Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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So for people that hate exercise, you can think about some aspect of exercise that you really enjoy. However, I will caution you against saying to yourself, I hate exercise, or I hate studying, or I hate this person, but I love the reward I give myself afterward. Later we're going to talk about how rewards given afterward actually make the situation worse. They won't make you like exercise more or studying more. They actually will undermine the dopamine release that would otherwise occur for that activity. Los tres primeros capítulos (LOVE, DRUGS and DOMINATION) son absolutamente fascinantes y creo que es bastante fácil verse reflejado (y gracias al libro, entender) muchas de las sensaciones y emociones que se describen y que todos experimentamos en el día a día. Los capítulos 4 – 6 (CREATIVITY, POLITICS y PROGRESS) no me han parecido tan brillantes y los resultados de alguno de los estudios mencionados (p.ej. correlación entre niveles de dopamina e ideología) no tan convincentes. En cualquier caso en estos últimos también hay insights interesantes y son relativamente cortos, así que merece la pena llegar hasta ellos. What's more, research has found that we retain more information when we learn in short, spaced-out intervals, rather than trying to cram it all in at once. Creativitatea reflectă creierul în forma sa cea mai elevată. Boala mintală este opusul.” Cel mai interesant capitol mi s-a părut cel despre creativitate și nebunie. Se vorbește despre saliență, vise, boli, modele mentale artă și altele, toate prin prisma dopaminei.

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. Applying lessons learned from inside her Silicon Valley office, which is furnished with a painting of giant peaches and a colourful coffee-stained tapestry, she’s urging us to make space in our brains to let our thoughts wash over us rather than constantly seeking stimulation. It might seem a little less fun and it will involve tolerating discomfort rather than seeking refuge in shiny things, but this “new form of asceticism” is, she promises, the “path to the good life”. This is a book I certainly recommend, though it could have been crisper in the early and middle portions. 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 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 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, I'm feeling kind of burned out. It’s very different from how life used to be, when we had to tolerate a lot more distress,” says Lembke. “We’re losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems and deal with frustration and pain in its many different forms.” Dopamine has been dubbed 'the Kim Kardashian of molecules' owing to its mainstream prominenceA wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: We all desire a break from our routines and those parts of life that upset us. What if, instead of trying to escape these things, we learn to turn toward them, to reach a peaceful harmony with ourselves and the people we share our lives with? Lembke has written a book that radically changes the way we think about mental illness, pleasure, pain, reward, and stress. Turn toward it. You’ll be happy you did.” Initially, dopamine was seen simply as a way for the body to produce a chemical called norepinephrine, which is what adrenaline is called when it is found in the brain."

Just very briefly, because it was also covered in the interview episode I did with Anna Lembke about addiction. Some of you might be asking, "What should I do if I experience a drop in my baseline level of dopamine because of engagement with some activity, or some substance, that led to big peaks?" Just to put some color, an example on this: a few episodes ago, I talked about a friend who I've known a long time, she's actually the child of a friend who has basically become addicted to video games. He decided, actually after seeing that episode with Anna, to do a 30-day complete fast from phone, from video games and from social media of all kinds. He's now at day 29, he's really accomplished this. Not incidentally, his levels of concentration, his overall mood are up. He's doing far, far better. What he did is hard; in particular, the first 14 days is really hard, but the way that you replenish the releasable pool of dopamine is to not engage in these dopaminergic-seeking behaviors. 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.Dopamine is what we call a neuromodulator. Neuromodulators are different than neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are involved in the dialogue between neurons, nerve cells, and neurotransmitters tend to mediate local communication. Just imagine two people talking to one another at a concert. That communication between them is analogous to the communication carried out by neurotransmitters, whereas neuromodulators influence the communication of many neurons. Imagine a bunch of people dancing where it's a coordinated dance involving 10 or 20 or hundreds of people. Neuromodulators are coordinating that dance. In the nervous system what this means is that dopamine release changes the probability that certain neural circuits will be active and that other neural circuits will be inactive. So it modulates a bunch of things all at once. And that's why it's so powerful at shifting not just our levels of energy, but also our mindset, also our feelings of whether or not we can or cannot accomplish something. You don't do the exercise and expect dopamine to arrive through some, what we call, exogenous source as well. You might think, "Well, that sounds lame. I want to continue to enjoy exercising." Ah, but that's exactly the point. If you want to maintain motivation for school, exercise, relationships, or pursuits of any duration and kind, the key thing is to make sure that the peak in dopamine, if it's very high, doesn't occur too often, and if something does occur very often, that you vary how much dopamine you experience with each engagement in that activity.