Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: Research has found that reading novels improves our brain functions on a variety of levels, including the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and flex your imagination. It also boosts our innovative thinking skills. Take it from Elon Musk, arguably one of the most innovative minds of our time. He's said that growing up, he spent more than 10 hours a day pouring through science fiction novels. In today's rapidly changing world, innovation is necessary for any business to stay competitive. If we get clarity on how our brain chemistry works, we can use that understanding to create a life full of healthy, sustainable and truly rewarding relationships and accomplishments, and more effectively avoid the traps of modern existence that are just about to kill us all. 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. Lieberman is highly entertaining, mixing the hard science with entertaining elements to make it more vivid, transporting it directly into the long term memory, except of course one is too stoned on dopamine and the data transmission affected by too much of whatever emotion. Don´t read angry, nervous, or horny, that´s not healthy for your wisdom!

Okay, so we've got these two pathways. One mainly for movement. This is the substantia nigra to dorsal striatum. And we've got this other pathway, the so-called mesocorticolimbic pathway that's for reward, reinforcement and motivation. I want you to remember that there are two pathways. If you don't remember the two pathways in detail, that's fine, but please remember that there are two pathways because that turns out to be important later. This is a very interesting book on how just one chemical – Dopamine influences so much of our behaviour. The undue influence Dopamine exerts is amazing considering the fraction the Dopamine circuit occupies in our brains. This is a well written book and very informative as well. It’s a sobering thought. Because the bounty of high-octane stimuli enables us to instantly boost our mood – something previous generations couldn’t do to the same degree – we’re under the impression we can fully control when we feel joy. In reality, our drip-fed, tech-fuelled bliss is fleeting, and often less than blissful. The main message is to stop hunting for pleasure all the time.It’s too much of a good thing, and all that. 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." Dopamine is the chemical of desire that always asks for more--more stuff, more stimulation, and more surprises. In pursuit of these things, it is undeterred by emotion, fear, or morality. Dopamine is the source of our every urge, that little bit of biology that makes an ambitious business professional sacrifice everything in pursuit of success, or that drives a satisfied spouse to risk it all for the thrill of someone new. Simply put, it is why we seek and succeed; it is why we discover and prosper. Yet, at the same time, it's why we gamble and squander.

Question Your Habits

Again, how much dopamine you experience from something depends on your baseline level of dopamine when you arrive there and your previous dopamine peaks. That's super important to understand, and it's completely neglected by the general language of dopamine hits. This is why when you repeatedly engage in something that you enjoy, your threshold for enjoyment goes up and up and up. So I want to talk about that process, and I want to explain how that process works because if you understand that process and you understand some of these schedules and kinetics, as we call them, around dopamine, you'll be in a terrific position to use any dopamine-enhancing tools that you decide to use. You'll be in an excellent position to modulate and control your own dopamine release for optimal motivation and drive.

So what sorts of activities, what sorts of things increase dopamine, and how much do they increase dopamine? Well, let's take a look at some typical things that people do out there, or ingest out there, that are known to increase dopamine. So let's recall that you have a baseline level of dopamine and that everybody does, and even within a family, you might have family members who are very excitable, happy and motivated, and others who are less excitable, happy and motivated. But your level of dopamine has everything to do with those genetics, but also with what you've experienced in the previous days and the previous months, and so on. When you do or ingest certain things, your levels of dopamine will rise above baseline transiently, and depending on what you do or ingest, it will rise either more or less, and it will be very brief or it will last a long time. It’s very different from how life used to be, when we had to tolerate a lot more distress,” says Lembke. “We’re losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems and deal with frustration and pain in its many different forms.” Dopamine has been dubbed 'the Kim Kardashian of molecules' owing to its mainstream prominence However, a number of energy drinks and, in particular, preworkouts, contain things that are precursors to dopamine, and on their own, even if you didn't engage in the activity, would cause the release of dopamine to a substantial degree. They do cause the release of dopamine to a substantial degree, and over time that will deplete your dopamine. So energy drinks, preworkout drinks, drugs of various kinds that people take to study and pay attention. We talked about some of these for the ADHD episode, things like Adderall, Ritalin, armodafinil, modafinil, taken repeatedly over time will reduce the level of satisfaction and joy that you get from the activities you engage in while under the influence of those compoSo for instance, the pen that I'm holding right now is one of these Pilot V5s. I love these Pilot V5s. They don't sponsor the podcast. I just happen to like them. I like the way that they write, how they feel. If I spent enough time thinking about it or talking about it, I could probably get a dopamine increase just talking about this Pilot V5, and that's not because I have the propensity to release dopamine easily. It's that as we start to engage with something more and more, and what we say about it and what we encourage ourself to think about it has a profound impact on its rewarding or nonrewarding properties. Now, it's not simply the case that you can lie to yourself and you can tell yourself, I love something, and when you don't really love it, and it will increase dopamine. But what's been found over and over again is that if people journal about something, or they practice some form of appreciation for something, or they think of some aspect of something that they enjoy, the amount of dopamine that that behavior will evoke tends to go up. Our brain simply loves to get high and for a long time we couldn´t get good stuff from the outer world ( it must have been terrible) when we were still stonagey and before, but we had those fine centers for own opioids, own cannabinoids, but especially the other hormones that aren´t so fancy. No matter where we look, to the love in our beds, to the digital shopping card, enemies and frenemies at work, what we love and hate about political parties, we are wired to react like animals. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. want to understand why yoga, meditation, balanced CBD consumption... make you feel happier :D (Work for me!)(Hints? They are Here and Now!)

E un sentiment al anticipării că viața e pe cale să devină mai bună. Circuitele ei nu procesează experiențe din lumea reală, ci numai posibilități viitoare imaginare. Hm, cum ar fi să-mi iau o înghețată după ce termin de scris aici. Before we dive into the meat of today's discussion, I'd like to share with you a fascinating result that really underscores what dopamine is capable of in our brains and bodies, and underscores the fact that just through behaviors, no drugs, nothing of that sort, just through behaviors we can achieve terrifically high increases in dopamine that are very long and sustained in ways that serve us. This is a result that was published in the European Journal of Physiology. I'll go into it in more detail later, but essentially what it involved is having human subjects get into water of different temperatures. So it was warm water, moderately cool water and cold, cold water. Had them stay in that water for up to an hour, and they measured by way of blood draw things like cortisol, norepinephrine and dopamine. We all desire a break from our routines and those parts of life that upset us. What if, instead of trying to escape these things, we learn to turn toward them, to reach a peaceful harmony with ourselves and the people we share our lives with? Lembke has written a book that radically changes the way we think about mental illness, pleasure, pain, reward, and stress. Turn toward it. You’ll be happy you did.”And eventually what typically happens is they will stop getting dopamine release from that activity as well, and then they drop into a pretty serious depression. And this can get very severe and people have committed suicide from these sorts of patterns of activity. But what about the more typical scenario? What about this scenario of somebody who is really good at working during the week, they exercise during the week, they drink on the weekends? Well, that person is only consuming alcohol maybe one or two nights a week, but oftentimes that same person will be spiking their dopamine with food during the middle of the week. Now we all have to eat, and it's nice to eat foods that we enjoy. I certainly do that. I love food, in fact. But let's say they're eating foods that really evoke a lot of dopamine release in the middle of the week. 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. 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." Why is it so hard for these authors to really trust that someone is actually interested in their topic and realize that they don't have to constantly lure the reader into stupidity? Yes. I am looking at you too, David Eagleman.