00:00:00 Introduction & Tool 1 to Induce Lasting Dopamine
Dopamine is responsible for:
Motivation, desire, and craving
Satisfaction and feelings of wellbeing
Addiction to all things
This podcast will focus on:
What we do, how we do it, and how we conceptualize those things leads to changes in our dopamine levels.
What dopamine is and what it isn't
There are many myths about dopamine that need to be dispelled
How Dopamine works:
Biology
Psychology
Neural circuits
Dopamine schedules
Food, drugs, caffeine, porn even some plant-based compounds can change our baseline levels of dopamine and subsequently the levels of dopamine we are capable of experiencing from very satisfying or dissatisfying events in the future.
This will be a vast discussion that will be well structured and you will come away with a deep understanding of:
What drives you
Tools to leverage dopamine
How to sustain energy, drive, and motivation over long periods of time.
Fascinating results from a paper published in the European Journal of Physiology underscore what dopamine is capable of and how behaviors alone can allow us to achieve very high sustained increases in dopamine levels in ways that serve us.
The study involved:
Human subjects getting into water of different temperatures
Warm, moderately cool, and very cold
They sat in the water for up to an hour
Measurements of cortisol, norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine were gathered
The study found:
Cold water exposure led to very rapid increases in norepinephrine and epinephrine, as well as dopamine
The increases in dopamine were very significant
They kicked in after 10-15 minutes of cold water submersion and continued to rise, eventually reaching levels as high as 250% above baseline.
After getting out of the water this increase was sustained
Many people are interested in cold water therapy as a way to increase metabolism and fat loss, but also to improve the sense of well-being, cognition, clarity of mind
There is something special about this very alert but calm state of mind that seems to be optimal for everything except for sleep, from all aspects of work to social engagements, to learning and sports.
Cold water exposure done correctly really can help people achieve that state of mind.
The details of this study and what it entailed will be discussed later on as well as:
How to limit the amount of cortisol (stress hormone) that's released as a result of the cold water.
Compounds (supplements) people can take to increase their levels of dopamine should they choose.
00:04:48 Sponsors: Roka, InsideTracker, Headspace
00:09:10 Upcoming (Zero-Cost) Neuroplasticity Seminar for Educators
00:09:58 What Dopamine (Really) Does
Tonic and phasic release of dopamine
Most people have heard of dopamine, usually in terms of 'dopamine hits' but these are a bit of a myth, and misunderstandings of this need to be dispelled.
Your body uses dopamine at baseline concentrations, meaning there is a set amount of the chemical that is always circulating in your brain and body (tonic release).
This is important for how you generally feel; whether you're in a good mood, motivated, etc.
You also can experience peaks in dopamine above that baseline (tonic) level, so-called phasic releases of dopamine.
These two things interact and this is very important to know and understand
The underlying neurobiology for this will be taught clearly
If you remember nothing else from this episode, remember that when you experience or crave something really desirable, exciting, and pleasurable that afterward your baseline level of dopamine drops.
These peaks of dopamine (phasic) will influence how much dopamine will generally be circulating afterward (tonic).
You might think that after a big peak in dopamine you will end up feeling even better because of the pleasurable/desirable event, but what actually happens is that your baseline level of dopamine drops after that peak experience, and your general mood thereafter will be lower.
The precise mechanism for how these two things interact will be explained.
Dopamine has everything to do with how you feel right now as you're listening to this, how you will feel an hour from now, your level of motivation, desire, and your willingness to push through effort.
If you've ever interacted with anyone who doesn't seem to have any drive, who's given up, or someone who seems to have endless drive and energy, what you are looking at is a difference in the level of dopamine circulating in their systems WITHOUT QUESTION.
There will be other factors too, but 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.
Dopamine is what we call a neuromodulator
Neuromodulators are different from neurotransmitters
Neurotransmitters are involved in the dialogue between neurons (nerve cells) tending to mediate local communication
Like two people talking to one another at a concert
Neuromodulators influence the communication of many neurons
Like many people dancing in coordination at a concert
In the nervous system, this means that dopamine levels will change the probability that certain neural circuits will be active and that other neural circuits will be inactive
It modulates many things at once and this is why it's so powerful at shifting not just our levels of energy, but also our mindset, our feelings of whether or not we CAN or CANNOT accomplish something.
How does dopamine work and what does it do?
Responsible for motivation, drive and craving at the psychological level
Controls time perception
We will get deep into how it modulates time perception and how important it is that everybody be able to access increases in dopamine at different time scales.
Important to avoid addiction to substances and sustain effort and be happy over long periods of time.
Vitally important for movement
The difference in dopamine for mindset and dopamine for movement will be discussed
In diseases like Parkinson's or Lewy Body dementia, there is a depletion or death of dopamine neurons in a particular area of the brain which leads to shaky movements, challenges in speaking, initiating movement, as well as drops in motivation and affect.
00:15:30 Two Main Neural Circuits for Dopamine
There are 2 main neural circuits in the brain that dopamine uses in order to exert all its effects.
The first is a pathway that goes from the ventral tegmentum to the ventral striatum and the prefrontal cortex.
This is the mesocorticolimbic pathway
This is the pathway by which dopamine influences motivation, drive, and craving
Involves structures like the nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex
Gets heavily disrupted in addictions by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine.
If you are pursuing anything in life you are tapping into this mesocorticolimbic pathway
The other pathway emerges from the substantia nigra
The cells in this area are dark and connect to the dorsal striatum
This is the nigrostriatal pathway
The first part of neuroanatomical nomenclature tells you where the neurons are, the second part tells you where they are connecting to.
This is heavily involved in movement.
Remember that there are 2 pathways as this turns out to be important later.
00:18:14 How Dopamine Is Released: Locally and Broadly
Dopamine can be released locally, between two neurons, and broadly over many neurons at once.
Synapses are the little spaces between neurons
Neurons communicate with one another by making each other either more or less electrically active
One nerve cell influences the next to fire (become electrically active) by spewing out vesicles (little packets) of chemicals, when they enter the synapse some of it docks on the other neuron, and by virtue of electrical changes in the postsynaptic neuron that neuron will fire.
Dopamine can do this like any other neurotransmitter or neuromodulator, however, dopamine can also engage in volumetric release.
The volumetric release is like a giant spew of packets that influences thousands of cells.
This makes dopamine interesting because it can have influences from a very narrow to a very broad scale.
If you were to take a drug or supplement that increases your level of dopamine you are influencing both the local and volumetric releases of dopamine.
This is important because you are affecting your baseline and peaks above baseline levels.
Many drugs that increase dopamine will make it harder for you to sustain dopamine release over long periods of time, and to achieve those peaks that most of us crave when we are in pursuit of things.
When both the volumetric and local releases are being affected the difference between the peak and baseline is likely to be smaller.
How satisfying a reward is doesn't just depend on the height of the peak, but the height of the peak relative to baseline.
If you increase the baseline and the peak levels, you are not going to achieve more and more pleasure from things.
Increasing your dopamine levels overall will make you excited about all things but it will also make that motivation very short-lived.
There is a better way to optimize this peak-to-baseline ratio that will be discussed.
We have covered:
2 main neural circuits, one for movement and one for motivation and craving.
2 main modes of communication with dopamine. Local and broad.
00:22:03 Fast and Slow Effects of Dopamine
Dopamine is unique compared to other neurotransmitters because it works through what are called g-protein-coupled receptors.
Mostly neurons communicate through one of 2 modes (there are others)
fast electrical synapses (ionotropic conduction) basically one neuron activates another and ions rush in through ion gates (usually Na+) .
Slower g-protein coupled receptors
Dopamine is released in these little vesicles, some of it binds the postsynaptic neuron and it will set off a cascade of events.
Although g-protein coupled receptors are slow they also have multiple cascading effects, they can even impact things like gene expression or how well or how poorly that cell will respond to the same signal in the future.
The effects of dopamine take a while in order to occur
This is important because it now underscores 2 things additional things:
Dopamine has two pathways to communicate, (craving and movement)
There are 2 scales at which dopamine can act (local and broad)
Dopamine can have slow effects, really slow effects or very long-lasting effects (even gene expression)
00:25:03 Dopamine Neurons Co-Release Glutamate
Dopamine doesn't function alone
Neurons that release dopamine co-release glutamate
Glutamate is a neurotransmitter that is excitatory meaning it stimulates neurons to be electrically active.
You should now begin to get a picture that dopamine is responsible for movement, motivation and drive, but also that it stimulates action in general because it releases this excitatory neurotransmitter tending to making neurons more active.
Dopamine is very stimulating overall, we say that it tends to stimulate sympathetic arousal
When the sympathetic nervous system is active it brings us into a state of more alertness, readiness with a stronger desire to pursue things outside the confines of our skin.
In summary, dopamine, when released tends to make you look outside yourself, pursue things outside yourself, and crave things outside of yourself and delivers the pleasure that arrives from achieving things, (this also involves other molecules.)
If you've ever felt lethargic and lazy with low motivation or drive; that’s a low dopamine state
If you've ever felt really motivated and excited (perhaps even a little scared) you are in a high dopamine state.
Dopamine is a universal currency that you use to track pleasure, success, and whether or not you are doing well or poorly.
How much dopamine is in our system at any one time compared to how much dopamine was in our system a few minutes ago and how much we remember enjoying a particular experience of the past dictates your so-called 'quality of life' and your desire to pursue things.
This is subjective, but if your dopamine is too low, you will not feel motivated, if it is really high you will feel motivated.
If your dopamine is somewhere in the middle, how you feel will depend on whether or not you had higher levels or lower levels of dopamine a few minutes ago.
00:28:00 Your Dopamine History Really Matters
Your experience of life and your level of motivation and drive depends on how much dopamine you have relative to your recent experiences.
This is something that isn't accounted for in the simple language of 'dopamine hits'.
A simple way to envision dopamine hits is that every time you do something you like you get an increase in dopamine.
This is correct, however if you enjoy something and get a peak, things that you might otherwise have found enjoyable might not be interesting in comparison shortly thereafter as they don't stimulate the same level of dopamine release.
If you do something later it might be more interesting than immediately after something else that you have experienced as enjoyable.
How much you enjoy something depends on your baseline level of dopamine when you arrive there and your previous dopamine peaks.
When you repeatedly engage in something that you enjoy, your threshold for enjoyment goes up and up and up.
We will talk about this process and explain how it works because if you understand it along with some of these schedules and kinetics around dopamine you will be in a terrific position to use any dopamine enhancing tools that you decide to use, modulate and control your own dopamine release for optimal motivation and drive.
For people who want more information on the biology of dopamine transmission, there is a link to a review of that was published in nature reviews neuroscience called Spatial and temporal scales of dopamine transmission.
00:30:30 Parkinson’s & Drugs That Kill Dopamine Neurons. My Dopamine Experience
2 anecdotes, one from Huberman's personal life and one from recent history illustrate some of the core biology of dopamine and how profoundly it can shape our experience.
Tragic situation occurred in the 80s when there was an outbreak of what looked like Parkinson's symptoms in a young population.
Parkinson's is a disease where people will start to quake, and have issues with smooth movements, speech, and sometimes cognition as well.
Typically it hits people later in life and has a genetic component.
There is a question of whether or not certain lifestyle factors can also create Parkinson's.
Some years ago illicit laboratories were trying to make a drug called MPPP which is an opiod-like compound a bit like heroin.
Heroin addicts went out and bought what they thought was MPPP, unfortunately, what they ended up taking ended up being a lot worse; MPTP.
A number of opioid addicts took this and ended up becoming completely boxed in and paralyzed.
Both aspects of dopamine transmission were disrupted.
They had no motivation and drive
They couldn't generate any movement of any kind
This condition is irreversible because MPTP kills the dopaminergic neurons of the substantia nigra and the mesocorticolimbic pathway.
Huberman was in college when this happened and at the time he had no understanding of what it was to have very high or very low levels of dopamine.
He had experienced regular ups and downs of life and various pleasures but nothing compared to this next anecdote.
Huberman got Giardia which is a stomach bug that causes terrible diarrhea and is extremely unpleasant.
He ended up going to the emergency room and ended up begging them for something to stop up his guts.
They put in a saline line for hydration and injected it with Thorazine.
Thorazine is an antipsychotic drug given to people who have schizophrenia and functions by blocking dopamine receptors.
Within minutes he felt more sadness, and an overwhelming sense of depression than he's ever felt in his entire life, it was absolutely profound. He was crying miserably without understanding why he was crying.
He then begged them to give him l-dopa to get his dopamine levels back up again.
They did and within minutes he felt fine again.
It was incredible for him and really opened up his mind to what it is to have plummeted levels of dopamine.
The poor souls who took MPTP lost all their dopamine cells,
People with Parkinson's struggle with this as well because their dopamine-producing cells often die; it's not merely a problem of them not releasing enough dopamine.
We will discuss dopamine neuron health and protection as they are very precious.
Huberman's experience with Thorazine opened his eyes to the fact that dopamine is perhaps one of the most powerful molecules that any of us has inside of us and one we ought to all think very carefully about how we leverage.
While most experiences and things we do, take, and eat won't create enormous highs and lows in dopamine, even subtle fluctuations in it really shape our perception of life and how we feel so we want to guard them and ensure we understand them.
00:36:58 Tool 3 Controlling Dopamine Peaks & Baselines
We want to keep the baseline in the appropriate healthy place and still be able to access the peaks in dopamine, as these are some of what makes life rich and worth living.
All of us have different baseline levels of dopamine
Some of this is sure to be genetic, some people simply ride at a higher level and are a little bit more excited and motivated than others who are a little mellower and less excitable
Some of this has to do with the fact that dopamine doesn't act alone It has close cousins and friends in the nervous system
Epinephrine (adrenaline) is the main chemical driver of energy, it's released from the adrenal glands above our kidneys and from an area of the brainstem called the locus coeruleus.
Its release tends to wake up neural circuits in the brain and various aspects of our body's physiology giving us a 'readiness'
Dopamine and epinephrine often work in conjunction with one another
Epinephrine is manufactured from dopamine,
l-dopa is converted to dopamine, to nor-epinephrine, and then to epinephrine.
Any time you discuss a peak or release in dopamine that inevitably means you have an increase in epinephrine as well.
Dopamine colors the subjective experience of an activity to make it more pleasurable,
Epinephrine is more about energy; fear, mental paralysis, and trauma.
If dopamine is mixed in with this state of fear then it becomes a state of 'excitement'
00:40:06 Chocolate, Sex (Pursuit & Behavior), Nicotine, Cocaine, Amphetamine, Exercise
What sorts of things increase dopamine and by how much?
Recall that we all have a baseline level of dopamine, but your level of dopamine has as much to do with what you've experienced in the previous days and months etc.
When you do/ingest certain things your levels of dopamine can rise above baseline transiently.
Depending on what you do/ingest it can rise either more or less, or it will be very brief or last a long time.
Some of the typical things that people do or eat that increase dopamine with some average measurements from microdialysis studies in animals or from serum measurements in humans
Chocolate: will increase your baseline level of dopamine 1.5x, transiently for either a few minutes or even a few seconds.
Sex: both the pursuit and the act of sex increase dopamine 2x on average.
The different aspects of sex have different effects on dopamine levels, but for now, as a general activity, it roughly doubles the amount of dopamine in circulation.
Nicotine (smoked): Increases dopamine 2.5x above baseline that is very short-lived which is understood by observing chain smokers.
Cocaine: 2.5x above baseline
Amphetamine: 10x above baseline (a tremendous increase)
Exercise: Will have a different impact on the levels of dopamine depending on how much someone subjectively enjoys that exercise
If you're somebody who LOVES running, the chances are it's going to increase your levels of dopamine 2x above baseline, not unlike sex.
People who dislike exercise will achieve a lower or no dopamine increase as a result.
If you like other forms of exercise like yoga, weightlifting, swimming, etc. the increase is going to vary depending on your subjective experience of those activities.
This is important and brings us back to something we talked about earlier
The 'cortical' part of the mesocorticolimbic pathway is important because the prefrontal cortex is the area of your brain involved in thinking planning and assigning rational explanations, and subjective experiences to things.
e.g Huberman likes Pilot v5 pens, if he spent enough time thinking or talking about it he could probably get a dopamine increase from that alone.
As we begin to engage with something more and more, what we say about it and what we encourage ourselves to think about it has a profound impact on its rewarding or non-rewarding properties.
It's not simply the case that you can lie to yourself and tell yourself that you love something when you don't really love it and increase dopamine. However, if people journal about something or practice some form of appreciation for something and they think of some aspect of something they enjoy the amount of dopamine that behavior will evoke tends to go up.
For people who hate exercise, you can think about some aspect of it that you genuinely enjoy.
Don't tell yourself you hate something but that you love the reward you give yourself afterward!
The reward given after displeasurable events can actually make the situation worse by undermining the dopamine release that would otherwise occur for that activity.
Certain things have a universal effect in making people's dopamine levels go up such as sex, nicotine, cocaine, and amphetamines.
The amount of dopamine released from things like exercise, studying, hard work, working through a challenge in a relationship, or something challenging of any kind is going to be subjective and vary from person to person.
This subjective component will be explained in more detail later.
00:46:46 Tool 4 Caffeine Increases Dopamine Receptors
Caffeine will increase dopamine slightly, but it's pretty modest compared to some of the things that have already been discussed.
Regular ingestion of caffeine increases the upregulation of certain dopamine receptors, so caffeine makes you more sensitive to dopamines effects.
Caffeine increases the number and density of the g-coupled protein receptors.
You might think of people having a cigarette and a cup of coffee together, or smoking and drinking together, this is because different compounds or certain behaviors and compounds can synergize to give bigger dopamine increases.
It's not uncommon for people to take things like pre-workout substances or energy drinks leading to big stimulating effects on dopamine and nor-epinephrine and then exercise to get an even greater dopaminergic experience out of the workout.
This approach of simply trying to get your dopamine as high as you possibly can in order to get the most out of a particular experience is not optimal.
Layering in multiple substances and activities that lead to big increases in dopamine can create severe issues with motivation and energy right after those experiences and even multiple days later.
If you do this too often you'll find that your capacity to release dopamine and your level of motivation and drive overall will take a serious hit.
00:49:54 Pursuit, Excitement & Your “Dopamine Setpoint”
From the beginning of the episode, the tonic and phasic release of dopamine has been discussed.
We can now cover this in more depth in order to leverage it for our own purposes.
In order to do this it's useful to ask why do we have a dopamine system like this, or why do we have this system at all?
Our species like all species has a survival agenda to replicate as much of itself as possible.
It's not just about sex and reproduction it's about foraging for resources; food, water, salt, shelter, and social connections.
Dopamine is the universal currency of foraging and seeking things that provide sustenance and pleasure in the short term and will extend the species in the long term.
Once we understand that dopamine is a driver for us to seek things, it makes perfect sense as to why we have a system with a baseline level and peaks that spike above that baseline and the peaks and baseline would be related in some direct way.
Let's say you were alive 10,000 years ago and you woke up and realized you had very little water and food left with a child and a partner and you NEED things.
You need to be able to generate the energy to go seeking those things.
Chances are there were dangers in seeking those things e.g. storms, cold, injuries, predators, isolation, etc.
This process of going out and foraging was driven by dopamine.
Let's say you find a few berries, or you hunt an animal and kill it, or you find some meat and water somewhere; you will experience some sort of dopamine release (you've found the reward), but then it needs to return to some lower level that is still pushing you because if you just stayed there you would never continue to forage for more.
What's very important to understand is that it doesn't just go back down to the level it was at before, it goes down to a level BELOW what it was before you went out seeking your needs.
This is counterintuitive because we often think in terms of pursuing a win
Run a marathon, cross the finish line, and feel great and you think ok, now I'm set for the entire year, I'm going to feel this amazing sense of accomplishment etc.
This is not really what happens, you will experience a peak, but then your level of dopamine will drop below baseline.
Eventually, it will ratchet back up, but 2 things are important
The extent to which it drops below baseline is proportional to how high the peak was.
If you cross the finish line mildly happy, it won't drop that much below baseline, if you cross the finish line ecstatic, a day or 2 later you will feel quite a bit lower than you might have otherwise.
Post-partum depression that people experience after giving birth or after a big win like a graduation etc. is heavily influenced by the drop in baseline levels of dopamine.
This happens on very rapid timescales and can last quite a long time as well.
This also explains how if we continue to engage with things we enjoy over and over again they begin to lose their edge over various timescales.
Some of us experience this drop in excitement more quickly and severely than others.
This has direct roots in these evolutionarily conserved circuits.
Some people may feel the illusion they're simply riding higher and higher all the time.
Often times we are feeling good because we are layering in different aspects of life, doing and consuming things that are increasing our levels of dopamine giving us those peaks
Afterward, the drop in baseline occurs and it always takes a little while to get back to our stable baseline.
We all have a dopamine 'set point'
If we continue to indulge in these same behaviors that continue to increase our peaks in dopamine we won't experience the same level of joy from those behaviors or from anything at all. This is what addiction is.
Even for people who aren't 'addicted' or have an attachment to any specific substance or behavior, the drop below baseline is substantial and it governs whether or not we will be able to pursue other things.
There is a way for us to work with this system such that we can experience peaks while keeping the baseline at an appropriate healthy level.
00:56:46 Your Pleasure-Pain Balance & Defining “Pain”
Dr. Anna Lembke was a previous guest on the Huberman podcast, she's head of the addiction dual diagnosis clinic at Stanford and is the author of 'Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.
The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity--and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race is another terrific book about dopamine.
Both books focus on dopamine schedules and the relationship between these peaks and baselines of dopamine.
Dr. Lembke talks about this pleasure-pain balance that occurs when we seek or experience something we really like.
We gain a little bit of pleasure (e.g. eating chocolate) then there is a little bit of pain that subtly exceeds the amount of pleasure. We experience it as wanting more of that thing.
There is a pleasure-pain balance that is governed by dopamine to some extent.
The pain comes from the lack of dopamine that we experience after a peak.
Earlier we talked about how dopamine is released into synapses where it can activate postsynaptic neurons, or it can be released volumetrically over many neurons, in both cases, it's released in synaptic vesicles and these vesicles get depleted.
The total amount of dopamine in vesicles that are available to be released is what synaptic physiologists call the 'readily releasable pool of dopamine'.
We can only deploy dopamine that is packaged in these little vesicles and is ready to be released.
The pleasure-pain balance doesn't only hinge on the readily releasable pool of dopamine but a large part of it does.
Now it should make sense why if you take/do something that leads to huge increases in dopamine, afterward your baseline should drop.
01:00:00 Addiction, Dopamine Depletion, & Replenishing Dopamine
Fortunately, most people do not pursue things that lead to these enormous increases in dopamine and drops below baseline.
Addicts do however and make the mistake of pursuing the dopamine-evoking activity/substance again to feel better. This only drives their baseline lower and lower.
When people are truly addicted to something then they won't receive much pleasure from anything at all.
You can see this with Videogames where people start out enjoying it, and they keep playing and playing and playing until one of 2 things happens (or both).
A narrowing of things that can bring you pleasure, people start losing interest in school, relationships, fitness, wellbeing etc.
They stop getting dopamine releases from the addictive behaviors and drop into potentially serious states of depression leading to suicide.
The more typical scenario of someone who is really good at working through the week with some exercise throughout and with drinks on the weekends who can develop depression, burnout, and drops in motivation:
This person will only be drinking 1-2 nights per week but may be spiking their dopamine with food during the middle of the week, swimming in the ocean in the middle of the week as well going out dancing on the weekend.
On the surface, it sounds like a pretty balanced life.
The problem is that dopamine is not just evoked by one of these activities but by all of them.
Dopamine is one currency of craving motivation and desire and pleasure.
Looking at the activities at face value and saying the drinking is just on the weekends, the food is only in the middle of the week as is the dancing and ocean swimming doesn't reveal what's really going on.
Looking at dopamine simply as a function of peaks and baseline it makes sense why this person after several years of this work hard play hard lifestyle would say they're feeling quite burnt out.
There are age-related reasons for why people can experience drops in energy but often they're spiking their dopamine through so many different activities throughout the week that their baseline is progressively dropping.
This drop in baseline can be very subtle and sinister in that it's imperceptible until it reaches a threshold of low dopamine where we feel we can't really get pleasure from anything anymore.
This begins to look the same as more severe and acute addictions to things like cocaine and amphetamine.
We should all of course engage in activities we enjoy, it's a huge part of life, the key thing is to understand this relationship between peaks and baseline and how they influence one another.
Once you understand this you can begin making really good choices in the short and long term to maintain or raise your dopamine baseline and still have peaks with feelings of elevated motivation, desire, and craving.
Those peaks and having a sufficiently high baseline are what drove the evolution of our species as well as the evolution of any individual's life progression.
What should you do if you've experienced a drop in your baseline level of dopamine because of engaging in activities or substances that led to big peaks over prolonged periods of time?
The child of one of Huberman's friends after becoming addicted to video games decided to do a 30-day fast from his phone, video games, and social media of all kinds. He's now at day 29 and not incidentally his levels of concentration and mood have improved.
This is hard to do, particularly in the first 14 days but the way you replenish this releasable pool of dopamine is to not engage in these dopaminergic seeking behaviors for a substantial period of time.
He thought initially that he had ADHD and was being treated for it, while there are many people with ADHD it is likely that many people are simply suffering from low dopamine levels and cannot concentrate adequately or have appropriate levels of motivation.
Tapering or quitting the dopamine-evoking behaviors is the best strategy to adopt.
01:07:50 Tool 5 Ensure Your Best (Healthy) Dopamine Release
Certain substances like cocaine and amphetamine should be avoided and categorized as unhealthy
Other things like food, chocolate, coffee, sex, etc. are all a part of life and aren't 'bad' per se but need to be engaged with appropriately.
How can we achieve the peaks that are an essential component of our enjoyment of life without dropping our baseline?
The key lies in the intermittent release of dopamine
Do not expect or chase high levels of dopamine every time we engage in these activities.
Intermittent rewards schedules are the central schedules by which casinos keep you gambling, elusive partners keep you pursuing and texting (on either side of the relationship), and the internet, social media, and all highly engaging activities keep you motivated and in pursuit.
Thinking back evolutionarily, not every trail, pursuit, or hunch about where to find rewards would have played out successfully.
There is something called dopamine reward prediction error. When we expect something to happen we are highly motivated to pursue it. If it happens, great! We get various chemical rewards including dopamine and we are more likely to engage in that behavior again.
You'll find there is something you are probably addicted to due to an intermittent schedule by which dopamine sometimes arrives in various amounts. This is the best schedule to export to other activities.
How do you do this?
If you are engaged in activities like school, sports relationships, etc. where you experience a win, you should be very careful about allowing yourself to experience huge peaks in dopamine unless you're willing to suffer the crash that follows.
In the practical sense, this might look like having coffee or pre-workout or music with your exercise regiment at random intervals.
You just do the exercise on its own sometimes without increasing dopamine through exogenous sources as well.
If you want to maintain motivation for school, exercise, sports, and relationships for any duration the key thing is to make sure that the peak in dopamine (if high) doesn't occur very often, and if it does occurs often you vary how much dopamine you experience with each engagement in that activity.
Some activities naturally have this intermittent property woven into them.
Sometimes we have classes we like and others we don't
We don't always get straight A's, or the perfect relationship outcome, etc.
How much motivation and pleasure you derive from what comes next is dictated by how much motivation and pleasure you experienced prior.
You can't give a very specific protocol like delete or limit dopamine every third time is that it wouldn't be intermittent. It should be random and unpredictable.
01:15:28 Smart Phones: How They Alter Our Dopamine Circuits
The Smartphone is a very interesting tool for dopamine in light of all this
It's extremely common to see people using their smartphones for various things while they're engaged in other activities.
This doesn't just affect our level of focus and engagement with any particular activity, but it's also a way of layering in dopamine and it's no surprise that levels of depression and lack of motivation are really on the increase.
Everything discussed up to this point sets up an explanation or interpretation of why interacting with digital technologies can potentially lead to disruptions in our baseline levels of dopamine.
Huberman noticed that if he brought his phone to his workouts, not only was he slightly more distracted, but also he lost interest in what he was doing, it didn't feel as pleasurable.
As he started learning more about this relationship between peaks and baseline levels of dopamine, he realized some time ago he probably experienced an incredible increase in his level of dopamine during one of his workouts while working out and listening to music, or podcasts, and communicating with people.
He had layered in too many of them too many times and eventually it wasn't working for him anymore.
We often interpret this increase in phone usage as an inability to be alone nowadays, but in Huberman's opinion, we have simply achieved a great increase in dopamine levels through technology and are now addicted to the point of constantly needing the next hit without ever achieving the same levels of fulfillment as in the past.
Try to remove multiple sources of dopamine release from activities that you want to continue to enjoy or to enjoy more.
This can be very challenging during the first week or so.
01:19:45 Stimulants & Spiking Dopamine: Counterproductive for Work, Exercise & Attention
For this very same reason, it's wise to avoid using stimulants every time you study, workout, or do anything that you want to continue to enjoy or be motivated towards.
Caffeine is an exception because it can make whatever dopamine is released by an activity more accessible to your neurons without affecting your baseline too much.
However, a number of energy drinks and pre-workout supplements contain things that are precursors to dopamine and do cause the release of dopamine to a substantial degree.
Over time this will deplete your dopamine levels.
Taking stimulants and then engaging in activities will inevitably result in challenges with motivation and drive related to those activities.
Intermittent dopamine spiking schedules are the way to go if you do it at all, chronically doing so in order to enhance your focus motivation, and drive will absolutely undermine your motivation focus and drive in the long run.
01:22:20 Caffeine Sources Matter: Yerba Mate & Dopamine Neuron Protection
Caffeine is something of an exception because it increases the density and efficacy of dopamine receptors.
The source of caffeine could be important.
Yerba Mate, contains caffeine, is high in antioxidants, and contains something called GLP-1 which is useful for the management of blood sugar levels.
It has also been found to be neuroprotective, specifically for dopaminergic neurons (only a few studies have been done) in both the movement and motivation-related pathways.
01:24:20 Caffeine & Neurotoxicity of MDMA
MDMA is under investigation for its potential to treat trauma and depression in various clinical studies, it's also a drug that's used recreationally and illegally.
Whether or not MDMA is neurotoxic has been quite controversial, early on it was thought to destroy serotonergic neurons. One of the early papers making this claim was retracted as the study mistakenly used methamphetamine instead of MDMA.
Caffeine however has been found to increase the toxicity of MDMA due to its upregulation of these dopamine receptors and can be dangerous in this context, while beneficial in another context.
01:26:15 Amphetamine, Cocaine & Detrimental Rewiring of Dopamine Circuits
Amphetamine and cocaine can cause long-term problems with the dopaminergic pathways.
Paper Amphetamine or cocaine limits the ability of later experience to promote structural plasticity in the neocortex and nucleus accumbens
Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change and adapt and is the basis of learning, memory, and remodeling of our neurocircuitry in positive ways.
This study was one of the first to show that ingesting amphetamine and cocaine because of the high peaks and low dopamine baselines that they generate limits plasticity and learning.
This was shown to be a long-lasting effect, unlikely permanent but should serve as a serious cautionary note that amphetamine and cocaine not only can drop baseline levels of dopamine but limits the brain's ability to learn and change itself to get better at least for some period of time.
01:27:57 Ritalin, Adderall, (Ar)Modafinil: ADHD versus non-Prescription Uses
A previous episode on ADHD talked about the widespread use of drugs like Adderall, Ritalin, modafinil, and armodafinil which all lead to very large increases in dopamine. For people with ADHD, this can really improve their symptoms.
There is a lot of non-prescription and non-clinical use of these substances as well.
It stands to reason that the use of these substances could provide the same blockade of plasticity that cocaine and amphetamine do because the amount of dopamine release that's triggered by these compounds is comparable.
01:28:45 Tool 6 Stimulating Long-Lasting Increases in Baseline Dopamine
Having covered some of the darker aspects of dopamine and how getting big peaks can be detrimental, it's time to acknowledge its virtues and how good it makes us feel.
Being in pursuit and motivated and craving things feels wonderful, and shouldn't be demonized.
There are activities that we can do that will give us healthy, sustained increases in both the peaks and the baseline levels of dopamine.
In recent years there has been a trend of more people doing cold exposure in part popularised by Wim Hof, cold showers, icebaths exposing oneself to cold water of various kinds can in fact increase our level of dopamine and norepinephrine.
This is not a new phenomenon, in the 1920's Vincent Priessnitz was one of the first people to popularise and formalize cold water therapies. He was an advocate of cold water exposure to boost the immune system and increase feelings of well-being.
Safety parameters should be established first.
Getting into very cold water at 30-40F can put people into a state of cold water shock leading to death.
For most people getting into 50-60F water or if you're acclimated to 30-40F water can have tremendously beneficial effects on your neuromodulator systems including dopamine.
What temperature of water you can tolerate will depend on how adapted you are and how familiar you are with the experience of getting into cold water.
There is never a case in which getting into cold water does not release a dose of epinephrine
The quickening of the breath, widening of the eyes, and the feeling of being breathless happens almost every time for everyone.
This wall is always coming and there isn't really a way of getting around it.
Study published in the European Journal of applied physiology looked at people getting into water that was warm moderately cold or very cold. 32C 20C or 14C and the concentrations of epinephrine and dopamine.
Upon getting into cold water the changes in adrenaline and noradrenaline were immediate and large, interestingly however dopamine levels started to rise slowly and then continued to rise and reach levels as high as 2.5 times above baseline.
This is comparable to what one sees in cocaine use, except in this case it wasn't a rise and crash. It was a sustained increase that took a very long time (up to 3 hours to come back to baseline) which is really remarkable. This explains some of the positive mental and physical effects that people report after doing cold water exposure.
There was an increase in stress hormone release in cold water exposure but what was interesting was that it was transitory.
There are two different approaches to remaining in the cold when it's uncomfortable
1 is to try and relax, practice slow breathing dilate your gaze
2 increase your level of autonomic arousal and force yourself into it
The approach to getting into the water doesn't matter for the sake of dopamine release.
In the study people stayed in the cold for an hour, this could be dangerous at low water temperatures and could lead to hypothermia.
It's well established that getting into cold water whether it's a shower, ice bath, circulating cold water, stream, etc. evokes the norepinephrine release immediately and the long arch of dopamine release.
This is good because it appears to raise the baseline of dopamine release for substantial periods of time and most people report feeling a heightened level of calm and focus after getting out of cold water.
Once doing this begins to feel comfortable then it doesn’t appear to evoke this release, there seems to be something in the pathway from cold water exposure through the norepinephrine pathway and into the mesolimbic brainstem that causes this release in dopamine.
It's basically a zero-cost way of triggering a long-lasting release of dopamine without ingesting anything.
Approach it with safety and caution in mind.
01:37:55 Tool 7 Tuning Your Dopamine for Ongoing Motivation
The positive and negative aspects of rewards from behaviors can illuminate a better approach to achieving a better relationship between your activities and the dopamine system, enabling you to tune it up for discipline, hard work, and motivation.
Hard work is hard and is something that most people don't generally like.
Most people work hard in order to achieve some end goal.
End goals and rewards are terrific whether or not they are monetary, social
Because dopamine relates to our perception of time, working hard at something for the sake of a reward that comes afterward can make it much more challenging and make us much less likely to lean into hard work in the future.
Researchers took children who enjoyed drawing and began giving them rewards for drawing, then stopped giving them the rewards and found the children had a much lower tendency to draw on their own.
This relates to intrinsic vs extrinsic reinforcements
Prior to receiving these rewards, these children were intrinsically motivated to draw.
When we receive rewards for something, even when we give ourselves rewards, we tend to associate less pleasure with the activity itself.
This seems counterintuitive but its bases on the peaks and baseline relationships in dopamine levels.
If you get a peak of dopamine from a reward, it will lower your baseline and the cognitive interpretation is that you didn't really do the activity because you enjoy it, you did it for the reward.
It's important to understand that dopamine controls our perception of time.
When and how much dopamine we experience is the way we carve up our subjective experience of time.
When we engage in hard work of any kind, because of the reward we are going to give ourselves at the end we actually extend the time bin over which we are perceiving that experience of work.
Because the reward comes at the end we start to dissociate the circuits for dopamine reward that would have normally been active during the activity and because it all arrives at the end, over time we have the experience of less and less pleasure from that particular activity while engaged in it.
This is the antithesis of the 'growth mindset'
Caroll Dweck came up with this principle of striving to be better where striving itself is the end goal and this delivers tremendous performance long term.
People who have the growth mindset have been observed to end up performing very well because they're focused on the effort itself.
All of us can cultivate a growth mindset
The neural mechanism of cultivating the growth mindset involves learning to access the rewards from effort and doing.
This is hard to do because you have to engage the prefrontal component of the mesocorticolimbic circuit, telling yourself the effort is great, and pleasurable, even though you might be in a state of discomfort.
You can find over time that you can begin to evoke dopamine release from the friction and challenge you find yourself in.
You completely eliminate the ability to generate those circuits and the process of being able to reward friction while in the effort if you are focused only on the goal at the end, because of the way that dopamine marks time.
If you say you're going to do this hard thing and push and push and push for the end goal, not only do you enjoy the process less, you make it more painful while you are engaged in it, and less efficient at it because dopamine levels will be lower and dopamine has these incredibly stimulating effects for our mind and bodies, and you undermine your ability to lean back into this activity the next time.
Next time you need twice as much coffee and three times as much music and the social connection just to get out the door and do what you need to do.
What serves as a tremendous amplifier on all endeavors that you engage in, especially hard endeavors is to stop layering in exogenous sources of dopamine to get to the starting line and to continue, but rather to subjectively start to attach the feeling of friction and effort to an internally generated reward system.
This is not meant to be vague, it exists in your mind and biology and has existed in humans for hundreds of thousands of years.
You are not just pursuing things that are innately pleasurable, food, sex, warmth, water etc. but the beauty of the mesocorticolimbic pathway is that it includes the forebrain and you can tell yourself the effort part is the good part.
What's beautiful about this system is that it begins to become reflexive for all types of effort.
In those moments of the most intense friction you tell yourself 'this is very painful and because it's painful it will evoke an increase in dopamine release later, but that in that moment you are doing it by choice and because you love it'
In some ways, this is lying to yourself but it's lying to yourself in the context of a truth which is that you want it to feel better, you want it to feel pleasurable.
This is very different from thinking of the reward that comes at the end.
We revere people who are capable of doing this
David Goggins comes to mind as an example, many people are probably familiar with.
There's no question that in the past we revered people who were willing to go out and forage and hunt and gather and caretake in ways that other members of our species would rather have avoided.
The ability to access this pleasure from the effort aspect of our dopaminergic circuitry is without question the most powerful aspect of dopamine and our biology of it.
The beautiful thing is that it's accessible to all of us.
Don't spike dopamine prior to engaging in effort, and don’t' spike dopamine after engaging in effort, learn to spike it from the effort itself.
01:47:40 Tool 8 Intermittent Fasting: Effects on Dopamine
Intermittent fasting is an example of people attaching dopamine to effort and strain as opposed to a process or reward that naturally evokes dopamine release.
This is popular nowadays with various time intervals that people adopt.
Many people find it easier to not eat at all than to eat small portions of food, this has everything to do with the dopamine-rewarding properties of food.
When we ingest food our dopamine levels rise and typically can cause cravings for more.
Fasting from the perspective of dopamine schedules
Typically when we eat we get dopamine release, especially when we are very hungry because deprivation states influence the way that our reward circuitry works.
Our experience of dopamine is heightened when our receptors haven't received much of it recently.
When you fast and then finally eat, it evokes more dopamine release and heightened sensitivity to that reward.
People also begin to evoke dopamine release from the effort of fasting itself
This is likely why fasting has been practiced for so long because it increases the rewarding properties of food as well as those of deprivation.
A lot of the knowledge of the benefits of fasting serve as reinforcing and amplifying aspects to the rewarding aspects of fasting.
If people are deep into their fast and are telling themselves their blood lipid profiles are improving along with their insulin sensitivity, longevity etc. they are enhancing the rewarding properties of the behaviour of fasting.
This is a salient example of where 'knowledge of knowledge' can help us change these deep primitive circuits related to dopamine and how the forebrain can be used to shape the very circuits that are involved in generating reward for what otherwise would just be primitive hardwired behaviors.
Rewards are not only attached to more primitive drives like food or sex or warmth but also to things we decide are good for us.
01:53:09 Validation of Your Pre-Existing Beliefs Increases Dopamine
Hearing something that reinforces one's prior beliefs actually can evoke dopamine release.
The dopamine pathway is so vulnerable to subjective interpretation that it actually makes it such that when we see or hear something that validates a belief we already have we experience pleasure and reward.
01:53:50 Tool 9 Quitting Sugar & Highly Palatable Foods: 48 Hours
If you ingest something you like and then something even sweeter or more savory then you go back to the food you ate previously you won't like it as much.
This shift in perception can be stopped by blocking the shift in dopamine
This really speaks to the experience of the peaks and valleys of dopamine where the pleasure you derive from anything is going to depend on your prior experience of things that evoke dopamine.
A big dopamine release makes it more challenging to experience big dopamine releases in the future.
Dopamine is one of those things you don't want too high or too low for too long.
Highly palatable foods will make whole foods taste much less rewarding for at least a period of a few days.
This speaks to dopamine being a universal currency of pleasure that establishes value not just on what you are experiencing in the moment, but what you experienced in the days and minutes before.
01:55:36 Pornography
Now you understand how your current level relates to your previous experience of dopamine and how it will connect to your future level of dopamine.
It should become obvious why things such as pornography, its accessibility, and its intensity can negatively shape real-world romantic and sexual interactions.
This is a serious concern and the underlying neurobiological mechanisms you now understand.
Any activity that evokes a lot of dopamine release will make it harder to achieve the same level and greater level of dopamine through a subsequent interaction.
Many people are addicted to pornography and many people who regularly engage in it experience challenges in real-world romantic interactions.
01:56:50 Wellbutrin & Depression & Anxiety
There are circumstances in which increasing dopamine levels is desirable, advantageous, and clinically helpful.
Wellbutrin also called Bupropion increases dopamine and nor-epinephrine.
It was developed as an alternative treatment for depression because some people who take SSRI's suffer from serotonin-related side effects like decreased appetite, libido, or increased appetite, etc.
Wellbutrin seems to avoid the sexual side effects, it can blunt appetite because of the increases in norepinephrine and dopamine increases motivation and craving but also creates a state of alertness that can sometimes get in the way of healthy eating.
It can increase anxiety because of the way that dopamine and nor-epinephrine are stimulating and tend to place people into heightened levels of alertness.
01:58:30 Tool 10 Mucuna Pruriens, Prolactin, Sperm, Crash Warning
There are many people who are seeking to increase their baseline levels of dopamine without taking any prescription pharmaceutical compounds.
There are many supplements that now exist to achieve this.
Mucuna Puriens is from a velvety bean whose contents are l-dopa which is the precursor to dopamine.
If you take it you will experience very large increases in dopamine that are transient
The constellations of effects look a lot like the effects of l-dopa
The most obvious use is in the context of Parkinson's, at least 5 studies have shown that they can reduce the symptoms of Parkinsons much in the same way l-dopa does
It can reduce a hormone called prolactin which tends to be in a push-pull relationship with dopamine.
Prolactin is involved in the milk letdown of women and the refractory period for sex after ejaculation in males.
It has a number of other effects that lie in the sex and reproduction pathway that are worth noting
It increases sperm concentrations and quality (4 studies)
Useful for people seeking to conceive children with nonprescription compounds
It's important to be aware that almost every time you consume a substance that increases dopamine by being a precursor to dopamine there is almost inevitably a crash or reduction in the baseline that we referred to previously. For this reason, many people have turned to L-tyrosine.
02:01:45 Tool 11 L-Tyrosine: Dosages, Duration of Effects & Specificity
L-tyrosine is an amino acid precursor to l-dopa so it lies further up the dopamine synthesis pathway and it's very common that people take it to feel more energized alert and focused.
There are data that show it will accomplish that
It's typically taken in capsule or powder form in anywhere from 500-1000mg
It is a potent stimulus for increasing dopamine and the timescale for that increase is about 30-45 minutes after ingestion, and after about 30 minutes the effects dissipated.
02:05:20 Tool 12 Avoiding Melatonin Supplementation, & Avoiding Light 10pm-4am
Things that can reduce your baseline levels of dopamine should also be mentioned
One that is rarely discussed is melatonin
Melatonin can help one get to sleep but not stay asleep
Dr. Matt Walker, in their discussion of melatonin, has generally stated that the use of melatonin except for the treatment of jet lag is not really a good idea.
It's not often thought about as impacting the dopamine pathway, however, there is at least one study Michiama 2001 Acute effects of melatonin administration on cardiovascular autonomic regulation in healthy men - K Nishiyama et. al found a statistically significant decrease in dopamine 60 minutes after melatonin administration.
Viewing bright lights between 10 pm and 4 am has been shown to reduce dopamine levels for several days after that light exposure.
02:07:00 Tool 13 Phenylethylamine (with Alpha-GPC) For Dopamine Focus/Energy
PEA is a compound that you've probably taken without realizing it that increases dopamine
It's found in various foods (e.g. chocolate) and can increase synaptic levels of dopamine.
Huberman takes 500mg of PEA every once in a while as a work aide with 300mg of alpha-GPC, leading to a sharp but transitory increase in dopamine that he's found to be much more regulated and even than something like l-tyrosine and certainly something like mucuna purines.
02:08:20 Tool 14 Huperzine A
Huperzine A is a compound that's gaining popularity as a so-called neutropic
It's a compound sold over the counter in the USA that can increase Achetyl choline transmission (a different neuromodulator entirely)
Interestingly it somehow by way of interaction between the cholinergic system and the dopaminergic system leads to increases in dopamine in the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.
Huberman recommends against people simply diving in and consuming things without gaining knowledge about how they function and whether or not their appropriate for you as an individual.
In the years to come, we are likely to see a lot more of l-tyrosine, PEA, and Huperzine A as a way of tapping into the dopaminergic and cholinergic circuits along with things like Alpha-gpc as nonprescription short-lived milder alternatives to things that really spike dopamine like Adderall, Ritalin, modafinil, armodafinil etc.
02:10:02 Social Connections, Oxytocin & Dopamine Release
One more result that's not related to pharmacology but for behaviors and social interactions
A very interesting and important finding made a few years ago by Rob Melanka showed that oxytocin and social connections are directly stimulating the dopamine pathway.
For many years the scientific community at large would hear and think that oxytocin was in the serotonergic pathway, that it was about pair-bonding and that some of the neuromodulators that were more associated with things related to feeling good with what we have in the 'present moment' which is typically what we think of with regards the opioid or serotonergic system.
The dopamine system is about seeking and reward.
Paper published in 2017 in the journal Science, Gating of social reward by oxytocin in the ventral tegmental area - Malenka et. al. found that oxytocin social connection and pair bonding itself triggers dopamine release,
For the evolution of our species and any species where social connections are important, it's also important to go and seek social connections.
While it's fun to think about pharmacology and underlying neurobiology, neurocircuitry and cold water baths, dopamine schedules and rewards mechanisms attaching a reward to effort, and the various things we've talked about today in terms of various scientific tools and protocols, it would be to remiss not to emphasize those close social connections that evoke oxytocin release (romantic, parent-child, friendships, and friends at a distance) are central to stimulating the dopamine pathways.
The take-home message is quite simple, engage in and pursue quality, healthy social interactions.
02:12:20 Direct & Indirect Effects: e.g., Maca; Synthesis & Application
A lot of things have been covered today with a focus on a lot of things that lie directly within the dopamine pathway and circuitries as well as the things that directly stimulate those pathways and circuitries.
What hasn't been covered are things that indirectly serve those pathways.
On the internet and the literature, you will find that things like maca root and the gut microbiome can increase dopamine
They do by creating an environment in which dopamine and dopamine circuits can flourish.
Maca is a good example of this as it will reduce cortisol and through some indirect pathways related to cortisol can increase dopamine but it's not a direct increase in dopamine, as a consequence it's rather subtle compared to the various compounds and behaviors that have been discussed.
Cold water exposure for example leads to huge and sustained increases in dopamine.
There is lot of information that might be overwhelming but the most important thing to understand is that these dopamine pathways really are under your control.
The locus of control resides in the fact that your previous levels of dopamine are influencing your levels of dopamine right now and your current levels of dopamine and where you take them next will influence your dopamine levels in the days and weeks to come.
With the mechanisms that you now have learned and some of the tools to tap into the dopaminergic system, both behavioral, and pharmacological that you'll have a better understanding of your dopaminergic system with a greater ability to control it.
