We really all have a sort of dopamine set point. And if we continue to indulge in the same behaviors or even different behaviors that increase our dopamine in these big peaks over and over and over again, we won't experience the same level of joy from those behaviors or from anything at all.

Now that has a name, it's called addiction, but even for people who aren't addicted, even for people who don't have an attachment to any specific substance or behavior, this drop in below baseline after any peak in dopamine is substantial and it governs whether or not we are going to feel motivated to continue to pursue other things.

Fortunately, there's a way to work with this such that we can constantly stay motivated, but also keep that baseline of dopamine at an appropriate healthy level. A previous guest on the Huberman Lab podcast was Dr. Anna Lembke. She's head of the Addiction Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford, has this amazing book, "Dopamine Nation," "Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence." If you haven't read the book, I highly encourage you to check it out, it's fantastic.

The other terrific book about dopamine is "The Molecule of More," which is similar in some regard, but isn't so much about addiction, it's more about other types of behaviors. Both books really focus on these dopamine schedules and the relationship between these peaks and baselines of dopamine. In Dr. Lembke's book, and when she was on the Huberman Lab podcast, another podcast, she's talked about this pleasure-pain balance, that when we seek something that we really like or we indulge in it, like eating a little piece of chocolate, if we really like chocolate, there's some pleasure, but then there's a little bit of pain that exceeds the amount of pleasure, and it's subtle, and we experience it as wanting more of that thing.

Okay, so there's a pleasure-pain balance, and I'm telling you that the pleasure and the pain are governed by dopamine to some extent. Well, how could that be, right? I've said before, when you engage in an activity or when you ingest something that increases dopamine, the dopamine levels go up to substantial degree with all the things I listed off.

Where's the pain coming from? Well, the pain is coming from the lack of dopamine that follows, and you now know what that lack of dopamine reflects. How do you know? Well, earlier we were talking about how dopamine is released between neurons, and I mentioned two ways. One is into the synapse, where it can activate the postsynaptic neuron, and the other was what I called volumetric release, where it is distributed more broadly.

It's released out over a bunch of neurons. In both cases, it's released from these things we call synaptic vesicles, literally little bubbles, tiny, tiny little bubbles that contain dopamine. They get vomited out into the area or into the synapse. Well, those vesicles get depleted. For the synaptic physiologists out there, we call this the readily releasable pool of dopamine.

We can only deploy dopamine that is ready to be deployed, that's packaged in those little vesicles and ready to go. It's like when you order a product and they say out of stock until two months from now, well, it's not ready to be released. Same thing with dopamine. There's a pool of dopamine that's synthesized, and you can only release the dopamine that's been synthesized, it's the readily releasable pool.

The pleasure-pain balance doesn't only hinge on the readily releasable pool of dopamine, but a big part of the pleasure-pain balance hinges on how much dopamine is there and how much is ready and capable of being released into the system. So now we've given some meat to this thing that we call the pleasure-pain balance.

And now it should make perfect sense why if you take something or do something that leads to huge increases in dopamine, afterward, your baseline should drop because there isn't a lot of dopamine around to keep your baseline going. What about the more typical scenario? What about the scenario of somebody who is really good at working during the week, they exercise during the week, they drink on the weekends?

Well, that person is only consuming alcohol maybe one or two nights a week. But oftentimes that same person will be spiking their dopamine with food during the middle of the week. Now we all have to eat, and it's nice to eat foods that we enjoy. I certainly do that.

I love food, in fact. But let's say they're eating foods that really evoke a lot of dopamine release in the middle of the week. They're drinking one or two days on the weekend. They are one of these work hard, play hard types. So they're swimming a couple of miles in the ocean in the middle of the week as well.

They're going out dancing once on the weekend. Sounds like a pretty balanced life as I describe it. Well, here's the problem. The problem is that dopamine is not just evoked by one of these activities. Dopamine is evoked by all of these activities. And dopamine is one currency of craving motivation and desire and pleasure.

There's only one currency. So even though if you look at the activities, you'd say, well, it's just on the weekends, or this thing is only a couple of times a week. If you looked at dopamine simply as a function, as a chemical function of peaks and baseline, it might make sense why this person, after several years of work hard, play hard, would say, yeah, you know, I'm feeling kind of burnt out.

I'm just not feeling like I have the same energy that I did a few years ago. And of course there are age-related reasons why people can experience drops in energy. But oftentimes what's happening is not some sort of depletion in cellular metabolism that's related to aging. What's happening is they're spiking their dopamine through so many different activities throughout the week that their baseline is progressively dropping.

And in this case, it can be very subtle. It can be very, very subtle. And that's actually a very sinister function of dopamine, we could say, which is that it can often drop in imperceptible ways, but then once it reaches a threshold of low dopamine, we just feel like, hmm, we can't really get pleasure from anything anymore.

What used to work doesn't work anymore. So it starts to look a lot like the more severe addictions or the more acute addictions to things like cocaine and amphetamine, which lead to these big increases, these big spikes in dopamine, and then these very severe drops in the baseline. Now, of course, we all should engage in activities that we enjoy.

I certainly do, everybody should. A huge part of life is pursuing activities and things that we enjoy. The key thing is to understand this relationship between the peaks and the baseline and to understand how they influence one another. Because once you do that, you can start to make really good choices in the short run and in the long run to maintain your level of dopamine baseline, maybe even raise that level of dopamine baseline and still get those peaks and still achieve those feelings of elevated motivation, elevated desire and craving.

Because again, those peaks and having a sufficiently healthy high level of dopamine baseline are what drove the evolution of our species. And they're really what drive the evolution of anyone's life progression too. So they're a good thing. Dopamine is a good thing. (upbeat music)