Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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Understanding why we do the dangerous and unhealthy stuff is the roadmap to creating the best possible life.

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.Before we dive into the meat of today's discussion, I'd like to share with you a fascinating result that really underscores what dopamine is capable of in our brains and bodies, and underscores the fact that just through behaviors, no drugs, nothing of that sort, just through behaviors we can achieve terrifically high increases in dopamine that are very long and sustained in ways that serve us. This is a result that was published in the European Journal of Physiology. I'll go into it in more detail later, but essentially what it involved is having human subjects get into water of different temperatures. So it was warm water, moderately cool water and cold, cold water. Had them stay in that water for up to an hour, and they measured by way of blood draw things like cortisol, norepinephrine and dopamine. Once we understand that dopamine is a driver for us to seek things, it makes perfect sense as to why it would have a baseline level and it would have peaks, and that the baseline and peaks would be related in some sort of direct way. Here's what I mean by that. Let's say that you were not alive now, but you were alive 10,000 years ago and you woke up and you looked and you realized you had minimal water and you had minimal food left. Maybe you have a child, maybe you have a partner, maybe you're in an entire village, but you realized that you need things, okay? You need to be able to generate the energy to go seek those things, and chances are there were dangers in seeking those things. Yes, it could be saber-tooth tigers and things of that sort, but there are other dangers too.

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. It's no surprise that if you choose something you genuinely enjoy, you'll be more likely to follow through with it. Plus, fully immersing yourself in one captivating book will give you so much more than speeding through a dozen books while your mind wanders elsewhere. Only when we're fully absorbed can we reach that priceless state of flow: the "optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best." 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. The crux of our behaviour boils down to two outlooks we humans have – here & now matters (which the authors refer to as the H&N circuit) and the future (our desires and actions). Dopamine is largely what determines how we approach the future – high dopamine defining the drive. Dopamine circuits are in two categories – ones which determine our desires and the other which exerts control over our actions. Dopamine is also vitally important for movement. I'll explain the neural circuits for dopamine and mindset, and dopamine in movement, in a moment. But in diseases like Parkinson's or Lewy body dementia, which is similar to Parkinson's in many ways, there's a depletion or death of dopamine neurons at a particular location in the brain, which leads to shaky movements, challenges in speaking, challenges in particular in initiating movement. And because dopamine is depleted elsewhere too, people with Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia also experience drops in motivation and affect, meaning mood. They tend to get depressed, and so on. When those people are properly treated, they can, not always, but they can recover some fluidity of movement, some ability to initiate movement. And almost without question, those people feel better psychologically, not just because they can move, but also because dopamine impacts mood and motivation.

The Battle for Your Time

The human brain contains four major dopamine “pathways,” or connections between different parts of the brain that act as highways for chemical messages called neurotransmitters. Each pathway has its own associated cognitive and motor (movement) processes. Three of these pathways—the mesocortical, mesolimbic, and nigrostriatal pathways—are considered our “reward pathways” and have been shown to be dysfunctional in most cases of addiction. They are responsible for the release of dopamine in various parts of the brain, which shapes the activity of those areas. The fourth, the tuberoinfundibular pathway, regulates the release of a hormone called prolactin that is required for milk production. Figure 1: Three dopamine pathways and their related cognitive processes. Most of your dopamine is generated deep in the midbrain, and it is released in many different areas across the brain. These areas are largely responsible for behaviors associated with learning, habit formation, and addiction. 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. And this is very important. How satisfying or exciting or pleasureful a given experience is doesn't just depend on the height of that peak. It depends on the height of that peak relative to the baseline. So if you increase the baseline and you increase the peak, you're not going to achieve more and more pleasure from things. I'll talk about how to leverage this information in a little bit, but just increasing your dopamine, yes, it will make you excited for all things. It will make you feel very motivated, but it will also make that motivation very short-lived. So there's a better way to increase your dopamine. There's a better way to optimize this peak-to-baseline ratio. Why are we always hopeful for solutions even in the darkest times--and so good at figuring them out?

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. Sistemul dopaminic s-a dezvoltat pentru a ne motiva să supraviețuim. Activarea ei provoacă dorință, entuziasm, speranță. Fără ea nu putem depune efort. 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. 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.

Radically changes the way we think about mental illness, pleasure, pain, reward and stress' Daniel Levitin, bestselling author of The Organized Mind activities and things that we ingest. All of us have different baseline levels of dopamine. Some of this is sure to be genetic. Some people just simply ride at a level a little bit higher. They're a little bit more excited, they're a little bit more motivated, or maybe they're a lot more excited or a lot more motivated. Some people are a little mellower, some people are a little less excitable, and some of that has to do with the fact that dopamine doesn't act alone. Dopamine has close cousins or friends in the nervous system, and I'll just name off a few of those close cousins and friends. There is a bunch of interesting information in this book, but it is hard to tell if it is accurate or wishful thinking on the author's side. 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.