Tame the Dopamine Drive — How to Stop Chasing and Start Living
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Summary
Dopamine is the most important chemical in the human brain, and it's a powerful motivator, but it also has its downsides. Here, to help us understand how this chemical works and how to deal with its pitfalls, Michael Long, a trained physicist turned writer whose latest book is Taming the Molecule of More, and I discuss how dopamine, for better and worse, makes you want what you don't have.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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All the neurochemicals in the brain have to do with life in the present, except for one,
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dopamine. Dopamine is the one neurochemical that looks to the future and anticipates what
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may be to come and drives you towards it. That can be a good thing. Dopamine is one
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powerful motivator, but it also has its downsides. Here to help us understand how the most
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important chemical in the brain works and how to deal with its pitfalls is Michael Long.
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Michael's a trained physicist turned writer whose latest book is Taming the Molecule of More.
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Mike and I discuss how dopamine, for better and worse, makes you want what you don't have.
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He shares what causes low dopamine activity, how to know if you're experiencing it,
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and what increases dopamine. We then talk about how to deal with the consequences of dopamine and
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some of the scenarios in which it plays a role, like losing the spark in a relationship, getting
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stuck in a smartphone scroll habit, and why so much of taming dopamine comes down to living in the here
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and now. We enter a conversation with why The Great Gatsby is really a novel about dopamine
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and the fundamental answer to not letting the dopamine chase lead you around. After the show's
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over, check out our show notes at awim.is.molecule.
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All right, Michael Long, welcome back to the show.
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Doing great. So we had you on the podcast several years ago, I think it was back in 2018,
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to discuss a book you co-authored called The Molecule of More. It's all about dopamine.
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You've written a sequel to that book called Taming the Molecule of More. What prompted the
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sequel? What did you flesh out in this book that you and your co-author didn't flesh out in the first
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one? Well, you know, the first book is about the science of dopamine and its effects on modern life,
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or I should say its effects on us and struggling in modern life. And we explained as much as we could,
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you know, as much as you can in 70,000 words, just how this plays out. And it turns out to affect
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everything from your political beliefs or your political behaviors, I should say, to why you get
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so wrapped up in your phone and even things like online pornography. And people read the book and
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they said, this is very interesting science. I love these stories. What can I do about it?
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And that's the second book. How do you tame the stress of dopamine in modern life? Hence the title,
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Taming the Molecule of More. And I wrote this one alone with a nice forward by Dr. Dan.
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So let's do a quick recap of the big ideas of the Molecule of More, since I think that'll help
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guide the rest of our conversation. You call dopamine the most important chemical in the human
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brain. So what is dopamine? Well, the best way to understand what dopamine is, is to first understand
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what it is not. Okay. And in general, when we talk about neurotransmitters, these are chemicals in
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your brain that guide your behavior and your feelings. All right. Behavior and feelings. And
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there are dozens of these chemicals, if not a couple of hundred actually. But for our purposes,
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we're interested in a handful. And so, as I said, to understand what dopamine does, first understand
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what it is not. Every neurotransmitter except one deals with the here and now. That is how things
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feel physically, how things taste and smell, how things sound. Those neurotransmitters let us live
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in the moment. But there's one that doesn't let us live in the moment at all. There's one that does
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nothing but anticipate what is possible. One that looks forward. And that one is dopamine. Not only does
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it make you look forward to the future, anticipate the future, it also makes you want what you don't
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have. And it does so in sort of a vicious and wonderful way. And what it does is it makes you
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believe that if there's something out there that you've just come across that might possibly improve
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your life, you have to break down walls to get it. That's what dopamine is. It's the molecule that
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makes you want, anticipate. It's the molecule that makes you desire more. And it does all this
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on the basis of the mere possibility, not even evidence that it's so. And I'm sure in the course
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of our conversation, we can offer all sorts of examples where this begins to mess up our days.
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A quick example, though, is when you pull that lever on a slot machine. Now, there's no guarantee at all
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that what comes up after you pull the lever is going to be any money, a penny, a million dollars,
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whatever. But that feeling of anticipation, it might be, it might be something better than I have
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right now. It might give me more. That's the dopamine feeling. The way you describe dopamine,
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I think it goes against the way often people think about what dopamine is. When they've heard of
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dopamine, they've probably heard of dopamine as like the reward neurotransmitter. The way you
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described it doesn't sound like it's a reward neurotransmitter. It's not a reward neurotransmitter
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at all. It is a go get the reward transmitter. It's a motivating neurotransmitter. More often,
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I hear actually that people think of it as the happiness molecule. They talk about, oh, I just got
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the dopamine buzz. Well, no, you probably just got the oxytocin buzz or maybe even the serotonin buzz to
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some extent. The dopamine buzz is that feeling that if I just keep pushing a little harder,
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I'll get this thing. Another good example of the dopamine feeling is if you celebrate Christmas,
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you know how kids are all leading up to Christmas and they're wondering what's in the presents.
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They're all hopeful that it's what they, that they wanted. And they'll even sometimes cheat a little
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bit and try to look inside the wrapping. I know that's what I did when I was a little boy. I still do it.
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I still do it today once in a while. That feeling of anticipation, that is the real dopamine buzz.
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It motivates us into the future. Yeah. One of the big takeaways I got from your description of
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dopamine, I took away from that first book. And then again, when I read this book, uncertainty is
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an important factor of dopamine. If there's no uncertainty, you're probably not going to have
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dopamine. So you don't know if it's going to be good or bad. And that's the thing that
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kickstarts that dopamine drive. Well, I got to find out. I want to resolve this uncertainty.
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That's exactly right. My favorite example is this, and it's one that Dr. Lieberman and I have used
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for years. And everybody can recognize this. Let's say for the sake of numbers, let's say you get at
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the end of every week, you get a check for a thousand dollars and that's your pay. Congratulations.
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There you go. You get a thousand dollars. At the end of the week, your boss comes to your desk,
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puts the thousand dollar check in your hand, you put it in your wallet and you don't think anything
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about it. Now the next week, the boss comes to your desk and the boss gives you a thousand
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dollar check. And then the boss says, she says, you know, you've done so well, I'm going to give
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you an extra hundred bucks. Here's another hundred dollar check. And you're like, wow,
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an extra hundred bucks. This is fantastic. Notice that the thousand dollars, you've just been slipping
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in your wallet. No big deal. She gives you one 10th of that and you're ecstatic. That's the thing
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we're talking about. Dopamine is that as long as something's a little bit better, we're going to go
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chasing it. So now the next week comes and all of a sudden you're thinking, I wonder if I'll get
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another hundred dollars this week. Oh, that would be exciting. So she gives you a thousand dollar
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check and you're waiting and waiting. And sure enough, she says another great week. Here's another
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hundred dollar bonus. Oh boy, that great feeling you've had anticipating and it turned out to be
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wonderful. So fast forward six or eight weeks down the road, you've been getting a thousand
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dollar check, which you yawn about one 10th of that a hundred dollar check. And you are excited
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about it. But once a few weeks pass and you realize, oh, she's always going to give me a hundred
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dollar bonus. You stop being excited about it. You stop looking forward to that little extra thing on
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Friday because it's no longer extra. It's become normal, nothing to be excited about. And that's what
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dopamine drives us to is to try to get that next thing. But once it becomes normal, part of the
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wallpaper, the dopamine buzz goes away. We don't feel that anticipation anymore.
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Yeah. The scientific phrase for that, it's called reward prediction error, right? It's like when you
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think there's a possibility of something to exceed your expectations, that's when you get that, oh,
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dopamine, oh man, let's find out if it's going to happen or not. So you mentioned dopamine is the
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neurotransmitter of anticipation. It's not about living in the here and now. The other neurotransmitters
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in our brain you call here and now neurotransmitters. What are those here and now neurotransmitters and
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how do they interact with dopamine? Well, the here and now neurotransmitters, as I say, deal with
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sensory matters, consummatory matters or consummatory matters. And there are lots of neurotransmitters we
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could talk about, but I'll just go through a few of them that are in the realm. And when I say
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literally all the others are here and now, literally all the others, Brett, are here and now. There's only
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one that truly deals with anticipation. One you've heard a lot about is serotonin. Serotonin deals with
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mood and sleep and it's a major player when we're trying to get treatment for depression. There are
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others that simply act like an accelerator or a decelerator on all the activities in the brain.
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One of those neurotransmitters is called glutamate and it causes things to get boosted a little bit.
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Things go a little faster. There's another called GABA. GABA, if you've ever taken Xanax or
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clonopin, that's what it is. It's a GABA acting chemical. It pushes GABA and that calms us down.
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It slows down some of the reactions. And what's interesting about it is it doesn't flow through
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the brain like oil does. It's, oh, put some oil in so it'll smooth it out a little bit. It actually
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acts in a discrete way, in a separate way. So all these circuits in your brain, all these receptors
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that are scattered about in a particular system, mixed among those receptors may be GABA receptors.
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And so those GABA receptors could be acted on at the same time the dopamine receptors are acted on.
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So instead of slowing it down like oil does, it's like, oh, here's another fellow who shows up to do
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a little work himself and he's going to slow it out. Now there are a couple of other H&N neurotransmitters
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that I like to mention, but they're actually not technically neurotransmitters. Now, 99 people out of
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100 don't give a damn, but technically we want to be correct. These are actually neuropeptides and it's just
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chemically a little different, but for our purposes, they're the same thing. They tend to act a little
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more slowly than neurotransmitters. One you've heard of, oxytocin. Oxytocin. And that acts in bonding,
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that acts in trust. And if you think about it, that makes sense that that would be a here and now thing
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because bonding is about the person that you are with in the moment. That's where that happens.
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The trust comes from what might happen to you in the moment you are with someone in the here and now.
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Another is endorphins. And endorphins, we can think of as natural opioids. So pretty much any
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place you want to point in that realm of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides, we'll find
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something that primarily acts in the here and now. And so it sounds like dopamine will drive you to get
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those good feelings because like, oh, this can make me feel good somehow, possibly. And then once you
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achieve the thing, dopamine drops off and then the here and now neurotransmitters, the oxytocin,
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the serotonin, they kick in to enhance the experience, help you enjoy the experience and
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strengthen your bond with the person you're with.
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Well, yeah, you just nailed it. The idea of dopamine driving you to get something that you can
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enjoy or consume is just a parallel to what happens in the real world. In fact, the simplest way to think
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of it is like exerting effort and then having a trophy. You don't get the trophy. You don't get
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the pleasure. You don't get to hold the trophy in your hand until you've done the work to get there.
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Dopamine is the motivator to do that work. And the trophy is the feeling, the physical feeling,
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the sound, the touch, the taste, or pursuing someone that you want to date. You go through a lot of
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anticipation, a lot of effort in order to get to the point where you actually touch them, where you're
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actually sitting with them and interacting with them in the here and now. Everything up to that
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point is quite literally anticipation. What can I do or rather what will it be like when I reach my
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goal? And that's what all those other neurotransmitters do is they indulge the goal. Dopamine pushes us
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toward the goal. And it's worth noting that that dopamine feeling, although it has nothing to do with
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the here and now, is typically more intense and more, I'll use the word motivating, even though
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that's literally what it does, more motivating than all the others. If it weren't so, we wouldn't have
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addiction. Addiction is driven by dopamine in large part. You'll know, and people who are listening to
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this who have dealt with addiction know that after a while, it takes more and more stimulation to get
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less and less feeling. And if you think about that, that ought to be the end of addiction. If you're
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doing cocaine and you have to do more and more lines to get higher or to get the same amount of
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high until finally you don't get high anymore, it makes sense that you go, well, forget this. I'm not
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going to do cocaine anymore. But people keep doing it. It's because dopamine doesn't give up. Dopamine
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doesn't fade like the pleasure does. It's so powerful and so intense. It continues pushing us
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towards something that may not even be good anymore. We've warped the system.
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Well, let's talk about how we can tame dopamine and get more out of it. Let's talk about having
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low dopamine first, because I imagine people are listening to you describe dopamine, that it causes
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you to have ambition, have drive, be motivated. And they're like, I need more of that in my life.
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So I'm sure a lot of people are like, well, how can I increase dopamine? Maybe that's my problem
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life. I don't have enough of it. First off, how do you know if you're low on dopamine? Are there
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any symptoms of it? Absolutely, there are. With one caveat, Brett, and that is, I'm going to tell
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you a lot of symptoms that you can look for, a lot of phenomena you can look for. But I want to offer
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the warning, as I say, that these are in broad terms. They can signal a lot of things. So just
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because you hear some of these that I say that click with you doesn't necessarily mean the problem
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is dopamine. If it's interfering with your life, by all means, call a psychiatrist, call a psychologist,
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go see your GP, get some help to find out if there's something truly pathological that you
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need some help with. But having offered that warning, here are some things that are typical
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about low dopamine activity in the brain. One is a lack of interest in the things that used to
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intrigue you. You loved it before, now not so much. If you're less interested than you used to be
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in new things, if you're not as easily intrigued, that can suggest a decline in dopamine activity.
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If you are lacking interest in things that by all rights intrigue everybody else and ought to intrigue
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you too. All this can take the form of reduced motivation, for instance, a lesser ability to
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concentrate, brain fog, less interest in sex is a hallmark of this as well. Just an overall decline
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in the ability to feel pleasure. You'll notice that a lot of these aren't about suddenly you wake up
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one day and here's a symptom. It's a change in the way you felt before to the way you feel now.
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And generally that decline involves less pleasure in life. Those are good signals that you're...
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And I'm going to take a little side note here. When we say low on dopamine, what we're really
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talking about is in most cases a reduction in dopamine activity, which again won't matter to most
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people, but we want to be precise. It's not as if you can take a dopamine pill and boost it. It's
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about increasing the amount of activity with dopamine in your brain. Do we know what causes
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lower dopamine activity? We know what causes some of it. We can describe it, which is different from
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saying we know what causes it. You know, we can describe the sunrise, but we can't exactly describe
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how the sun got there. When there's less dopamine activity, a couple of things can be happening
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technically. One is that the dopamine that you have in your brain is getting diluted or washed away
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before it does all its job. Think of a bunch of locks on one side and a bunch of keys on the other.
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When dopamine acts, what happens is any neurotransmitter acts. That key slips into the
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lock and that opens the door and causes the feeling. So you could have a lot of those locks blocked.
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That would be one thing you could do. You could have fewer keys. That's something else.
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You could have keys not staying in the lock very long. All these things are declines. Now,
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what causes them? Well, some of them are just purely organic. It could be that your body was
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just designed with this flaw. It could be that your brain has changed and these receptors and this
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receptor activity across the gap or the synapses is now reduced by a simple change in time. It could be
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that, and this is most common, it could be that you've used some kind of compound that has
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stretched your ability to appreciate what happens when the lock goes in the key and you've changed
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what we call homeostasis. You've changed your normal to something that requires a lot more
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stimulation. I always think of Miley Cyrus, who had some wonderful things to say about our first book
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for exactly this reason. She said, I went through a period of time where I was not excited about
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performing in front of a half million people. It just didn't thrill me anymore. And it was because she
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had done it so much, so often, it was no longer unusual to her. It was just part of normal. Now,
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you and I might pass out if we had to stand in front of half a million people, but for her,
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she would yawn. It's about stretching out that system, really, like a sweater that you've worn,
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that you've pulled over your head too many times, and now it's stretched out.
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Okay, so you could have low dopamine activity because of some organic biological reason,
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or it could be because you just hit a dopamine-stimulating activity over and over again.
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So this could be with drugs, or it could be with something else, just like social media.
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It's just whenever you flood the brain with high levels of dopamine, it reduces the number of
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dopamine receptors, and it's kind of like closing windows during a windstorm. And that makes it harder
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to feel pleasure from that stimulation in the future. Let's go into different ways people think
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they can try to increase dopamine activity. We know drugs can reduce dopamine activity in the long
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term, but is it also possible to increase dopamine activity with drugs? And I'm not just talking
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illegal drugs. I'm talking stimulants and prescription drugs. Yes, yes, it is. But with, again, a big
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warning. Everything I have to say is I give with one hand and take away with the other, Brett. First,
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you need to know about that dopamine in your brain. When we talk about dopamine levels,
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you think about something like, you know, insulin or A1C. What are my levels there? And you take a
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blood test, and there you go. Well, you can't do that with dopamine. This is weird. This is so,
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I think this is so interesting. All the dopamine that we're talking about that has to do with mood
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and behavior, this is already in your brain. All the dopamine that you're going to deal with is
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already there. It's made in the brain, it stays in the brain, and it gets washed out of something else.
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So you can't drink yourself a big glass of dopamine and make it go up. It could never get
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into your brain because your brain has a wall around it called a blood-brain barrier. And it's
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looking for chemicals like dopamine that are too big or too polarized to get in there. Because it's
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like, I don't want you messing with my brain system, man. Leave me alone. I got a wall up here to keep
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you out. So you can't just ingest this stuff. You can shoot it into your spinal column and it'll go up
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there. But it acts so quickly, it won't help. And that's very dangerous anyway. So we don't really
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do that too much. So if we want to elevate it with drugs, there are things that do it by causing the
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dopamine to hang around longer. To make those keys I talked about, to make those keys stay in the lock
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a little longer or go in the lock a few more times. We see that with antidepressants like Welbutrin,
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like Zoloft, like Effexor. Oh yeah, well like there's an older antidepressant called an MAO
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inhibitor. And those do that as well. Now we can get this with stimulants, Adderall,
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Ritalin, cocaine. You may be thinking of L-DOPA, which you've heard of, which is a precursor to
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dopamine. But that won't help us in our conversation, Brett, because that is a precursor to dopamine
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that largely acts on the circuits that have to do with motion. That's why if you Google dopamine,
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you're going to get a bunch of hits about Parkinson's disease. There are other circuits in
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the dopamine system that do things we are not talking about. So yes, there are compounds that
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you can use. Here's where I take away with the other hand. Here's that. If you have a deficiency
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of dopamine, we can often raise the dopamine activity to get you back to normal. That's a
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good thing. I take an antidepressant. It helps me. It makes a big difference. Not just serotonin. It's
00:21:12.600
also, in many cases, the dopamine level. But if you have normal dopamine, you can't take Welbutrin,
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Zoloft, Effexor, or Adderall. Listen up, students. You can't take that and get a boost in behavior or a
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boost in performance from that. We can't overclock the brain, it turns out. We can try, but it just
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won't work. Why is that? We don't know exactly. There is something built into the brain that won't let
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it overclock that dopamine. And when it does overclock in more natural or pathological ways,
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then you've got problems. Then you have real problems. Okay. So if you have an actual dopamine
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deficiency or deficiency in activity, drugs can help. But if you're just normal and you're trying
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to boost yourself like with the limitless pill, that's not going to work. It's not going to work
00:22:01.800
out for you. Don't even try. I know what you're talking about. You're talking about the movie,
00:22:05.380
the limitless pill, right? That is such a cool idea. And I know we caught a few people when I said
00:22:10.960
Adderall won't help. They're like, ah, the hell it won't help. I went to college and got by on Adderall.
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But the studies that we have on this show that with or without the Adderall, if you're taking Adderall or
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if you're taking a placebo and you think you're taking Adderall, you're trying to do better on a
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test, you will do better on a test. It's a placebo effect. It's the belief that you'll do better.
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And to some extent, you may actually commit to studying harder because you think now I have
00:22:38.100
the Adderall benefit. This is bound to be easier. So even though it feels like it's helping you and
00:22:44.320
in practice, you may find that it's better. It is still a placebo effect. It's not really
00:22:49.460
affecting your dopamine. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:22:56.820
And now back to the show. Something else you mentioned in the book about increasing dopamine
00:23:01.440
activity. And it took me back to like college. This is back in the 2000s because I got really
00:23:07.360
into this back then. Binaural beats, how they can potentially modulate dopamine levels. So for
00:23:13.960
people who aren't familiar, what are binaural beats and what role do they play with dopamine?
00:23:18.720
First for people, so everybody knows what it is. If I put one frequency in one ear, let's say I put
00:23:24.180
335 hertz in one ear and 345 in the other, okay? You won't hear 335 and 345. You'll hear the
00:23:31.880
difference of 10 hertz, 10 beats instead of those two beats. You're going to hear a wave. And this
00:23:38.040
does something, but nobody knows exactly what's going on. All we know is that it seems to change
00:23:45.340
our behavior. Isn't that crazy? It's weird. Does it modulate dopamine levels? Does it affect them
00:23:51.580
in terms of activity? It's impossible for us to know from the research so far. But what we do know
00:23:57.500
is that it is causing easier concentration at certain frequencies. It's causing more motivation
00:24:05.940
at certain frequencies. This may have something to do with what we'll call neural synchronization
00:24:10.840
because every living thing gives off waves. And that's not a woo-woo thing. I mean, systems that
00:24:16.960
have activity in them tend to vibrate at particular frequencies. And those frequencies are associated
00:24:22.920
with certain kinds of activities. And the brain itself has several different levels of frequency
00:24:28.300
ranges that are associated with things like deep sleep or concentration or excitement. So the binaural
00:24:34.580
beats phenomenon, is it modulating dopamine? Maybe. Is it retuning the entire brain? Maybe. We just
00:24:43.360
don't know. But this is another promising place that may help us overcome. You know, I think what is
00:24:49.840
so important to remember when you look at dopamine-driven problems is the answer may not always
00:24:55.420
be, and in the future it certainly won't be, well, let's just fiddle with the dopamine dial.
00:25:00.180
It could be that we can find other ways to overcome a dopamine deficiency or to modulate and reduce
00:25:07.260
too much dopamine activity. And that would be wonderful because dopamine is a really difficult
00:25:13.460
system to manipulate. It's so segregated. It's so isolated in terms of how well we can touch it. And we
00:25:24.000
Yeah. So I'll still, back in college, I would listen to binaural beats that were supposed to be designed to help
00:25:28.800
you focus or stay motivated. I'll do that occasionally today. If I'm doing taxes and have to like get stuff
00:25:33.800
ready for my accountant or I'm writing an article and I'm just having a hard time, I'll just find
00:25:37.960
Spotify and look for like binaural beats focus or binaural beats motivation. And it's actually nice
00:25:44.740
just as white noise, right? It's kind of keeps you focused. And maybe there's something going on with
00:25:49.840
binaural beats. Who knows? But you can look for that on Spotify. There's plenty of binaural beat
00:25:54.080
play tracks out there. Let's go back to the problem where you're just not as sensitive to dopamine
00:25:59.740
because you've hammered your brain with dopamine stimulating activity so much. So it's not responding
00:26:05.920
to the stimuli anymore. Like the example you gave of the overstretched sweater. One solution you'll hear
00:26:13.980
about is doing a dopamine fast. And this is where you temporarily abstain from pleasurable or stimulating
00:26:22.220
activities like social media or porn to reset the brain's reward system. Like reset your dopamine
00:26:30.260
so you resensitize yourself to normal everyday levels of pleasures. We've actually talked about
00:26:37.260
dopamine fast on the podcast and our website before. Is there anything to this idea of dopamine fast?
00:26:44.280
Absolutely there is. And if you want to do it, you got to be sure you're doing it right. Because if you
00:26:49.500
don't, you're going to make it worse. There was an article in the New York Times a while back about
00:26:53.820
a couple of entrepreneurs who tried to do this on a weekly basis. And they did things like getting
00:26:58.000
away from their phone or turning the lights off or never looking at a screen. All these things are
00:27:03.760
sort of in the realm of dopamine to some level. I mean, in the same way, driving a car is sort of
00:27:08.900
related to going to the gas station. There's a lot more to it. But if you're going to do a dopamine fast,
00:27:14.640
let me tell you the best thing to remember about it is that dopamine stuff you're feeling is filling
00:27:22.640
a hole. It's filling a gap in your emotions, in your life. And if you get rid of dopamine by saying,
00:27:28.620
I'm going to cut myself off from these activities, that hole is still there, except now it's empty.
00:27:35.080
And you won't be able to keep that up. If you're going to pull back from dopamine,
00:27:39.940
you have to fill that hole with something else. And what you want to do is fill it with here and
00:27:46.360
now activities. We spend so much time anticipating. That's what your phone is all about. We're scrolling
00:27:53.040
down the phone looking for something that might be interesting because last time I saw something
00:27:57.440
interesting. Maybe I'll see something fun again. You have to fill that with here and now, which means
00:28:03.420
sensory things. Perhaps you could talk to a friend, read a book, go outside and draw a picture.
00:28:09.920
For Pete's sake, pick up an instrument, do some exercise, anything that involves your engagement
00:28:17.140
with reality in the moment. So if you're going to dopamine fast, by all means, knock that stuff out,
00:28:24.160
but be sure you fill the hole that remains because it will not stay empty for long and dopamine will
00:28:30.320
win that battle every damn time. I imagine meditation is another one that you could do, replace it with.
00:28:35.560
Absolutely. Because meditation puts you in the moment. It requires you to not anticipate, but to
00:28:42.100
feel. Feeling is the word here. The feel, the physical feel with all five senses. You look into
00:28:48.700
breath work. It's a really neat idea. It has to do with carbon dioxide levels in your brain and your body.
00:28:54.560
This can make a big difference. It's something that I've been looking at in the past few months. I've
00:28:58.780
found a lot of peace in it. It's the kind of thing that you can do when you're standing in line at
00:29:02.980
McDonald's. It's going to help you live in the moment. So after tackling what we can do to
00:29:08.820
have healthy dopamine levels, resensitize ourselves to it, you spend the rest of the book talking about
00:29:14.220
different issues where dopamine plays a role and offers suggestions on how to tame dopamine for
00:29:20.260
those situations. Let's talk about this one. A couple that's been together for a long time,
00:29:25.140
talking about a romantic couple, and they feel like the spark is gone. What's going on there with
00:29:30.080
dopamine? Well, the first thing we can know is that a couple that's been together a long time
00:29:37.400
has now reached the end of significant reward prediction error, which is a fancy way of saying
00:29:43.980
they don't surprise each other anymore. A part of love, especially in the early, as Helen Fisher has
00:29:50.720
done in her research, showed in her research, early love is about surprise anticipation. It's about
00:29:56.020
what is it that I'm going to learn. When love starts to fade, as we think of romantic love,
00:30:01.120
it's because there's nothing new left to discover. So what we want to do is find ways to restore
00:30:07.660
reward prediction error. And I'll tell you a few things that you can do to do that right away to
00:30:13.880
create a little more spark. Do things where you're going to be in a situation that you can't predict the
00:30:21.360
outcome. For Pete's sake, go to karaoke night with your partner. Do that. Take two $10 bills. Each of
00:30:27.560
you have a $10 bill. Go to a thrift store or go to the mall and say, okay, you got to go pick me out
00:30:34.000
something. Go buy me a $10 present. Go pick a destination you haven't been before and go there
00:30:40.540
and explore it. Don't have an agenda. Just say, we're going to find out what's there. You're putting
00:30:45.280
yourself in situations where you don't know exactly what the other person's going to do.
00:30:50.700
You might have an idea, but we can surprise each other. So these are things to create new
00:30:57.440
opportunities for reward prediction error. As for sex, there are things that we can do in that realm
00:31:03.480
as well. One of the things you can do is create a place where people can say, the couple can say
00:31:09.080
what it is that they might not want to say out loud because they're afraid they'll surprise you in a bad
00:31:14.820
way. So create a private communication channel between the two of you. Some little secret
00:31:19.760
account. Don't use your regular account because you don't want to press enter at the wrong time.
00:31:23.740
And there are things you can do in terms of intimacy. I don't know how much detail you want to go into
00:31:27.760
here, but certainly, you know, you can say we're going to make out, but we're not going to go all
00:31:31.400
the way. How about that? That's for tomorrow. And then you've got this wonderful, delicious day of
00:31:36.200
anticipation that you build like that. Anything that creates an opportunity to anticipate,
00:31:41.100
that creates an opportunity to encounter a surprise from your partner. And that begins by creating
00:31:48.740
situations where that mystery is possible. All right. So do new things together. I think it's
00:31:53.280
an easy one. I think another thing you can do, I think when you're with someone for a long time,
00:31:57.700
you have the illusion that you know this person really well, like the back of your hand and you
00:32:02.360
do, like you do know them a lot, but there's still like, there's still another, like they're a mind.
00:32:07.280
You actually don't know everything about them. There's parts of them that you don't know.
00:32:11.520
And so you suggest maybe you go deeper, like ask questions you haven't explored yet.
00:32:15.380
Tell me about some memory from your childhood. Like you're just trying to recreate the dynamic of
00:32:22.480
those early days of dating, you know, where you had that excitement of learning new things about each
00:32:26.760
other that you didn't know. And you can do that by just asking a deeper question or just asking
00:32:32.000
about something you've never talked about before. Absolutely. So you can increase the spark by
00:32:38.180
doing new things together, going deeper in your conversations, but also another tactic of
00:32:44.000
maintaining that connection long-term is shifting over to the here and now neurotransmitters as well.
00:32:50.660
Like don't just rely on dopamine. There comes a point in your relationship where the here and now
00:32:54.280
need to start taking over more. That's exactly right. You know, I, when I was in college,
00:32:59.560
I had a friend who had a sign on his wall. He wasn't a very romantic fellow, let's say.
00:33:05.740
And the sign on his wall said, kissing don't last, cooking do. And it was such a great thought about,
00:33:13.900
about how romance has to ultimately become, well, there's really not a lot that I have to discover
00:33:20.520
about you, but the fact that you and I can savor the sensory world around us is going to be enough.
00:33:27.540
And that's what romantic love almost always evolves into. And if you're not ready for it,
00:33:34.220
you're not going to be very happy. The more you spend on anticipation, the less you're in the
00:33:40.080
moment. And I want people to realize what, frankly, what I've realized is that the moment is all you
00:33:46.700
got, Brett. The moment is all you got. When my best friend died, he was 39 years old. At the funeral,
00:33:53.400
the man who gave the talk at his funeral, a man named Chris White, he said, you may not remember
00:33:57.700
all the time you spent with our friend Kent, but it's okay because it happened. And my response was,
00:34:05.160
what the hell does that even mean? What could that possibly mean? And over the years in learning
00:34:10.520
more about neuroscience, I began to see what he got and he was right on the mark. You and I won't
00:34:15.680
remember much about today or yesterday. As time goes on, this will just fade away. We'll remember
00:34:22.440
broad things about it if we remember it at all. But while we're doing this right now, while you and
00:34:27.940
I are talking, Brett, I'm having a good time. I'm very much in the moment enjoying what we are doing
00:34:34.100
right now, even though I won't remember it. So that tells me we're not doing these things because
00:34:39.640
of how we can sit back in our dotage and think back on the old days. We're doing it because right
00:34:45.520
now happened and let's live in the moment. What a joyful thing to realize is that we can replace
00:34:52.640
this constant dopamine chase for what might be, what might be, what might be. Replace it with what is
00:34:58.740
right now. A good, vigorous conversation with a smart guy who knows a lot of people, knows a lot of
00:35:04.700
stuff. I'm getting to talk to you, Brett. That's pretty cool. You're getting to talk to me and I know
00:35:08.560
a few things maybe that you haven't heard before. This is fun and the moment is wonderful. If you want to
00:35:14.040
beat dopamine, start living in the moment. Enjoy what you have. You know, when Warren Zevon was dying,
00:35:20.760
David Letterman asked him, what is your lesson? And he said, enjoy every sandwich. My goodness,
00:35:26.880
truer words never spoken. How can we use our knowledge of how dopamine works to tame our
00:35:32.240
problematic smartphone use? Oh my. Let me give you a single example of what I did in my life.
00:35:41.920
And that is my compulsion with the smartphone. And it has a direct parallel to things like social media
00:35:48.300
is I was following the news. I came to Washington, D.C. many years ago to write in politics. And it
00:35:55.140
didn't take very many years for me to get tired of the abject hostility involved in that world to
00:36:00.220
back away. But I decided in 2017 that I was not going to read the news for a year. Now, as Nick
00:36:08.020
Offerman said on Parks and Rec, what you just heard me say was, Mike didn't read as much news. No,
00:36:14.040
Mike stopped reading the news. I used technology to cut off technology. I blocked the news sites. I
00:36:22.100
blocked certain keywords in social media. And I spent a year without reading the news. I just cut
00:36:27.660
myself off from it. And after a year, I said, you know what? I'd like to continue to do this. So I did
00:36:32.780
it for another four to six months. And it was, you ask, how do you do it? Well, in that case, I did
00:36:37.600
technology to break it off. And I also planned for other things to do when I felt the urge to read the
00:36:44.780
news. I would have something else. I'd have a novel to read. I'd have a musical instrument to play. I'd find
00:36:49.460
something physical to do. Go bake a batch of cookies, do something. And what I found at the
00:36:54.060
end, and this is the takeaway, is that what I thought I was getting from reading the news,
00:36:58.480
and this is true of social media or any kind of doom scrolling, dealing with your phone,
00:37:02.380
I found that what I was getting from it wasn't nearly what I thought. Was it making me an informed
00:37:07.020
participant in the public debate? No, it wasn't. In fact, it turned out that mostly I was posting
00:37:12.800
things so I could get hits, so I could get likes. And those likes made me feel good. Was I changing
00:37:18.240
anybody's mind? No. I was just reinforcing people who already agreed with me. And if I did
00:37:23.120
disagree with someone, it was usually some random person that I didn't give a care about in the first
00:37:27.420
place. Why am I arguing with strangers? I discovered that the time I spent on social media and my
00:37:35.200
smartphone were not contributing to my life in the long run. They were barely contributing to it in the
00:37:41.200
short run. And in fact, they were robbing me of the time I could have spent either working on
00:37:46.200
something productive or simply enjoying the act of being a human being. So if you want to get out
00:37:53.400
of the smartphone game, if you want to get out of social media, cut yourself off completely for a
00:37:59.080
period of time. And you do that by cutting off the apps, turning the apps off, getting rid of them on
00:38:05.640
your phone, putting in a block that limits the amount of time that you can access it and when you
00:38:10.800
can access it. Some of these are accessible through the so-called children's settings. Get yourself an
00:38:15.180
accountability partner. Whenever you feel that you're going to do this, tell your friend, hey,
00:38:19.800
I'm going to call you and I need you to talk me out of this, okay? Please let me do this for you.
00:38:24.580
When you say, I'm not just going to taper off, but I'm going to quit, the initial hill is high,
00:38:30.520
but the trip after that is much easier and the powerful experience afterward can change your life
00:38:36.180
for the better. Yeah, I've used apps to block apps on my phone using technology to fight
00:38:41.100
technology. But another powerful thing that I've used to break the smartphone scroll habit is some
00:38:48.140
like metacognition. So I think, okay, I checked my smartphone because I'm hoping that I'm going to
00:38:53.500
find something that will change my life. I'll find something interesting, funny, maybe some useful
00:38:57.600
information. Let me think back all the times I've checked my phone. How often does that happen?
00:39:02.060
Well, it's like hardly ever. And so I just started thinking, you know what? I think I'm going to find
00:39:06.500
something cool and new when I check my phone. I usually don't. So why am I checking my phone?
00:39:12.140
That's kind of the metacognition I do to trick myself into. There's really no reason to check
00:39:16.120
your phone because there's nothing there. And the problem is dopamine says, yeah,
00:39:20.440
yeah, you might not find it every time, but what if you do? Yeah. I mean, there's still that
00:39:24.060
dopaminergic pull, but I have found, I think it's useful to talk back to it. Like just reminding
00:39:29.000
myself that there's nothing there. Like it's helped me out a lot. I think it can help people walk away
00:39:34.120
from social media. It's just like, yeah, there's nothing on social media. And with you, it seems
00:39:38.260
like it helped you with quitting the news. Like you realize you weren't missing anything, right?
00:39:42.720
You had that realization. You also have a section devoted to problematic porn use. How does dopamine
00:39:48.880
make porn so alluring? Like what's going on there? Well, it's doing the same thing that we've talked
00:39:54.500
about in all these other realms with a couple of nasty little attachments to it. Not only do we have
00:40:01.300
the attraction of dopamine to the possibility of something new, we have it combined with at least
00:40:08.440
the effects of three other neurotransmitters and the general attraction of sexual activity of
00:40:15.480
reproduction, which is the strongest of human desires. So here we are stuck on our cell phone
00:40:22.040
or looking at the laptop or whatever, and we have the possibility that we'll see something new and
00:40:27.040
exciting. Plus we have serotonin, but can make us more compulsively behave this way. We have glutamate,
00:40:34.680
which is pushing us harder toward compulsive behavior. And we have reduced GABA, which means
00:40:39.780
it's not relaxing us, but it's goosing this event. It's goosing this desire. So you're getting hit from
00:40:45.480
all sides. And it flows from the fact that the sexual response, the sexual drive is the most basic and
00:40:53.040
powerful. It's, I guess, to use a cliche, it's dopamine on steroids.
00:40:58.640
And so to tame that, probably the same tactics you use to tame your smartphone addiction or news
00:41:03.360
addiction. That's the great thing about dealing with dopamine. If you find a system that works for
00:41:08.580
you in social media, if you find a system that works for you in online gaming or shopping, if you
00:41:14.360
find something that works with serial dating, something we haven't talked much about, if it works for those
00:41:19.680
things, it'll work for everything else. We're talking about the same mechanism over and over
00:41:25.700
again. And this way, we're no longer saying, I just have to be more self-disciplined. Self-discipline
00:41:31.660
has a shelf life. It doesn't last very long. But if we plan for it, if we use technology, if we
00:41:38.500
understand the system, if we engage with the observing self, meaning that we know we're going to feel a
00:41:44.800
stimulation and instead of reacting, we're going to take a moment to decide how to react. If we plan
00:41:50.100
for that, we can beat this thing. And then the other thing to not only take away, you not only want to
00:41:54.880
subtract that trigger, that dopamine trigger, but you want to replace it with a here now activity,
00:42:00.240
meditation, going for a walk outside, talking with your friends. That's going to be more useful to you
00:42:05.800
instead of just trying to rely on pure grit alone. Absolutely. And hey, quit trying to be normal,
00:42:11.780
folks. Oh, I'm going to read a book. I'm going to do pushups. No. Say, I've always wanted to learn
00:42:17.680
to draw. I'm going to go buy myself some art supplies. I'm going to try to draw. I've wanted
00:42:22.420
to learn to play guitar, but I don't want to buy a guitar. I want to buy a $40 ukulele because I don't
00:42:27.520
want to spend $200 on a guitar. Buy a freaking ukulele. Do something. It doesn't have to be normal or
00:42:34.200
ordinary. If it amuses you, that's enough. And the more unusual it is, ta-da, the more dopamine is going to
00:42:41.080
go, what the hell is this ukulele doing back here? Let's explore that. And all of a sudden, you've
00:42:45.240
replaced a pure dopaminergic waste of time with a dopamine-driven here-and-now experience that leverages
00:42:52.080
the best of dopamine. You, in the book, talk about one of my favorite novels of all time. It's The Great
00:42:56.800
Gatsby. And you argue that it's a novel that captures the tug-of-war with dopamine perfectly.
00:43:03.740
Tell us about that. Why do you think The Great Gatsby is the great novel of dopamine?
00:43:07.580
Well, it is The Great Novel of dopamine. And it is also, and I hear you and I are going to part
00:43:13.080
company pretty strongly. I think it's one of the most damaging novels ever written.
00:43:17.600
Okay. Yeah, there's some damaging, but I think it's well-written. I enjoy reading it.
00:43:22.460
Oh, it is. Oh, some of the prose is beautiful. I was reading it as I wrote this book, reading it
00:43:29.060
again. And it's devastatingly beautiful. The phrases will be part of the English parlance forever.
00:43:35.240
But the problem is, is here's this guy. Here's this guy, Fitzgerald, who had the most wonderful
00:43:41.980
life you could imagine. He had money, he had fame, he had love, he had admiration. And his book is about
00:43:48.780
how everything is pointless. The whole thing gets to the point of saying, and you know what? Here's
00:43:54.380
that green light and we'll never reach it. We'll never get there. We'll never reach the orgastic,
00:43:59.640
as he calls it, delight that we seek. And so here we are, you know, boats against the current,
00:44:05.600
beat back ceaselessly into the past. And what a horrible, sad, hopeless thing to tell your readers,
00:44:11.400
especially a guy who knows better. So when I look at Gatsby, I see that. I see here's somebody who did
00:44:18.520
not finish the equation. Is it a beautiful book? It's absolutely a beautiful book, but it tells us
00:44:24.740
something that's not true, which is life is pointless. And that's really at the heart of
00:44:28.720
taming the molecule of more of the book. If you're going to face up to dopamine and try to live in the
00:44:34.860
here and now, even the here and now isn't going to fix it unless what you're doing over the course of
00:44:39.840
your life leads to meaning, leads to meaning. And that's what's missing from Gatsby. You know,
00:44:45.660
Aristotle talked about this and so did Viktor Frankl, the great psychiatrist. And it's very simple.
00:44:51.000
If you want to solve the dopamine problem, yes, solve those discrete dopamine issues,
00:44:56.800
but realize that you also need to fill the hole with something of meaning. And the way Aristotle
00:45:03.160
said, we can do that. It's very simple. It's crazily simple. Find the things you love to do,
00:45:08.220
find the things you're good at and see where they intersect. What is it that you're good at and you
00:45:12.900
love to do? Now, from that, think about what matters to you, what virtues matter to you. And by virtue,
00:45:18.860
I don't mean holiness. I mean, things like knowledge or justice or grace or kindness.
00:45:24.080
What is it that you do that you enjoy it or good at that also advances your best virtues? This way,
00:45:30.960
what you do moment to moment will lead to nothing less than a fulfilling life, a good, solid,
00:45:37.240
contributing life that means something to you and others. If you're going to be the lunch lady,
00:45:41.600
you know, you like to cook, you love seeing the little kids and the kids are happier for seeing you.
00:45:46.800
What a wonderful life that would be. What a wonderful life that would be. And that would
00:45:51.900
be a fulfilling, meaningful life because it mattered beyond you. That's where the hope comes
00:45:57.060
from. Look beyond yourself. So it sounds like instead of looking to Jay Gatsby,
00:46:02.080
you should look to George Bailey. I think that's a pretty good example.
00:46:05.800
That's a good one. Well, Michael, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn
00:46:09.440
more about the book and your work? Tamingthemolecule.com. You can buy the book there. You can
00:46:15.020
interact with me if you want. If you have a book club and you'd like me to swoop in and have a
00:46:19.540
conversation with your book club, I'd love to do it. Tamingthemolecule.com.
00:46:24.580
Fantastic. Well, Michael Long, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:46:30.260
My guest here is Michael Long. He's the author of the book,
00:46:32.620
Taming the Molecule of More. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:46:36.320
You can find more information about his work at his website,
00:46:39.020
tamingthemolecule.com. Also check out our show notes at awim.is slash molecule.
00:46:42.860
Where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.
00:46:52.940
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AWIM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
00:46:56.860
artofmanless.com where you find our podcast archives and make sure to sign up for a new
00:47:00.540
newsletter. It's called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It's a great way to support
00:47:05.020
the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett
00:47:08.700
McKay. Remind you to not listen to the AWIM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.