You're Destroying Your Mind - How to Control Dopamine

so in The Last 5 Years there's been a lot of stuff online about dopamine and how it causes us to be addicted to things like our phones and in particular the idea of dopamine detoxing today I'm talking about dopamine detoxing dopamine detox dopamine detox you do not control dopamine dopamine controls you and so given all these Trends I wanted to better understand the actual science about what dopamine is but also how we can manage our dopamine levels to improve our overall productivity and well-being so me and my team spent absolutely ages reading a bunch of research papers listening to tons of podcasts and going through some books to try and figure out exactly what is going on with dopamine now in particular this involved going through DrAnna ly's work she's a psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine and she recently published a book called dopamine Nation finding balance in the age of indulgence and she's got some really helpful takeaways that I hope will be genuinely needle moving for your productivity so in this video we're going to be looking at what dopamine is the science behind how to control dopamine and four actionable tips that will hopefully help boost your overall productivity and by the way if you're new to the channel then hello my name is Ali I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and I'm the author of the book Feelgood productivity which is about how to do more of what matters to you in a way that's enjoyable effective and sustainable and I've actually got a personal interest in dopamine given that a I went through med school B I did an extra degree in Psychology with some modules on cognitive Neuroscience which featured dopamine pretty heavily and so exploring dopamine for this video was kind of fun because it was sort of revisiting some of the stuff I did at University but with more of a focus on how understanding dopamine can genuinely help us boost our productivity and ideally improve our lives as well part one what is dopamine okay so this is dopamine it is a small molecule called a neurotransmitter that works in our brain mostly and it helps our neurons or our nerve cells communicate with each other now dopamine is involved in a bunch of different things including movement and sleep and mood but most importantly for this video it's involved in reward and motivation and the way we can think of it is that in our brain's reward system dopamine is the major currency that motivates us to actually do stuff okay so how do they do that well there are Broly two different ways in which dopamine works in the brain there is tonic transmission and then there is phasic [Music] transmission so to understand these let's imagine that you're in a restaurant now tonic transmission is like the constant hum of the people who are chattering around you it's basically background noise and you can't really make out any individual conversations and tonic transmission is when your neurons are randomly but continuously releasing small amounts of dopamine and this sets your Baseline dopamine [Music] level and then you can think of phasic transmission as if someone is calling your name out in the restaurant which you can make out and respond to even though there are lots of other people talking and this represents a surge of dopamine which is sort of the signal above the noise this by the way is sometimes called the cocktail party effect where you're in a cocktail party there is a hum of chatter in the the background and if someone says your name oh hey Ellie you'll be able to hear it now here's how this might work in reality so imagine getting an Instagram notification on your phone for some likes on a new Instagram post that you've just posted now at first your dopamine is set at its Baseline because of tonic transmission but then when your phone buzzes and lights up with a notification this is called a Q and this causes a phasic release of dopamine because we expect to open Instagram to find a message from someone and that is the reward and this short burst of DOP mean creates this feeling of wanting or craving and it m motivates us to do something so in this case we feel the urge and we feel motivated to unlock our phone and open Instagram now at this point there are three potential different outcomes outcome number one is that we get more likes than we predicted so in this post I got 11,000 likes and maybe I predicted only getting 5,000 likes and so when I open this post and I see 11,000 likes I get a release in dopamine so here in blue we've got the tonic release of dopamine we get a little bit of phasic release of dopamine when I see the Q I. E the Ping and the buzz of the notification and then once I open my phone and I get the reward which is more likes than I thought I would get suddenly we get an increase in dopamine and that is the surge of dopamine and this is called a reward prediction error our brain made a prediction of how many likes we're going to get we made an error in that prediction and we ended up getting more likes than we thought and this unexpected reward is what causes that increase in dopamine that is option number one now we've got option number two which is let's say we get exactly the same amount amount of likes as we predicted so I predict I would get 5,000 likes for this picture and I got about 5,000 likes for this picture now I still get the increase in dopamine from the que I seeing the notification pop up but in this case because the reward was expected I got exactly the same number of likes as I expected my brain did not make an error in the prediction the prediction was correct and I get no dopamine release so when you get an unexpected reward you get an increase in dopamine but when you get an expected reward a reward that you knew was going to come you don't get any dopamine release that's very interesting now option number three is what if you get fewer likes than you predicted what if I predicted 5,000 likes and I only got 1,000 likes now in this context I still get the increase in dopamine from the Q I. E the buzz of my notification because that's the QED dopamine release but then the reward is absent I made a prediction error I predicted 5,000 likes I only got 1,000 likes and this very interestingly causes a decrease in dopamine levels now as you might appreciate from this example when dopamine is released we feel pretty good when dopamine is at its Baseline we feel like m whatever that's pretty normal but when dopamine is decreased we feel pretty bad which is why it feels kind of bad to get fewer like than you expected and feels kind of good to get more like than you expected now in a lot of cases this relationship between dopamine prediction reward and feeling good or bad is actually quite good like when we get hungry dopamine motivates us to find food if that food is particularly tastier than what we predicted I.

E unfortunately if it has more sugar and fat in it than what we potentially predicted we're going to release dopamine that's going to make us feel good and obviously this sort of thing is very useful for the survival of our species but in other cases like social media for example our dopamine system can be manipulated by social media companies to change our behavior and keep us on these apps for way longer than we should so for example these companies know that we release more dopamine when we don't expect something so sometimes you'll be scrolling through Instagram reals or whatever and none of them will seem particularly interesting but suddenly you're hit with something super funny or you might have been browsing Instagram for some time and then it randomly will send you a notification telling you how many likes you got on your most recent post and this is what is called a random intermittent reward where you are shown something rewarding at random intervals and social media algorithms use this to keep giving us hits of dopamine and it keeps us on the apps for longer and the rise of social media and gaming and other addictive stuff is why dopamine is becoming an increasingly bigger topic of discussion oh by the way on route to being able to control your dopamine figuring out all this stuff you might like to check out a really helpful app called rise who are very kindly sponsoring this video rise is a really good automatic time tracker so what you do is that you install it on any device and what it does is that in the background it figures out what app you're using or what website you're on or whatever and it will then categorize things into work or entertainment or emails or communication and a bunch of different categories you can create custom categories as well I've been using rice for the last 2 and 1 half years now and it's just super helpful to see exactly where my time is going so I can see things like last month I spent an ungodly amount of time watching random Youtube videos during working hours where I sort of intended to work but then I ended up getting distracted by YouTube it's also got a built-in pomodora timer which is just kind of nice for being able to time your work sessions and the other nice thing about it is that it pops up with these like distraction reminders so if it senses like for me if I'm on Google Docs cuz I'm working on a writing project and then I open a new browser window to go on a news site or YouTube or something like that it will recognize hang on that's probably a distraction will pop up with a big popup asking hey are you getting distracted and then you can say yep thanks for the reminder or you can say nope this is not a distraction and even just that it's just like a oh yeah I getting distracted whoops thanks for the reminder let me go back to the thing that I was actually trying to do if you're interested in checking it out you can get a free trial at rise. i/ Al abdal and that will be linked down in the video description as well thank you so much rise for sponsoring this video okay so now that we know all of that let's talk about how can we control our dopamine and use it potentially to our advantage rather than becoming a slave to the social media algorithms part two how to control your dopamine okay so one thing that's fairly common here on YouTube around how to control your dopamine is the idea of a dopamine detox and the general idea here is that if you're feeling particularly addicted to social media or video games or porn or whatever the thing might be then by completely abstaining from those things and going cold turkey for a period of days or weeks you can in theory reset your dopamine levels and you can stop the addiction to that specific behavior now a lot of people don't understand the term dopamine detox they think it means detoxing from dopamine but you can't detox from dopamine because you need dopamine to like live and move and survive and it would be very bad if you tried to detox from dopamine instead dopamine detox is when you detox from dopamine inducing activities like The Addictive behaviors or the social media or the video games or whatever the thing might be so let's let's imagine two different scenarios we've got scenario 1 and scenario 2 and scenario 1 is someone who tries drugs for the first time the blue is their tonic background level of dopamine release and then at some point they try a drug and they get a phasic release of dopamine and this feels wonderful because you get lots of dopamine and dopamine feels good and this makes you want to continue using the drugs or whatever addictive behavior the thing might be but then the problem is if you use the addictive thing the drug the video game whatever the thing might be if you use it too often you actually increase your tonic levels of dopamine transmission and that means the next time you know after a while if you take the drug you get a phasic release but this phasic release doesn't really stand out compared to the tonic background level of dopamine and so to get the same hit of euphoria you need to increase the dose you need to take double the dose of the drug or play video games for even longer or go even more extreme and whatever the thing might be to get any sense of feeling good and when you're in this cycle of constantly having to seek out more to get that same sense of feeling good this is sometimes called a dopamine deficit State I believe that what's happening is that we as both individ ual and nations are exposed to so many high reward substances from our coffee in the morning to that first text that we read to our Netflix binge at night that were all in a chronic dopamine deficit State barely able to enjoy the modest rewards of life and experiencing more and more anxiety and depression that was DrAnna lmy who we mentioned before is a dopamine expert and the author of this book dopamine Nation why our addiction to pleasure is causing us pain and so really in this chronic dopamine deficit State the problem is that things that don't release a lot of dopamine like reading or watching a slow TV show or taking a walk in the park or hanging out with friends those things no longer make us feel good cuz we've got such a high tonic level of dopamine that we need an enormous signal to feel anything at all and that's one of the reasons why a lot of us find it hard to watch a TV show or a movie without checking our phone because we kind of need that extra hit of dopamine to feel anything at all which is kind of scary and so if you want to do a dopamine detox the idea is that really it's about resetting the balance between tonic and phasic dopamine release and you can almost think of it as resetting your Baseline levels of enjoyment we actively want the phasic signals to be heard above the tonic background noise of dopamine again and to do this we need to stop doing too much of the things that give us those big spikes in dopamine and those instant feelings of pleasure things like scrolling Tik Tok for too long or video gaming or gambling or eating too much sugary food late at night and really in short a dopamine detox is kind of just a fancy way of saying that we need to learn to enjoy The Simple Pleasures in life and the idea is that by resetting this balance between tonic and phasic dopamine release we will learn to become happier in a less stimulating environment oh by the way if you're enjoying this video so far you might like to check out my completely free Focus crash course it's at Focus crashcourse tocom it's a 7-Day series of emails where each day I'll email you some actionable strategies and tools that you can use to improve your focus and to really help take control of your dopamine it's completely free you can unsubscribe whenever you want there's a link down below or head over to focus crashcourse tocom part three four actionable strategies for controlling your dopamine strategy number one the rule of pain before pleasure so there's this nice diagram in DrAnna's book that shows this seesaw between Pleasure and Pain if you press too much on the pleasure side the brain will want to achieve homeostasis and go back towards pain it wants these things to be level but crucially if you press on the pain side then you're more likely to then experience pleasure and that's why this strategy is the rule of pain before pleasure because if you can get yourself to feel some sort of pain or do an uncomfortable thing first you're more likely to then experience the pleasure of doing the more pleasurable thing afterwards like for example when you've just finished watching an episode of your favorite Netflix show then you're going to want to watch another one and then another and then another but if you decide at any point not to continue watching that episode that next episode you're going to start to feel the sense of pain and so the way that I personally think about this is that if I'm about to do something that's highly dopamine inducing or highly pleasurable I'll sort of think how can I pay for this upfront by experiencing a little bit of discomfort so on the weekends for example I've got the whole day to myself and I know I want to play some Horizon forbidden West on the PS5 on the days where I just play Horizon forbidden West all day I actually don't feel that great but if I can talk myself into to the gym first or getting my 10,000 steps by walking around the park first and then it's almost like I'm rewarding myself for experiencing that discomfort with the video game the video game feels better and then also like going to the gym or going for a walk in the park those generally low dopamine activities also start to feel good and there's an interesting way of thinking of this which is sort of separating out two types of fun there's type one fun and then there's type two fun type one fun is the pure fun type of fun like playing a video game or whatever but type two fun is the fun that's sort of fun in hindsight like running a marathon or like going on a on a big challenge hike those are also fun but they're like kind of painful in the moment but they give you this incredible feeling of Joy afterwards and that's this idea of the pleasure pain seesaw tipping in the pain Direction so that you get more pleasure afterwards all right strategy number two is the rule of voidance so we talked about how always having these high dopamine activities like social media or videos or whatever always having them on increases our tonic levels of dopamine and so the rule of avoidance is basically to cultivate moments where you are not doing a high doine activity and you're ideally slowly phasing out those activities now it's worth appreciating that it takes about 4 weeks to reset our dopamine balance according to DrAna lmy and in those four weeks we need to avoid the addictive behavior altogether if we can this is the idea of dopamine detoxing and one of the best ways to do this is to avoid anything that reminds you of the thing that you find addictive and triggers are things that make us want to go back to using our drug and the key thing about triggers whatever they are is they also release a little bit of dopamine right so just thinking about whatever the trigger is that we associate with drug use or just thinking about drug use can already release this anticipatory DOP mean this little mini Spike so for example if you find yourself scrolling on Tik Tok too much at night then you might need to turn off your notifications entirely or just uninstall the app and get rid of notifications so that you don't have any cue or craving to open the app now breaking this cycle will take a bit of effort and you're definitely going to feel worse before you feel better because you'll experience this almost as withdrawal symptoms and this might include feeling agitated feeling angry and sometimes even not being being able to sleep but the idea is that over this 4 weeks as we explicitly avoid that behavior or detox from it we need to learn to enjoy ourselves without relying on those things that release lots of dopamine next up we have the rule of barriers so avoiding something entirely can be really hard especially if you feel kind of addicted to it so another way to help with this is to put up barriers and personal rules and this is more about creating a healthy balance of these kind of high dopamine behaviors rather than necessarily cutting them out completely and there are these three types of barriers that Dranaly talks about there is chronological geographical and categorical now chronological barriers are time barriers like limiting the amount of time you spend on social media apps or on your phone or in video games for example one thing that I personally do is I use the app opal which is a very good distraction blocker and it blocks all social media apps from 9:00 p. m.

at night all the way through to 9:00 a. m.