Today, we're going to talk about how to boost your resistance to dopamine. The basic struggle that most of us have today is that we should be doing some things, like studying or working on our resume or exercising, but our brain wants to do something else. It wants to do dopaminergic things like play video games, watch pornography, doom scroll, take your pick of technological addiction.
And the problem is that we struggle to control this part of our brain. But But that doesn't work because the part of your brain that wants these dopaminergic activities actually is the part of your brain that controls you. So this is sort of best described by this old Soviet Russian meme. So I don't know if you all have heard this, but you know, these memes back in the day about in Soviet watch television. So in our brain, the way that this kind of works is in Soviet Russia or in the current digital age, you do not control dopamine.
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So thank you to Babbel for keeping mental health content on the internet free and actually teaching human beings how to communicate with each other. So we have to understand this. So you have one part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens. And when we're talking about dopamine, this is the part of our brain that we're talking about.
So the nucleus accumbens basically generates motivation for us. And the way that it does that is through using dopamine as a signal. So when we get motivated towards something and we engage in that behavior, we get this triggering of dopamine, which gives us a sense of pleasure and results in behavioral reinforcement. The problem is that you can't really directly control this circuit. Because this circuit is what generates...
your wants and motivations. So you can't kind of motivate yourself to not be motivated by pleasurable things, if that kind of makes sense. It's the part of your brain that generates your motivation.
Instead, what we need to do is utilize the other parts of our brain to reduce the power of our nucleus accumbens. So when it comes to a behavioral action, there's the motivational drive from the nucleus accumbens, but then there are all these other parts of our brain that influence that motivational drive. And this is sort of what I've learned as an addiction psychiatrist.
This is kind of our bread and butter, is that we work with people whose nucleus accumbens and dopaminergic circuitry is in full control of their brain. So we have people who will do things like pick up a bottle of beer, let's say, and the moment I get my first sip, even though there are parts of my brain that are screaming at me, put it down, put it down, put it down. You can't control it.
You're going to get divorced. You're going to get fired. You're going to get thrown in jail. Your whole brain is screaming at you, but you cannot control it.
Because once the nucleus accumbens gets a taste of that alcohol, you lose all control. So let's start with the nucleus accumbens. Okay. So the first thing is that our nucleus accumbens has this pile of dopamine in it. And let's just go over a quick overview of kind of what the nucleus accumbens does.
So anytime we engage in an action, depending on what the results of that action are, we will get a release of dopamine. And then this dopamine results in pleasure. Now, when we receive pleasure from this action, we are going to go back and we are going to reinforce the action. Once we do this, then this will create a motivation to engage in the action again.
Okay. So basically there's some kind of initial experience with something which results in dopamine and pleasure, which then creates behavioral reinforcement and improves motivation. So the first thing that we're going to talk about is how things like dopamine detox actually move us in the wrong direction. So in order to do what we want, we actually want a large amount of dopamine available in our brain.
So I know that sounds very contrary to popular thinking, but let's take a quick look at some research on it. Here is a study that looks at rats and dopamine depletion. So what we've got here is is we have lever presses, which is the action. And we have two kinds of rats.
We have our control rats. And what we sort of see is that the control rats, over time, will engage in lots of... of lever presses. And then we also have something called dopamine depleted rats.
And what we tend to see is that when you get rid of dopamine in the brain, you actually engage in less and less action. So the nucleus accumbens dopamine and regulation of effort in food seeking behavior, implications for studies of natural motivation, psychiatry, and drug abuse. Now, here's the sentence that we're going to focus on. Accumbens dopamine, that's DA, may be important for enabling rats to overcome behavioral constraints. Such as work-related response costs and may be critical for behavioral organization and conditioning processes that enable animals to engage in vigorous responses such as barrier climbing or emit large numbers of responses.
Okay, so this is kind of complicated, but let me explain what this means. This basically says the more dopamine we have, the easier it is to engage in something called sustained effort. Now, this may sound kind of weird. But let's understand this, okay?
If you look at our body, this is what happens. We wake up and we've got a ton of dopamine. And then our body has the system called homeostasis. And so what this means is if we engage in some kind of action, right? So let's take an action.
And we've got a ton of dopamine. What this means is that if we engage in an action, we've got a lot of dopamine, a lot of dopamine comes out. Because we've got a ton of it, right?
So our brain is just like the way you are with your bank account, where if you've got a bunch of money, You can afford to spend some because you've got a bunch left. So after we engage in some kind of action, we lose some dopamine, but we kind of spend dopamine. And then the action, remember, the more dopamine we release, this action gets reinforced.
Okay? So this is totally fine. So as we use some dopamine, you know, that's fine.
We have some left. We can take another action and we'll deplete some more dopamine, right? Totally fine.
And then eventually what happens is we run out of dopamine. And once we run out of dopamine, then we have a slight problem because now our bank account is empty. So now in order to get dopamine out, right, now that we're kind of, we've squeezed the lemon dry, we need to engage in highly dopaminergic activities.
So now that our reserve of dopamine has run out, we need something. So think about it like a lemon that you're squeezing the juice out of, right? So the more you squeeze, at the very beginning, you can squeeze very little and you can get a lot of juice out.
But at the very end, you need something very, very powerful to squeeze, to squeeze out the remaining juice. So the more dopaminergic the activity, the less dopamine you need to engage in the activity. So when we look at things like video games, these are highly dopaminergic. And I don't know if this kind of makes sense to you, but when you feel really tired and you don't feel motivated and you don't feel like doing anything, when you're exhausted and you don't want to have fun, you're just kind of sitting around doing nothing. What are the only actions that you can take?
What are the actions that are the easiest to take? The lower your energy level is, the easier it is to engage in dopaminergic activities because these will squeeze out the last bit of dopamine that is left in your brain because they're very powerful pulls of dopamine. Now, if we engage in actions like video games, let's go down here.
So if we engage in, let's say we start out our day. And we engage in an action like a video game. Now, remember, this is a powerful squeeze.
So now we have a full lemon and we are squeezing very tightly. What's going to happen to our dopaminergic signal? We're going to actually empty our whole swath of dopamine because we've got a full lemon and we have a powerful squeeze. And then we have no dopamine left over for other things. This is what this rat study essentially shows, that if you want to engage in sustained effort with Low rewards.
We need to have a lot of dopamine in reserve, okay? So this is something that a lot of people don't get. But what we really need to do is understand that the moment you engage in a high dopaminergic activity at the beginning of the day, you're going to exhaust all your dopamine and you literally will have nothing left for the sustained effort of the things that you want to do. And y'all may have noticed this in your own life, right? So when you wake up and you play video games for six hours, Between 8 a.m.
and 2 p.m., how motivated are you at the end of that time? And then flip it around. Let's say we wake up in the morning and we work for four hours.
How motivated are you? How much video games can you play after four hours of work? So this is the first important thing to understand.
We do not want to get rid of our dopamine. We actually want a high level of dopamine so that when we engage in low dopaminergic activities, we still get dopamine. a strong dopamine response.
And as we get a strong dopamine response, right, because there's a lot of dopamine in our brains, we are going to reinforce the action and increase our motivation. engage in the action. So the TLDR for this is that dopamine isn't bad.
It's actually what causes behavioral reinforcement. And this is why it is very important to do productive stuff first thing in the morning. So do not even pick up your phone for one hour after you get up.
Wake up and start doing something, anything. Try to avoid technology usage or especially the dopaminergic technology usage for at least four hours, ideally, at the beginning of the day. But don't touch your phone for one hour. As you do this, you will have lots of dopamine and then you will be able to engage literally in sustained effort, right?
So let's go back to this. So this is an experiment where we have lab chow, which is like crappy food Okay, that is very very easy to access and then what the rat can do is jump up here and then end up eating This tasty chow. So this is like better chow, but requires more effort And when we have a dopamine intact mouse, what we find is the mouse goes over here, jumps on here and eats the tasty chow.
Okay. So this is harder to get. And then what happens is if we have a dopamine depleted rat, the rat is too lazy to even get the thing that is good for it, that it likes more.
And this is a beautiful example of what goes on in most people's lives. We know that there are things that we should end up doing, but we are too lazy to do them. And every time we do them, we're like, damn.
This was really great. I'm so glad I did this. And it turns out that the reason that we can't engage in the stuff that is good for us is actually because we're depleted in dopamine. So conserve your dopamine and try to use it at the very beginning of the day in whatever productive activities you have. The cool thing is that kind of going back to our iPad drawing, what we see is that any action, even something like cleaning your room, if we have a large reserve of dopamine, will generate dopamine and behavioral reinforcement.
So let's talk about our second part of the brain. So here's the nucleus accumbens, and now we're going to talk about the amygdala and the limbic system. So this system is very important for dopamine vulnerability.
So the more negative emotion we are dealing with, the more vulnerable we are to dopaminergic signals from the nucleus accumbens. So these two parts of the brain talk to each other a lot. There are a lot of connections between the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala.
So if you sort of think about it, this kind of makes sense, right? The worse we feel, if I'm feeling depressed, if I'm feeling anxious, I'm more vulnerable to dopaminergic activities. Because what we know is that dopamine basically shuts off negative emotion. And negative emotion induces cravings for dopamine.
Because we feel bad when we have negative emotions, right? And if we feel bad when we have negative emotions, What does our brain, how does our brain know how to make ourselves feel better? Ah, that's right. We have this thing called dopamine. And if we release dopamine, we will induce more pleasure.
So what do we see as in psychiatry, especially with things like addiction psychiatry? So we tend to find is that people who are addicted tend to have a lot of negative pent up emotions. And as long as you have negative pent up emotions, your vulnerability to dopamine signals will increase. On the converse side, when we do things like psychotherapy and we end up reducing our negative emotion, our resistance to dopaminergic signals actually improves. So what we really want to do, if y'all are struggling to control your motivation and you're not motivated to do what you should, you should really start to work on your negative emotions.
So we can do all kinds of emotional processing activities. This can be things like therapy or journaling, meditation. Right. And some of y'all may be saying, OK, so, Dr. K, you just saying that I should journal and meditate and go to therapy. Oh, my God.
You've said a million times. Oh, my God. Yes.
But this is the main thing to understand. It's not about engaging these activities because they're good for you. Right.
So this is once again, we'll get to value generation in a second. But the thing to understand is that if you want to be able to control your dopamine circuitry, you have to understand what the inputs are and understand that the more depressed you are, the more anxious you are. the more you will wind up addicted to dopaminergic stuff.
So you must deal with those negative emotions. And the cool thing is that as you start dealing with these negative emotions, and you can do something as simple as taking a walk, right? You can just go for a walk for about an hour, and a lot of these negative emotions will start to process themselves automatically.
As you go through this stuff, you will be amazed at how much you are able to resist the dopaminergic impulse. As long as your emotions get taken care of, you go for three walks a week for one hour a week. I mean, one hour a day, right? So you do that three times and you'll be amazed that you will be 20% more resistant to the effects of dopaminergic activities.
The next circuit that we're going to talk about is the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is part of our frontal lobes, and our frontal lobes are what generate things like willpower, right? So when we do things like meditate, the frontal lobes are basically what control the other parts of our brain.
So if you're feeling really, really emotional and there's this voice in your brain that says, get it together, buddy, let's calm down. We need to focus. Or if you're trying to study.
And so your brain is like, instead of getting distracted, let's focus. That's all done by your frontal lobes. But that's hard. right?
And the one thing that we're going to focus on today, we're not going to do hard things. We're going to teach you easy things to improve your resistance to dopamine. So the other thing that the prefrontal cortex does is generate value assessments.
So anytime you're thinking about doing an action, your brain has some idea of what the action is worth, right? What the value of the action is. For example, when we have something like studying or gaming, each of these have a value. And now we may think. that the value of studying is greater than the value of gaming, but if on a given day you choose to game or you lose control and you end up gaming instead of studying, what that literally means is that the value generated by gaming in this subconscious part of your brain, it's not intellectual, this is what it's actually observed, okay?
This is some weird subconscious part. It is doing a subconscious calculation about the value of gaming versus the value of studying. And this is literally what drives our behavior, the result of the subconscious action.
And this subconscious value assessment is done by the prefrontal cortex. So what we need to do is do a conscious value assessment. And there's one really, really simple way to do that.
So this isn't something like, I know this, you may think, okay, like, I just think about it. I know studying is better. Like, I know that. Like, but I just can't motivate myself. No, no, no.
You don't understand. If you are motivated to not study, that means that your subconscious value judgment is going to the nucleus accumbens and telling it to game instead of study. That's literally what's happening. And there are some moments, even if you sort of think about it, right?
So if we kind of, and this is a constantly ongoing process. So why do we study one day before the test? Because our subconscious value judgment is today we can game, tomorrow we can game, on day three we can game, on day four we can game.
And then the subconscious value judgment changes on Thursday morning when you wake up and you have a final exam on Friday. Now the subconscious value judgment changes. And if you sort of stop and examine yourself, you'll see this. Now you start to panic.
Now the consequences are big. Now it becomes very important to start studying. The subconscious value judgment has changed.
So this is what's really cool. We can take that last minute panic. We can take that last minute motivation and we can bring it up a couple of days.
We can generate that motivation earlier if we do a conscious value assessment. And there is one really simple way to start doing this. We use this a ton. ton in addiction psychiatry. Works really well.
It's called play the tape through to the end. This is what we're going to do. We're going to play the tape through to the end. Okay. So what does this mean?
This means that you should sit down with a piece of paper. You can't do it in your head because in your head, your mind will jump to all kinds of stuff. You have to sit down ideally with a piece of paper.
Don't use a technological device and walk through the actions that you're going to take and what the consequences of those actions are going to be like. So if I wake up at 8 a.m. and I study, what's going to happen next?
What's going to happen at 9 a.m.? What's going to happen at 10 a.m.? What's going to happen at 11 a.m.? And then how am I going to feel at 5 p.m.?
And I study for at least two or three hours. Versus if I game right now, what's going to happen at 9 a.m.? What's going to happen at 10 a.m.?
How am I going to feel at 5 p.m.? Your mind will tell you, oh, we'll do it later. But stop and really play the tape through to the end.
Are you going to do it later? When? What's actually going to happen?
And when you force your mind to slow down and you play the tape through to the end, if I start drinking today, what's actually going to happen? What do I know is going to happen? Even though this may not instantly boost your willpower, you may sort of find that at the end of this exercise, you end up gaming anyway. And that's actually okay. Because what we've done is change your subconscious thinking a little bit.
Now the price of gaming, there's a part of you that feels a little bit more guilty. at the end of this exercise, right? You end up gaming anyway, but it's not quite as mindless as it used to be. You're like, holy shit, I really shouldn't do this. But okay, fine, whatever.
Today is fine. So even that is a small subconscious shift. And as you play the tape through to the end, over and over and over again, your value assessment will change. Okay. So the next thing we're going to talk about is super fascinating, and this is the hippocampus.
So the hippocampus is our memory circuit. This is where our memories live. So there's one thing that's really important to understand. When the hippocampus has a strong influence on the nucleus accumbens, But there are some things that the hippocampus loves and some things that the hippocampus hates.
So this is important to remember. The hippocampus values novelty. So if something is new for you, it will actually trigger a stronger motivational impulse.
So if you are trying to do something like study or let's say, let's take the case of exercise and it is hard for you to exercise. If you were trying to exercise instead of playing video games, and you've tried to exercise before, the hippocampus will say, hey, we've tried this before. It doesn't work well.
We don't really enjoy exercise. So let's end up gaming. If you want to start exercising, the key thing that you need to do is add novelty to the mix. So if you try a different kind of exercise, let's go to Pilates. Let's go to yoga.
Let's go to Tai Chi. Let's work out with friends. Let's do high intensity interval training. Let's join this workout group with dudes or with women or whatever.
The more novelty you can add that if you're trying to do something again, the more it will increase your motivation and trigger that sort of positive dopamine response. So if you failed at trying to do something like going to the gym to work out, I've tried going to the gym, I've tried going to the gym, going to the gym, utilize your hippocampus circuitry and just try something new. The more different it is, the easier it will be to try.
And this is something that the gaming industry understands very well, right? They understand that games are old and old games are boring. And how do we encourage people to play this game again?
We add new stuff. We add new stuff. We add new stuff.
So novelty triggers motivation. So anything that you're trying to do, whether it's cooking, exercising, studying, whatever, try to add some novelty to the mix and it will be easier to do. The next circuit we're going to talk about is actually the opioid circuit.
So this involves... the mu receptor and the kappa receptor. So this is interesting because when we're all talking about dopamine, we're obsessed with dopamine, motivation, pleasure, all this kind of stuff. But remember that the whole brain works as a circuit.
Things are connected, right? And it turns out that the opioid, endogenous opioids and the opioid receptors are very powerful influencers of our pleasure circuitry. And it turns out that pain and pleasure are actually very tightly linked and control one another, literally. So I'll give you all a simple example of this.
Let's say that you're playing a video game and it's a stomp. So when you stomp in a video game, how fun is it? Chances are it's less fun than if the game was very, very hard, right?
If I'm losing at the beginning and then my team makes a comeback, the dopamine rush I get is huge. So this is something very important to understand, that pain correlates with pleasure. So as we can increase the pain from a particular activity, The pleasure that we will get from that activity actually increases.
So you can sort of notice this as well when we kind of think a little bit about like things like working out, right? So if we half-ass when we work out, like if we half-ass it and it's just a lot of pain and there's not, what ends up happening is we avoid the pain. And when you half-ass working out, you actually avoid the pain, minimize the pain. And then it turns out that we have less reinforcement. But instead, if we sort of think about working out, right, let's say I'm like doing a bench press or something like that, and I can do six reps of the bench press without too much problem, but it's in that seventh rep and that eighth rep that I sort of feel that burn.
This is what Arnold Schwarzenegger calls the bump, right? As I feel that pump, those are the hard ones, and those are the ones that make me feel really good at the end of it. So it's that last painful part that actually positively reinforces our behavior.
So this is where we've got to be super careful because a lot of times when we are engaging in dopaminergic activities or our nucleus accumbens is running the show, we have a ton of avoidance of pain. And instead, what we want to try to do is add some pain to the mix to influence our dopaminergic circuitry. We also have really interesting evidence of this, which is that if you want to reduce cravings, we have a medication called naltrexone. And what naltrexone actually does is block some of these opioid receptors.
partially blocks them. It's not a full blockade. And so it kind of interferes with our ability to engage in pleasure from dopaminergic activities.
Now, I know that's not exactly what we're talking about here, but we certainly know from things like naltrexone that the opioid receptors and the opioid system in the dopaminergic system, the nucleus accumbens, are very tightly linked. So the way that we want to utilize our opioid system is, first of all, don't retreat from pain. We want the right... amount of pain. We want to balance the pain.
So we want something that is moderately painful or mildly painful, which will make, that we can still complete. So we don't want to have pain to the point of... stopping the activity, right? So if something is too painful, our brain will actually say this is not worth it.
So this is where I think working out is really like perfect. And people sort of figured this out, right? They said you should do the weight that makes you feel the burn in the seventh rep, the eighth rep. The last couple reps should be painful, but you should be able to do it.
And that's literally what we're kind of shooting for. So you want to add some pain to the mix, which will increase your resistance to the dopamine system. And this is something that I think people like David Goggins has turned this into a lifestyle, right? So he's somehow figured out a way to use pain to increase his motivation is what I've heard.
I've never talked to the guy. And so this is, it's actually very consistent with our understanding of neuroscience. So let's summarize.
The problem is that the nucleus accumbens generates motivation. And once it generates motivation, that's what we want to do, right? This is what creates our want. Now, this is a problem because if we have created a want, then it's very hard to control it. And our whole life is a struggle about wanting to want different things.
So instead, what we're going to do, since we can't create the wants that we want, right? So you don't get to pick what your desires are. Instead, what we're going to do is utilize other circuits of the brain to weaken the strength of our nucleus accumbens. To weaken the ability of the nucleus accumbens to control our behaviors.
And we're going to use other circuits of the brain. We're going to use amygdala because our amygdala makes us vulnerable to dopamine. We're going to use our prefrontal cortex and change the way that we consciously demonstrate value. We're also going to use our mu receptor and opioid system.
Because if we can add some pain into the mix, it will change the way that we experience pleasure. We're also going to use our hippocampus to add novelty to the mix. And so if you have some kind of goal that you don't feel motivated to do, the more novel you can make it, the more your motivation will increase.
And lastly, we're going to be super careful about our dopamine reserves. And we're going to remember that in order to exhibit sustained effort, we require dopamine. We need lots of reserves of dopamine and the more dopamine you have, the easier it is to release a higher amount of dopamine for a less pleasurable activity. And the biggest mistake that you can make is depleting your dopamine at the beginning of the day because then what you need is you need something very, very dopaminergic to squeeze the remainder of the juice out.
So the last thing that I want to share with y'all is that if we look at the brain, there's one very fundamental principle. One part of the brain cannot control itself. So we sort of think about, let's say we get emotional. The part of our brain that experiences emotion can't restrain itself.
We need other parts of the brain to control our emotional circuitry, right? So we will use something like our frontal lobes and we'll say, hey bro, you need to calm down. Or hey girl, you need to calm down.
I need to take a step back. I need to take a deep breath. That's your frontal lobes controlling your amygdala and your limbic system.
So then the question becomes, how do we control our very motivational circuitry? And the problem is that we've gotten so obsessed with willpower and habits and things like that, that we've stopped looking at the inputs to our motivational circuitry. And once you understand the inputs to your motivational circuitry, what you will discover is that you can control your motivational circuitry by using these other things. So definitely give this a shot and let us know how it works for you.