology.

00:29:59.280 | However, I realize that some people probably want

00:30:01.360 | even more information about the biology

00:30:03.880 | of dopamine transmission.

00:30:05.720 | If you're interested in that,

00:30:07.240 | I'll post a link to a absolutely stellar review

00:30:09.840 | that was published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience

00:30:12.360 | called Spatial and Temporal Scales of Dopamine Transmission.

00:30:15.480 | It is quite detailed, but they have beautiful diagrams

00:30:18.240 | and can walk you through all the things

00:30:20.280 | that I just described and get into even more detail.

00:30:22.680 | We'll put a link to that in the caption on YouTube.

00:30:26.240 | Right now, I want to share with you two anecdotes,

00:30:29.360 | one from my own life and one from some fairly recent history

00:30:34.220 | that illustrate some of the core biology of dopamine

00:30:38.140 | and how profoundly it can shape our experience.

00:30:41.560 | The first one is a really tragic situation that occurred.

00:30:45.980 | This was in the '80s.

00:30:49.300 | There was a outbreak of what looked

00:30:52.360 | like Parkinsonian symptoms in a young population.

00:30:56.300 | So many of you heard of Parkinson's disease.

00:30:58.200 | Parkinson's disease is a disease

00:31:00.260 | in which people initially start to quake,

00:31:03.640 | can't generate smooth movements.

00:31:05.080 | They'll have issues with speech,

00:31:06.320 | sometimes cognition as well.

00:31:08.560 | There are examples like Michael J. Fox,

00:31:10.940 | which are kind of early onset Parkinson's.

00:31:13.500 | Typically, it hits people a little bit later in life.

00:31:16.660 | There's a genetic component,

00:31:19.620 | but there is this question and there's always been

00:31:22.700 | this question whether or not certain lifestyle factors

00:31:25.260 | can also create Parkinson's.

00:31:27.580 | And some years ago, there was a situation

00:31:32.140 | where laboratories, street laboratories,

00:31:35.300 | illicit laboratories were trying to make a drug called MPPP,

00:31:39.980 | which is an opioid-like compound.

00:31:41.780 | It's a bit like heroin and heroin addicts seeking heroin

00:31:47.260 | went out and bought what they thought was MPPP.

00:31:50.680 | Unfortunately, it was not MPPP.

00:31:56.120 | I mean, it would have been tragic if it was anyway,

00:31:58.000 | because they were drug addicts,

00:31:59.200 | but what they ended up taking turned out to be a lot worse.

00:32:02.280 | What they ended up taking was MPTP,

00:32:05.740 | and MPTP can arise in the synthesis of MPPP.

00:32:10.740 | So someone in a lab someplace,

00:32:12.680 | this was mainly in the Central Valley in California,

00:32:14.660 | but elsewhere as well,

00:32:16.820 | somebody created MPTP.

00:32:20.160 | And what ended up happening was a large number

00:32:23.820 | of young people who were opioid addicts

00:32:26.780 | became completely boxed in paralyzed,

00:32:30.220 | couldn't speak, couldn't blink, couldn't do anything,

00:32:34.240 | couldn't function, couldn't move.

00:32:35.800 | So both aspects of dopamine transmission were disrupted.

00:32:40.800 | They had no motivation and drive.

00:32:43.300 | They couldn't generate any movement of any kind.

00:32:45.740 | They were literally locked in frozen.

00:32:47.880 | And sadly, this is irreversible.

00:32:51.540 | It's irreversible because what MPTP does

00:32:54.900 | is it kills the dopaminergic neurons

00:32:58.180 | of the substantia nigra, that nigrostriatal pathway

00:33:00.900 | that's involved in generating movement,

00:33:02.780 | and it kills the dopaminergic neurons

00:33:05.180 | of the so-called mesocortical limbic pathway.

00:33:07.940 | I was in college when this whole MPTP thing happened,

00:33:10.980 | and I remember hearing this story.

00:33:13.100 | At the time, I had no understanding of what it is

00:33:16.320 | to have very high levels of dopamine

00:33:18.380 | or extremely depleted levels of dopamine.

00:33:20.660 | There was no reason why I should have that understanding.

00:33:22.560 | I mean, of course, I had experienced different pleasures

00:33:24.700 | of different kinds, and I've had lows in my life,

00:33:27.660 | but nothing to the extreme that I'm about to discuss.

00:33:32.040 | I got Giardia, and Giardia is a stomach bug

00:33:38.060 | that if any of you ever had it, it is terrible.

00:33:40.780 | It's terrible diarrhea, you end up very dehydrated,

00:33:43.180 | very quickly, you drop a ton of weight,

00:33:45.740 | and it is extremely unpleasant.

00:33:48.120 | I ended up going to the emergency room,

00:33:51.660 | and in the emergency room,

00:33:53.780 | I begged them for something to stop up my guts,

00:33:56.100 | and they gave it to me.

00:33:57.340 | They put a saline line in to rehydrate me,

00:33:59.500 | and they injected something into the saline bag,

00:34:02.660 | and within minutes, I felt more sadness,

00:34:08.700 | more overwhelming sense of depression,

00:34:13.340 | basically lower than I'd ever felt in my entire life.

00:34:16.580 | It was absolutely profound.

00:34:19.620 | I was crying endlessly without knowing why I was crying.

00:34:23.700 | I was miserable, and I asked them, "What did you inject?"

00:34:26.740 | And they said, "We injected Thorazine."

00:34:29.020 | Thorazine is an anti-psychotic drug.

00:34:31.540 | It's actually used to block dopamine receptors.

00:34:34.120 | It's what's given to people who have schizophrenia,

00:34:37.380 | often is given to people who have schizophrenia,

00:34:39.440 | because schizophrenia involves, among other things,

00:34:42.860 | elevated levels of dopamine.

00:34:44.500 | It was horrible.

00:34:47.860 | The experience of it was miserable,

00:34:50.620 | unlike anything I'd ever experienced.

00:34:53.140 | And so I actually said to them, "What did you give me?"

00:34:56.540 | They said, "Thorazine," and I said,

00:34:58.220 | "You have to give me L-DOPA.

00:35:00.700 | You have to give me something

00:35:01.780 | to get my dopamine levels back up again."

00:35:04.100 | And they did.

00:35:04.980 | They gave me an injection of L-DOPA into the bag

00:35:07.320 | went straight into my bloodstream,

00:35:08.500 | and within minutes, I felt fine again.

00:35:12.220 | It was incredible, and it really opened up my mind

00:35:15.300 | and my experience to what it is

00:35:17.060 | to have absolutely plummeted levels of dopamine.

00:35:21.060 | There's nothing more miserable than that, I'll tell you.

00:35:23.120 | And these poor souls who had this MPTP experience,

00:35:27.820 | unfortunately, they couldn't recover those cells.

00:35:29.820 | People who have severe Parkinson's

00:35:31.980 | are struggling with this as well,

00:35:33.360 | because in Parkinson's and in Lewy body dementia,

00:35:35.500 | the dopaminergic neurons often die.

00:35:37.800 | It's not just a problem

00:35:38.700 | with those neurons releasing enough dopamine.

00:35:40.940 | Later, we're going to talk about some approaches

00:35:43.200 | to maintaining dopaminergic neuron health

00:35:46.040 | and things that we can all do for that.

00:35:47.800 | But I will tell you, these dopamine neurons

00:35:49.980 | that we all have are very precious

00:35:51.800 | for movement and mood and motivation.

00:35:54.240 | Having experienced what it is

00:35:56.120 | to have very, very low levels of dopamine,

00:35:58.720 | or in this case, to have my dopamine receptors

00:36:00.740 | blocked from thorazine was eye-opening, to say the least,

00:36:05.740 | and has given me tremendous sensitivity

00:36:09.060 | to the fact that dopamine is perhaps

00:36:12.120 | one of the most powerful molecules

00:36:13.900 | that any of us has inside of us,

00:36:16.460 | and the one that we ought to all think very carefully

00:36:19.120 | about how we leverage.

00:36:20.100 | Because while most experiences and most things

00:36:24.380 | that we do and take and eat and et cetera

00:36:27.260 | won't create enormous highs and enormous lows in dopamine,

00:36:30.860 | even subtle fluctuations in dopamine

00:36:33.600 | really shape our perception of life

00:36:35.740 | and what we're capable of and how we feel.

00:36:38.060 | And so we want to guard those

00:36:39.180 | and we want to understand them.

00:36:40.580 | So let's lean into that understanding about dopamine,

00:36:42.660 | and then let's talk about some tools that we can all use

00:36:45.220 | to leverage dopamine in order to keep that baseline

00:36:48.340 | in the appropriate healthy place

00:36:50.520 | and still be able to access those peaks in dopamine,

00:36:53.780 | because those, after all,

00:36:55.520 | are some of what makes life rich and worth living.

00:36:58.380 | So let's talk about the baseline of dopamine

00:37:00.620 | that we all have and the peaks in dopamine

00:37:03.640 | that we all can achieve through different activities

00:37:07.040 | and things that we ingest.

00:37:08.560 | All of us have different baseline levels of dopamine.

00:37:13.760 | Some of this is sure to be genetic.

00:37:17.000 | Some people just simply ride at a level a little bit higher,

00:37:21.240 | they're a little bit more excited,

00:37:22.500 | they're a little bit more motivated,

00:37:24.620 | or maybe they're a lot more excited

00:37:25.980 | or a lot more motivated.

00:37:27.240 | Some people are a little mellower,

00:37:30.340 | some people are a little less excitable.

00:37:32.460 | And some of that has to do with the fact

00:37:34.500 | that dopamine doesn't act alone.

00:37:37.180 | Dopamine has close cousins or friends in the nervous system,

00:37:41.300 | and I'll just name off a few of those

00:37:42.640 | close cousins and friends.

00:37:44.000 | Epinephrine, also called adrenaline,

00:37:48.620 | is the main chemical driver of energy.

00:37:52.020 | We can't do anything.

00:37:54.280 | Anything at all unless we have some level of epinephrine

00:37:56.980 | in our brain and body.

00:37:58.620 | It's released from the adrenal glands,

00:38:00.020 | which ride atop our kidneys.

00:38:01.180 | It's released from an area of the brainstem

00:38:03.420 | called locus coeruleus.

00:38:05.420 | And its release tends to wake up neural circuits

00:38:08.620 | in the brain and wake up various aspects

00:38:11.880 | of our body's physiology and give us a readiness.

00:38:15.780 | So it should come as no surprise

00:38:16.940 | that dopamine and epinephrine,

00:38:19.580 | AKA adrenaline, hang out together.

00:38:22.300 | In fact, epinephrine and adrenaline

00:38:24.640 | are actually manufactured from dopamine.

00:38:28.120 | There's a biochemical pathway involving dopamine,

00:38:30.560 | which is a beautiful pathway.

00:38:32.200 | If ever you want to look it up,

00:38:33.700 | you could just look up biochemistry of dopamine.

00:38:36.120 | But what you'll find is that L-DOPA

00:38:39.160 | is converted into dopamine.

00:38:41.480 | Dopamine is converted into noradrenaline,

00:38:47.200 | norepinephrine, it's also called.

00:38:49.500 | And noradrenaline, norepinephrine is converted

00:38:52.840 | into adrenaline.

00:38:54.460 | So not only are dopamine and epinephrine,

00:38:57.800 | AKA adrenaline close cousins,

00:39:00.020 | they are actually family members, okay?

00:39:02.540 | They're closely related.

00:39:04.060 | I'm not going to get too deep into epinephrine today.

00:39:06.260 | I'm not going to talk too much about those pathways,

00:39:08.380 | but anytime I'm talking about dopaminergic transmission

00:39:11.020 | or that you have a peak in dopamine,

00:39:13.060 | inevitably that means that you have a peak

00:39:15.100 | in release of epinephrine as well.

00:39:17.660 | What dopamine does is dopamine really colors

00:39:21.560 | the subjective experience of an activity

00:39:24.340 | to make it more pleasureful,

00:39:26.340 | to make it something that you want more of.

00:39:28.600 | Epinephrine is more about energy.

00:39:30.780 | Epinephrine alone can be fear, paralysis, trauma,

00:39:35.780 | not physical paralysis, but mental paralysis,

00:39:38.640 | frozen in fear or being traumatized or scared.

00:39:42.160 | But the addition of dopamine to that chemical cocktail,

00:39:45.980 | if dopamine was released in the brain,

00:39:48.380 | well, then that epinephrine becomes one of excitement.

00:39:53.060 | Okay, I'm using a broad brush here,

00:39:54.860 | but essentially what you need to know is that dopamine

00:39:57.460 | and epinephrine, AKA adrenaline are family members

00:40:00.820 | and they tend to work together like a little gang

00:40:03.160 | to make you seek out certain things.

00:40:06.020 | So what sorts of activities,

00:40:08.100 | what sorts of things increase dopamine

00:40:11.200 | and how much do they increase dopamine?

00:40:14.000 | Well, let's take a look at some typical things

00:40:17.700 | that people do out there or ingest out there

00:40:21.340 | that are known to increase dopamine.

00:40:23.840 | So let's recall that you have a baseline level of dopamine

00:40:26.580 | and that everybody does.

00:40:28.200 | And even within a family,

00:40:29.360 | you might have family members who are very excitable,

00:40:31.900 | happy and motivated and others who are less excitable,

00:40:34.500 | happy and motivated.

00:40:36.080 | But your level of dopamine has everything to do

00:40:40.660 | with those genetics,

00:40:41.800 | but also with what you've experienced in the previous days

00:40:44.640 | and the previous months and so on.

00:40:46.380 | When you do or ingest certain things,

00:40:50.440 | your levels of dopamine will rise above baseline transiently

00:40:54.500 | and depending on what you do or ingest,

00:40:57.980 | it will rise either more or less

00:41:00.780 | and it will be very brief or it'll last a long time.

00:41:03.700 | So let's take a look at some of the typical things

00:41:05.540 | that people take and do and eat.

00:41:08.820 | Some are good for us, some are not good for us.

00:41:12.000 | And let's ask how much dopamine is increased above baseline.

00:41:15.720 | Now, of course, these are averages,

00:41:16.940 | but these are averages that have been measured

00:41:19.100 | in so-called micro dialysis studies in animals.

00:41:21.860 | So actually extracting from particular brain areas,

00:41:24.020 | how much dopamine is released or from measuring the serum,

00:41:27.340 | the circulating levels of dopamine in humans.

00:41:30.720 | Chocolate, they didn't look at milk versus dark chocolate,

00:41:35.820 | but chocolate will increase your baseline level

00:41:38.940 | of dopamine 1.5 times, okay?

00:41:41.920 | So it's a pretty substantial increase in dopamine.

00:41:44.400 | It's transient, it goes away after a few minutes

00:41:48.000 | or even a few seconds.

00:41:50.320 | I'll explain what determines the duration in a minute,

00:41:53.280 | but 1.5 times for chocolate.

00:41:55.620 | Sex, both the pursuit of sex and the act of sex

00:42:01.600 | increases dopamine two times.

00:42:06.320 | So it's a doubling above baseline.

00:42:08.980 | Now, of course, there's going to be variation there,

00:42:11.300 | but that's the average increase in baseline dopamine

00:42:15.220 | caused by sex.

00:42:17.720 | Later, I will talk about how the different aspects

00:42:22.300 | of the so-called arousal arc, the different aspects of sex,

00:42:25.260 | believe it or not, have a differential impact on dopamine.

00:42:28.900 | But for now, as a general theme or activity,

00:42:33.060 | sex doubles the amount of dopamine circulating in your blood.

00:42:37.100 | Nicotine, in particular, nicotine that is smoked,

00:42:43.340 | like cigarettes and so forth,

00:42:44.940 | increases dopamine 2.5 times above baseline.

00:42:49.900 | So there's a peak that goes up above baseline

00:42:53.240 | 2.5 times higher.

00:42:55.640 | It is very short-lived.

00:42:59.160 | Anyone who's ever been a chain smoker

00:43:01.480 | or observed a chain smoker understands

00:43:03.440 | that the increase in dopamine from nicotine

00:43:06.580 | is very short-lived.

00:43:08.420 | Cocaine will increase the level of dopamine

00:43:12.300 | in the bloodstream 2.5 times above baseline.

00:43:15.080 | And amphetamine, another drug that increases dopamine,

00:43:21.340 | will increase the amount of dopamine in the bloodstream

00:43:25.000 | 10 times above baseline,

00:43:27.420 | a tremendous increase in dopamine.

00:43:30.200 | Exercise.

00:43:31.780 | Now, exercise will have a different impact

00:43:34.460 | on the levels of dopamine,

00:43:35.660 | depending on how much somebody

00:43:37.500 | subjectively enjoys that exercise.

00:43:40.580 | So if you're somebody who loves running,

00:43:43.300 | chances are it's going to increase your levels of dopamine

00:43:47.740 | two times above your baseline, not unlike sex.

00:43:51.320 | People who dislike exercise

00:43:55.140 | will achieve less dopamine increase

00:43:57.500 | or no increase in dopamine from exercise.

00:44:01.000 | And if you like other forms of exercise,

00:44:02.560 | like yoga or weightlifting or swimming or what have you,

00:44:05.920 | again, it's going to vary by your subjective experience

00:44:08.320 | of whether or not you enjoy that activity.

00:44:11.380 | This is important.

00:44:12.720 | And it brings us back to something

00:44:14.100 | that we talked about earlier.

00:44:15.280 | Remember that mesocorticolimbic pathway?

00:44:19.300 | Well, the cortical part is important.

00:44:21.560 | The cortical part actually has a very specific part,

00:44:25.220 | which is your prefrontal cortex.

00:44:26.980 | The area of your forebrain

00:44:28.900 | that's involved in thinking and planning

00:44:31.360 | and involved in assigning a rational explanation

00:44:35.460 | to something and involved in assigning

00:44:38.060 | a subjective experience to something.

00:44:41.100 | So for instance, the pen that I'm holding right now,

00:44:43.240 | it's one of these Pilot V5s.

00:44:44.580 | I love these Pilot V5s.

00:44:45.700 | They don't sponsor the podcast.

00:44:46.680 | I just happen to like them.

00:44:47.520 | I like the way that they write, how they feel.

00:44:49.780 | If I spent enough time thinking about or talking about it,

00:44:53.260 | I could probably get a dopamine increase

00:44:54.700 | just talking about this Pilot V5.

00:44:56.220 | And that's not because I have the propensity

00:44:58.840 | to release dopamine easily.

00:45:00.260 | It's that as we start to engage with something more and more

00:45:03.520 | and what we say about it

00:45:05.040 | and what we encourage ourselves to think about it

00:45:07.980 | has a profound impact on its rewarding

00:45:11.080 | or non-rewarding properties.

00:45:13.300 | Now it's not simply the case that you can lie to yourself

00:45:15.780 | and you can tell yourself, I love something.

00:45:17.260 | And when you don't really love it

00:45:18.620 | and it will increase dopamine.

00:45:20.880 | But what's been found over and over again

00:45:22.740 | is that if people journal about something

00:45:24.580 | or they practice some form of appreciation for something

00:45:27.780 | or they think of some aspect of something that they enjoy,

00:45:31.540 | the amount of dopamine that that behavior will evoke

00:45:35.580 | tends to go up.

00:45:37.140 | So for people that hate exercise,

00:45:38.660 | you can think about some aspect of exercise

00:45:41.580 | that you really enjoy.

00:45:42.660 | However, I will caution you against saying to yourself,

00:45:47.660 | I hate exercise or I hate studying or I hate this person,

00:45:52.700 | but I love the reward I give myself afterward.

00:45:55.900 | Later we're going to talk about how rewards given afterward

00:45:59.280 | actually make the situation worse.

00:46:01.640 | They won't make you like exercise more or studying more.

00:46:04.600 | They actually will undermine the dopamine release

00:46:07.080 | that would otherwise occur for that activity.

00:46:09.440 | So certain things, chemicals have a universal effect.

00:46:13.580 | They make everybody's dopamine go up.

00:46:16.040 | So some people like chocolate,

00:46:17.540 | some people don't of course,

00:46:19.380 | but in general it causes this increase in dopamine,

00:46:22.860 | but sex, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamine,

00:46:25.940 | those things cause increases in dopamine

00:46:28.040 | in everybody that takes them.

00:46:29.500 | Things like exercise, studying, hard work,

00:46:33.400 | working through a challenge in a relationship

00:46:35.300 | or working through something hard of any kind,

00:46:38.100 | that is going to be subjective

00:46:40.300 | as to how much dopamine will be released.

00:46:42.740 | And we will return to that subjective component

00:46:45.320 | in a little bit.

00:46:46.780 | But now you have a sense of how much dopamine

00:46:50.900 | can be evoked by different activities

00:46:53.060 | and by different substances.

00:46:54.980 | One that you might be wondering about is caffeine.

00:46:57.440 | I'm certainly drinking my caffeine today

00:46:59.320 | and I do enjoy caffeine in limited quantities.

00:47:03.500 | I drink Yerba Mate and I drink coffee and I love it.

00:47:07.340 | Does it increase dopamine?

00:47:10.100 | Well, a little bit.

00:47:11.820 | Caffeine will increase dopamine to some extent,

00:47:14.380 | but it is pretty modest compared to the other things

00:47:17.580 | that I described.

00:47:18.780 | Chocolate, sex, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamine, and so on.

00:47:21.580 | However, there's a really interesting paper published

00:47:25.780 | in 2015, this is Volkow et al,

00:47:28.540 | you can look it up, it's very easy to find,

00:47:30.580 | that showed that regular ingestion of caffeine,

00:47:33.600 | whether or not it's from coffee or otherwise,

00:47:36.100 | increases up regulation of certain dopamine receptors.

00:47:40.940 | So caffeine actually makes you able to experience

00:47:45.940 | more of dopamine's effects.

00:47:47.940 | Because as I mentioned before,

00:47:49.060 | dopamine is vomited out into the synapse

00:47:51.260 | or it's released volumetrically,

00:47:52.500 | but then it has to bind someplace

00:47:53.960 | and trigger those G protein coupled receptors.

00:47:56.820 | And caffeine increases the number,

00:47:59.700 | the density of those G protein coupled receptors.

00:48:03.380 | Now, sitting back and thinking about that,

00:48:06.020 | you might think, oh yeah, sometimes I'll notice people,

00:48:09.300 | at least in the old days that it used to be a cigarette

00:48:11.900 | and a cup of coffee, or when people drink alcohol,

00:48:14.660 | oftentimes they'll smoke.

00:48:16.260 | And it's well known that different compounds

00:48:18.980 | like alcohol and nicotine or caffeine and nicotine

00:48:23.020 | or certain behaviors and certain drugs

00:48:25.660 | can synergize to give bigger dopamine increases.

00:48:28.740 | And this is not terribly uncommon.

00:48:30.580 | There are a lot of people nowadays who, for instance,

00:48:32.840 | take pre-workout energy drinks.

00:48:34.740 | They'll drink, I won't name names,

00:48:36.420 | but they'll drink a canned energy drink

00:48:38.640 | or they'll drink a pre-workout

00:48:40.500 | and they'll try and get that big stimulation,

00:48:42.900 | that stimulant effect for the dopamine, the norepinephrine,

00:48:45.960 | that family of molecules that works together

00:48:47.680 | to make you motivated.

00:48:48.700 | And then they'll also exercise to try and get even more

00:48:51.720 | of a dopaminergic experience out of that workout.

00:48:54.940 | Sometimes it's also to perform better as well, of course.

00:48:59.100 | But as we'll talk about in a few minutes,

00:49:01.840 | that aspect or that approach rather

00:49:04.140 | of trying to just get your dopamine

00:49:05.500 | as high as you possibly can

00:49:07.040 | in order to get the most out of an experience,

00:49:09.540 | turns out to not be the best approach.

00:49:11.820 | And what you'll find as we talk about dopamine schedules

00:49:15.980 | is that layering together multiple things,

00:49:19.660 | substances and activities that lead to big increases

00:49:23.100 | in dopamine actually can create pretty severe issues

00:49:26.980 | with motivation and energy right after those experiences

00:49:30.460 | and even a couple of days later.

00:49:32.180 | So I'm not saying that people shouldn't take

00:49:33.940 | the occasional pre-workout if that's your thing

00:49:35.800 | or drink a cup of coffee or two before working out.

00:49:38.560 | Now and again, some people really enjoy that.

00:49:40.660 | I certainly do that every once in a while.

00:49:42.720 | But if you do it too often,

00:49:44.240 | what you'll find is that your capacity to release dopamine

00:49:48.380 | and your level of motivation and drive and energy overall

00:49:51.500 | will take a serious hit.

00:49:53.380 | Now I've been alluding to this dopamine peaks

00:49:55.760 | versus dopamine baseline thing

00:49:57.480 | since the beginning of the episode,

00:49:58.940 | talked about tonic and phasic release and so forth.

00:50:01.960 | But now let's really drill into what this means

00:50:04.280 | and how to leverage it for our own purposes.

00:50:07.960 | In order to do that, let's take a step back and ask,

00:50:10.200 | why would we have a dopamine system like this?

00:50:12.960 | Why would we have a dopamine system at all?

00:50:15.100 | Well, we have to remember

00:50:16.260 | what our species primary interest is.

00:50:20.900 | Our species like all species has a main interest

00:50:24.980 | and that's to make more of itself.

00:50:26.740 | It's not just about sex and reproduction.

00:50:28.580 | It's about forging for resources.

00:50:31.300 | Resources can be food.

00:50:32.540 | It can be water, it can be salt, can be shelter,

00:50:36.600 | can be social connection.

00:50:38.100 | Dopamine is the universal currency of forging and seeking.

00:50:44.040 | We call sometimes talk about motivation and craving,

00:50:46.780 | but what we mean in the evolutionary adaptive context,

00:50:49.600 | what we mean is forging and seeking, seeking water,

00:50:52.460 | seeking food, seeking mates,

00:50:54.780 | seeking things that make us feel good and avoiding things

00:50:57.320 | that don't make us feel good,

00:50:58.280 | but in particular seeking things

00:51:00.040 | that will provide sustenance and pleasure in the short term

00:51:03.760 | and will extend the species in the longterm.

00:51:06.520 | Once we understand that dopamine

00:51:09.080 | is a driver for us to seek things,

00:51:12.240 | it makes perfect sense as to why

00:51:14.240 | it would have a baseline level and it would have peaks

00:51:17.400 | and that the baseline and peaks would be related

00:51:19.880 | in some sort of direct way.

00:51:21.920 | Here's what I mean by that.

00:51:23.800 | Let's say that you were not alive now,

00:51:26.080 | but you were alive 10,000 years ago

00:51:28.920 | and you woke up and you looked

00:51:31.160 | and you realize you had minimal water

00:51:33.800 | and you had minimal food left.

00:51:36.120 | Maybe you have a child, maybe you have a partner,

00:51:38.560 | maybe you're in an entire village,

00:51:39.960 | but you realize that you need things, okay?

00:51:43.120 | You need to be able to generate the energy

00:51:47.240 | to go seek those things.

00:51:49.040 | And chances are there were dangers in seeking those things.

00:51:52.120 | Yes, it could be saber tooth tigers and things of that sort,

00:51:55.160 | but there are other dangers too.

00:51:56.840 | There's the danger of a cut to your skin

00:51:58.460 | that could lead to infection.

00:51:59.480 | There's the danger of storms, there's the danger of cold,

00:52:01.880 | there's the danger of leaving your loved ones behind.

00:52:04.680 | So you go out and forage, right?

00:52:07.480 | You could be hunting, you could be gathering,

00:52:08.940 | or you could be doing both.

00:52:10.920 | The going out and foraging process was,

00:52:14.500 | we are certain, driven by dopamine.

00:52:16.980 | I mean, there's no fossil record of the brain,

00:52:18.720 | but these circuits have existed, we know,

00:52:20.600 | for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years

00:52:23.820 | and they are present in every animal, not just mammals,

00:52:27.000 | but even in little worms, like C. elegans,

00:52:28.880 | the same process is mediated by dopamine.

00:52:32.280 | So dopamine drives you to go out and look for things.

00:52:35.100 | And then let's say you find a couple berries

00:52:37.500 | and these ones are rotten, these ones are good.

00:52:39.500 | Maybe you hunt an animal and kill it,

00:52:41.640 | or you find an animal that was recently killed

00:52:43.660 | and you decide to take the meat.

00:52:45.260 | You are going to achieve, or I should say,

00:52:48.720 | experience some sort of dopamine release.

00:52:51.560 | You found the reward, that's great,

00:52:53.980 | but then it needs to return to some lower level.

00:52:57.480 | Why?

00:52:58.320 | Well, because if you just stayed there,

00:53:00.380 | you would never continue to forage for more.

00:53:02.620 | It doesn't just increase your baseline and then stay there,

00:53:06.720 | it goes back down.

00:53:08.240 | And what's very important to understand

00:53:09.860 | is that it doesn't just go back down

00:53:11.460 | to the level it was before,

00:53:13.500 | it goes down to a level below what it was

00:53:16.720 | before you went out seeking that thing.

00:53:19.020 | Now, this is counterintuitive.

00:53:20.940 | We often think, oh, okay, I'm going to pursue the win, right?

00:53:24.340 | Let's move this to modern day.

00:53:26.420 | I'm going to run this marathon,

00:53:28.500 | I'm going to train for this marathon.

00:53:29.700 | Then you run the marathon and you finish,

00:53:32.200 | you cross the finish line, you feel great.

00:53:34.460 | And you would think, okay, now I'm set for the entire year.

00:53:37.180 | I'm going to feel so much better.

00:53:38.200 | I'm going to feel this accomplishment in my body.

00:53:40.140 | It's going to be so great.

00:53:41.460 | That's not what happens.

00:53:42.900 | You might feel some of those things,

00:53:44.320 | but your level of dopamine

00:53:45.900 | has actually dropped below baseline.

00:53:48.460 | Now, eventually it will ratchet back up.

00:53:51.320 | But two things are really important.

00:53:52.700 | First of all, the extent to which it drops below baseline

00:53:55.800 | is proportional to how high the peak was.

00:53:59.020 | So if you cross the finish line pretty happy,

00:54:02.700 | it won't drop that much below baseline afterward.

00:54:05.980 | If you cross the finish line ecstatic,

00:54:08.940 | well, a day or two later,

00:54:10.140 | you're going to feel quite a bit lower

00:54:12.360 | than you would otherwise.

00:54:13.380 | You might not be depressed

00:54:14.480 | because it depends on where that baseline was to begin with.

00:54:17.180 | But the so-called postpartum depression

00:54:19.060 | that people experience after giving birth

00:54:21.700 | or after some big win, a graduation,

00:54:25.620 | or any kind of celebration,

00:54:27.620 | that postpartum drop in mood and affect and motivation

00:54:32.260 | is the drop in baseline dopamine.

00:54:35.060 | This is very important to understand

00:54:36.380 | because this happens on very rapid timescales

00:54:38.740 | and it can last quite a long time.

00:54:40.640 | It also explains the behavior

00:54:44.620 | that most of us are familiar with

00:54:46.100 | of engaging in something that we really enjoy,

00:54:48.220 | going to a restaurant that we absolutely love

00:54:51.060 | or engaging in some way with some person

00:54:53.140 | that we really, really enjoy.

00:54:55.220 | But if we continue to engage in that behavior

00:54:57.300 | over and over again, it kind of loses its edge.

00:55:01.180 | It starts to kind of feel less exciting to us.

00:55:05.300 | Some of us experience that drop in excitement

00:55:10.100 | more quickly and more severely than others,

00:55:12.860 | but everyone experiences that to some extent.

00:55:16.360 | And this has direct roots

00:55:18.860 | in these evolutionarily conserved circuits.

00:55:22.180 | Some of you may be hearing this and think,

00:55:23.620 | "No, no, no, that's not how it works for me.

00:55:25.500 | I'm just riding higher and higher all the time.

00:55:27.540 | I love my kids. I love my job.

00:55:29.420 | I love school. I love wins.

00:55:31.100 | I don't want losses."

00:55:33.020 | I agree.

00:55:33.860 | We all feel good when we are achieving things,

00:55:37.460 | but oftentimes we are feeling good

00:55:40.120 | because we are layering in different aspects of life,

00:55:43.880 | consuming things and doing things that increase our dopamine.

00:55:46.460 | We're getting those peaks.

00:55:48.240 | But afterward, the drop in baseline occurs

00:55:52.720 | and it always takes a little while

00:55:54.680 | to get back to our stable baseline.

00:55:58.160 | We really all have a sort of dopamine set point.

00:56:01.520 | And if we continue to indulge in the same behaviors

00:56:04.800 | or even different behaviors that increase our dopamine

00:56:07.420 | in these big peaks over and over and over again,

00:56:10.000 | we won't experience the same level of joy

00:56:12.560 | from those behaviors or from anything at all.

00:56:16.360 | Now that has a name, it's called addiction,

00:56:18.580 | but even for people who aren't addicted,

00:56:22.000 | even for people don't have an attachment

00:56:23.980 | to any specific substance or behavior,

00:56:26.360 | this drop in below baseline after any peak in dopamine

00:56:30.160 | is substantial and it governs whether or not

00:56:33.240 | we are going to feel motivated

00:56:34.340 | to continue to pursue other things.

00:56:36.960 | Fortunately, there's a way to work with this.

00:56:39.880 | Such that we can constantly stay motivated,

00:56:42.120 | but also keep that baseline of dopamine

00:56:44.440 | at an appropriate healthy level.

00:56:46.380 | A previous guest on the Huberman Lab podcast

00:56:48.700 | was Dr. Anna Lemke.

00:56:49.880 | She's head of the Addiction Dual Diagnosis Clinic

00:56:52.660 | at Stanford, has this amazing book, "Dopamine Nation,

00:56:56.140 | Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence."

00:56:58.020 | If you haven't read the book,

00:56:59.040 | I highly encourage you to check it out, it's fantastic.

00:57:02.000 | The other terrific book about dopamine

00:57:03.980 | is "The Molecule of More,"

00:57:05.520 | which is similar in some regard,

00:57:08.000 | but isn't so much about addiction,

00:57:09.440 | it's more about other types of behaviors.

00:57:11.840 | Both books really focus on these dopamine schedules

00:57:15.520 | and the relationship between these peaks

00:57:17.160 | and baselines of dopamine.

00:57:18.560 | In Dr. Lemke's book,

00:57:21.480 | and when she was on the Huberman Lab podcast,

00:57:23.320 | another podcast,

00:57:24.160 | she's talked about this pleasure-pain balance

00:57:26.040 | that when we seek something that we really like,

00:57:28.780 | or we indulge in it,

00:57:29.620 | like eating a little piece of chocolate,

00:57:31.160 | if we really like chocolate, there's some pleasure,

00:57:33.540 | but then there's a little bit of pain

00:57:37.080 | that exceeds the amount of pleasure.

00:57:38.680 | And it's subtle and we experience it

00:57:41.560 | as wanting more of that thing.

00:57:43.700 | Okay, so there's a pleasure-pain balance,

00:57:45.760 | and I'm telling you that the pleasure and the pain

00:57:48.640 | are governed by dopamine to some extent.

00:57:50.680 | Well, how could that be, right?

00:57:52.080 | I said before, when you engage in an activity

00:57:54.880 | or when you ingest something that increases dopamine,

00:57:57.580 | the dopamine levels go up to a substantial degree

00:58:00.320 | with all the things I listed off.

00:58:02.240 | Where's the pain coming from?

00:58:06.080 | Well, the pain is coming from the lack of dopamine

00:58:09.080 | that follows,

00:58:10.940 | and you now know what that lack of dopamine reflects.

00:58:15.940 | How do you know?

00:58:17.080 | Well, earlier we were talking about

00:58:18.660 | how dopamine is released between neurons,

00:58:22.040 | and I mentioned two ways.

00:58:23.080 | One is into the synapse

00:58:24.460 | where it can activate the postsynaptic neuron,

00:58:26.720 | and the other was what I called volumetric release

00:58:28.760 | where it is distributed more broadly.

00:58:31.000 | It's released out over a bunch of neurons.

00:58:35.240 | In both cases, it's released from these things

00:58:37.960 | we call synaptic vesicles, literally little bubbles,

00:58:40.800 | tiny, tiny little bubbles that contain dopamine.

00:58:43.760 | They get vomited out into the area or into the synapse.

00:58:47.580 | Well, those vesicles get depleted.

00:58:50.680 | For the synaptic physiologists out there,

00:58:54.400 | we call this the readily releasable pool of dopamine.

00:58:58.900 | We can only deploy dopamine that is ready to be deployed,

00:59:03.080 | that's packaged in those little vesicles

00:59:04.720 | and ready to go.

00:59:05.560 | It's like when you order a product

00:59:07.240 | and they say out of stock until two months from now,

00:59:10.520 | well, it's not ready to be released.

00:59:12.320 | Same thing with dopamine.

00:59:13.220 | There's a pool of dopamine that's synthesized,

00:59:16.420 | and you can only release the dopamine

00:59:20.000 | that's been synthesized.

00:59:20.920 | It's the readily releasable pool.

00:59:22.820 | The pleasure pain balance doesn't only hinge

00:59:27.000 | on the readily releasable pool of dopamine,

00:59:29.400 | but a big part of the pleasure pain balance

00:59:33.160 | hinges on how much dopamine is there

00:59:36.620 | and how much is ready and capable

00:59:38.680 | of being released into the system.

00:59:40.320 | So now we've given some meat to this thing

00:59:44.960 | that we call the pleasure pain balance.

00:59:47.240 | And now it should make perfect sense

00:59:49.680 | why if you take something or do something

00:59:52.620 | that leads to huge increases in dopamine,

00:59:55.760 | afterward, your baseline should drop

00:59:58.220 | because there isn't a lot of dopamine around

01:00:00.960 | to keep your baseline going.

01:00:03.460 | Fortunately, most people do not experience

01:00:07.260 | or pursue enormous increases in dopamine

01:00:10.140 | leading to these severe drops in baseline.

01:00:12.360 | Many people do, however, and that's what we call addiction.

01:00:17.880 | When somebody pursues a drug or an activity

01:00:20.400 | that leads to huge increases in dopamine,

01:00:22.820 | and now you understand that afterward,

01:00:24.320 | the baseline of dopamine drops

01:00:26.780 | because of depletion of dopamine,

01:00:28.660 | the readily releasable pool,

01:00:30.520 | the dopamine is literally not around to be released,

01:00:33.320 | and so people feel pretty lousy.

01:00:35.640 | And many people make the mistake

01:00:37.520 | of then going and pursuing the dopamine evoking,

01:00:41.040 | the dopamine releasing activity or substance.

01:00:43.240 | Again, thinking mistakenly

01:00:46.300 | that it's going to bring up their baseline.

01:00:48.080 | It's going to give them that peak again.

01:00:50.340 | Not only does it not give them a peak,

01:00:52.020 | their baseline gets lower and lower

01:00:54.200 | because they're depleting dopamine more and more and more.

01:00:57.280 | And we've seen this over and over again

01:00:59.480 | when people get addicted to something,

01:01:01.640 | then they're not achieving much pleasure at all.

01:01:04.380 | You can even see this with video games.

01:01:08.240 | People will play a video game, they love it,

01:01:10.940 | it's super exciting to them,

01:01:12.580 | and then they'll keep playing and playing and playing,

01:01:15.200 | and either one of two things happens, typically both.

01:01:19.540 | First of all, I always say addiction

01:01:22.360 | is a progressive narrowing

01:01:23.720 | of the things that bring you pleasure.

01:01:25.120 | So oftentimes what will happen is

01:01:26.620 | the person only has excitement and can achieve dopamine

01:01:30.080 | release to the same extent doing that behavior

01:01:33.700 | and not other behaviors.

01:01:35.140 | And so they start losing interest in school,

01:01:37.560 | they start losing interest in relationships,

01:01:39.900 | they start losing interest in fitness and wellbeing

01:01:42.300 | and depletes their life.

01:01:44.980 | And eventually what typically happens

01:01:47.460 | is they will stop getting dopamine release

01:01:50.220 | from that activity as well,

01:01:52.260 | and then they drop into a pretty serious depression.

01:01:55.120 | And this can get very severe and people have committed

01:01:57.320 | suicide from these sorts of patterns of activity.

01:02:01.680 | But what about the more typical scenario?

01:02:04.200 | What about the scenario of somebody

01:02:06.640 | who is really good at working during the week,

01:02:10.080 | they exercise during the week, they drink on the weekends?

01:02:13.680 | Well, that person is only consuming alcohol

01:02:16.200 | maybe one or two nights a week,

01:02:17.980 | but oftentimes that same person

01:02:20.640 | will be spiking their dopamine

01:02:23.280 | with food during the middle of the week.

01:02:25.360 | Now we all have to eat

01:02:26.480 | and it's nice to eat foods that we enjoy.

01:02:28.280 | I certainly do that.

01:02:29.440 | I love food in fact,

01:02:31.380 | but let's say they're eating foods

01:02:34.300 | that really evoke a lot of dopamine release

01:02:36.180 | in the middle of the week,

01:02:37.160 | they're drinking one or two days on the weekend,

01:02:39.760 | they are one of these work hard, play hard types.

01:02:42.560 | So they're swimming a couple miles in the ocean

01:02:45.320 | in the middle of the week as well.

01:02:48.140 | They're going out dancing once on the weekend,

01:02:49.920 | sounds like a pretty balanced life as I describe it.

01:02:53.360 | Well, here's the problem.

01:02:55.180 | The problem is that dopamine

01:02:59.200 | is not just evoked by one of these activities,

01:03:01.520 | dopamine is evoked by all of these activities.

01:03:04.280 | And dopamine is one currency of craving motivation

01:03:08.900 | and desire and pleasure.

01:03:11.240 | There's only one currency.

01:03:13.480 | So even though if you look at the activities,

01:03:16.760 | you'd say, well, it's just on the weekends

01:03:18.480 | or this thing is only a couple of times a week.

01:03:21.340 | If you looked at dopamine simply as a function,

01:03:23.840 | as a chemical function of peaks and baseline,

01:03:26.940 | it might make sense why this person,

01:03:28.480 | after several years of work hard, play hard,

01:03:31.460 | would say, yeah, you know, I'm feeling kind of burnt out.

01:03:34.120 | I'm just not feeling like I have the same energy

01:03:35.840 | that I did a few years ago.

01:03:37.360 | And of course there are age-related reasons

01:03:39.280 | why people can experience drops in energy,

01:03:42.400 | but oftentimes what's happening

01:03:45.200 | is not some sort of depletion in cellular metabolism

01:03:48.100 | that's related to aging.

01:03:49.080 | What's happening is they're spiking their dopamine

01:03:51.420 | through so many different activities throughout the week

01:03:54.760 | that their baseline is progressively dropping.

01:03:57.200 | And in this case, it can be very subtle.

01:03:59.540 | It can be very, very subtle.

01:04:00.880 | And that's actually a very sinister function of dopamine,

01:04:05.880 | we could say, which is that it can often drop

01:04:08.840 | in imperceptible ways,

01:04:10.740 | but then once it reaches a threshold of low dopamine,

01:04:15.360 | we just feel like, hmm,

01:04:16.480 | we can't really get pleasure from anything anymore.

01:04:18.600 | What used to work doesn't work anymore.

01:04:20.460 | So it starts to look a lot like the more severe addictions

01:04:23.100 | or the more acute addictions

01:04:25.000 | to things like cocaine and amphetamine,

01:04:26.620 | which lead to these big increases,

01:04:28.380 | these big spikes in dopamine,

01:04:29.620 | and then these very severe drops in the baseline.

01:04:33.380 | Now, of course, we all should engage in activities

01:04:36.980 | that we enjoy.

01:04:38.240 | I certainly do, everybody should.

01:04:39.820 | A huge part of life is pursuing activities

01:04:42.160 | and things that we enjoy.

01:04:44.680 | The key thing is to understand this relationship

01:04:47.240 | between the peaks and the baseline

01:04:48.640 | and to understand how they influence one another.

01:04:50.920 | Because once you do that,

01:04:52.300 | you can start to make really good choices in the short run

01:04:55.320 | and in the long run

01:04:56.500 | to maintain your level of dopamine baseline,

01:04:59.860 | maybe even raise that level of dopamine baseline,

01:05:02.880 | and still get those peaks

01:05:04.760 | and still achieve those feelings of elevated motivation,

01:05:08.480 | elevated desire and craving.

01:05:10.000 | Because again, those peaks

01:05:12.840 | and having a sufficiently healthy high level

01:05:16.280 | of dopamine baseline

01:05:17.720 | are what drove the evolution of our species.

01:05:19.380 | And they're really what drive the evolution

01:05:20.740 | of anyone's life progression too.

01:05:22.760 | So they're a good thing.

01:05:23.600 | Dopamine is a good thing.

01:05:25.380 | Just very briefly,

01:05:26.220 | because it was also covered in the interview episode

01:05:28.800 | I did with Anna Lemke about addiction.

01:05:32.480 | Some of you might be asking,

01:05:34.160 | what should I do if I experience a drop

01:05:36.600 | in my baseline level of dopamine

01:05:38.820 | because of engagement with some activity

01:05:41.600 | or some substance that led to big peaks?

01:05:44.080 | Just to put some color and example on this,

01:05:48.120 | a few episodes ago,

01:05:49.080 | I talked about a friend who I've known a long time.

01:05:52.360 | So actually the child of a friend

01:05:53.920 | who has basically become addicted to video games.

01:05:57.520 | He decided actually after seeing that episode with Anna

01:06:00.200 | to do a 30 day complete fast from phone,

01:06:04.400 | from video games and from social media of all kinds.

01:06:07.400 | He's now at day 29.

01:06:08.880 | He's really accomplished this.

01:06:11.000 | Not incidentally, his levels of concentration,

01:06:13.400 | his overall mood are up.

01:06:14.520 | He's doing far, far better.

01:06:16.880 | What he did is hard.

01:06:18.080 | In particular, the first 14 days is really hard.

01:06:20.600 | But the way that you replenish the releasable pool

01:06:23.920 | of dopamine is to not engage

01:06:25.880 | in these dopaminergic seeking behaviors.

01:06:29.080 | Because remember, typically people arrive at a place

01:06:31.840 | where they want to stop engaging in these behaviors

01:06:34.080 | or ingesting substances when that dopamine is depleted,

01:06:37.120 | when they're not getting the same lift.

01:06:38.660 | In his case, he was feeling depressed.

01:06:40.240 | He thought he had ADHD.

01:06:41.520 | They were starting to treat it as ADHD.

01:06:44.420 | And certainly there are people out there who have ADHD,

01:06:47.160 | but what he found was that his levels

01:06:48.640 | of concentration are back.

01:06:49.680 | He does not need to be treated for ADHD.

01:06:52.680 | And actually the psychiatrist wondered if he did prior

01:06:55.100 | to this video game social media fast.

01:06:58.000 | He's feeling good.

01:06:58.880 | He's exercising again, not making this up.

01:07:01.560 | This is really a very specific,

01:07:04.880 | but very relevant example of how the dopamine system

01:07:08.440 | can replenish itself.

01:07:10.640 | Of course, if there's a clinical need for ADHD treatment,

01:07:13.180 | by all means, pursue that.

01:07:14.700 | But I think a lot of ADHD does go misdiagnosed

01:07:19.320 | because of this depletion in dopamine that occurs

01:07:21.900 | because of overindulgence and other activities

01:07:23.980 | in the drop in baseline.

01:07:25.640 | So for anyone that's experienced a real drop in baseline

01:07:28.720 | who has addictive tendencies,

01:07:31.180 | whether or not their behaviors are substances,

01:07:32.840 | that is always going to be the path forward,

01:07:36.980 | is going to be either cold Turkey

01:07:38.880 | or through some sort of tapering to limit interactions

01:07:42.780 | with what would otherwise be the dopamine evoking behavior

01:07:46.400 | or substance.

01:07:47.400 | So let's talk about the optimal way to engage in activities

01:07:51.920 | or to consume things that evoke dopamine.

01:07:55.680 | And by no means am I encouraging people

01:07:57.300 | to take drugs of abuse.

01:07:58.360 | I would not do that.

01:07:59.280 | I am not doing that.

01:08:00.540 | But some of the things on these lists

01:08:03.180 | of dopamine evoking activities are things like chocolate,

01:08:07.160 | coffee, even if it's indirect, sex and reproduction,

01:08:11.960 | provided it's healthy, consensual, context appropriate,

01:08:15.080 | age appropriate, species appropriate, of course,

01:08:17.440 | is central to our evolution and progression as a species.

01:08:21.800 | So certain things like cocaine, amphetamine,

01:08:24.760 | I will put in the classification of bad.

01:08:26.880 | I'm willing to do that.

01:08:27.720 | And other things are part of life, food, exercise.

01:08:31.200 | If that evokes your dopamine,

01:08:32.560 | how are we supposed to engage

01:08:33.840 | with these dopamine evoking activities in ways

01:08:37.000 | that are healthy and beneficial for us?

01:08:38.520 | How do we achieve these peaks,

01:08:40.240 | which are so central to our wellbeing and experience of life

01:08:43.020 | without dropping our baseline?

01:08:45.040 | And the key lies in intermittent release of dopamine.

01:08:50.040 | The real key is to not expect or chase high levels

01:08:55.260 | of dopamine release every time we engage

01:08:58.760 | in these activities.

01:09:01.840 | Intermittent reward schedules are the central schedule

01:09:05.160 | by which casinos keep you gambling,

01:09:08.800 | the central schedule by which elusive partners

01:09:12.360 | or potential partners keep you texting and pursuing

01:09:15.200 | on either side of the relationship.

01:09:18.680 | Intermittent schedules are the way that the internet

01:09:22.040 | and social media and all highly engaging activities

01:09:27.040 | keep you motivated and pursuing.

01:09:31.400 | And we can take this back

01:09:32.720 | to our evolutionary adaptive scenario,

01:09:36.260 | where you are out there looking for water,

01:09:38.360 | looking for food, not every trail, not every pursuit,

01:09:42.820 | not every hunch about where the animals will be,

01:09:46.640 | where the food will be, where the berries will be,

01:09:49.800 | not every single one of those played out.

01:09:51.860 | There's something called dopamine reward prediction error.

01:09:56.560 | When we expect something to happen,

01:09:58.880 | we are highly motivated to pursue it.

01:10:01.500 | If it happens, great, we get the reward.

01:10:04.720 | The reward comes in various chemical forms,

01:10:06.640 | including dopamine, and we are more likely to engage

01:10:09.480 | in that behavior again.

01:10:11.020 | This is the basis of casino gambling.

01:10:13.560 | This is how they keep you going back again and again

01:10:15.480 | and again, even though on average, the house really does win.

01:10:19.060 | You can transplant that example

01:10:22.440 | to any number of different pleasureful activities.

01:10:24.660 | If you're not a gambler and that doesn't appeal to you,

01:10:27.140 | I have to imagine there's something that appeals to you,

01:10:29.340 | something that you do repeatedly because you enjoy it.

01:10:31.940 | And almost inevitably it's because

01:10:34.220 | there's an intermittent schedule.

01:10:36.160 | There's a intermittent schedule by which dopamine

01:10:40.000 | sometimes arrives, sometimes a little bit,

01:10:42.100 | sometimes a lot, sometimes a medium amount, okay?

01:10:45.860 | That intermittent reinforcement schedule

01:10:48.200 | is actually the best schedule to export to other activities.

01:10:53.200 | How do you do that?

01:10:54.940 | Well, first of all, if you are engaged in activities,

01:10:59.480 | school, sport, relationship, et cetera,

01:11:01.760 | where you experience a win,

01:11:04.120 | you should be very careful about allowing yourself

01:11:06.820 | to experience huge peaks in dopamine,

01:11:09.120 | unless you're willing to suffer the crash that follows

01:11:12.520 | and waiting a period of time for it to come back up.

01:11:17.060 | What would this look like in the practical sense?

01:11:18.960 | Well, let's say you are somebody

01:11:20.200 | who really does enjoy exercise,

01:11:22.360 | or let's say you're somebody who kind of likes exercise,

01:11:24.640 | but forces yourself to do it,

01:11:26.280 | but you make it pleasureful by giving yourself

01:11:28.520 | your favorite cup of coffee first,

01:11:30.460 | or maybe taking a pre-workout drink,

01:11:32.520 | or taking an energy drink,

01:11:34.120 | or listening to your favorite music,

01:11:35.640 | and then you're in the gym and you're listening to your music

01:11:37.440 | that all sounds great, right?

01:11:39.080 | Well, it is great, except that by layering together

01:11:42.260 | all these things to try and achieve that dopamine release,

01:11:44.800 | and by getting a big peak in dopamine,

01:11:46.780 | you're actually increasing the number of conditions required

01:11:50.920 | to achieve pleasure from that activity again.

01:11:53.560 | And so there is a form of this

01:11:55.800 | where sometimes you do all the things that you love

01:11:58.200 | to get the optimal workout.

01:11:59.360 | You listen to your favorite music,

01:12:00.860 | you go at your favorite time of day,

01:12:02.600 | you have your pre-workout drink if that's your thing,

01:12:04.520 | you do all the things that give you that best experience

01:12:08.280 | of the workout for you.

01:12:09.860 | But there's also a version of this

01:12:12.620 | where sometimes you don't do

01:12:14.960 | the dopamine enhancing activities.

01:12:17.180 | You don't ingest anything to increase your dopamine.

01:12:19.840 | You just do the exercise.

01:12:22.800 | You don't do the exercise and expect dopamine to arrive

01:12:27.380 | through some what we call exogenous source as well.

01:12:30.520 | You might think, well, that sounds lame.

01:12:31.880 | I want to continue to enjoy exercising.

01:12:35.000 | Ah, but that's exactly the point.

01:12:36.840 | If you want to maintain motivation for school,

01:12:39.960 | exercise, relationships, or pursuits of any duration in kind,

01:12:44.120 | the key thing is to make sure that the peak in dopamine,

01:12:47.720 | if it's very high, doesn't occur too often.

01:12:51.280 | And if something does occur very often,

01:12:54.380 | that you vary how much dopamine you experience

01:12:56.840 | with each engagement in that activity.

01:13:00.260 | Now, some activities naturally have

01:13:02.500 | this intermittent property woven into them, right?

01:13:05.240 | We sometimes have classes that we like

01:13:07.920 | and other classes we don't like.

01:13:09.360 | We don't always get straight A's.

01:13:11.360 | Sometimes we don't get rewarded

01:13:13.000 | with the outcome that we would like.

01:13:14.720 | We don't always have the perfect relationship outcome,

01:13:18.000 | but understand that your ability to experience

01:13:20.640 | motivation and pleasure for what comes next

01:13:23.520 | is dictated by how much motivation and pleasure

01:13:25.960 | and dopamine you experienced prior.

01:13:28.260 | The reason I can't give a very specific protocol

01:13:32.420 | like delete dopamine or lower dopamine every third time

01:13:36.020 | is that that wouldn't be intermittent.

01:13:38.200 | The whole basis of intermittent reinforcement

01:13:40.680 | is that you don't really have a specific schedule

01:13:44.460 | of when dopamine is going to be high

01:13:46.560 | and when dopamine is going to be low

01:13:48.020 | and when dopamine is going to be medium.

01:13:49.840 | That's a predictable schedule,

01:13:51.320 | not a random intermittent schedule.

01:13:53.920 | So do like the casinos do, certainly works for them.

01:13:57.200 | And for activities that you would like to continue

01:14:00.000 | to engage in over time, whatever those happen to be,

01:14:03.960 | start paying attention to the amount of dopamine

01:14:07.120 | and excitement and pleasure that you achieve with those

01:14:09.320 | and start modulating that somewhat at random.

01:14:11.980 | That might be removing some of the dopamine

01:14:15.040 | releasing chemicals that you might take prior.

01:14:18.100 | Maybe you remove them every time,

01:14:21.020 | but then every once in a while you introduce them.

01:14:23.540 | Maybe it involves sometimes doing things socially

01:14:27.460 | that you enjoy doing socially,

01:14:28.580 | sometimes doing the same thing, but alone.

01:14:30.780 | There are a lot of different ways to do this.

01:14:34.180 | There are a lot of different ways to approach this,

01:14:36.240 | but now knowing what you know about peaks

01:14:38.860 | and baselines in dopamine and understanding

01:14:41.660 | how important it is not just to achieve peaks,

01:14:43.940 | but to maintain that baseline at a healthy level,

01:14:46.380 | it should be straightforward for you to implement

01:14:48.500 | these intermittent schedules.

01:14:49.980 | For those of you that are begging for more specificity,

01:14:54.320 | we can give you a tool.

01:14:55.740 | One would be you can flip a coin before engaging

01:14:59.240 | in any of these types of activities and decide whether

01:15:01.820 | or not you are going to allow other dopamine supportive

01:15:06.300 | elements to go, for instance, into the gym with you.

01:15:09.540 | Are you going to listen to music or not?

01:15:10.980 | If you enjoy listening to music, well then flip a coin.

01:15:13.620 | And if it comes up heads, bring the music in.

01:15:15.400 | If it comes up tails, don't, okay?

01:15:17.820 | Sounds like you're undercutting your own progress,

01:15:19.940 | but actually you are serving your own progress,

01:15:23.040 | both short-term and long-term by doing that.

01:15:25.740 | Now, the smartphone is a very interesting tool

01:15:29.020 | for dopamine in light of all this.

01:15:30.980 | It's extremely common nowadays to see people texting

01:15:35.160 | and doing selfies and communicating in various ways,

01:15:39.180 | listening to podcasts, listening to music,

01:15:41.660 | doing all sorts of things while they engage

01:15:43.620 | in other activities or going to dinner and texting

01:15:45.760 | other people or making plans, sharing information.

01:15:48.800 | That's all wonderful.

01:15:49.640 | It gives depth and richness and color to life,

01:15:52.540 | but it isn't just about our distracted nature

01:15:56.900 | when we're engaging with the phone.

01:15:59.440 | It's also a way of layering in dopamine.

01:16:02.300 | And it's no surprise that levels of depression

01:16:06.660 | and lack of motivation are really on the increase.

01:16:11.180 | Everything that we've talked about until now sets up

01:16:15.420 | an explanation or an interpretation

01:16:17.540 | of why interacting with digital technology

01:16:21.220 | can potentially lead to disruptions

01:16:23.420 | or lowering in baseline levels of dopamine.

01:16:26.960 | I can use a personal example for this.

01:16:30.620 | I happen to really enjoy working out.

01:16:32.220 | I've always really enjoyed it.

01:16:33.900 | But in recent years, I noticed that if I was bringing

01:16:38.020 | my phone to my workouts,

01:16:39.780 | then not only was I a little bit more distracted

01:16:41.980 | and not focusing on what I was doing

01:16:43.580 | as much as I could have or should have,

01:16:45.800 | but also I started to lose interest in what I was doing.

01:16:49.380 | It wasn't as pleasureful.

01:16:50.820 | I would feel like it just didn't have the same kind of oomph

01:16:53.680 | and I was beginning to question my motivation.

01:16:55.980 | As I started learning more about this relationship

01:16:59.620 | between the peaks and the baselines and dopamine,

01:17:02.020 | what I realized was that some time ago,

01:17:04.380 | I probably experienced a incredible increase

01:17:07.560 | in the amount of dopamine during one of my workouts

01:17:09.900 | because I enjoy working out and I enjoy listening to music.

01:17:13.760 | I also enjoy listening to podcasts.

01:17:15.280 | I also enjoy communicating with people.

01:17:17.360 | Those are all wonderful pursuits,

01:17:18.700 | but I had layered in too many of them too many times.

01:17:22.540 | And then it essentially wasn't working for me anymore,

01:17:25.940 | much in the same way a drug wouldn't work for somebody

01:17:28.140 | who takes it repeatedly

01:17:29.060 | because their baseline of dopamine is dropping.

01:17:31.520 | So at least for this calendar year,

01:17:33.860 | I've made a rule for myself,

01:17:35.380 | which is I don't allow my phone into my workouts at all.

01:17:40.380 | No music, at least not from the phone.

01:17:42.580 | It can be in the room.

01:17:43.640 | I might listen to a podcast in the room,

01:17:46.920 | but I don't listen to anything

01:17:49.060 | or engage in anything on my phone, no texting whatsoever.

01:17:51.460 | And most of the time,

01:17:52.300 | I just don't even bring it with me for that period of time.

01:17:54.480 | It's only a short period of time.

01:17:56.340 | I'm not training that often.

01:17:58.000 | This is something that I think has been misinterpreted

01:18:03.940 | as people can't be alone now.

01:18:06.380 | People talk about, oh, you know,

01:18:07.880 | they can't walk across the street

01:18:10.180 | or they can't go anywhere, ride the bus,

01:18:13.320 | can't be on the plane without being in contact.

01:18:15.720 | They can't handle just their thoughts.

01:18:17.380 | I don't think that's really what's going on.

01:18:19.120 | I think what's happened is

01:18:20.760 | that we achieved the great dopamine increase

01:18:23.780 | that comes from this incredible thing,

01:18:25.520 | which I personally enjoy being able to communicate

01:18:28.620 | by phone, by text and exchange pictures

01:18:30.700 | and send links and these kinds of things, social media.

01:18:33.500 | But then what happens is it doesn't have

01:18:36.220 | that same fulfilling aspect to it.

01:18:38.620 | And it tends to remove the excitement

01:18:41.260 | and the pleasure of the very activities

01:18:42.960 | that we are engaged in.

01:18:44.640 | So I know this is a hard one for many people,

01:18:46.860 | but I do invite you to try

01:18:49.140 | removing multiple sources of dopamine release,

01:18:52.820 | or what used to be multiple sources of dopamine release

01:18:56.100 | from activities that you want to continue to enjoy

01:18:58.940 | or that you want to enjoy more.

01:19:00.820 | And now you understand the biological mechanisms

01:19:03.000 | that would underlie a statement like that.

01:19:05.740 | It takes a little bit of working with.

01:19:07.820 | I know it can be challenging in the first week or so

01:19:10.800 | of not engaging with the phone during any kind of workout.

01:19:14.140 | That actually was really tough.

01:19:16.020 | But now I'm back to a place where I enjoy it that much more.

01:19:18.960 | I also feel as if I conquered something

01:19:20.540 | in terms of the circuitry related to dopamine.

01:19:23.300 | I now understand why something that I enjoyed so much

01:19:26.740 | had become less pleasureful for me.

01:19:29.420 | And there's a deep, deep satisfaction

01:19:31.560 | that comes from understanding,

01:19:32.540 | okay, there wasn't anything wrong with me

01:19:34.640 | or what I was doing or anything at all.

01:19:38.440 | It was just,

01:19:39.440 | there was something wrong with the approach I was taking,

01:19:41.360 | which was layering in all these sources of dopamine

01:19:43.660 | and dropping my baseline.

01:19:45.240 | For this very same reason,

01:19:46.600 | I caution people against using stimulants

01:19:49.660 | every time they study or every time they work out

01:19:54.660 | or every time that they do anything

01:19:57.380 | that they would like to continue to enjoy

01:19:59.040 | and be motivated at.

01:20:00.900 | There's one exception, which is caffeine,

01:20:02.660 | because I mentioned before, if you like caffeine,

01:20:06.680 | that actually could be a good thing for your dopamine system

01:20:08.660 | because it does upregulate these D2, D3 receptors.

01:20:11.740 | So it actually makes whatever dopamine is released

01:20:14.600 | by that activity more accessible or more functional

01:20:18.340 | within the biochemistry and the pathways

01:20:20.900 | of your brain and body.

01:20:22.060 | However, a number of energy drinks

01:20:25.900 | and in particular pre-workouts contain things

01:20:28.420 | that are precursors to dopamine.

01:20:30.580 | And on their own, even if you didn't engage in the activity,

01:20:33.820 | would cause the release of dopamine to a substantial degree.

01:20:36.720 | They do cause the release of dopamine

01:20:38.460 | to a substantial degree.

01:20:40.060 | And over time, that will deplete your dopamine.

01:20:44.080 | So energy drinks, pre-workout drinks,

01:20:48.300 | drugs of various kinds that people take to study

01:20:51.280 | and pay attention.

01:20:52.120 | We talked about some of these for the ADHD episode,

01:20:54.060 | things like Adderall, Ritalin, Armadafinil, Modafinil.

01:20:58.300 | Taken repeatedly over time

01:21:00.580 | will reduce the level of satisfaction and joy

01:21:03.640 | that you get from the activities you engage in

01:21:05.940 | while under the influence of those compounds.

01:21:10.060 | I'm not trying to demonize those compounds

01:21:11.820 | for their clinical use.

01:21:13.020 | What I'm saying is taking stimulants

01:21:14.860 | and then engaging in activities

01:21:16.620 | that you would like to continue to feel pleasureful

01:21:19.220 | is undercutting the process.

01:21:20.920 | And inevitably, it might not happen tomorrow,

01:21:23.660 | might not happen in a month,

01:21:24.900 | but inevitably you will have challenges

01:21:27.140 | with motivation and drive related to those activities.

01:21:30.500 | Now, some people can keep it right in check.

01:21:32.260 | They can just do the one can of the energy drink

01:21:34.760 | or they only do their pre-workout

01:21:36.860 | before really hard days, for instance.

01:21:39.940 | More power to you.

01:21:41.040 | I actually do that sometimes, frankly.

01:21:44.780 | But people who are trying to get into that peak,

01:21:47.460 | super motivated, driven, driven state,

01:21:49.680 | really focused every time they engage in an activity,

01:21:52.900 | you are absolutely undercutting the process

01:21:55.220 | and you are undermining your ability to stay motivated

01:21:57.780 | and focused.

01:21:58.900 | So just as we talked about intermittent reward schedules

01:22:02.940 | a moment ago, intermittent spiking of dopamine,

01:22:07.160 | if you do it at all, is definitely the way to go.

01:22:10.260 | And chronically trying to spike your dopamine

01:22:12.980 | in order to enhance your motivation, focus, and drive

01:22:15.900 | will absolutely undermine your motivation, focus, and drive

01:22:19.380 | in the long run.

01:22:20.460 | Ingestion of caffeine is somewhat of an exception

01:22:24.780 | among the other examples of things I've mentioned

01:22:27.420 | to avoid before what would otherwise be

01:22:30.220 | dopamine-increasing activities.

01:22:32.260 | Because again, caffeine can increase the density

01:22:37.260 | and the efficacy of these dopamine receptors.

01:22:40.280 | Turns out that the source of caffeine could also matter.

01:22:45.140 | While coffee or tea or other forms of caffeine

01:22:48.860 | will have this effect of increasing dopamine receptors.

01:22:52.660 | Yerba mate, something I've talked about before

01:22:55.380 | on this podcast, has some interesting properties.

01:22:58.180 | First of all, it contains caffeine.

01:22:59.900 | It's also high in antioxidants.

01:23:02.000 | It also contains something called GLP-1,

01:23:04.640 | which is favorable for management of blood sugar levels.

01:23:07.780 | Yerba mate, it turns out, has also been shown

01:23:12.980 | to be neuroprotective specifically for dopaminergic neurons.

01:23:17.940 | Now I should mention this is just a couple of studies,

01:23:20.100 | so we don't want to conclude too much from these studies.

01:23:23.020 | More needs to be done.

01:23:24.460 | But they showed that in a model of damage

01:23:27.780 | to dopamine neurons, ingestion of yerba mate

01:23:31.100 | and some of the compounds within yerba mate

01:23:33.300 | can actually serve to preserve the survival

01:23:35.780 | of dopamine neurons in both the movement-related pathway

01:23:39.100 | and the motivation pathway.

01:23:41.240 | So perhaps you need that incentive

01:23:44.100 | in order to ingest yerba mate tea.

01:23:46.140 | Perhaps you don't need any incentive.

01:23:48.220 | In my case, I don't need any incentive.

01:23:49.740 | I already enjoy yerba mate as my principal source of caffeine

01:23:53.220 | although I do drink coffee as well.

01:23:55.100 | But if one were going to consume caffeine,

01:23:57.860 | you might consider consuming that caffeine

01:24:00.140 | in the form of yerba mate,

01:24:01.980 | both for sake of upregulating dopamine receptors

01:24:05.040 | and getting more of a dopamine increase.

01:24:07.800 | And of course, for the stimulant properties of caffeine,

01:24:10.380 | if that's what you're seeking.

01:24:12.520 | And in addition to that,

01:24:13.980 | because yerba mate does appear to have

01:24:16.780 | some sort of neuroprotective

01:24:18.500 | and in particular dopamine neuron protective properties.

01:24:22.100 | Now that doesn't mean that caffeine is always beneficial.

01:24:24.540 | And actually there's one instance related to dopamine

01:24:27.540 | where caffeine can be particularly dangerous.

01:24:30.740 | This relates to MDMA, so-called ecstasy.

01:24:33.340 | MDMA is under investigation in various clinical trials

01:24:37.460 | for its potential to treat trauma and depression.

01:24:40.320 | It's also of course a drug that's used recreationally.

01:24:44.760 | It's still illegal, at least in the United States.

01:24:48.320 | Whether or not MDMA is neurotoxic

01:24:52.600 | has been very controversial.

01:24:53.820 | Early on, it was thought that it is neurotoxic,

01:24:56.240 | that it can destroy serotonergic neurons.

01:24:58.880 | There were other papers that came out

01:25:01.680 | which argued that's not the case.

01:25:04.520 | And that's in particular because one of the early papers

01:25:07.640 | published in Science Magazine

01:25:09.160 | claiming that MDMA was neurotoxic.

01:25:12.220 | That paper was retracted.

01:25:14.700 | It turns out that that study had mistakenly used

01:25:17.860 | methamphetamine instead,

01:25:19.500 | and methamphetamine is known to be neurotoxic.

01:25:21.880 | I think most of the data point to the idea

01:25:25.420 | that MDMA might not be neurotoxic, but in any case,

01:25:29.980 | caffeine has been shown to increase

01:25:32.260 | the toxicity of MDMA receptors.

01:25:34.580 | And you might say, well, how could that be?

01:25:36.420 | Well, now you understand why that could be.

01:25:39.420 | Caffeine increases the density and efficacy

01:25:42.460 | of these dopamine receptors, the D2 and D3 receptors.

01:25:45.260 | MDMA is a potent drug for increasing concentrations

01:25:50.260 | of dopamine as well as serotonin and other neuromodulators.

01:25:53.820 | And it appears that caffeine ingestion

01:25:56.100 | by upregulating these receptors

01:25:58.240 | can lead to more toxicity of MDMA.

01:26:02.420 | So caffeine can be a beneficial substance in one context

01:26:06.740 | and actually can be a detrimental

01:26:08.820 | if not dangerous substance in another context.

01:26:11.940 | Two substances that greatly increase dopamine,

01:26:14.660 | namely amphetamine and cocaine,

01:26:17.600 | can cause long-term problems with the dopaminergic pathways.

01:26:22.560 | And this is largely based on a study

01:26:24.800 | that was published some years ago, 2003,

01:26:27.840 | but still holds a lot of merit.

01:26:29.820 | This is a paper published

01:26:30.980 | in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,"

01:26:33.240 | a very high tier, stringent journal.

01:26:36.940 | First author is Kolb, K-O-L-B.

01:26:38.900 | And the title of the paper pretty much tells the story.

01:26:42.400 | Amphetamine or cocaine limits the ability

01:26:45.120 | of later experience to promote structural plasticity

01:26:47.860 | in the neocortex and nucleus accumbens.

01:26:49.420 | Neocortex is the outer shell of the brain, more or less,

01:26:54.080 | and the nucleus accumbens is part

01:26:55.740 | of that mesolimbic dopamine pathway

01:26:58.500 | for motivation, drive, and reinforcement.

01:27:01.420 | Neuroplasticity, of course,

01:27:02.700 | is the brain's ability to change

01:27:04.180 | in response to experience,

01:27:05.220 | and neuroplasticity is the basis of learning

01:27:08.580 | and memory and essentially remodeling

01:27:12.140 | of our neural circuitry in positive ways of all kinds.

01:27:15.420 | And this study was really one of the first to show

01:27:18.780 | that ingesting amphetamine and cocaine

01:27:21.740 | because of the high peak in dopamine that it creates

01:27:26.140 | and the low dopamine state,

01:27:27.980 | the baseline drop that it creates afterwards,

01:27:31.740 | limits plasticity and learning subsequent

01:27:34.200 | to taking amphetamine and cocaine.

01:27:36.340 | It was, at least in this study,

01:27:38.500 | shown to be a long-lasting effect.

01:27:40.340 | I doubt it's a permanent effect,

01:27:41.860 | but this should serve as a serious cautionary note

01:27:45.260 | that amphetamine and cocaine not only can cause

01:27:48.260 | a drop in baseline dopamine,

01:27:49.620 | but can actually put the brain into a state

01:27:51.940 | in which it cannot learn and modify itself to get better,

01:27:55.280 | at least for some period of time.

01:27:57.300 | In a previous episode on ADHD,

01:28:00.220 | I talked about the widespread use of drugs

01:28:02.740 | like Adderall, Ritalin, modafinil, and armodafinil,

01:28:05.340 | all of which lead to very large increases in dopamine

01:28:07.860 | and for people with ADHD can really improve their symptoms.

01:28:12.700 | But of course, there's a lot of non-prescription,

01:28:15.300 | non-clinical use of those compounds as well.

01:28:17.980 | And it stands to reason that the use of those substances

01:28:21.220 | to increase dopamine could very well provide

01:28:24.980 | the same sort of blockade of neuroplasticity

01:28:27.140 | that cocaine and amphetamine do,

01:28:28.620 | because when you look at the amount of dopamine increase

01:28:31.960 | that's triggered by those compounds, it's really comparable.

01:28:35.320 | So again, a cautionary note against spiking

01:28:38.640 | one's dopamine too much on a regular basis,

01:28:41.520 | unless there's a valid clinical need for doing that.

01:28:45.520 | So we've been focusing a lot for the last few minutes

01:28:48.160 | on the kind of darker side of dopamine

01:28:50.880 | and how getting big peaks in dopamine can be detrimental.

01:28:54.520 | But I want to acknowledge the truth,

01:28:56.460 | which is that dopamine feels great.

01:28:59.060 | Being in pursuit and motivated and craving things

01:29:01.840 | feels wonderful, and I don't want to demonize dopamine.

01:29:05.400 | What I'm trying to do today is to illustrate

01:29:07.440 | how dopamine works in your brain

01:29:09.260 | so that you can continue to engage

01:29:12.120 | in dopamine evoking activities.

01:29:15.780 | And certainly there is a place for ingesting things

01:29:18.500 | that can increase dopamine provided that they are safe for us

01:29:22.300 | in the short and long-term.

01:29:23.680 | There are activities that we can do

01:29:27.880 | that will give us healthy sustained increases in dopamine,

01:29:31.620 | both the peaks when they happen and to maintain

01:29:35.440 | or even increase our baseline levels of dopamine.

01:29:37.720 | So how do we do that?

01:29:39.120 | What are some of these activities?

01:29:41.000 | Well, in recent years, there's been a trend

01:29:44.360 | toward more people doing so-called cold exposure.

01:29:47.640 | In part, this was popularized by Wim Hof,

01:29:51.120 | the so-called Iceman, getting into cold showers,

01:29:53.960 | taking ice baths, exposing oneself to cold water

01:29:57.360 | of various kinds can in fact increase our levels

01:30:00.980 | of dopamine as well as the neuromodulator, neuronephrine.

01:30:04.300 | This is not a new phenomenon.

01:30:07.080 | In the 1920s, a guy by the name of Vincent Priznitz

01:30:12.040 | was one of the first people to popularize

01:30:14.580 | and formalize cold water therapies.

01:30:17.360 | He was an advocate of cold water exposure

01:30:20.600 | in order to boost the immune system

01:30:22.880 | and increase feelings of wellbeing.

01:30:24.560 | And actually this practice dates back

01:30:26.140 | long before Vincent's popularized it.

01:30:30.080 | And Wim Hof is the more recent iteration of this.

01:30:33.320 | First of all, some of the safety parameters.

01:30:35.220 | Let's establish those first.

01:30:36.600 | Getting into very, very cold water, you know,

01:30:38.800 | 30 degree Fahrenheit or even low 40 degree Fahrenheit

01:30:42.120 | can put somebody into a state of cold water shock.

01:30:44.640 | I mean, people can die doing that.

01:30:46.460 | So obviously you want to approach this with some caution,

01:30:49.560 | but for most people getting into 60 degree water

01:30:52.940 | or 50 degree water, or if you're acclimated

01:30:55.680 | and comfortable with it, you know,

01:30:57.780 | 40 degree water or 45 degree water

01:31:00.020 | can have tremendously beneficial results

01:31:03.300 | on your neuromodulator systems, including dopamine.

01:31:06.300 | What temperature of water you can tolerate will depend

01:31:10.700 | on how cold water adapted you are and how familiar you are

01:31:14.400 | with the experience of getting into cold water.

01:31:16.940 | And when I say comfortable with, I should mention,

01:31:19.840 | there is never a case in which getting into cold water

01:31:23.120 | does not evoke a release of epinephrine.

01:31:27.620 | So the quickening of the breath, the widening of the eyes,

01:31:29.840 | the feeling as if you can't catch your breath

01:31:32.880 | and even some physical pain at the level of the skin,

01:31:35.420 | that happens almost every time

01:31:37.260 | or every time that you get into cold water,

01:31:39.360 | even if you're cold water adapted.

01:31:41.140 | What almost everybody knows and understands is that

01:31:44.460 | that wall, as I like to refer to it, is coming.

01:31:47.020 | That's always the first experience

01:31:48.780 | of getting into cold water.

01:31:50.060 | There's no real way around that.

01:31:52.420 | Now, the study that I mentioned earlier,

01:31:55.340 | human physiological responses to immersion into water

01:31:58.300 | of different temperatures, really interesting study

01:32:00.520 | that was done and published in the University of,

01:32:03.540 | excuse me, the European Journal of Applied Physiology.

01:32:06.180 | I can provide a link to that study in the show caption.

01:32:09.700 | It's a really interesting study.

01:32:10.980 | They looked at people getting exposed to water

01:32:14.460 | that was warm, moderately cold or very cold.

01:32:16.780 | It was 32 degrees Celsius, 20 degrees Celsius

01:32:19.020 | or 14 degrees Celsius.

01:32:21.100 | You can just put those online and do the conversion

01:32:23.380 | or you can do the conversion to Fahrenheit if you like.

01:32:25.740 | But in any case, what they looked at were the concentrations

01:32:29.820 | of things like epinephrine and dopamine and so on.

01:32:34.120 | And what they found was really interesting.

01:32:36.340 | First of all, upon getting into cold water,

01:32:41.340 | the changes in adrenaline and noradrenaline,

01:32:46.580 | epinephrine and norepinephrine were immediate and fast

01:32:49.740 | and these were huge increases.

01:32:52.020 | So that's the getting into the cold water

01:32:53.820 | that everybody experiences,

01:32:55.160 | these huge increases in adrenaline.

01:32:57.300 | But then what was interesting is they observed

01:32:59.500 | that dopamine levels started to rise somewhat slowly

01:33:03.180 | and then continue to rise and reach levels

01:33:06.460 | as high as 2.5 times above baseline.

01:33:10.740 | That's a remarkably high increase.

01:33:12.760 | Remember, if we go back to our examples of chocolate, sex,

01:33:17.760 | a doubling above baseline, nicotine,

01:33:20.180 | 2.5 times above baseline, cocaine,

01:33:23.000 | the increase in dopamine from cold water exposure

01:33:27.060 | of this kind was comparable to what one sees from cocaine,

01:33:31.080 | except in this case, it wasn't a rise and crash.

01:33:36.080 | It was actually a sustained rise in dopamine

01:33:40.000 | that took a very long time, up to three hours

01:33:42.500 | to come back down to baseline, which is really remarkable.

01:33:46.060 | And I think this explains some of the positive mental

01:33:50.080 | and physical effects that people report subjectively

01:33:53.260 | after doing cold water exposure.

01:33:55.320 | One question that many of you are probably asking is

01:33:57.500 | just how cold should the water be?

01:33:59.940 | Well, you could mimic what was done in this study

01:34:01.660 | and do 14 degrees Celsius,

01:34:03.220 | but for some people that won't be cold enough,

01:34:05.280 | for some people that will be too cold.

01:34:07.580 | They did look at the release of stress hormones

01:34:10.060 | like cortisol in addition to the release

01:34:11.820 | of things like epinephrine and adrenaline.

01:34:13.940 | And it's interesting that they noted that in all cases,

01:34:17.280 | but especially at that coldest temperature,

01:34:19.180 | there was an increase in cortisol, but that it was transient

01:34:22.160 | that eventually people's cortisol,

01:34:24.080 | the stress hormone subsided a bit.

01:34:26.780 | There are basically two different approaches

01:34:28.740 | to remaining in the cold when it's uncomfortable.

01:34:31.700 | One is to try and relax yourself,

01:34:34.200 | to try and practice slow breathing,

01:34:36.780 | to try and dilate your gaze.

01:34:38.220 | I've talked about this before in previous podcasts,

01:34:40.060 | to go into panoramic vision,

01:34:41.180 | to essentially try and calm yourself

01:34:42.980 | so that it's not as stressful in the cold.

01:34:46.660 | Other people, however, take the approach

01:34:49.580 | of trying to ramp up their level

01:34:51.540 | of internal autonomic arousal,

01:34:53.780 | meaning to get really energized

01:34:55.700 | and kind of lean into the friction of the cold.

01:34:58.300 | And they find that easier.

01:34:59.740 | Other people distract themselves.

01:35:01.180 | They recite the alphabet or they do something,

01:35:04.100 | anything to try and distract themselves

01:35:06.100 | from the discomfort.

01:35:08.060 | To be totally honest,

01:35:09.060 | it does not matter for sake of dopamine release

01:35:12.020 | because the dopamine release is triggered

01:35:14.060 | and then continues even after you get out of the cold water.

01:35:17.900 | Now, in this study, it was long exposure to cold water.

01:35:22.380 | It was an hour.

01:35:23.960 | That's a long period of time.

01:35:25.580 | And I do warn you against getting into cold water

01:35:29.180 | that's so cold that it will make your temperature drop

01:35:32.160 | and make you hyperthermic for an hour.

01:35:33.780 | That actually could be dangerous for a lot of people.

01:35:35.500 | You might have a hard time reheating

01:35:36.940 | and hypothermia is not a good thing.

01:35:39.540 | They had people monitoring subjects in these studies

01:35:42.980 | and paying attention to their core body temperature.

01:35:45.220 | They were able to reheat them afterwards.

01:35:47.820 | It's well-established now that getting into cold water,

01:35:51.220 | whether or not it's a shower, an ice bath,

01:35:52.920 | circulating cold water, a stream, et cetera,

01:35:55.220 | that can evoke the norepinephrine release immediately

01:35:59.380 | and the long arc of that dopamine release.

01:36:01.580 | Why would that be good?

01:36:02.680 | Up until now, I've basically said

01:36:04.780 | getting increases in dopamine

01:36:06.940 | are detrimental to your baseline.

01:36:09.340 | Well, this does appear to raise the baseline of dopamine

01:36:12.380 | for substantial periods of time.

01:36:13.940 | And most people report feeling a heightened level

01:36:18.060 | of calm and focus after getting out of cold water.

01:36:22.060 | So cold water exposure turns out to be

01:36:23.660 | a very potent stimulus for shifting the entire milieu,

01:36:27.300 | the entire environment of our brain and body

01:36:30.520 | and allowing many people to feel much, much better

01:36:34.980 | for a substantial period of time

01:36:36.760 | after getting out of the ice bath or cold water of any kind

01:36:40.560 | than they did before.

01:36:42.140 | Now you might ask how often to do this.

01:36:44.340 | Some people do this every day.

01:36:45.980 | It can be very stimulating.

01:36:47.260 | So typically doing it early in the day,

01:36:49.980 | it's going to be better.

01:36:50.800 | I don't necessarily recommend doing it right before sleep,

01:36:53.700 | but some people do it in the afternoon

01:36:55.620 | and some people will indeed do that seven days a week.

01:36:58.500 | Other people, three days a week.

01:36:59.660 | Other people, every once in a while.

01:37:01.220 | What I can say is once you become cold water adapted,

01:37:05.300 | once it no longer has the same impact of novelty

01:37:09.120 | and feeling a bit like a,

01:37:10.900 | I don't want to say a shock to your system

01:37:12.220 | because you don't want to go into cold water shock,

01:37:13.760 | but once it is comfortable for you,

01:37:17.960 | then it will no longer evoke this release.

01:37:20.220 | There really does seem to be something in the pathway

01:37:22.340 | from cold water exposure through the norepinephrine pathway

01:37:25.460 | and into the mesolimbic brainstem

01:37:27.240 | that causes this release in dopamine.

01:37:29.360 | But nonetheless, it's a basically zero cost.

01:37:32.560 | I mean, you need access to water of some sort,

01:37:34.380 | cold water, shower, et cetera,

01:37:35.580 | but basically zero cost way of triggering

01:37:38.160 | a long lasting increase in dopamine

01:37:39.860 | without ingesting anything, no pharmacology whatsoever.

01:37:42.780 | Please again, approach it with safety and caution in mind,

01:37:46.000 | but it is a very potent stimulus.

01:37:47.920 | Again, 250% rise in baseline,

01:37:51.740 | two and a half times rise in baseline rivals that of cocaine,

01:37:55.100 | which is really remarkable.

01:37:56.760 | Now I'd like to talk about the positive aspects of rewards

01:37:59.580 | for our behavior and the negative aspects

01:38:01.860 | of rewards for our behavior.

01:38:03.020 | And from that, I will suggest a protocol

01:38:06.060 | by which you can achieve a better relationship

01:38:09.180 | to your activities and to your dopamine system.

01:38:12.060 | In fact, it will help tune up your dopamine system

01:38:14.500 | for discipline, hard work, and motivation.

01:38:18.260 | Hard work is hard.

01:38:22.580 | Generally, most people don't like working hard.

01:38:26.000 | Some people do, but most people work hard

01:38:29.020 | in order to achieve some end goal.

01:38:31.380 | End goals are terrific and rewards are terrific,

01:38:34.900 | whether or not they are monetary, social, or any kind.

01:38:39.820 | However, because of the way that dopamine relates

01:38:43.860 | to our perception of time, working hard at something

01:38:48.860 | for sake of a reward that comes afterward

01:38:52.300 | can make the hard work much more challenging

01:38:55.700 | and make us much less likely to lean into hard work

01:38:58.840 | in the future.

01:38:59.820 | Let me give you a couple examples

01:39:01.600 | by way of data and experiments.

01:39:03.840 | There's a classic experiment done actually at Stanford

01:39:07.620 | many years ago in which children in nursery school

01:39:11.980 | and kindergarten drew pictures.

01:39:14.840 | And they drew pictures 'cause they liked to draw.

01:39:17.680 | The researchers took kids that liked to draw

01:39:20.660 | and they started giving them a reward for drawing.

01:39:23.540 | The reward generally was a gold star

01:39:25.580 | or some thing that a young child would find rewarding.

01:39:28.940 | Then they stopped giving them the gold star.

01:39:33.480 | And what they found is the children

01:39:35.660 | had a much lower tendency to draw on their own, no reward.

01:39:40.660 | Now, remember this was an activity

01:39:44.300 | that prior to receiving a reward,

01:39:46.460 | the children intrinsically enjoyed and selected to do.

01:39:50.400 | No one was telling them to draw.

01:39:52.800 | What this relates to is so-called intrinsic

01:39:54.500 | versus extrinsic reinforcement.

01:39:57.260 | When we receive rewards,

01:39:58.800 | even if we give ourselves rewards for something,

01:40:01.980 | we tend to associate less pleasure

01:40:04.060 | with the actual activity itself that evoked the reward.

01:40:07.940 | Now, that might seem counterintuitive,

01:40:09.420 | but that's just the way

01:40:10.660 | that these dopaminergic circuits work.

01:40:13.240 | And now understanding these peaks and baselines in dopamine,

01:40:16.640 | which I won't review again, this should make sense.

01:40:20.300 | If you get a peak in dopamine from a reward,

01:40:24.260 | it's going to lower your baseline.

01:40:25.740 | And the cognitive interpretation

01:40:29.060 | is that you didn't really do the activity

01:40:31.540 | because you enjoyed the activity, you did it for the reward.

01:40:34.420 | Now, this doesn't mean all rewards of all kinds are bad,

01:40:37.320 | but it's also important to understand

01:40:39.740 | that dopamine controls our perception of time.

01:40:42.780 | When and how much dopamine we experience

01:40:46.200 | is the way that we carve up

01:40:48.160 | what we call our experience of time.

01:40:50.540 | When we engage in an activity,

01:40:52.140 | let's say school or hard work of any kind or exercise,

01:40:56.980 | because of the reward we are going to give ourselves

01:40:59.420 | or receive at the end, the trophy,

01:41:01.100 | the Sunday, the meal, whatever it happens to be,

01:41:05.320 | we actually are extending the time bin

01:41:10.500 | over which we are analyzing or perceiving that experience.

01:41:15.500 | And because the reward comes at the end,

01:41:19.380 | we start to dissociate the neural circuits

01:41:22.820 | for dopamine and reward

01:41:24.520 | that would have normally been active during the activity.

01:41:28.580 | And because it all arrives at the end over time,

01:41:32.880 | we have the experience of less and less pleasure

01:41:35.800 | from that particular activity while we're doing it.

01:41:39.180 | Now, this is the antithesis of growth mindset.

01:41:43.100 | My colleague at Stanford, Carol Dweck, as many of you know,

01:41:45.780 | has come up with this incredible theory and principle,

01:41:49.040 | and it actually goes beyond theory and principle

01:41:50.900 | called growth mindset,

01:41:51.980 | which is this striving to be better,

01:41:54.140 | to be in this mindset of I'm not there yet,

01:41:56.760 | but striving itself is the end goal.

01:42:00.880 | And that of course delivers you to tremendous performance

01:42:03.200 | has been observed over and over and over again,

01:42:05.160 | that people that have growth mindset,

01:42:06.580 | kids that have growth mindset end up performing very well

01:42:09.420 | because they're focused on the effort itself.

01:42:12.000 | And all of us can cultivate growth mindset.

01:42:15.540 | The neural mechanism of cultivating growth mindset

01:42:18.140 | involves learning to access the rewards

01:42:21.600 | from effort and doing.

01:42:23.800 | And that's hard to do because you have to engage

01:42:27.880 | this prefrontal component of the mesolimbic circuit.

01:42:30.380 | You have to tell yourself, okay, this effort is great.

01:42:33.660 | This effort is pleasureful,

01:42:35.180 | even though you might actually be in a state of physical pain

01:42:37.500 | from the exercise, or I can recall this from college,

01:42:40.100 | just feeling like I wanted to get up from my desk,

01:42:42.240 | but forcing myself to study,

01:42:43.640 | forcing myself and forcing myself.

01:42:45.140 | What you find over time is that you can start to associate

01:42:48.420 | a dopamine release, you can evoke dopamine release

01:42:51.020 | from the friction and the challenge

01:42:53.980 | that you happen to be in.

01:42:55.820 | You completely eliminate the ability to generate

01:42:59.580 | those circuits and the rewarding process

01:43:02.340 | of being able to reward friction while in effort,

01:43:06.040 | if you are focused only on the goal that comes at the end,

01:43:09.540 | because of the way that dopamine marks time.

01:43:12.500 | So if you say, oh, I'm going to do this very hard thing

01:43:15.440 | and I'm going to push and push and push and push

01:43:17.340 | for that end goal that comes later,

01:43:20.260 | not only do you enjoy the process of what you're doing less,

01:43:24.980 | you actually make it more painful

01:43:27.060 | while you're engaging in it.

01:43:28.520 | You make yourself less efficient at it,

01:43:30.260 | because if you were able to access dopamine while in effort,

01:43:33.500 | dopamine has all these incredible properties

01:43:35.360 | of increasing the amount of energy in our body

01:43:37.940 | and in our mind, our ability to focus

01:43:39.880 | by way of dopamine's conversion into epinephrine,

01:43:43.200 | but also you are undermining your ability

01:43:46.160 | to lean back into that activity the next time.

01:43:48.540 | The next time you need twice as much coffee

01:43:51.500 | and three times as much loud music

01:43:53.660 | and four times as much energy drink

01:43:55.700 | and the social connection just to get out the door

01:43:58.360 | in order to do the run or to study.

01:44:00.740 | So what's more beneficial in fact can serve

01:44:04.780 | as a tremendous amplifier on all endeavors

01:44:07.640 | that you engage in, especially hard endeavors,

01:44:11.200 | is to A, not start layering in other sources of dopamine

01:44:15.660 | in order to get to the starting line,

01:44:17.500 | not layering in other sources of dopamine

01:44:19.960 | in order to be able to continue,

01:44:21.220 | but rather to subjectively start to attach

01:44:24.580 | the feeling of friction and effort

01:44:27.500 | to an internally generated reward system.

01:44:30.340 | And this is not meant to be vague.

01:44:32.380 | This is a system that exists in your mind,

01:44:35.140 | that exists in the minds of humans

01:44:37.000 | for hundreds of thousands of years

01:44:38.900 | by which you're not just pursuing the things

01:44:41.740 | that are innately pleasureful, food, sex,

01:44:44.660 | warmth, water when you're thirsty.

01:44:47.860 | But the beauty of this mesolimbic reward pathway

01:44:51.180 | that I talked about earlier

01:44:52.820 | is that it includes the forebrain.

01:44:54.380 | So you can tell yourself the effort part is the good part.

01:44:59.240 | I know it's painful.

01:45:00.080 | I know this doesn't feel good, but I'm focused on this.

01:45:02.380 | I'm going to start to access the reward.

01:45:04.940 | You will find the rewards,

01:45:07.380 | meaning the dopamine release inside of effort

01:45:10.060 | if you repeat this over and over again.

01:45:12.040 | And what's beautiful about it

01:45:13.720 | is that it starts to become reflexive

01:45:15.240 | for all types of effort.

01:45:17.420 | When we focus only on the trophy,

01:45:19.280 | only on the grade, only on the win as the reward,

01:45:22.960 | you undermine that entire process.

01:45:25.520 | So how do you do this?

01:45:27.400 | You do this in those moments of the most intense friction,

01:45:31.420 | you tell yourself, this is very painful.

01:45:34.760 | And because it's painful,

01:45:36.920 | it will evoke an increase in dopamine release later,

01:45:40.580 | meaning it will increase my baseline in dopamine.

01:45:43.900 | But you also have to tell yourself that in that moment,

01:45:48.640 | you are doing it by choice

01:45:50.460 | and you're doing it because you love it.

01:45:53.640 | And I know that sounds like lying to yourself.

01:45:55.980 | And in some ways it is lying to yourself,

01:45:58.380 | but it's lying to yourself in the context of a truth,

01:46:01.260 | which is that you want it to feel better.

01:46:05.020 | You want it to feel even pleasureful.

01:46:07.780 | Now, this is very far and away different

01:46:10.820 | from thinking about the reward that comes at the end,

01:46:14.300 | the hot fudge Sunday after you cross the finish line,

01:46:17.000 | and you can replace hot fudge Sunday

01:46:18.320 | with whatever reward happens to be appealing to you.

01:46:21.980 | We revere people who are capable

01:46:23.660 | of doing what I'm describing.

01:46:25.800 | David Goggins comes to mind as a really good example.

01:46:28.060 | Many of you are probably familiar with David Goggins,

01:46:30.160 | former Navy SEAL,

01:46:31.480 | who essentially has made a post-military career

01:46:36.040 | out of explaining and sharing his process

01:46:39.800 | of turning the effort into the reward.

01:46:42.640 | There are many other examples of this too, of course.

01:46:45.340 | Throughout evolutionary history,

01:46:48.720 | there's no question that we revered people

01:46:50.580 | who were willing to go out and forage and hunt and gather

01:46:53.920 | and caretake in ways that other members of our species

01:46:58.560 | probably found exhausting

01:47:00.400 | and probably would have preferred to just put their feet up

01:47:02.720 | or soak them in a cool stream

01:47:04.020 | rather than continue to forage.

01:47:06.060 | The ability to access this pleasure from effort aspect

01:47:10.420 | of our dopaminergic circuitry is without question

01:47:14.980 | the most powerful aspect of dopamine

01:47:17.580 | and our biology of dopamine.

01:47:19.520 | And the beautiful thing is it's accessible to all of us,

01:47:23.020 | but just to highlight the things that can interfere with

01:47:25.940 | and prevent you from getting dopamine release

01:47:29.920 | from effort itself,

01:47:32.120 | don't spike dopamine prior to engaging in effort

01:47:34.980 | and don't spike dopamine after engaging in effort.

01:47:39.420 | Learn to spike your dopamine from effort itself.

01:47:42.980 | One straightforward example of learning to attach dopamine

01:47:47.480 | to effort and strain as opposed to a process or a reward

01:47:52.480 | that naturally evokes dopamine release

01:47:55.260 | is so-called intermittent fasting.

01:47:57.120 | I know this is very popular nowadays.

01:47:59.500 | Some people like to do intermittent fasting,

01:48:01.160 | some people don't.

01:48:02.300 | Some people have a 12 hour feeding window every 24 hours.

01:48:05.180 | Some people do long fasts of two to three days even.

01:48:08.260 | I personally don't monitor a feeding window

01:48:11.540 | with a lot of precision.

01:48:12.660 | I tend to skip one meal a day, either breakfast or lunch,

01:48:15.380 | and then I eat the other two meals of the day

01:48:16.840 | depending on which meal I skip.

01:48:18.100 | So it's either breakfast, lunch,

01:48:19.740 | and maybe a little something in the evening,

01:48:22.280 | or I'll skip breakfast and do lunch and dinner and so on.

01:48:25.700 | Many people are now eating this way

01:48:28.320 | in part because many people find it easier

01:48:30.240 | to not eat at all than to eat a smaller portion

01:48:35.220 | of some food.

01:48:36.060 | And that has everything to do

01:48:37.420 | with the dopamine reward evoking properties of food.

01:48:42.000 | When we ingest food, or when we are about to ingest food,

01:48:45.940 | our dopamine levels go up.

01:48:47.160 | And typically when we ingest food,

01:48:49.320 | if it evokes some dopamine release,

01:48:51.000 | then we tend to want even more food.

01:48:52.680 | Remember, dopamine's main role is one of motivation

01:48:55.960 | and seeking.

01:48:56.800 | And what dopamine always wants more of is more dopamine,

01:49:00.680 | more activity or thing that evokes more dopamine release.

01:49:05.180 | Well, let's just look at fasting from the perspective

01:49:09.080 | of dopamine schedules and dopamine release

01:49:11.880 | and peaks and baselines.

01:49:13.180 | Typically when we eat, we get dopamine release,

01:49:18.820 | especially when we eat after being very hungry.

01:49:21.520 | If you've ever gone camping or you're very, very hungry,

01:49:24.180 | the food tastes that much better.

01:49:26.080 | And that's actually because of the way

01:49:28.080 | that deprivation states increase the way

01:49:32.800 | that dopaminergic circuits work.

01:49:35.080 | Our perception of dopamine is heightened

01:49:38.540 | when the receptors for dopamine

01:49:40.320 | have not seen much dopamine lately.

01:49:42.440 | They haven't bound much dopamine.

01:49:43.840 | So when you fast, fast, fast, fast, fast,

01:49:45.760 | and then you finally eat, it evokes more dopamine release.

01:49:49.640 | So this is the big reward that comes at the end.

01:49:52.000 | Even bigger because you deprived yourself.

01:49:56.200 | This is true for all rewarding behaviors and activities,

01:49:59.000 | by the way.

01:50:00.200 | The longer you restrict yourself from that activity,

01:50:02.960 | the greater the dopamine experience

01:50:05.280 | when the dopamine is finally released

01:50:06.820 | because of an upregulation of the receptors for dopamine.

01:50:09.680 | But I just spent five minutes or more telling you

01:50:13.440 | that you should avoid too much reward at the end,

01:50:16.420 | and you should actually focus on the dopamine

01:50:20.000 | that you can consciously evoke

01:50:22.680 | from the deprivation strain and effort.

01:50:24.880 | And in fact, this is what happens for many people

01:50:28.060 | that start doing fasting and take a liking to it.

01:50:31.160 | Many people say that their state of mind

01:50:33.960 | when they fast is clear,

01:50:35.880 | that they actually start to enjoy the period of fasting.

01:50:39.080 | In fact, some people start pushing out their eating window

01:50:41.840 | or skipping entire days of eating more and more

01:50:44.220 | in order to get deeper into that state of mind

01:50:47.920 | where surely it's not just dopamine,

01:50:50.420 | but dopamine is released, they will track their clock.

01:50:53.340 | Oh, I've been fasting 12 hours, 16 hours, et cetera.

01:50:56.020 | They are starting to attach dopamine release

01:50:58.440 | or create dopamine release from the deprivation,

01:51:01.440 | not from the food reward itself.

01:51:03.740 | And this, I think, makes it an interesting practice

01:51:06.240 | and one that certainly has been practiced for centuries

01:51:10.220 | in different cultures and different religions

01:51:12.200 | of deliberately restricting food,

01:51:14.240 | not just to increase the rewarding properties of food itself

01:51:17.980 | but also to increase the rewarding properties

01:51:20.520 | of deprivation.

01:51:22.040 | And I should emphasize that a lot of the subjective aspects

01:51:25.040 | of the knowledge of the benefits of fasting

01:51:27.480 | serve as reinforcing dopamine amplifying aspects to fasting.

01:51:32.480 | Meaning if somebody does intermittent fasting

01:51:36.560 | and they are deep into their fast

01:51:38.340 | and they're telling themselves,

01:51:39.240 | oh, my blood lipid profiles are probably improving

01:51:41.880 | and my glucose management is probably improving,

01:51:44.460 | my insulin sensitivity is going up

01:51:46.240 | and I'm going to live longer.

01:51:47.160 | All these things that have some basis from animal studies

01:51:50.960 | and some basis or not from human studies,

01:51:53.720 | it's all kind of still in emerging literature,

01:51:55.760 | but it does seem to be pointing in that direction

01:51:57.600 | that fasting can encourage things like autophagy,

01:52:01.280 | the engulfment of dead cells and things of that sort.

01:52:04.520 | Well, as people tell themselves these things,

01:52:07.760 | they are enhancing the rewarding properties

01:52:10.960 | of the behavior of fasting.

01:52:12.840 | And so this is a salient example

01:52:14.960 | of where knowledge of knowledge

01:52:17.120 | can actually help us change these deep primitive circuits

01:52:21.840 | related to dopamine.

01:52:23.020 | And this illustrates how the forebrain,

01:52:25.440 | which carries knowledge and carries interpretation

01:52:28.240 | and rational thought can be used to shape the very circuits

01:52:32.680 | that are involved in generating reward

01:52:35.240 | for what would otherwise just be kind of primitive

01:52:37.400 | behaviors, hardwired behaviors.

01:52:39.060 | And that's the beauty of these dopamine circuits.

01:52:41.320 | And that's the beauty of dopamine.

01:52:42.540 | It's not just attached to the more primitive behaviors

01:52:46.080 | of food, sex, heat, et cetera.

01:52:49.480 | It's also attached to the things that we decide

01:52:52.400 | are good for us and are important for us.

01:52:54.660 | So telling yourself that exercise or fasting or studying

01:52:58.640 | or listening better or any kind of behavior is good for you

01:53:01.760 | will actually reinforce the extent to which it is good

01:53:05.880 | for you at a chemical level.

01:53:08.000 | And a somewhat eerie example of what I just mentioned

01:53:10.800 | was a study that was published last year

01:53:13.740 | in the journal Neuron, Cell Press Journal,

01:53:15.440 | excellent journal, that showed that hearing something

01:53:20.160 | that reinforces one's prior beliefs

01:53:22.920 | actually can evoke dopamine release.

01:53:25.400 | So the dopamine pathway is so vulnerable

01:53:28.460 | to subjective interpretation that it actually makes it such

01:53:32.260 | that when we see something or hear something

01:53:34.440 | that validates a belief that we already have,

01:53:36.840 | that itself can increase dopamine release.

01:53:40.560 | Along the lines of how dopamine and dopamine schedules

01:53:44.140 | and our perception of things can shape the way

01:53:46.640 | that we experience things as pleasureful or not.

01:53:49.520 | There are beautiful studies,

01:53:51.120 | mainly looking at sugar appetite and our sense of pleasure

01:53:54.480 | from sweet things, but also for savory foods, et cetera.

01:53:58.640 | And essentially the results that come out of this

01:54:00.600 | are the following.

01:54:01.540 | If you ingest something that you like,

01:54:03.800 | it tastes good to you,

01:54:05.080 | but then you ingest something that's even sweeter

01:54:07.900 | or even more savory, and then you go back to the food

01:54:11.760 | that you ate previously,

01:54:13.540 | well, you don't like it as much.

01:54:15.560 | And that might seem like a duh, obviously,

01:54:18.280 | but that shift in perception can be blocked

01:54:22.560 | by blocking the shift in dopamine.

01:54:25.160 | And so this really speaks to these peaks and valleys

01:54:28.160 | in dopamine that I mentioned before

01:54:29.480 | and how your experience of anything is going to depend

01:54:33.040 | on your prior experience of other things

01:54:35.880 | that evoke dopamine.

01:54:36.840 | Big dopamine release makes it more challenging

01:54:39.840 | to experience more big dopamine release.

01:54:42.960 | So dopamine is one of those things that you don't want,

01:54:45.400 | too high or too low for too long.

01:54:47.820 | It's all about staying in that dynamic range,

01:54:50.100 | and that's going to be different for everybody.

01:54:52.460 | So for the very savory foods that are now everywhere,

01:54:57.460 | those highly savory foods,

01:54:59.600 | or I think they call them highly palatable foods,

01:55:02.160 | are making more bland foods, whole foods,

01:55:06.000 | meaning foods that aren't processed,

01:55:07.400 | it's making those tastes less good, at least for a while.

01:55:10.140 | And all it takes is a short period of time,

01:55:12.280 | even just days, two days or so,

01:55:14.600 | of not consuming any highly palatable foods.

01:55:17.920 | And suddenly broccoli with just a little bit of seasoning

01:55:22.400 | tastes delicious to you, all right?

01:55:24.480 | So again, this just speaks to the fact

01:55:26.600 | that dopamine is this universal currency.

01:55:29.120 | It establishes value based on

01:55:31.560 | not just what you're experiencing in the moment,

01:55:33.200 | but what you experienced in the days and minutes before.

01:55:36.580 | Now that you understand how your previous level of dopamine

01:55:40.400 | relates to your current level of dopamine

01:55:42.680 | and how your current level of dopamine

01:55:45.200 | will influence your future level of dopamine,

01:55:48.460 | it should become obvious why things like pornography,

01:55:52.560 | not just the accessibility of pornography,

01:55:54.640 | but the intensity of pornography

01:55:57.280 | can negatively shape real-world romantic

01:56:01.200 | and sexual interactions.

01:56:02.680 | This is a serious concern.

01:56:04.020 | The discussion is happening now.

01:56:06.180 | The underlying neurobiological mechanisms you now understand,

01:56:09.800 | and this isn't to pass judgment on whether or not

01:56:12.880 | people like or don't like pornography.

01:56:14.720 | That's an ethical discussion.

01:56:15.900 | It's a moral discussion that has to be decided

01:56:18.000 | for each individual by virtue of age, et cetera.

01:56:21.320 | But again, any activity that evokes a lot of dopamine release

01:56:27.500 | will make it harder to achieve the same level

01:56:32.120 | and certainly the greater level of dopamine

01:56:34.560 | through a subsequent interaction.

01:56:36.840 | So yes, indeed, many people are addicted to pornography

01:56:40.400 | and yes, indeed, many people who regularly indulge

01:56:44.500 | in pornography experience challenges

01:56:46.800 | in real-world romantic interactions.

01:56:49.100 | You now understand the mechanisms

01:56:50.560 | behind what I'm telling you.

01:56:52.260 | Now, there are circumstances in which increasing levels

01:56:55.040 | of dopamine is desirable and advantageous

01:56:57.840 | and clinically helpful.

01:56:59.380 | Good example of this would be the drug wellbutrin,

01:57:01.740 | also called bupryron,

01:57:03.240 | which increases dopamine and norepinephrine.

01:57:06.120 | Wellbutrin and bupryron was developed

01:57:07.800 | as an alternative treatment for depression

01:57:10.200 | because some people who take the so-called SSRI,

01:57:12.840 | selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,

01:57:15.560 | which as the name suggests, increase serotonin,

01:57:17.820 | suffer from serotonin-related side effects,

01:57:21.360 | things like decreased appetite, decreased libido,

01:57:24.720 | or sometimes increased appetite

01:57:27.080 | or other side effects that they don't want.

01:57:30.360 | And wellbutrin seems to avoid the sexual side effects.

01:57:34.200 | It can blunt appetite and these sorts of things

01:57:38.460 | because of the increase in norepinephrine

01:57:40.540 | and dopamine increases levels of motivation and craving,

01:57:44.480 | but also can create a state of elevated alertness

01:57:49.120 | that can sometimes get in the way of healthy eating

01:57:52.120 | and things of that sort.

01:57:52.960 | So one has to work with their clinician,

01:57:55.520 | as a psychiatrist, it is a prescription drug,

01:57:57.960 | in order to find the dosage of wellbutrin

01:57:59.920 | that's correct for them.

01:58:01.840 | In addition, things like wellbutrin and bupryron

01:58:04.400 | can increase anxiety

01:58:05.480 | because of the way that dopamine and norepinephrine

01:58:08.200 | are stimulating and tend to place people

01:58:10.080 | into heightened levels of alertness.

01:58:11.720 | Nonetheless, many people have gained terrific relief

01:58:14.640 | from depression from wellbutrin and bupryron,

01:58:17.240 | and many of those same people had serious trouble

01:58:19.780 | with some of the SSRI.

01:58:21.040 | So it does seem to be a very useful drug in certain contexts,

01:58:24.000 | both for depression and for the treatment of smoking,

01:58:26.840 | for people desiring to quit smoking.

01:58:29.140 | And of course, there are a lot of people out there

01:58:31.240 | who are seeking to increase their baseline levels of dopamine

01:58:34.800 | without taking any prescription pharmaceutical compounds.

01:58:38.640 | And nowadays there exists a lot of supplements to do that.

01:58:42.400 | The two most common ones that are directly

01:58:44.760 | within the dopamine pathway are mucuna prurines,

01:58:48.400 | which is actually a velvety bean whose contents are L-DOPA.

01:58:53.400 | Believe it or not, the content of this bean

01:58:56.280 | is the precursor to dopamine.

01:58:58.600 | So mucuna prurines is sold over the counter,

01:59:01.480 | at least in the United States,

01:59:03.160 | and it literally is the precursor to dopamine.

01:59:07.060 | Meaning if you take it,

01:59:08.160 | you will experience very large increases in dopamine.

01:59:11.160 | Those increases are transient and very, very intense.

01:59:14.040 | And in fact, if you look at the constellation of effects

01:59:17.760 | of mucuna prurines,

01:59:19.600 | what you find is that they're pretty striking

01:59:21.480 | and they look a lot like, if not identical to L-DOPA.

01:59:25.640 | The most obvious of those is in the context

01:59:28.360 | of Parkinson's disease.

01:59:29.660 | There are at least five studies that have shown

01:59:31.740 | that mucuna prurines can reduce the symptoms

01:59:35.160 | of Parkinson's disease, much in the same way

01:59:37.400 | that L-DOPA can reduce the symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

01:59:41.280 | And that shouldn't come as any surprise

01:59:42.920 | given what I just told you,

01:59:43.840 | that mucuna prurines is essentially L-DOPA.

01:59:46.800 | It also can reduce a particular hormone called prolactin.

01:59:50.240 | Dopamine and prolactin tend to be

01:59:51.860 | in somewhat push-pull fashion.

01:59:53.880 | When dopamine is up, prolactin is down, and vice versa.

01:59:57.240 | Prolactin is involved in milk let down in women.

01:59:59.600 | It's involved in setting the refractory period

02:00:02.300 | for sex after ejaculation in males.

02:00:06.000 | The reason mating can occur

02:00:07.800 | and then not occur after ejaculation

02:00:09.520 | is because of an increase in prolactin.

02:00:11.200 | Mucuna prurines is often used to blunt prolactin.

02:00:14.920 | And there are actually a couple of studies showing

02:00:17.020 | that it can indeed do that.

02:00:18.480 | Mucuna prurines has a number of other effects

02:00:21.760 | that lie in the sort of sex and reproduction pathway

02:00:24.900 | that are worth noting.

02:00:26.000 | Sperm concentration, sperm quality

02:00:29.660 | is actually greatly increased by mucuna prurines.

02:00:32.520 | These are kind of curious effects

02:00:33.760 | until you understand a little bit more

02:00:35.000 | about the biology of dopamine,

02:00:36.400 | which I'll mention in a moment.

02:00:37.900 | But there are several studies, four in fact,

02:00:41.680 | that describe how mucuna prurines can increase sperm count,

02:00:46.680 | sperm quality, and sperm motility.

02:00:49.640 | So for those of you seeking to conceive children,

02:00:52.360 | mucuna prurines might be an interesting choice

02:00:54.940 | if you're interested in exploring non-prescription compounds.

02:00:58.100 | However, I should mention that anytime you consume

02:01:02.680 | a substance that increases dopamine by mimicking dopamine

02:01:07.680 | or acting as a direct precursor to dopamine,

02:01:10.600 | there's almost inevitably a crash

02:01:13.560 | or a reduction in the baseline in dopamine

02:01:16.440 | that we referred to previously.

02:01:18.640 | So many people who take mucuna prurines

02:01:20.760 | feel really elevated, really motivated, really alert,

02:01:24.840 | all the sorts of things that one would expect

02:01:26.600 | from a dopaminergic drug, which mucuna prurines is,

02:01:30.360 | and then they feel a low or a reduction in drive

02:01:34.720 | and excitement and enthusiasm after the drug wears off,

02:01:38.160 | just like they would with any other

02:01:40.160 | dopamine-increasing compound.

02:01:41.960 | For that reason, many people have turned

02:01:45.340 | to the use of L-tyrosine.

02:01:47.360 | L-tyrosine is an amino acid precursor to L-DOPA,

02:01:50.760 | so it lies further up the dopamine synthesis pathway.

02:01:54.160 | And nowadays it's very common because L-tyrosine

02:01:57.480 | is sold over the counter in the United States,

02:02:00.040 | that people will take L-tyrosine as a way

02:02:02.860 | to get more energized, alert, and focused.

02:02:06.120 | Indeed, there are data that L-tyrosine will accomplish that.

02:02:09.560 | L-tyrosine is typically taken in capsule form

02:02:13.160 | or powder form, anywhere from 500 to 750 to 1,000 milligrams.

02:02:18.160 | It is a potent stimulus for increasing dopamine.

02:02:21.840 | And the timescale for increasing dopamine

02:02:23.700 | is about 30 to 45 minutes after ingestion,

02:02:26.480 | dopamine levels start to peak.

02:02:28.340 | The classic study that really nailed down the fact

02:02:31.640 | that tyrosine has this effect

02:02:34.000 | was published way back in 1983,

02:02:36.720 | Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism,

02:02:39.520 | that directly compared L-tyrosine supplementation

02:02:42.900 | with tryptophan ingestion on plasma dopamine and serotonin,

02:02:47.900 | tryptophan being a precursor to serotonin.

02:02:51.320 | And indeed what they found is that ingestion of L-tyrosine

02:02:55.000 | can increase the amount of dopamine circulating in the blood

02:02:58.800 | and in the brain too, of course.

02:03:00.740 | The tyrosine ingestion induced dopamine increases

02:03:04.540 | within 45 minutes, and they were short lasting.

02:03:07.640 | After about 30 minutes, the effect had dissipated,

02:03:10.960 | meaning the levels of dopamine had dropped down to baseline.

02:03:13.940 | And even though they didn't look at levels

02:03:16.060 | of baseline dopamine past that time point,

02:03:19.140 | the expectation based on everything we know

02:03:21.600 | about dopamine biology is that it would then drop

02:03:24.160 | below baseline due to the depletion

02:03:27.240 | of the readily reservable pool of dopamine vesicles

02:03:29.900 | that we talked about way back

02:03:30.960 | at the beginning of this episode.

02:03:33.320 | The nice thing about this study is it does show specificity

02:03:35.760 | of effect because ingestion of tryptophan

02:03:38.280 | did not increase dopamine.

02:03:40.300 | Instead, it increased serotonin.

02:03:42.320 | So there's really specificity of these pathways

02:03:44.260 | that rule out any placebo type effects.

02:03:46.580 | I'm not suggesting that anybody,

02:03:50.280 | everybody increase their dopamine levels

02:03:52.640 | by way of tyrosine and macuna purines.

02:03:55.900 | For those of you that are seeking to increase

02:03:57.460 | your dopamine levels without prescription drugs,

02:03:59.780 | those are the most direct route to that.

02:04:01.900 | Of course, if you have a preexisting dopaminergic condition,

02:04:05.440 | so schizophrenia or psychosis of any kind,

02:04:08.640 | bipolar, anxiety, things like macuna purines

02:04:13.060 | and L-tyrosine will not be good for you.

02:04:15.860 | And if you don't, you should just understand

02:04:18.900 | and expect that it's going to lead

02:04:21.260 | to an increase in dopamine.

02:04:23.340 | You'll certainly feel an elevated state.

02:04:25.140 | For some of you, that might be agitating.

02:04:27.820 | For some of you, that might be really pleasureful.

02:04:29.580 | And then you will feel a crash afterwards.

02:04:31.880 | How deep is that crash will really depend

02:04:34.340 | on your biology and where your dopamine baseline began.

02:04:38.300 | So I personally am not a fan of using things

02:04:41.020 | like macuna purines at all for myself,

02:04:43.620 | for the reasons I mentioned earlier,

02:04:45.680 | just too intense and too much of a crash.

02:04:48.280 | I do use L-tyrosine from time to time

02:04:50.700 | for enhancing focus and motivation,

02:04:52.460 | but I want to emphasize from time to time.

02:04:55.180 | So I might use it once a week, occasionally twice a week,

02:04:58.460 | but I've never been one to take L-tyrosine regularly

02:05:01.340 | in order to focus or train or do any kind of mental work.

02:05:04.900 | I just don't want to rely on any exogenous substance

02:05:08.940 | in order to get my dopamine circuits activated.

02:05:12.320 | And I don't want to experience the drop in dopamine

02:05:15.140 | that inevitably occurs some period of time afterwards.

02:05:18.420 | I should also mention things that can reduce your levels

02:05:22.260 | of baseline dopamine.

02:05:23.960 | One that is rarely discussed is melatonin.

02:05:27.620 | I have talked before on this podcast about melatonin,

02:05:30.460 | why I am not a fan of using melatonin

02:05:33.220 | in order to enhance sleep.

02:05:35.120 | It can help one get to sleep, but not stay asleep.

02:05:37.660 | Dr. Matt Walker, sleep expert

02:05:39.300 | from University of California, Berkeley.

02:05:41.400 | I think I don't want to put words in his mouth,

02:05:43.840 | but in our discussion about melatonin on this podcast,

02:05:48.600 | when Matt was a guest and in his book and on other podcasts,

02:05:51.400 | Matt has generally stated that the use of melatonin,

02:05:54.660 | except for treatment of jet lag,

02:05:56.580 | is generally not a good idea, and I agree.

02:05:59.740 | I think that melatonin is not often thought about

02:06:03.180 | as impacting the dopamine pathway,

02:06:04.820 | but there's at least one study published in 2001.

02:06:08.660 | First author is Nishiyama, just as it sounds.

02:06:12.540 | It's spelled just as it sounds.

02:06:14.480 | Acute effects of melatonin administration

02:06:16.420 | on cardiovascular autonomic regulation in healthy men.

02:06:19.020 | So the study wasn't specifically about dopamine,

02:06:21.800 | but they looked at norepinephrine and dopamine levels,

02:06:24.180 | and they found a significant,

02:06:26.640 | statistically significant decrease in dopamine

02:06:29.740 | 60 minutes after melatonin administration.

02:06:32.700 | I've talked before about how viewing bright lights

02:06:36.060 | between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.

02:06:38.160 | has been shown in studies by Dr. Samir Hattar,

02:06:40.500 | David Berson, excellent circadian scientists

02:06:42.900 | to reduce levels of dopamine for several days

02:06:46.980 | after that light exposure.

02:06:48.280 | So dim the lights at night.

02:06:50.420 | If you can, avoid exogenous melatonin,

02:06:53.660 | meaning if you don't have to take melatonin

02:06:56.260 | and you can find a better alternative,

02:06:58.060 | that would be a good idea

02:06:58.960 | if you want to maintain healthy levels of dopamine.

02:07:01.700 | Now, there is one compound that you are all familiar with

02:07:04.460 | and you've probably actually taken without realizing it

02:07:07.540 | that increases dopamine,

02:07:08.780 | and that's something called PEA for phenylethylamine,

02:07:12.980 | technically beta phenylethylamine.

02:07:16.060 | And PEA is found in various foods.

02:07:19.180 | Chocolate just happens to be one enriched in PEA

02:07:23.020 | and can increase synaptic levels of dopamine.

02:07:25.680 | I personally take PEA from time to time

02:07:29.620 | as a focus and work aid

02:07:32.700 | in order to do intense bouts of work.

02:07:35.400 | Again, I don't do that too often.

02:07:36.860 | This might be once a week or once every two weeks.

02:07:39.300 | I might use it for training, but typically I don't.

02:07:41.660 | It's usually for mental work.

02:07:42.980 | And I will take 500 milligrams of PEA

02:07:46.180 | and I'll take 300 milligrams of alpha-GPC.

02:07:49.220 | That's something that I personally do.

02:07:50.800 | That's what's right for me.

02:07:51.840 | It's within my margins of safety for my health.

02:07:54.320 | Again, you have to check with your doctor

02:07:55.940 | and decide what's right for you.

02:07:57.920 | It leads to a sharp but very transient increase in dopamine

02:08:02.500 | that lasts about 30 to 45 minutes.

02:08:05.500 | And at least in my system,

02:08:06.760 | I found to be much more regulated

02:08:10.080 | and kind of even than something like L-tyrosine

02:08:13.280 | and certainly much more regulated

02:08:15.100 | and even and lower dopamine release

02:08:17.440 | than something like macuna prurines.

02:08:20.200 | One of the lesser talked about compounds that's out there,

02:08:22.820 | but that's gaining popularity for increasing dopamine

02:08:26.540 | and as a so-called nootropic

02:08:28.300 | is something called Hooperzine A.

02:08:30.580 | Hooperzine A is a compound sold over the counter,

02:08:33.780 | at least in the United States,

02:08:35.180 | that can increase acetylcholine transmission,

02:08:38.100 | a different neuromodulator entirely.

02:08:40.380 | But what's interesting is that Hooperzine A

02:08:42.580 | somehow by way of interactions

02:08:44.980 | between the cholinergic system and the dopaminergic system

02:08:48.200 | leads to increases in dopamine

02:08:51.020 | in the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.

02:08:53.660 | Hippocampus, of course, being an area of the brain

02:08:55.620 | associated with learning and memory

02:08:57.180 | and prefrontal cortex being associated

02:08:58.980 | with the mesolimbic pathway decision-making focus, et cetera.

02:09:02.300 | And so I think the reason why we're seeing an increase

02:09:04.580 | in popularity of companies,

02:09:06.620 | including Hooperzine A and nootropic compounds

02:09:09.460 | is both for the cholinergic stimulating properties,

02:09:12.140 | but also for stimulating dopamine release.

02:09:15.520 | I personally have never tried Hooperzine A.

02:09:17.500 | You can go to examine.com or put Hooperzine A into PubMed

02:09:21.440 | if you'd like to search around

02:09:22.660 | and see some of the science behind it.

02:09:24.340 | Again, I'm not recommending anyone take these things.

02:09:26.300 | In fact, I recommend against anyone just diving in

02:09:28.460 | and starting to consume things

02:09:29.620 | without gaining knowledge about how they function

02:09:32.380 | and whether or not they're right for you.

02:09:33.940 | But nonetheless, I think in the years to come,

02:09:36.080 | we are going to see a lot more of L-tyrosine,

02:09:39.320 | PEA, phenylethylamine, and Hooperzine

02:09:42.300 | as a way of tapping into the dopaminergic

02:09:44.720 | and cholinergic circuits,

02:09:45.960 | certainly along with things like alpha-GPC

02:09:48.360 | as non-prescription, short-lived,

02:09:50.860 | somewhat milder alternatives

02:09:53.300 | to things that really spike dopamine,

02:09:56.340 | things like Adderall, Ritalin,

02:09:57.740 | Modafinil, R-Modafinil, and similar.

02:10:00.620 | And I can't help but share with you one more result.

02:10:02.900 | It's not related to pharmacology.

02:10:04.900 | It's related to behaviors and social interactions.

02:10:08.540 | And that's the very interesting,

02:10:10.220 | and I would say important finding

02:10:12.340 | that was made a few years ago by my colleague, Rob Malenka,

02:10:15.140 | who's in our department of psychiatry at Stanford,

02:10:17.500 | showing that oxytocin and social connection

02:10:20.820 | is actually directly stimulating the dopamine pathway.

02:10:24.740 | I think for many years, all of us, including me,

02:10:27.940 | would hear and thought that oxytocin

02:10:31.900 | was in the serotonergic pathway,

02:10:33.780 | that it was about pair bonding,

02:10:35.300 | and it was about some of these neuromodulators

02:10:37.380 | that were more associated with things related

02:10:40.080 | to feeling good with what we have in the present moment.

02:10:43.500 | That's typically what we think of

02:10:44.620 | when we think of the opioid system

02:10:46.140 | or the serotonergic system.

02:10:48.080 | The dopamine system is really about seeking and reward.

02:10:50.920 | But in a paper published in 2017 in the journal Science,

02:10:53.800 | excellent journal, the paper's titled

02:10:57.040 | "Gating of Social Reward by Oxytocin

02:11:00.480 | "in the Ventral Tegmental Area."

02:11:02.580 | You now know what the ventral tegmental area,

02:11:04.160 | it's that area of the mesolimbic pathway.

02:11:06.280 | What this paper essentially showed

02:11:08.000 | is that oxytocin, social connection,

02:11:11.320 | and pair bonding itself triggers dopamine release.

02:11:15.000 | And as everyone read this result, we all realized,

02:11:18.420 | ah, this makes total sense that for the evolution

02:11:21.900 | of our species, indeed for any species

02:11:23.840 | where social connections are important,

02:11:26.640 | it's also important to go seek social connections.

02:11:29.240 | And so while it's fun to think about pharmacology

02:11:31.580 | and underlying neural circuitry and cold water baths

02:11:34.900 | and all these different things related to dopamine schedules

02:11:38.500 | and reward mechanisms and attaching reward to effort

02:11:41.300 | and all the various things that we've talked about today

02:11:43.340 | in terms of science and tools and protocols,

02:11:45.540 | I'd be remiss if I didn't include description of this result

02:11:49.700 | and just emphasize that social connections,

02:11:53.740 | close social connections in particular

02:11:55.860 | that evoke oxytocin release.

02:11:57.340 | So those are romantic type, those are parent-child type,

02:12:01.200 | those are friendship related,

02:12:02.680 | and those can even be just friends at a distance related.

02:12:06.540 | It doesn't actually require skin contact

02:12:08.720 | to get oxytocin release,

02:12:11.340 | but oxytocin release is central

02:12:13.340 | to stimulating the dopamine pathways.

02:12:15.900 | So the take-home message there is quite simple,

02:12:18.720 | engage in, pursue quality, healthy social interactions.

02:12:24.060 | I know I've covered a lot of material today.

02:12:26.300 | I've really tried hard to focus on things

02:12:28.100 | that lie directly within the dopamine pathway

02:12:31.260 | and circuitries, as well as things that directly stimulate

02:12:34.660 | those pathways and circuitries.

02:12:36.940 | What I haven't talked about are all the things

02:12:39.560 | that indirectly serve the dopamine pathways.

02:12:42.880 | And out there on the internet,

02:12:44.320 | and indeed in the scientific literature,

02:12:46.360 | you will find, for instance,

02:12:47.640 | that things like maca root can increase dopamine,

02:12:50.200 | things like the gut microbiome can influence dopamine,

02:12:53.520 | and indeed they can,

02:12:54.920 | but they do that through indirect mechanisms

02:12:57.040 | by creating an environment, a milieu,

02:12:59.960 | in which dopamine and dopamine circuits can flourish.

02:13:03.440 | Maca is a good example of that.

02:13:04.800 | It will reduce cortisol,

02:13:06.320 | and through some indirect pathways related to cortisol

02:13:09.380 | can increase dopamine,

02:13:10.860 | but it's not a direct increase in dopamine.

02:13:13.060 | And so as a consequence, it's rather subtle

02:13:15.180 | compared to the various compounds and behaviors

02:13:17.380 | that I talked about today.

02:13:18.740 | Indeed, cold water exposure leads to huge increases

02:13:23.240 | in dopamine, as we talked about before,

02:13:25.540 | and very sustained ones at that.

02:13:27.520 | I realize in giving you a lot of information

02:13:31.000 | about science and mechanism,

02:13:32.560 | all the way from psychological and biological

02:13:34.660 | to circuitry and synaptic transmission,

02:13:36.500 | volumetric transmission, and so forth,

02:13:39.100 | that it might seem overwhelming.

02:13:40.720 | The most important things to understand

02:13:42.560 | are that these dopamine pathways

02:13:43.800 | really are under your control,

02:13:45.760 | and the locus of control resides in the fact

02:13:49.040 | that your previous levels of dopamine

02:13:51.280 | are influencing your levels of dopamine right now,

02:13:54.060 | and your current levels of dopamine

02:13:55.560 | and where you take them next

02:13:56.960 | will influence your dopamine levels

02:13:58.520 | in the next days and weeks to come.

02:14:00.300 | So I hope both with the mechanisms that you now have in hand

02:14:04.000 | plus some of the tools to tap into the dopaminergic system,

02:14:06.720 | both behavioral, pharmacologic, prescription,

02:14:09.140 | and non-prescription, et cetera,

02:14:10.760 | that you'll feel that you have more control

02:14:12.180 | over your dopamine system,

02:14:13.440 | and certainly that you have a better understanding

02:14:15.480 | of your dopamine system so that you can modulate

02:14:18.380 | and adjust your levels of dopamine

02:14:19.840 | in the ways that serve you best.

02:14:22.080 | If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast,

02:14:25.840 | please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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02:14:29.480 | In addition, please leave us a comment or a suggestion

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02:14:42.520 | to leave us up to a five-star review

02:14:44.520 | and to leave us a comment there as well.

02:14:47.080 | Please also check out the sponsors mentioned

02:14:48.960 | at the beginning of today's podcast.

02:14:50.860 | That's a terrific way to support us.

02:14:52.920 | In addition, if you'd like to support the Huberman Lab

02:14:55.080 | and research at Stanford on stress, stress mitigation,

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02:14:59.480 | you can do that by going to hubermanlab.stanford.edu/giving.

02:15:05.000 | And there you can make a tax deductible donation

02:15:07.420 | to the research in my laboratory.

02:15:09.660 | In addition, we have a Patreon.

02:15:11.480 | It's patreon.com/andrewhuberman.

02:15:14.520 | And there you can support the podcast

02:15:16.360 | at any level that you like.

02:15:18.320 | Today and on previous podcast episodes,

02:15:20.460 | we talked a bit about supplements.

02:15:22.360 | Supplements certainly aren't necessary,

02:15:24.320 | but many people find them beneficial

02:15:25.920 | for things like adjusting their levels of dopamine

02:15:27.920 | or for other purposes.

02:15:29.920 | If you're going to use supplements,

02:15:31.080 | it's very important that the supplements you use

02:15:33.280 | be of very high quality

02:15:34.680 | and that the quantity of ingredients that are on the label

02:15:37.920 | match what's actually in those bottles.

02:15:39.560 | For that reason, we've partnered with Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E,

02:15:42.840 | because Thorne has the highest levels of stringency

02:15:45.040 | with respect to quality

02:15:46.560 | and how much of each supplement

02:15:48.840 | they put in the products that they sell.

02:15:51.040 | If you'd like to see the supplements that I take,

02:15:52.840 | you can go to thorne.com/u/huberman.

02:15:57.840 | And there you can see what I take.

02:15:59.260 | You can get 20% off any of those supplements.

02:16:02.000 | And if you navigate into the Thorne site

02:16:04.040 | through that portal,

02:16:05.640 | then you can get 20% off any of the supplements

02:16:08.020 | that Thorne makes.

02:16:09.060 | If you're not already following us on Instagram

02:16:11.180 | at Huberman Lab, please do so.

02:16:12.740 | There I teach neuroscience tools and information.

02:16:15.960 | Oftentimes it's tools and information

02:16:17.580 | that I don't cover on the podcast.

02:16:19.660 | We're also on Twitter, also at Huberman Lab.

02:16:22.280 | And last, but certainly not least,

02:16:24.500 | thank you for your interest in science.

02:16:26.320 | [upbeat music]

02:16:28.900 | (upbeat music)

Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction | Huberman Lab Podcast #39

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