Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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So if I were to just put a really simple message around dopamine, it would be: "There's a molecule in your brain and body that when released tends to make you look outside yourself, pursue things outside yourself, and to crave things outside yourself." The pleasure that arrives from achieving things also involves dopamine, but is mainly the consequence of other molecules. But if ever you felt lethargic and just lazy, and you had no motivation or drive, that's a low-dopamine state. If ever you felt really excited, motivated, even if you were a little scared to do something. Maybe you did your first skydive or you're about to do your first skydive, or you're about to do some public speaking, and you really don't want to screw it up, you are in a high dopamine state. He found that a slower form of information, books, was the antidote to his information overload. So he made them part of his routine again. According to McGuire, "Reading books again has given me more time to reflect, to think, and has increased both my focus and the creative mental space to solve work problems."

So certain things like cocaine, amphetamine, I will put in the classification of bad; I'm willing to do that, and other things are part of life: food, exercise, if that evokes your dopamine, how are we supposed to engage with these dopamine-evoking activities in ways that are healthy and beneficial for us? How do we achieve these peaks, which are so essential to our well-being and experience of life, without dropping our baseline? And the key lies in intermittent release of dopamine. The real key is to not expect or chase high levels of dopamine release every time we engage in these activities. I now understand why something that I enjoyed so much had become less pleasureful for me, and there's a deep, deep satisfaction that comes from understanding, okay, there wasn't anything wrong with me or what I was doing, or anything at all. It was just there was something wrong with the approach I was taking, which was layering in all these sources of dopamine and dropping my baseline. For this very same reason, I caution people against using stimulants every time they study, or every time they work out, or every time that they do anything that they would like to continue to enjoy and be motivated at. There's one exception which is caffeine, because I mentioned before, if you like caffeine, that actually could be a good thing for your dopamine system because it does upregulate these D2, D3 receptors, so it actually makes whatever dopamine is released by that activity more accessible or more functional within the biochemistry in the pathways of your brain and body. Dopamine is the chemical of desire that always asks for more--more stuff, more stimulation, and more surprises. In pursuit of these things, it is undeterred by emotion, fear, or morality. Dopamine is the source of our every urge, that little bit of biology that makes an ambitious business professional sacrifice everything in pursuit of success, or that drives a satisfied spouse to risk it all for the thrill of someone new. Simply put, it is why we seek and succeed; it is why we discover and prosper. Yet, at the same time, it's why we gamble and squander.

Never Alone

There are a lot of myths about the molecule dopamine; we often hear about so-called dopamine hits. Today we are going to dispel many common myths about dopamine, and we are going to talk about how dopamine actually works. We're going to discuss the biology of dopamine, the psychology. We will discuss some neural circuits and a really exciting aspect of dopamine biology or so-called dopamine schedules. In other words, we are going to discuss how things like food, drugs, caffeine, pornography, even some plant-based compounds, can change our baseline levels of dopamine. And in doing so, they change how much dopamine we are capable of experiencing from what could be very satisfying events, or events that make us feel not so good because of things that we did or took prior. So I promise you it's going to be a vast discussion, but I will structure it for you, and you'll come away with a deep understanding of really what drives you. You will also come away with a lot of tools, how to leverage dopamine so that you can sustain energy, drive and motivation for the things that are important to you over long periods of time. Well, it is great, except that by layering together all these things to try and achieve that dopamine release and by getting a big peak in dopamine, you're actually increasing the number of conditions required to achieve pleasure from that activity again. And so there is a form of this where sometimes you do all the things that you love to get the optimal workout. You listen to your favorite music. You go at your favorite time of day. You have your preworkout drink, if that's your thing. You do all the things that give you that best experience of the workout for you. But there's also a version of this where sometimes you don't do the dopamine-enhancing activities. You don't ingest anything to increase your dopamine. You just do the exercise. Understanding why we do the dangerous and unhealthy stuff is the roadmap to creating the best possible life. If the most successful entrepreneurs manage to find the time, I can, too. Sometimes, that means being a little thrifty: like reading in short bursts throughout the day — on the way to work or waiting in line at the coffee shop. Or, instead of zoning out with Netflix before bed, try squeezing in a few chapters. It strikes a perfect balance between technical precision, flowing relatable prose, effective functional metaphors and harder science.

So do like the casinos do, it certainly works for them, and for activities that you would like to continue to engage in over time, whatever those happen to be, start paying attention to the amount of dopamine and excitement and pleasure that you achieve with those and start modulating that somewhat at random. That might be removing some of the dopamine-releasing chemicals that you might take prior. Maybe you remove them every time, but then every once in a while you introduce them. Maybe it involves sometimes doing things socially, that you enjoy doing socially, sometimes doing the same thing, but alone. There are a lot of different ways to do this. There are a lot of different ways to approach this, but now knowing what you know about peaks and baselines in dopamine, and understanding how important it is not just to achieve peaks but to maintain that baseline at a healthy level, it should be straightforward for you to implement these intermittent schedules. Additionally, the subject matter is utterly germane to the issues of addiction, mental health, compulsory consumption and more fundamentally learning, motivation and ultimately well being. Well, first of all, it is not just responsible for pleasure. It is responsible for motivation and drive, primarily at the psychological level, also for craving. Those three things are sort of the same. Motivation, drive and craving. It also controls time perception, and we will get deep into how dopamine can modulate time perception and how important it is that everybody be able to access increases in dopamine at different time scales. This turns out to be important to not end up addicted to substances, but it also turns out to be very important to sustain effort and be a happy person over long periods of time, which I think most everybody wants. It certainly is adaptive in life to be able to do that.

The Hands that Pull – Reward prediction errors and variable reward schedules

And eventually what typically happens is they will stop getting dopamine release from that activity as well, and then they drop into a pretty serious depression. And this can get very severe and people have committed suicide from these sorts of patterns of activity. But what about the more typical scenario? What about this scenario of somebody who is really good at working during the week, they exercise during the week, they drink on the weekends? Well, that person is only consuming alcohol maybe one or two nights a week, but oftentimes that same person will be spiking their dopamine with food during the middle of the week. Now we all have to eat, and it's nice to eat foods that we enjoy. I certainly do that. I love food, in fact. But let's say they're eating foods that really evoke a lot of dopamine release in the middle of the week. Reading is the best, not to mention the easiest, way to shore up our creative thinking and give our brains a break from digital overload — which, according to a 2019 Workplace Productivity Report, more than half of the workforce experiences. With that in mind, here are some strategies for making quality reading time a part of your daily routine. 1. Stash your devices One that you might be wondering about is caffeine. I'm certainly drinking my caffeine today, and I do enjoy caffeine in limited quantities. I drink yerba maté and I drink coffee, and I love it. Does it increase dopamine? Well, a little bit. Caffeine will increase dopamine to some extent, but it is pretty modest compared to the other things that I described. Chocolate, sex, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamine, and so on. However, there's a really interesting paper published in 2015. This is Volkow et al. You can look it up. It's very easy to find. That showed that regular ingestion of caffeine, whether or not it's from coffee or otherwise, increases upregulation of certain dopamine receptors. So caffeine actually makes you able to experience more of dopamine's effects, because as I mentioned before, dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or its release volumetrically, but then it has to bind someplace and trigger those G-protein-coupled receptors, and caffeine increases the number, the density of those G-protein-coupled receptors. For those who enjoy some history with their science, Epstein’s book is the place to go for understanding how we know what we know about our bodies’ chemical ringmasters. From tests on brains in jars to the precise hormonal research of the past couple of decades, Aroused covers the gamut, while also telling an engaging story about the role hormones play in just about every facet of our lives. It’s a detective tale with multiple twists, and an informativemust read for the year.