Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Product Information

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. Rather than giving us pleasure itself, as is commonly thought, dopamine motivates us to do things we think will bring pleasure. As the brain’s major reward and pleasure neurotransmitter, it’s what drives us to seek pizza when we’re hungry and sex when we’re aroused. Scientists use dopamine to measure “the addictive potential of any experience,” writes Lembke. The higher the dopamine release, the more addictive the thing. 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.

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 One wonders if all of the author's interpretations are as inelegant and rudimentary as his take on the concept of eudaimonia. 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. So certain things, chemicals, have a universal effect, they make everybody's dopamine go up. So some people like chocolate, some people don't, of course, but in general, it causes this increase in dopamine; but sex, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamine, those things cause increases in dopamine in everybody that takes them. Things like exercise, studying, hard work, working through a challenge in a relationship or working through something hard of any kind, that is going to be subjective as to how much dopamine will be released, and we will return to that subjective component in a little bit, but now you have a sense of how much dopamine can be evoked by different activities and by different substances. A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:

The Battle for Your Time

I was distracted when at work, distracted when with family and friends, constantly tired, irritable, and always swimming against a wash of ambient stress induced by my constant itch for digital information. My stress had an electronic feel to it, as if it was made up of the very bits and bytes on my screens."

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. 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. Epinephrine, also called adrenaline, is the main chemical driver of energy. We can't do anything, anything at all, unless we have some level of epinephrine in our brain and body. It's released from the adrenal glands, which ride atop our kidneys. It's released from an area of the brain stem called locus coeruleus, and its release tends to wake up neural circuits in the brain and wake up various aspects of our body's physiology and give us a readiness. So it should come as no surprise that dopamine and epinephrine, aka adrenaline, hang out together. In fact, epinephrine and adrenaline are actually manufactured from dopamine. There's a biochemical pathway involving dopamine, which is a beautiful pathway — if ever you want to look it up, you could just look up biochemistry of dopamine, but what you'll find is that L-dopa is converted into dopamine. Dopamine is converted into noradrenaline, norepinephrine, it's also called, and noradrenaline, norepinephrine, is converted into adrenaline.

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

Just when you thought you knew all you needed to know about the addiction crisis, along comes Dr. Anna Lembke with her second brilliant book on the topic—this one not about a drug but about the most powerful chemical of all: the dopamine that rules the pain and pleasure centers of our minds. In an era of overconsumption and instant gratification, Dopamine Nation explains the personal and societal price of being ruled by the next fix—and how to manage it. No matter what you might find yourself over-indulging in—from the internet to food to work to sex—you’ll find this book riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued. Lembke weaves patient stories with research, in a voice that’s as empathetic as it is clear-eyed.”