Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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I was in college when this whole MPTP thing happened, and I remember hearing this story. At the time, I had no understanding of what it is to have very high levels of dopamine or extremely depleted levels of dopamine. There was no reason why I should have that understanding. I mean, of course, I had experienced different pleasures of different kinds, and I've had lows in my life, but nothing to the extreme that I'm about to discuss. Anna Lembke deeply understands an experience I hear about often in the therapy room at the nexus between our modern addictions and our primal brains. Her stories of guiding people to find a healthy balance between pleasure and pain have the power to transform your life. ” When we binge on pleasurable things, homeostasis means “our brain compensates by bringing us lower and lower and lower,” says Lembke. Each time the thing becomes less enjoyable, but we eventually become dependent on those stimuli to keep functioning. We spiral into a joy-seeking abyss. The digital world enables bingeing on a previously unseen scale because there are no practical limitations forcing us to pause. With substances, you eventually run out of money or lines of cocaine (even temporarily), but Netflix shows or TikTok feeds are indefatigable. Often you needn’t do anything: the next hit automatically loads on your screen. Once we understand that dopamine is a driver for us to seek things, it makes perfect sense as to why it would have a baseline level and it would have peaks, and that the baseline and peaks would be related in some sort of direct way. Here's what I mean by that. Let's say that you were not alive now, but you were alive 10,000 years ago and you woke up and you looked and you realized you had minimal water and you had minimal food left. Maybe you have a child, maybe you have a partner, maybe you're in an entire village, but you realized that you need things, okay? You need to be able to generate the energy to go seek those things, and chances are there were dangers in seeking those things. Yes, it could be saber-tooth tigers and things of that sort, but there are other dangers too.

Trevor Haynes is a research technician in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. For more information: Now, what was interesting is after subjects got out of this cold water, that dopamine increase was sustained. And I know nowadays many people are interested in using cold water therapy as a way to increase metabolism and fat loss, but also to improve sense of well-being, improve cognition, improve clarity of mind. There's something really special about this very alert but calm state of mind that seems to be the one that's optimal for pretty much everything except sleep. But for all aspects of work and for social engagement and for sport, that highly alert but calm state of mind really is the sweet spot that I believe most of us would like to achieve. And this cold water exposure, done correctly, really can help people achieve that state of mind through these increases in dopamine that last a very long time. Additionally, the subject matter is utterly germane to the issues of addiction, mental health, compulsory consumption and more fundamentally learning, motivation and ultimately well being.

Question Your Habits

It strikes a perfect balance between technical precision, flowing relatable prose, effective functional metaphors and harder science. Also, on a side note, for the love of God and all you hold dear, please stop this nonsense encountered so often in nonfiction books of introducing concepts as follows: Lembke is sanguine that we can beat our digital dependencies by embracing a more monastic mindset. She advocates replacing some pleasure-seeking vices with“painful” pursuits. When we do things that are challenging – going for a run, having an ice bath, talking to a stranger, reading a book on philosophy – instead of receiving a dopamine boost beforehand we experience it afterwards. “Doing things that are hard is one of the best ways to pursue a life worth living, because the pleasure we get afterwards is more enduring,” she says.We tend to forget that earned highs are that much sweeter. So for anyone that's experienced a real drop in baseline, who has addictive tendencies, whether or not they're behaviors or substances, that is always going to be the path forward is going to be either cold turkey or through some sort of tapering to limit interactions with what would otherwise be the dopamine-evoking behavior or substance. So let's talk about the optimal way to engage in activities, or to consume things, that evoke dopamine. And by no means am I encouraging people to take drugs of abuse. I would not do that, I am not doing that, but some of the things on these lists of dopamine-evoking activities are things like chocolate, coffee — even if it's indirect; sex and reproduction, provided it's healthy, consensual, context-appropriate, age-appropriate, species-appropriate, of course, is central to our evolution and progression as a species.

Creativitatea reflectă creierul în forma sa cea mai elevată. Boala mintală este opusul.” Cel mai interesant capitol mi s-a părut cel despre creativitate și nebunie. Se vorbește despre saliență, vise, boli, modele mentale artă și altele, toate prin prisma dopaminei.Dopamine is the universal currency of foraging and seeking, right? We sometimes talk about motivation and craving, but what we mean in the evolutionary adaptive context, what we mean is foraging and seeking, seeking water, seeking food, seeking mates, seeking things that make us feel good and avoiding things that don't make us feel good, but in particular, seeking things that will provide sustenance and pleasure in the short term and will extend the species in the long term. He found that a slower form of information, books, was the antidote to his information overload. So he made them part of his routine again. According to McGuire, "Reading books again has given me more time to reflect, to think, and has increased both my focus and the creative mental space to solve work problems." The crux of our behaviour boils down to two outlooks we humans have – here & now matters (which the authors refer to as the H&N circuit) and the future (our desires and actions). Dopamine is largely what determines how we approach the future – high dopamine defining the drive. Dopamine circuits are in two categories – ones which determine our desires and the other which exerts control over our actions.

It's no surprise that if you choose something you genuinely enjoy, you'll be more likely to follow through with it. Plus, fully immersing yourself in one captivating book will give you so much more than speeding through a dozen books while your mind wanders elsewhere. Only when we're fully absorbed can we reach that priceless state of flow: the "optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best." Chocolate, they didn't look at milk versus dark chocolate, but chocolate will increase your baseline level of dopamine 1.5 times, okay? So it's a pretty substantial increase in dopamine. It's transient, it goes away after a few minutes or even a few seconds. I'll explain what determines the duration in a minute, but 1.5 times for chocolate. Sex, both the pursuit of sex and the act of sex increases dopamine two times. So it's a doubling above baseline. Now, of course, there's going to be variation there, but that's the average increase in baseline dopamine caused by sex. Later I will talk about how the different aspects of the so-called arousal arc, the different aspects of sex, believe it or not, have a differential impact on dopamine. But for now, as a general theme or activity, sex doubles the amount of dopamine circulating in your blood. Los tres primeros capítulos (LOVE, DRUGS and DOMINATION) son absolutamente fascinantes y creo que es bastante fácil verse reflejado (y gracias al libro, entender) muchas de las sensaciones y emociones que se describen y que todos experimentamos en el día a día. Los capítulos 4 – 6 (CREATIVITY, POLITICS y PROGRESS) no me han parecido tan brillantes y los resultados de alguno de los estudios mencionados (p.ej. correlación entre niveles de dopamina e ideología) no tan convincentes. En cualquier caso en estos últimos también hay insights interesantes y son relativamente cortos, así que merece la pena llegar hasta ellos. Dopamine is what we call a neuromodulator. Neuromodulators are different than neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are involved in the dialogue between neurons, nerve cells, and neurotransmitters tend to mediate local communication. Just imagine two people talking to one another at a concert. That communication between them is analogous to the communication carried out by neurotransmitters, whereas neuromodulators influence the communication of many neurons. Imagine a bunch of people dancing where it's a coordinated dance involving 10 or 20 or hundreds of people. Neuromodulators are coordinating that dance. In the nervous system what this means is that dopamine release changes the probability that certain neural circuits will be active and that other neural circuits will be inactive. So it modulates a bunch of things all at once. And that's why it's so powerful at shifting not just our levels of energy, but also our mindset, also our feelings of whether or not we can or cannot accomplish something.

The Hands that Pull – Reward prediction errors and variable reward schedules

Many of these ideas are familiar: we’ve all heard about digital detoxes and mindfulness practices, but unlike many spiritual gurus, Lembke is straight-shooting. She is not promising sunshine and rainbows. Yes, it’s natural and healthy to pursue enjoyment, but our consumer culture has created an expectation “that life is supposed to be so fun!” she says. “And really, it’s not. Life is a slog and I think if we could admit that and take comfort in knowing we’re not alone in the day-to-day struggle, paradoxically, we would be happier.” We’re losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems The purpose of that time away, says Lembke, is to reset our brain’s pathways and gain perspective on how our dependency affects us. The goal is generally not to banish it forever, but to figure out how to enjoy it in moderation – that most elusive of things. Some will realise they cannot enjoy it without going too far but usually “self-binding” techniques should help with finding a balance. You might try putting barriers between you and the vice, like removing all screens from your bedroom, putting your phone on airplane mode, or committing to only using the thing at certain times, like at weekends. These will be more manageable after your initial fast. It’s “easier to go from abstinence to moderation, than from excessive consumption to moderation,” says Lembke. So do like the casinos do, it certainly works for them, and for activities that you would like to continue to engage in over time, whatever those happen to be, start paying attention to the amount of dopamine and excitement and pleasure that you achieve with those and start modulating that somewhat at random. That might be removing some of the dopamine-releasing chemicals that you might take prior. Maybe you remove them every time, but then every once in a while you introduce them. Maybe it involves sometimes doing things socially, that you enjoy doing socially, sometimes doing the same thing, but alone. There are a lot of different ways to do this. There are a lot of different ways to approach this, but now knowing what you know about peaks and baselines in dopamine, and understanding how important it is not just to achieve peaks but to maintain that baseline at a healthy level, it should be straightforward for you to implement these intermittent schedules. It really, really does sound and feel like: "The four-legged piece of furniture called chair is placed around the round wooden object called table in what we call a living room. That's the room in which people live or spend most of their free time when at home." It makes one cringe from the bottom of this ambiguous thing called soul.