The Secret Behind Resisting Dopamine

today we're going to talk about how to boost your resistance to [Music] 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 dope and energic 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 that doesn't work because the part of your brain that wants these dope energic 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 yall have heard this but you know these memes back in the day about in Soviet Russia you do not watch television television watches you 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 dopamine controls you I want to want to take a moment to thank the sponsor of today's video Babel Babel is the top language learning app worldwide and I really love it because I'm actually learning Spanish after I've been using it for about 2 months so right now for example I'm learning common conversational phrases that I can string together to actually have a conversation like which means twice a week or Al which means three times a month and that's what I really love about the app is they make learning very very easy and accessible and they use certain scientific methods that actually have you being the most proficient in the shortest amount of time so I can't recommend Babel enough and it's awesome that they're giving us 60% off of their subscription if you check out the link in the description below so thank you to Babel 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 succumbent and when we're talking about dopamine this is the part of our brain that we're talking about so the the nucleus accumbent 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 Pleasure able 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 accumbent so when it comes to a behavioral action there's the motivational drive from the nucleus accumbent 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 people whose nucleus accumbent in dopam energic circuitry is in full control of their brain so we have people who will do things like pick up a bottle of of beer let's say and I 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 accumbent okay so the first thing is that our nucleus accumbens is has this pile of dopamine in it and let's just go over a quick overview of of kind of what the nucleus succumbent 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 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 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 a cin dopamine that's da may be important for enabling rats to overcome behavioral constraints such as work rated 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 em 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 understand this okay if you look at our 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 homostasis 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 a bunch left so after we engage in some kind of action we lose some dopamine but we 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 squeeze 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 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 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 uh 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 dop energic 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 6 hours between 8:00 a. m. and 2:00 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 4 hours how motivated are you how many how much video games can you play after 4 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 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 in increase our motivation to 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 avoid technology usage or especially the dop and energic Technology usage for at least 4 hours ideally at the beginning of the day but don't touch your phone for 1 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 amydala and the limic 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 dopam energic signals from the nucleus accumbent 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 amydala 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 what 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 yall 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 okay so DrK 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 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'll be 20% more resistant to the effects of dopaminergic activities the next circuit that we're going to talk about is the prefrontal c so the prefrontal cortex is part of our frontal loes and our frontal loes are what generate things like willpower right so when we do things like meditate the frontal loes are basically what control the other parts of our brain so that 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 loes 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 uh 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 sub conscious 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 you don't understand if you are motivated to not study that means that your subconscious value judgment is going to the nucleus accumbent 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 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 ideal 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 what's happen next what's going to happen at 9:00 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 5:00 p. m. and I study for at least 2 or three hours versus if I game right now what's going to happen at 9:00 a.

m. what's going to happen at 10: a. m.

how am I going to feel at 5:00 p. m.