Living in a Dopamine Nation

Dopamine is one of the most powerful molecules we all have inside of ourselves. And we must think carefully about how we leverage it, according to Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The baseline of dopamine in your body is a pretty good indicator of how you feel, whether you're in a good mood or not. How much dopamine is in your system compared to a few minutes ago and how much we remember something enjoyable in the past lends itself to determining your quality of life, Huberman said during a 90-min deep dive into dopamine during a recent episode of his podcast, Huberman Lab. 

I'm fascinated with dopamine and its impact on our motivation, drive and achieving flow states. My basic interest began by trying to understand how it works in helping people develop new habits and how it can be managed to break bad habits.

When working with the Tiny Habits® method from Dr. B.J. Fogg, the integration of a celebration after completing a new habit is an integral part of the method. The formula we developed at our self-leadership program Be Your Own Best Coach was to savor the moment after you do a wanted behavior. Both actions are to make the new habit pleasurable and release a little dopamine to develop a craving for the new behavior.

Additionally, dopamine is vital to achieving flow states, the optimal state of consciousness where you feel your best and perform at your best. When I present workshops on how to get into flow states more consistently, the area that I am most passionate about is the recovery phase. It’s the phase right after the flow state. If you stay in flow too long, you’re releasing dopamine and a series of other neurochemicals at levels that will cause a crash and could lock you out of flow. 

For these reasons, learning more about dopamine is essential for performing at our best. Or as Huberman said, how we leverage dopamine is very powerful.

What's exciting about dopamine is new research is continuing to illuminate more insights into this molecule. 

“In the press, dopamine is often referred to as a ‘pleasure molecule’ or a ‘reward molecule,’” said Erin Calipari, who also is a faculty member of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute and the Center for Addiction Research. "...dopamine is not a reward molecule at all. It instead helps encode information about all types of important and relevant events and drive adaptive behavior—regardless of whether it is positive or negative.”

A new book by psychiatrist Anna Lembke called Dopamine Nation highlights why we should all be learning more about how to manage this molecule.

"It's important to recognize that addiction is a spectrum disorder, and it is possible to be a little bit addicted," Lembke told Terry Gross on a recent edition of NPR's Fresh Air. 

"Also, the same brain mechanisms that mediate severe addiction also mediate our minor addictions. ... I don't think that anybody is immune from this problem. And I do believe that smartphones are addictive. They've been engineered to be addictive and ... we don't really need more studies to show that that's true. All you need to do is go outside and look around."

DOPAMINE BASELINE

Now back to the subject of the baseline of dopamine in your system, the indicator of how you feel, whether you're in a good mood or not. When you get a spike in your dopamine, it corresponds with a depletion in your dopamine.

"One of the most fascinating findings in neuroscience in the last 75 years is that the same areas of the brain that process pleasure also process pain and that pleasure and pain work like a balance," according to Lembke.

"When that pleasure/pain balance tilts to the side of pain after the experience of pleasure, that pain is subjectively experienced as a number of different things. One of [them] is a subjective feeling of being uncomfortable, restless, irritable, unhappy and wanting to re-create the feeling of pleasure. But that's also in many ways what craving is: wanting to have the pleasure, again, being preoccupied with eliminating the experience of pain that we feel in the aftermath."

For comparison, here’s how much dopamine increases above baseline in your system for the following items:

  • Chocolate 55%

  • Nicotine 100%

  • Sex 100%

  • Cocaine 225%

  • Amphetamine 1000%

  • Adderall 1000%

Often we’re also stacking pleasurable dopamine-releasing activities on top of each other, like working out while listening to music after taking a pre-workout energy drink. This can result in dulling the enjoyment of the individual activities.

What can we do?

First, be mindful of the quantity and height of your dopamine peaks. The old saying, Don’t let your highs get too high or your lows too low is backed up by the science of dopamine.

Huberman suggests not always stacking pleasurable activities on top of each other. Make it more random. For example, on some of your workout days, don’t listen to music and skip that energy drink.

Cold Exposure

Building that dopamine baseline is another good strategy. Cold exposure such as a cold shower or a cold plunge can help raise your dopamine baseline. Cold exposure has been a health and wellness solution for as long as history has been documented. It’s been most recently been popularized by Wim Hof, also known as ‘The Iceman’. He developed protocols for handling extreme cold including breathing techniques I wrote about in my article, Time to Take A Breath.

According to Huberman, studies have shown that cold exposure can have the same increase in dopamine levels as cocaine, but without the corresponding drop below baseline, aka the crash. In fact, it helps strengthen that baseline. Wim Hof has shown that cold exposure has created an array of benefits in his autonomic nervous system and immune system.

“The increase in dopamine from a cold water exposure of this kind was comparable to what one sees from cocaine, except, except in this case it wasn't a rise and crash,” Huberman said on his podcast. “It was actually a sustained rise in dopamine that took a very long time, up to three hours, to come back down to baseline, which is really remarkable. And I think this explains some of the positive mental and physical effects that people report subjectively after doing cold water exposure.” 

Dopamine Fasting

If you're stuck doing a dopamine releasing activity repeatedly, both Lembke and Huberman said a 30-day break is recommended to reset to your dopamine baseline. In my behavior design work, I also recommend creating new habits while on the 30-day break that are opposite of the unwanted behavior. For example, if on a break from social media and you feel a craving to look at social media, find an offline activity that you enjoy and is better for your mental health such as going for a walk or stretching.

Some even take to a dopamine fasting strategy. When dopamine fasting you're trying to reduce exposure to as much dopamine increasing activities as possible.

“The point of dopamine fasting is to increase behavioral flexibility, by reducing impulsive behavior for extended periods of time,” Cameron Sepah, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco, said to Vox. 

Sepah defined dopamine fasting when he published a guide to dopamine fasting on LinkedIn. “Taking a break from behaviors that trigger strong amounts of dopamine release (especially in a repeated fashion) allows our brain to recover and restore itself,” he wrote.

Telling the Truth

While we're all addicted to a behavior in at least a minor way that gives us a dopamine release and subsequent craving, Lembke said learning from severe addicts can help with minor addictions or uncontrolled dopamine release. She said that telling the truth, which is often part of a recovery program, strengthens the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. 

The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain behind your forehead that handles the executive functions of the brain, it’s the slower logic part of the brain. The limbic system, evolutionarily the oldest part of the brain, is involved in our behavioural and emotional responses. It’s quick and reactionary, and is important for survival. It’s the fight, flight or freeze part of the brain.

So what’s incredible about the science is learning that telling the truth, even with the small things, strengthens this connection between the executive part of the brain and its autonomic response system. This is similar to what studies have shown meditation also strengthens. In both cases, this gives you space to let the dopamine craving subside and return to baseline. 

This article gives you a little insight into how to leverage dopamine to move in the direction you want to go and leave behind what isn’t helping you. I encourage you to check out the following resources to learn more:


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