Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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Her stories have the power to transform your life' Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Again, how much dopamine you experience from something depends on your baseline level of dopamine when you arrive there and your previous dopamine peaks. That's super important to understand, and it's completely neglected by the general language of dopamine hits. This is why when you repeatedly engage in something that you enjoy, your threshold for enjoyment goes up and up and up. So I want to talk about that process, and I want to explain how that process works because if you understand that process and you understand some of these schedules and kinetics, as we call them, around dopamine, you'll be in a terrific position to use any dopamine-enhancing tools that you decide to use. You'll be in an excellent position to modulate and control your own dopamine release for optimal motivation and drive. Understanding why we do the dangerous and unhealthy stuff is the roadmap to creating the best possible life. So for instance, the pen that I'm holding right now is one of these Pilot V5s. I love these Pilot V5s. They don't sponsor the podcast. I just happen to like them. I like the way that they write, how they feel. If I spent enough time thinking about it or talking about it, I could probably get a dopamine increase just talking about this Pilot V5, and that's not because I have the propensity to release dopamine easily. It's that as we start to engage with something more and more, and what we say about it and what we encourage ourself to think about it has a profound impact on its rewarding or nonrewarding properties. Now, it's not simply the case that you can lie to yourself and you can tell yourself, I love something, and when you don't really love it, and it will increase dopamine. But what's been found over and over again is that if people journal about something, or they practice some form of appreciation for something, or they think of some aspect of something that they enjoy, the amount of dopamine that that behavior will evoke tends to go up. 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."

Lieberman is highly entertaining, mixing the hard science with entertaining elements to make it more vivid, transporting it directly into the long term memory, except of course one is too stoned on dopamine and the data transmission affected by too much of whatever emotion. Don´t read angry, nervous, or horny, that´s not healthy for your wisdom! 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. This is a book I certainly recommend, though it could have been crisper in the early and middle portions.

Tengo un amigo que cuando escuchó por primera vez el podcast del neurocientífico de Stanford, Andrew Huberman, me dijo: “El tío mola mucho y es una pasada escucharle… una pena que se lo invente todo”. El comentario me hizo bastante gracia porque entendí rápidamente que lo que realmente estaba queriendo decir es que las explicaciones de Huberman sobre cómo funciona el cerebro son tan elegantes, sencillas e intuitivas que parecen ciencia ficción. Leyendo The Molecule of More (libro recomendado por el propio Huberman en uno de los episodios del podcast) he tenido la misma sensación ya que parece imposible que un único neurotransmisor, la dopamina, sea la explicación de tantos y tan dispares comportamientos humanos.

Epinephrine, also called adrenaline, is the main chemical driver of energy. We can't do anything, anything at all, unless we have some level of epinephrine in our brain and body. It's released from the adrenal glands, which ride atop our kidneys. It's released from an area of the brain stem called locus coeruleus, and its release tends to wake up neural circuits in the brain and wake up various aspects of our body's physiology and give us a readiness. So it should come as no surprise that dopamine and epinephrine, aka adrenaline, hang out together. In fact, epinephrine and adrenaline are actually manufactured from dopamine. There's a biochemical pathway involving dopamine, which is a beautiful pathway — if ever you want to look it up, you could just look up biochemistry of dopamine, but what you'll find is that L-dopa is converted into dopamine. Dopamine is converted into noradrenaline, norepinephrine, it's also called, and noradrenaline, norepinephrine, is converted into adrenaline. A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: 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. want to know whether you're more like a dopaminergic type or Here&Now type (and if you don't understand these terms, read the book :D)It’s a sobering thought. Because the bounty of high-octane stimuli enables us to instantly boost our mood – something previous generations couldn’t do to the same degree – we’re under the impression we can fully control when we feel joy. In reality, our drip-fed, tech-fuelled bliss is fleeting, and often less than blissful. The main message is to stop hunting for pleasure all the time.It’s too much of a good thing, and all that. As I started learning more about this relationship between the peaks and the baselines in dopamine, what I realized was that some time ago I probably experienced an incredible increase in the amount of dopamine during one of my workouts, because I enjoy working out and I enjoy listening to music. I also enjoy listening to podcasts. I also enjoy communicating with people. Those are all wonderful pursuits, but I had layered in too many of them too many times, and then it essentially wasn't working for me anymore, much in the same way a drug wouldn't work for somebody who takes it repeatedly, because their baseline of dopamine is dropping. So at least for this calendar year, I've made a rule for myself, which is I don't allow my phone into my workouts at all. Dopamine is a chemical produced by our brains that plays a starring role in motivating behavior. It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise, and, importantly, when we have successful social interactions. In an evolutionary context, it rewards us for beneficial behaviors and motivates us to repeat them.

Life is a slog and I think if we could admit that and take comfort in knowing we’re not alone in the day-to-day struggle, paradoxically, we would be happier’: Dr Anna Lembke. Photograph: Boris Zharkov/The Observer So certain things, chemicals, have a universal effect, they make everybody's dopamine go up. So some people like chocolate, some people don't, of course, but in general, it causes this increase in dopamine; but sex, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamine, those things cause increases in dopamine in everybody that takes them. Things like exercise, studying, hard work, working through a challenge in a relationship or working through something hard of any kind, that is going to be subjective as to how much dopamine will be released, and we will return to that subjective component in a little bit, but now you have a sense of how much dopamine can be evoked by different activities and by different substances. Welcome to The Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. 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. From dopamine's point of view, it's not the having that matters. It's getting something--anything--that's new. From this understanding--the difference between possessing something versus anticipating it--we can understand in a revolutionary new way why we behave as we do in love, business, addiction, politics, religion - and we can even predict those behaviors in ourselves and others.The philosopher Aristotle (...) looked at all the things we do for the sake of something else and wondered if there was an end to it all. (...) Is there anything we seek for itself only, not because it leads to something else? Aristotle decided it was. He decided there was a single thing at the end of every string of Whys, and its name was Happiness. Everything we do is for the sake of happiness." While the reward pathways ( Figure 1) are distinct in their anatomical organization, all three become active when anticipating or experiencing rewarding events. In particular, they reinforce the association between a particular stimulus or sequence of behaviors and the feel-good reward that follows. Every time a response to a stimulus results in a reward, these associations become stronger through a process called long-term potentiation. This process strengthens frequently used connections between brain cells called neurons by increasing the intensity at which they respond to particular stimuli.

Radically changes the way we think about mental illness, pleasure, pain, reward and stress' Daniel Levitin, bestselling author of The Organized Mind want to understand why yoga, meditation, balanced CBD consumption... make you feel happier :D (Work for me!)(Hints? They are Here and Now!) I was in college when this whole MPTP thing happened, and I remember hearing this story. At the time, I had no understanding of what it is to have very high levels of dopamine or extremely depleted levels of dopamine. There was no reason why I should have that understanding. I mean, of course, I had experienced different pleasures of different kinds, and I've had lows in my life, but nothing to the extreme that I'm about to discuss. Responsible action is a delicate balance – excessive dopamine activity can become impractical and is speculated at times even lead to mental illnesses. The influence of Dopamine on politics, sex, relationships, emotions, political affiliations, religion and business is all discussed in a good amount of detail.I was distracted when at work, distracted when with family and friends, constantly tired, irritable, and always swimming against a wash of ambient stress induced by my constant itch for digital information. My stress had an electronic feel to it, as if it was made up of the very bits and bytes on my screens." 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.