The Art of Manliness - Tame the Dopamine Drive — How to Stop Chasing and Start Living

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.520 All the neurochemicals in the brain have to do with life in the present, except for one,

00:00:16.220 dopamine. Dopamine is the one neurochemical that looks to the future and anticipates what

00:00:20.900 may be to come and drives you towards it. That can be a good thing. Dopamine is one

00:00:25.560 powerful motivator, but it also has its downsides. Here to help us understand how the most

00:00:29.980 important chemical in the brain works and how to deal with its pitfalls is Michael Long.

00:00:34.100 Michael's a trained physicist turned writer whose latest book is Taming the Molecule of More.

00:00:38.820 Mike and I discuss how dopamine, for better and worse, makes you want what you don't have.

00:00:43.440 He shares what causes low dopamine activity, how to know if you're experiencing it,

00:00:47.160 and what increases dopamine. We then talk about how to deal with the consequences of dopamine and

00:00:50.920 some of the scenarios in which it plays a role, like losing the spark in a relationship, getting

00:00:54.620 stuck in a smartphone scroll habit, and why so much of taming dopamine comes down to living in the here

00:00:59.080 and now. We enter a conversation with why The Great Gatsby is really a novel about dopamine

00:01:03.200 and the fundamental answer to not letting the dopamine chase lead you around. After the show's

00:01:08.100 over, check out our show notes at awim.is.molecule.

00:01:23.020 All right, Michael Long, welcome back to the show.

00:01:26.280 Hey, it's good to be here, Brett. How are you?

00:01:28.220 Doing great. So we had you on the podcast several years ago, I think it was back in 2018,

00:01:32.940 to discuss a book you co-authored called The Molecule of More. It's all about dopamine.

00:01:39.420 You've written a sequel to that book called Taming the Molecule of More. What prompted the

00:01:44.820 sequel? What did you flesh out in this book that you and your co-author didn't flesh out in the first

00:01:49.780 one? Well, you know, the first book is about the science of dopamine and its effects on modern life,

00:01:55.540 or I should say its effects on us and struggling in modern life. And we explained as much as we could,

00:02:02.600 you know, as much as you can in 70,000 words, just how this plays out. And it turns out to affect

00:02:09.260 everything from your political beliefs or your political behaviors, I should say, to why you get

00:02:14.700 so wrapped up in your phone and even things like online pornography. And people read the book and

00:02:19.600 they said, this is very interesting science. I love these stories. What can I do about it?

00:02:23.760 And that's the second book. How do you tame the stress of dopamine in modern life? Hence the title,

00:02:29.300 Taming the Molecule of More. And I wrote this one alone with a nice forward by Dr. Dan.

00:02:34.880 So let's do a quick recap of the big ideas of the Molecule of More, since I think that'll help

00:02:40.240 guide the rest of our conversation. You call dopamine the most important chemical in the human

00:02:46.280 brain. So what is dopamine? Well, the best way to understand what dopamine is, is to first understand

00:02:53.700 what it is not. Okay. And in general, when we talk about neurotransmitters, these are chemicals in

00:03:00.200 your brain that guide your behavior and your feelings. All right. Behavior and feelings. And

00:03:06.500 there are dozens of these chemicals, if not a couple of hundred actually. But for our purposes,

00:03:11.840 we're interested in a handful. And so, as I said, to understand what dopamine does, first understand

00:03:17.960 what it is not. Every neurotransmitter except one deals with the here and now. That is how things

00:03:25.060 feel physically, how things taste and smell, how things sound. Those neurotransmitters let us live

00:03:32.360 in the moment. But there's one that doesn't let us live in the moment at all. There's one that does

00:03:38.700 nothing but anticipate what is possible. One that looks forward. And that one is dopamine. Not only does

00:03:46.920 it make you look forward to the future, anticipate the future, it also makes you want what you don't

00:03:53.920 have. And it does so in sort of a vicious and wonderful way. And what it does is it makes you

00:04:01.720 believe that if there's something out there that you've just come across that might possibly improve

00:04:07.800 your life, you have to break down walls to get it. That's what dopamine is. It's the molecule that

00:04:14.480 makes you want, anticipate. It's the molecule that makes you desire more. And it does all this

00:04:22.160 on the basis of the mere possibility, not even evidence that it's so. And I'm sure in the course

00:04:29.260 of our conversation, we can offer all sorts of examples where this begins to mess up our days.

00:04:34.920 A quick example, though, is when you pull that lever on a slot machine. Now, there's no guarantee at all

00:04:41.080 that what comes up after you pull the lever is going to be any money, a penny, a million dollars,

00:04:46.400 whatever. But that feeling of anticipation, it might be, it might be something better than I have

00:04:52.100 right now. It might give me more. That's the dopamine feeling. The way you describe dopamine,

00:04:58.020 I think it goes against the way often people think about what dopamine is. When they've heard of

00:05:03.680 dopamine, they've probably heard of dopamine as like the reward neurotransmitter. The way you

00:05:08.300 described it doesn't sound like it's a reward neurotransmitter. It's not a reward neurotransmitter

00:05:13.980 at all. It is a go get the reward transmitter. It's a motivating neurotransmitter. More often,

00:05:21.420 I hear actually that people think of it as the happiness molecule. They talk about, oh, I just got

00:05:26.060 the dopamine buzz. Well, no, you probably just got the oxytocin buzz or maybe even the serotonin buzz to

00:05:32.820 some extent. The dopamine buzz is that feeling that if I just keep pushing a little harder,

00:05:39.700 I'll get this thing. Another good example of the dopamine feeling is if you celebrate Christmas,

00:05:45.660 you know how kids are all leading up to Christmas and they're wondering what's in the presents.

00:05:50.280 They're all hopeful that it's what they, that they wanted. And they'll even sometimes cheat a little

00:05:54.040 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.

00:05:57.880 I still do it today once in a while. That feeling of anticipation, that is the real dopamine buzz.

00:06:05.660 It motivates us into the future. Yeah. One of the big takeaways I got from your description of

00:06:10.300 dopamine, I took away from that first book. And then again, when I read this book, uncertainty is

00:06:15.220 an important factor of dopamine. If there's no uncertainty, you're probably not going to have

00:06:18.560 dopamine. So you don't know if it's going to be good or bad. And that's the thing that

00:06:22.100 kickstarts that dopamine drive. Well, I got to find out. I want to resolve this uncertainty.

00:06:26.240 That's exactly right. My favorite example is this, and it's one that Dr. Lieberman and I have used

00:06:32.460 for years. And everybody can recognize this. Let's say for the sake of numbers, let's say you get at

00:06:38.580 the end of every week, you get a check for a thousand dollars and that's your pay. Congratulations.

00:06:42.420 There you go. You get a thousand dollars. At the end of the week, your boss comes to your desk,

00:06:46.040 puts the thousand dollar check in your hand, you put it in your wallet and you don't think anything

00:06:50.140 about it. Now the next week, the boss comes to your desk and the boss gives you a thousand

00:06:55.400 dollar check. And then the boss says, she says, you know, you've done so well, I'm going to give

00:07:00.060 you an extra hundred bucks. Here's another hundred dollar check. And you're like, wow,

00:07:04.620 an extra hundred bucks. This is fantastic. Notice that the thousand dollars, you've just been slipping

00:07:09.640 in your wallet. No big deal. She gives you one 10th of that and you're ecstatic. That's the thing

00:07:15.960 we're talking about. Dopamine is that as long as something's a little bit better, we're going to go

00:07:20.540 chasing it. So now the next week comes and all of a sudden you're thinking, I wonder if I'll get

00:07:24.920 another hundred dollars this week. Oh, that would be exciting. So she gives you a thousand dollar 0.84

00:07:29.320 check and you're waiting and waiting. And sure enough, she says another great week. Here's another

00:07:32.780 hundred dollar bonus. Oh boy, that great feeling you've had anticipating and it turned out to be

00:07:37.960 wonderful. So fast forward six or eight weeks down the road, you've been getting a thousand

00:07:43.600 dollar check, which you yawn about one 10th of that a hundred dollar check. And you are excited

00:07:49.740 about it. But once a few weeks pass and you realize, oh, she's always going to give me a hundred

00:07:55.120 dollar bonus. You stop being excited about it. You stop looking forward to that little extra thing on

00:08:01.260 Friday because it's no longer extra. It's become normal, nothing to be excited about. And that's what

00:08:07.560 dopamine drives us to is to try to get that next thing. But once it becomes normal, part of the

00:08:12.980 wallpaper, the dopamine buzz goes away. We don't feel that anticipation anymore.

00:08:18.060 Yeah. The scientific phrase for that, it's called reward prediction error, right? It's like when you

00:08:23.060 think there's a possibility of something to exceed your expectations, that's when you get that, oh,

00:08:29.200 dopamine, oh man, let's find out if it's going to happen or not. So you mentioned dopamine is the

00:08:34.920 neurotransmitter of anticipation. It's not about living in the here and now. The other neurotransmitters

00:08:41.860 in our brain you call here and now neurotransmitters. What are those here and now neurotransmitters and

00:08:47.760 how do they interact with dopamine? Well, the here and now neurotransmitters, as I say, deal with

00:08:53.900 sensory matters, consummatory matters or consummatory matters. And there are lots of neurotransmitters we

00:08:59.840 could talk about, but I'll just go through a few of them that are in the realm. And when I say

00:09:03.240 literally all the others are here and now, literally all the others, Brett, are here and now. There's only

00:09:09.380 one that truly deals with anticipation. One you've heard a lot about is serotonin. Serotonin deals with

00:09:15.400 mood and sleep and it's a major player when we're trying to get treatment for depression. There are

00:09:21.440 others that simply act like an accelerator or a decelerator on all the activities in the brain.

00:09:28.400 One of those neurotransmitters is called glutamate and it causes things to get boosted a little bit.

00:09:34.200 Things go a little faster. There's another called GABA. GABA, if you've ever taken Xanax or

00:09:39.080 clonopin, that's what it is. It's a GABA acting chemical. It pushes GABA and that calms us down.

00:09:45.140 It slows down some of the reactions. And what's interesting about it is it doesn't flow through

00:09:50.000 the brain like oil does. It's, oh, put some oil in so it'll smooth it out a little bit. It actually

00:09:55.100 acts in a discrete way, in a separate way. So all these circuits in your brain, all these receptors

00:09:59.560 that are scattered about in a particular system, mixed among those receptors may be GABA receptors.

00:10:06.200 And so those GABA receptors could be acted on at the same time the dopamine receptors are acted on.

00:10:12.200 So instead of slowing it down like oil does, it's like, oh, here's another fellow who shows up to do

00:10:16.460 a little work himself and he's going to slow it out. Now there are a couple of other H&N neurotransmitters

00:10:22.000 that I like to mention, but they're actually not technically neurotransmitters. Now, 99 people out of

00:10:28.200 100 don't give a damn, but technically we want to be correct. These are actually neuropeptides and it's just

00:10:34.080 chemically a little different, but for our purposes, they're the same thing. They tend to act a little

00:10:38.680 more slowly than neurotransmitters. One you've heard of, oxytocin. Oxytocin. And that acts in bonding,

00:10:46.240 that acts in trust. And if you think about it, that makes sense that that would be a here and now thing

00:10:50.820 because bonding is about the person that you are with in the moment. That's where that happens.

00:10:55.560 The trust comes from what might happen to you in the moment you are with someone in the here and now.

00:11:00.760 Another is endorphins. And endorphins, we can think of as natural opioids. So pretty much any

00:11:07.200 place you want to point in that realm of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides, we'll find

00:11:12.480 something that primarily acts in the here and now. And so it sounds like dopamine will drive you to get

00:11:20.380 those good feelings because like, oh, this can make me feel good somehow, possibly. And then once you

00:11:26.220 achieve the thing, dopamine drops off and then the here and now neurotransmitters, the oxytocin,

00:11:31.680 the serotonin, they kick in to enhance the experience, help you enjoy the experience and

00:11:36.440 strengthen your bond with the person you're with.

00:11:39.200 Well, yeah, you just nailed it. The idea of dopamine driving you to get something that you can

00:11:45.500 enjoy or consume is just a parallel to what happens in the real world. In fact, the simplest way to think

00:11:52.500 of it is like exerting effort and then having a trophy. You don't get the trophy. You don't get

00:11:57.420 the pleasure. You don't get to hold the trophy in your hand until you've done the work to get there.

00:12:02.880 Dopamine is the motivator to do that work. And the trophy is the feeling, the physical feeling,

00:12:08.540 the sound, the touch, the taste, or pursuing someone that you want to date. You go through a lot of

00:12:14.480 anticipation, a lot of effort in order to get to the point where you actually touch them, where you're

00:12:19.080 actually sitting with them and interacting with them in the here and now. Everything up to that

00:12:23.360 point is quite literally anticipation. What can I do or rather what will it be like when I reach my

00:12:30.100 goal? And that's what all those other neurotransmitters do is they indulge the goal. Dopamine pushes us

00:12:36.720 toward the goal. And it's worth noting that that dopamine feeling, although it has nothing to do with

00:12:42.580 the here and now, is typically more intense and more, I'll use the word motivating, even though

00:12:49.480 that's literally what it does, more motivating than all the others. If it weren't so, we wouldn't have

00:12:55.160 addiction. Addiction is driven by dopamine in large part. You'll know, and people who are listening to

00:13:01.500 this who have dealt with addiction know that after a while, it takes more and more stimulation to get

00:13:07.880 less and less feeling. And if you think about that, that ought to be the end of addiction. If you're

00:13:13.480 doing cocaine and you have to do more and more lines to get higher or to get the same amount of

00:13:19.460 high until finally you don't get high anymore, it makes sense that you go, well, forget this. I'm not

00:13:24.220 going to do cocaine anymore. But people keep doing it. It's because dopamine doesn't give up. Dopamine

00:13:30.340 doesn't fade like the pleasure does. It's so powerful and so intense. It continues pushing us

00:13:36.580 towards something that may not even be good anymore. We've warped the system.

00:13:41.340 Well, let's talk about how we can tame dopamine and get more out of it. Let's talk about having

00:13:46.340 low dopamine first, because I imagine people are listening to you describe dopamine, that it causes

00:13:52.580 you to have ambition, have drive, be motivated. And they're like, I need more of that in my life.

00:13:58.540 So I'm sure a lot of people are like, well, how can I increase dopamine? Maybe that's my problem

00:14:02.320 life. I don't have enough of it. First off, how do you know if you're low on dopamine? Are there

00:14:06.420 any symptoms of it? Absolutely, there are. With one caveat, Brett, and that is, I'm going to tell

00:14:12.320 you a lot of symptoms that you can look for, a lot of phenomena you can look for. But I want to offer

00:14:17.680 the warning, as I say, that these are in broad terms. They can signal a lot of things. So just

00:14:24.820 because you hear some of these that I say that click with you doesn't necessarily mean the problem

00:14:28.860 is dopamine. If it's interfering with your life, by all means, call a psychiatrist, call a psychologist,

00:14:32.800 go see your GP, get some help to find out if there's something truly pathological that you

00:14:38.740 need some help with. But having offered that warning, here are some things that are typical

00:14:42.900 about low dopamine activity in the brain. One is a lack of interest in the things that used to

00:14:48.940 intrigue you. You loved it before, now not so much. If you're less interested than you used to be

00:14:56.860 in new things, if you're not as easily intrigued, that can suggest a decline in dopamine activity.

00:15:04.960 If you are lacking interest in things that by all rights intrigue everybody else and ought to intrigue

00:15:11.040 you too. All this can take the form of reduced motivation, for instance, a lesser ability to

00:15:17.380 concentrate, brain fog, less interest in sex is a hallmark of this as well. Just an overall decline

00:15:24.600 in the ability to feel pleasure. You'll notice that a lot of these aren't about suddenly you wake up

00:15:30.180 one day and here's a symptom. It's a change in the way you felt before to the way you feel now.

00:15:37.240 And generally that decline involves less pleasure in life. Those are good signals that you're...

00:15:43.220 And I'm going to take a little side note here. When we say low on dopamine, what we're really

00:15:47.260 talking about is in most cases a reduction in dopamine activity, which again won't matter to most

00:15:53.240 people, but we want to be precise. It's not as if you can take a dopamine pill and boost it. It's

00:15:58.540 about increasing the amount of activity with dopamine in your brain. Do we know what causes

00:16:03.540 lower dopamine activity? We know what causes some of it. We can describe it, which is different from

00:16:09.960 saying we know what causes it. You know, we can describe the sunrise, but we can't exactly describe

00:16:14.420 how the sun got there. When there's less dopamine activity, a couple of things can be happening

00:16:19.400 technically. One is that the dopamine that you have in your brain is getting diluted or washed away

00:16:26.520 before it does all its job. Think of a bunch of locks on one side and a bunch of keys on the other.

00:16:32.920 When dopamine acts, what happens is any neurotransmitter acts. That key slips into the

00:16:37.920 lock and that opens the door and causes the feeling. So you could have a lot of those locks blocked.

00:16:44.480 That would be one thing you could do. You could have fewer keys. That's something else.

00:16:48.460 You could have keys not staying in the lock very long. All these things are declines. Now,

00:16:53.760 what causes them? Well, some of them are just purely organic. It could be that your body was

00:16:58.260 just designed with this flaw. It could be that your brain has changed and these receptors and this

00:17:03.600 receptor activity across the gap or the synapses is now reduced by a simple change in time. It could be

00:17:09.860 that, and this is most common, it could be that you've used some kind of compound that has

00:17:13.780 stretched your ability to appreciate what happens when the lock goes in the key and you've changed

00:17:19.620 what we call homeostasis. You've changed your normal to something that requires a lot more

00:17:24.300 stimulation. I always think of Miley Cyrus, who had some wonderful things to say about our first book

00:17:29.640 for exactly this reason. She said, I went through a period of time where I was not excited about

00:17:34.300 performing in front of a half million people. It just didn't thrill me anymore. And it was because she

00:17:39.300 had done it so much, so often, it was no longer unusual to her. It was just part of normal. Now,

00:17:46.180 you and I might pass out if we had to stand in front of half a million people, but for her,

00:17:50.820 she would yawn. It's about stretching out that system, really, like a sweater that you've worn,

00:17:56.160 that you've pulled over your head too many times, and now it's stretched out.

00:18:00.440 Okay, so you could have low dopamine activity because of some organic biological reason,

00:18:05.320 or it could be because you just hit a dopamine-stimulating activity over and over again.

00:18:10.920 So this could be with drugs, or it could be with something else, just like social media.

00:18:15.960 It's just whenever you flood the brain with high levels of dopamine, it reduces the number of

00:18:21.320 dopamine receptors, and it's kind of like closing windows during a windstorm. And that makes it harder

00:18:27.480 to feel pleasure from that stimulation in the future. Let's go into different ways people think

00:18:33.380 they can try to increase dopamine activity. We know drugs can reduce dopamine activity in the long

00:18:39.020 term, but is it also possible to increase dopamine activity with drugs? And I'm not just talking

00:18:44.100 illegal drugs. I'm talking stimulants and prescription drugs. Yes, yes, it is. But with, again, a big

00:18:52.240 warning. Everything I have to say is I give with one hand and take away with the other, Brett. First,

00:18:57.960 you need to know about that dopamine in your brain. When we talk about dopamine levels,

00:19:01.160 you think about something like, you know, insulin or A1C. What are my levels there? And you take a

00:19:06.020 blood test, and there you go. Well, you can't do that with dopamine. This is weird. This is so,

00:19:10.580 I think this is so interesting. All the dopamine that we're talking about that has to do with mood

00:19:15.680 and behavior, this is already in your brain. All the dopamine that you're going to deal with is

00:19:20.720 already there. It's made in the brain, it stays in the brain, and it gets washed out of something else.

00:19:25.940 So you can't drink yourself a big glass of dopamine and make it go up. It could never get

00:19:31.680 into your brain because your brain has a wall around it called a blood-brain barrier. And it's

00:19:36.700 looking for chemicals like dopamine that are too big or too polarized to get in there. Because it's

00:19:42.040 like, I don't want you messing with my brain system, man. Leave me alone. I got a wall up here to keep

00:19:47.240 you out. So you can't just ingest this stuff. You can shoot it into your spinal column and it'll go up

00:19:52.600 there. But it acts so quickly, it won't help. And that's very dangerous anyway. So we don't really 0.86

00:19:56.900 do that too much. So if we want to elevate it with drugs, there are things that do it by causing the

00:20:03.420 dopamine to hang around longer. To make those keys I talked about, to make those keys stay in the lock

00:20:09.040 a little longer or go in the lock a few more times. We see that with antidepressants like Welbutrin,

00:20:15.420 like Zoloft, like Effexor. Oh yeah, well like there's an older antidepressant called an MAO

00:20:21.320 inhibitor. And those do that as well. Now we can get this with stimulants, Adderall,

00:20:26.900 Ritalin, cocaine. You may be thinking of L-DOPA, which you've heard of, which is a precursor to

00:20:32.200 dopamine. But that won't help us in our conversation, Brett, because that is a precursor to dopamine

00:20:37.800 that largely acts on the circuits that have to do with motion. That's why if you Google dopamine,

00:20:43.880 you're going to get a bunch of hits about Parkinson's disease. There are other circuits in

00:20:48.400 the dopamine system that do things we are not talking about. So yes, there are compounds that

00:20:53.800 you can use. Here's where I take away with the other hand. Here's that. If you have a deficiency

00:21:00.480 of dopamine, we can often raise the dopamine activity to get you back to normal. That's a

00:21:07.320 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,

00:21:20.200 Zoloft, Effexor, or Adderall. Listen up, students. You can't take that and get a boost in behavior or a

00:21:27.460 boost in performance from that. We can't overclock the brain, it turns out. We can try, but it just

00:21:33.740 won't work. Why is that? We don't know exactly. There is something built into the brain that won't let

00:21:40.400 it overclock that dopamine. And when it does overclock in more natural or pathological ways,

00:21:47.640 then you've got problems. Then you have real problems. Okay. So if you have an actual dopamine

00:21:52.760 deficiency or deficiency in activity, drugs can help. But if you're just normal and you're trying

00:21:57.360 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.

00:22:15.820 But the studies that we have on this show that with or without the Adderall, if you're taking Adderall or

00:22:23.120 if you're taking a placebo and you think you're taking Adderall, you're trying to do better on a

00:22:28.280 test, you will do better on a test. It's a placebo effect. It's the belief that you'll do better.

00:22:33.480 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

00:25:21.960 can't touch it very much.

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 0.91

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 0.95

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.

00:46:27.520 Brett, it's always a pleasure. Thanks, buddy.

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.

The Art of Manliness - July 09, 2025

Tame the Dopamine Drive — How to Stop Chasing and Start Living

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