Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

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If ever you've interacted with somebody who just doesn't seem to have any drive, they've given up, or if you've interacted with somebody who seems to have endless drive and energy, what you are looking at there in those two circumstances is without question a difference in the level of dopamine circulating in their system. There will be other factors too, but the level of dopamine is the primary determinant of how motivated we are, how excited we are, how outward facing we are, and how willing we are to lean into life and pursue things. They're drinking one or two days on the weekend. They are one of these work hard, play hard types. So they're swimming a couple miles in the ocean in the middle of the week, as well. They're going out dancing once on the weekend. Sounds like a pretty balanced life, as I describe it. Well, here's the problem. The problem is that dopamine is not just evoked by one of these activities. Dopamine is evoked by all of these activities, and dopamine is one currency of craving, motivation, and desire and pleasure. There's only one currency. So even though if you look at the activities, you'd say, well, it's just on the weekends, or this thing is only a couple times a week. If you looked at dopamine simply as a function, as a chemical function of peaks and baseline, it might make sense why this person, after several years of work hard, play hard, would say, yeah, I'm feeling kind of burned out. So do like the casinos do, it certainly works for them, and for activities that you would like to continue to engage in over time, whatever those happen to be, start paying attention to the amount of dopamine and excitement and pleasure that you achieve with those and start modulating that somewhat at random. That might be removing some of the dopamine-releasing chemicals that you might take prior. Maybe you remove them every time, but then every once in a while you introduce them. Maybe it involves sometimes doing things socially, that you enjoy doing socially, sometimes doing the same thing, but alone. There are a lot of different ways to do this. There are a lot of different ways to approach this, but now knowing what you know about peaks and baselines in dopamine, and understanding how important it is not just to achieve peaks but to maintain that baseline at a healthy level, it should be straightforward for you to implement these intermittent schedules. Also, on a side note, for the love of God and all you hold dear, please stop this nonsense encountered so often in nonfiction books of introducing concepts as follows:

Trevor Haynes is a research technician in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. For more information: Sitting prominently in the category of books that didn’t get a lot of attention but should have, Kevin J. Mitchell’s exploration of neuroscience research—from intelligence, to perception, to sexuality—is a must-read that I’m pleased toconclude the first part of this list with, perchance a few readers may go find it for themselves. If, for example, you’ve been interested in understanding why some of us see blue in a dress while others see gold, or some hear “yanny” and not “laurel,” this is the book that offers a way to understand the answers. It’s all in the neural wiring, after all, but what influences the wiring that influences our perception? Mitchell’s book explains what’s going on behind the firewall. Research has found that reading novels improves our brain functions on a variety of levels, including the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and flex your imagination. It also boosts our innovative thinking skills. Take it from Elon Musk, arguably one of the most innovative minds of our time. He's said that growing up, he spent more than 10 hours a day pouring through science fiction novels. In today's rapidly changing world, innovation is necessary for any business to stay competitive. Many of these ideas are familiar: we’ve all heard about digital detoxes and mindfulness practices, but unlike many spiritual gurus, Lembke is straight-shooting. She is not promising sunshine and rainbows. Yes, it’s natural and healthy to pursue enjoyment, but our consumer culture has created an expectation “that life is supposed to be so fun!” she says. “And really, it’s not. Life is a slog and I think if we could admit that and take comfort in knowing we’re not alone in the day-to-day struggle, paradoxically, we would be happier.” We’re losing our capacity to delay gratification, solve problems We all desire a break from our routines and those parts of life that upset us. What if, instead of trying to escape these things, we learn to turn toward them, to reach a peaceful harmony with ourselves and the people we share our lives with? Lembke has written a book that radically changes the way we think about mental illness, pleasure, pain, reward, and stress. Turn toward it. You’ll be happy you did.”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. Okay, so we've got these two pathways. One mainly for movement. This is the substantia nigra to dorsal striatum. And we've got this other pathway, the so-called mesocorticolimbic pathway that's for reward, reinforcement and motivation. I want you to remember that there are two pathways. If you don't remember the two pathways in detail, that's fine, but please remember that there are two pathways because that turns out to be important later.

I ask myself in such contexts what influence meditation, mindfulness, and positive psychology might have on the neurochemistry of the brain and, in this case, especially on the essential little helpers that make our emotional spectrum so manifold, wonderful, irresponsible, and prone to lunacy. Applying lessons learned from inside her Silicon Valley office, which is furnished with a painting of giant peaches and a colourful coffee-stained tapestry, she’s urging us to make space in our brains to let our thoughts wash over us rather than constantly seeking stimulation. It might seem a little less fun and it will involve tolerating discomfort rather than seeking refuge in shiny things, but this “new form of asceticism” is, she promises, the “path to the good life”. There's the danger of a cut to your skin that could lead to infection. There's the danger of storms, there's the danger of cold. There's the danger of leaving your loved ones behind. So you go out and forage, right? You could be hunting, you could be gathering, or you could be doing both. The going out and foraging process was, we are certain, driven by dopamine. I mean there's no fossil record of the brain, but these circuits have existed, we know, for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and they are present in every animal, not just mammals, but even in little worms like C. elegans. The same process, it's mediated by dopamine. So dopamine drives you to go out and look for things, and then let's say you find a couple berries. These ones are rotten, these ones are good. Maybe you hunt an animal and kill it, or you find an animal that was recently killed and you decide to take the meat; you are going to achieve or I should say experience some sort of dopamine release. For those who enjoy some history with their science, Epstein’s book is the place to go for understanding how we know what we know about our bodies’ chemical ringmasters. From tests on brains in jars to the precise hormonal research of the past couple of decades, Aroused covers the gamut, while also telling an engaging story about the role hormones play in just about every facet of our lives. It’s a detective tale with multiple twists, and an informativemust read for the year.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. You don't do the exercise and expect dopamine to arrive through some, what we call, exogenous source as well. You might think, "Well, that sounds lame. I want to continue to enjoy exercising." Ah, but that's exactly the point. If you want to maintain motivation for school, exercise, relationships, or pursuits of any duration and kind, the key thing is to make sure that the peak in dopamine, if it's very high, doesn't occur too often, and if something does occur very often, that you vary how much dopamine you experience with each engagement in that activity. I was in college when this whole MPTP thing happened, and I remember hearing this story. At the time, I had no understanding of what it is to have very high levels of dopamine or extremely depleted levels of dopamine. There was no reason why I should have that understanding. I mean, of course, I had experienced different pleasures of different kinds, and I've had lows in my life, but nothing to the extreme that I'm about to discuss.

Well, first of all, it is not just responsible for pleasure. It is responsible for motivation and drive, primarily at the psychological level, also for craving. Those three things are sort of the same. Motivation, drive and craving. It also controls time perception, and we will get deep into how dopamine can modulate time perception and how important it is that everybody be able to access increases in dopamine at different time scales. This turns out to be important to not end up addicted to substances, but it also turns out to be very important to sustain effort and be a happy person over long periods of time, which I think most everybody wants. It certainly is adaptive in life to be able to do that. Sistemul dopaminic s-a dezvoltat pentru a ne motiva să supraviețuim. Activarea ei provoacă dorință, entuziasm, speranță. Fără ea nu putem depune efort.

Additionally, this book reaches too far trying to explain too much through too little: love, sex, drug use, creativity, madness, political preference, progress, immigration, you name it - dopamine influences and even determines human behavior in almost any situation. I am not saying it does not play a role, I am saying the author is riding his hobby-horse to death. 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 that you might be wondering about is caffeine. I'm certainly drinking my caffeine today, and I do enjoy caffeine in limited quantities. I drink yerba maté and I drink coffee, and I love it. Does it increase dopamine? Well, a little bit. Caffeine will increase dopamine to some extent, but it is pretty modest compared to the other things that I described. Chocolate, sex, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamine, and so on. However, there's a really interesting paper published in 2015. This is Volkow et al. You can look it up. It's very easy to find. That showed that regular ingestion of caffeine, whether or not it's from coffee or otherwise, increases upregulation of certain dopamine receptors. So caffeine actually makes you able to experience more of dopamine's effects, because as I mentioned before, dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or its release volumetrically, but then it has to bind someplace and trigger those G-protein-coupled receptors, and caffeine increases the number, the density of those G-protein-coupled receptors. endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin, endocannabinoids” เพื่อให้อยู่กับความจริง เข้าอกเข้าใจความรู้สึก พอใจกับคู่ชีวิต กับสิ่งที่ได้

From dopamine's point of view, it's not the having that matters. It's getting something--anything--that's new. From this understanding--the difference between possessing something versus anticipating it--we can understand in a revolutionary new way why we behave as we do in love, business, addiction, politics, religion - and we can even predict those behaviors in ourselves and others. For those of you that are begging for more specificity, we can give you a tool. One would be you can flip a coin before engaging in any of these types of activities and decide whether or not you are going to allow other dopamine-supportive elements to go, for instance, into the gym with you. Are you going to listen to music or not? If you enjoy listening to music, well then flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, bring the music in. If it comes up tails, don't. Okay? Sounds like you are undercutting your own progress, but actually you are serving your own progress both short term and long term by doing that. Now, the smartphone is a very interesting tool for dopamine, in light of all this. It's extremely common nowadays to see people texting and doing selfies, and communicating in various ways, listening to podcasts, listening to music, doing all sorts of things while they engage in other activities, or going to dinner and texting other people, or making plans, sharing information.

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Responsible action is a delicate balance – excessive dopamine activity can become impractical and is speculated at times even lead to mental illnesses. The influence of Dopamine on politics, sex, relationships, emotions, political affiliations, religion and business is all discussed in a good amount of detail. Creativitatea reflectă creierul în forma sa cea mai elevată. Boala mintală este opusul.” Cel mai interesant capitol mi s-a părut cel despre creativitate și nebunie. Se vorbește despre saliență, vise, boli, modele mentale artă și altele, toate prin prisma dopaminei. Well, dopamine is unique among chemicals in the brain because dopamine, unlike a lot of chemicals in the brain, works through what are called G-protein-coupled receptors. And for those of you that are about to pass out from the amount of detail, just hang in there with me, it's really not complicated. There are two ways that neurons can communicate, or mainly two ways. There are a third and a fourth, but mostly neurons communicate by two modes. One is what we call fast electrical synapses, ionotropic conduction, all right? You don't need to know what that means, but basically one neuron activates another neuron and little holes open up in that neuron and ions rush in. Lembke is sanguine that we can beat our digital dependencies by embracing a more monastic mindset. She advocates replacing some pleasure-seeking vices with“painful” pursuits. When we do things that are challenging – going for a run, having an ice bath, talking to a stranger, reading a book on philosophy – instead of receiving a dopamine boost beforehand we experience it afterwards. “Doing things that are hard is one of the best ways to pursue a life worth living, because the pleasure we get afterwards is more enduring,” she says.We tend to forget that earned highs are that much sweeter. So now we've given some meat to this thing that we call the pleasure-pain balance, and now it should make perfect sense why if you take something or do something that leads to huge increases in dopamine, afterward your baseline should drop, because there isn't a lot of dopamine around to keep your baseline going. Fortunately, most people do not experience or pursue enormous increases in dopamine leading to these severe drops in baseline. Many people do however, and that's what we call addiction. When somebody pursues a drug or an activity that leads to huge increases in dopamine, and now you understand that afterward, the baseline of dopamine drops because of depletion of dopamine, the readily releasable pool; the dopamine is literally not around to be released, and so people feel pretty lousy, and many people make the mistake of then going and pursuing the dopamine, evoking the dopamine-releasing activity or substance again, thinking mistakenly that it's going to bring up their baseline, it's going to give them that peak again.