Dopamine Nation is a fantastic book that talks about dopamine and how it controls practically every single aspect of our lives and society. Written by Anna Lembke, it's a culmination of what she has learned after working in the field of psychotherapy for many decades. In this video, I will be talking about the modern-day dopamine economy, the pleasure-pain balance, the dopamine fasting framework, and strategies that we can use to help us in our endeavors. ## Dopamine Economy The main point that Anna makes in the book is that we live in a modern day dopamine economy. Every single aspect of our lives has been optimized to stimulate the largest amount of dopamine possible. It's made its way into our food, with copious amounts of sugar, salt, and fat being added to much of the food we eat: things that we don't need to survive but make our modern-day monkey brains explode with pleasure. It's made its way into online shopping with the act of consumption itself becoming a drug. My dad frequently tells me his issues with stopping his bad habit of surfing amazon for hours looking at camera lenses. My friends at Cornell are constantly stuck looking at their phones and devices, checking out the most recent Tik Tok trend or Instagram post. Seventy percent of world global deaths are attributable to modifiable behavioral risk like smoking, physical inactivity, and diet. It needs to stop. ## We Are Running From Pain Beyond some extreme examples of running from pain, we have lost the ability to tolerate even the most minor forms of discomfort. Teens today are less capable than ever before of sitting in even a moment of silence. They instinctively take out their phones and put on some music or a podcast or some other form of distraction. Living in Noise Anna brings up the story of Sophie, one of her patients, to make this point. Sophie was caught in a chronic state of noise. She was unwilling to spend any moment of her life in silence. Every walk to class or moment of respite was used plugged in to some music or noise of some sort. Sophie came to Anna looking for help with her constant anxiety issues. Anna immediately noticed that Sophie was running from her thoughts. Instead of prescribing some anxiety medication, Anna told Sophie to spend her walks to class listening to the birds or the sound of the wind. At first, Sophie said it was agonizingly boring. Just a few weeks later, however, her anxiety seemed to dampen significantly. I myself find that running from pain is only a short term solution. I spend the morning meditating for ten minutes followed by a nice walk out in the sun with nothing in my ear. Just silence. It's truly invigorating. We are less happy than ever Unfortunately, most people never get to experience the benefits that come from running toward the world instead of away from it. Many people drown themselves in pills, couch surf while binge watching Netflix movies, or fall into a food addiction. We will do almost anything to distract ourselves from ourselves. Interestingly, according to the World Happiness Report, which ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be, people living in the United States reported being less happy in 2018 than they were in 2008. But if technology is getting better and famine and drought are becoming less prominent then ever before, what is happening to cause this terrible decline? ## The Pleasure Pain Balance Anna believes that "the reason we are all so miserable is that we are working so hard to avoid being miserable." If we want to understand why everyone is so unhappy in this modern day dopamine economy, we must first understand the way that dopamine works in the brain. ## The Motivation Hormone Most people think of dopamine as the pleasure hormone when in reality it's the motivation hormone. Dopamine may play a bigger role in the motivation to get a reward than the pleasure of the reward itself. In addition to this discovery, neuroscientists have discovered that pleasure and pain are actually processed in overlapping regions of the brain via an opponent process system. If we experience something insanely pleasurable, then the balance in the pathway is shifted toward the side of pleasure. But here is the important thing about the balance. It wants to remain level. Hence, every time the scale is tipped toward the pleasure or pain side, there will be a corresponding shift toward the opposite at some point. This means that if we do something particularly pleasurable, we will have a subsequent bout of depression or less pleasurable state in the hours or days afterward. Gym Mistake I feel to take this fact into account when I first started going to the gym. I wanted to make the gym session as pleasurable as possible so I experimented. I already enjoyed working out but then added on the bonus of drinking pre-workout beforehand. Pre-workout has an ingredient in it known as tyrosine: a precursor to dopamine. I combined all of this with a music playlist during the workout as well as a meal reward right after. This culmination of things led to an insane pleasure spike during my workout. What I noticed, however, was that in the afternoons or evenings, I always seemed to be a little less happy. Nothing too bad, but definitely noticeable. That is the power of the pleasure pain balance. As I went through my gym routine more and more, I received less pleasure from what had given me so much just months before. What did I do in response? More pre-workout, louder music, and a bigger meal afterward. I couldn't stop. My body had gone through something called neuroadaptation. With repeated exposure to the same stimulus, the initial deviation to the side of pleasure gets weaker and shorter and the after-response to the side of pain gets stronger and longer in a process known as neuroadaptation. The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind. Neurons that fire together wire together Another very popular saying in neuroscience is that neurons that fire together wire together. This means that neurons associated with a particular reward pathway get more and more ingrained. In a process known as myelination, fat slowly builds up around the nerves and makes them easier to fire. This makes it easier and easier to fall for bad behaviors once the nerves associated with them have become stronger through myelination. It's the difference between someone who gets dessert every now and then and someone who feels a deep craving to have dessert every single night. It's why people that get over an addiction can still fall back into it again months or even years down the line. The Good News Although some changes to addiction are permanent, it's possible to detour around these damaged areas by creating new neural networks. We can find new synaptic pathways to create healthy behaviors. If we wait long enough, our brains (usually) adapt to the absence of the drug and we reestablish baseline homeostasis. This allows us to once again get pleasure out of everyday simple rewards: walking outside in nature, eating a meal with friends, reading a book. ## Dopamine Fasting So we now know that dopamine affects our motivation and Happiness on a pleasure pain balance. The question that remains is how we can reset our reward pathways so that we can take pleasure in simple things. The answer is through a process called dopamine fasting. Anna gives a framework in the book that can be used to try and get out of the addictive state that most of us are in. It's quite easy to remember because it actually goes with the acronym DOPAMINE. To make it easier to understand the framework, we will be analyzing my addiction to chamomile tea using the framework. D: The d in DOPAMINE stands for data. It entails gathering the simple facts of consumption. I drink probably a good three or four cups of chamomile tea a day. O: The o in DOPAMINE stands for objective. It comes with identifying the objectives someone has with addictive behavior. I drink chamomile tea because of how relaxed it seems to make me while reading or writing. I also put one packet of stevia in it which is one of my guilty pleasures. P: The p in DOPAMINE stands for problems related to it's use. I spend so much gosh darn time going to the bathroom. I also spend more time than I am willing to admit in front of the water boiler waiting for the water to be ready. A: The a in DOPAMINE stands for abstinence. Abstinence is necessary to restore homeostasis and get pleasure out of normal things again. If should probably start by reducing my consumption to around 2 cups per day instead of 4-5. I might also be able to abstain from using stevia in the drink as it definitely makes it more appealing to get together because of it. M: The m of DOPAMINE stands for mindfulness. This is simply being mindful of how your body is feeling during the fast. Are you craving the thing that you are fasting from? What thoughts are going through your head. It's important to be mindful of the fact that you will feel worse in the beginning after starting your DOPAMINE fast. After about four weeks, however, you should in most cases be feeling much better. I don't think it would take me four weeks to get through my chamomile addiction as it's not that severe. I: The i of DOPAMINE stands for insight. Fasting on one addictive behavior can give you a ton of insight into other behaviors you do that you never realized were also addictions. If I went through my chamomile tea fast, I might notice other addictions that I never even knew I had. N: The n of DOPAMINE stands for next steps. This comes with asking yourself what you are going to do after you have successfully gone through with the fast. I would probably keep drinking chamomile tea but in less insane amounts. Maybe only two cups a day and without stevia. E: The e and final letter of DOPAMINE stands for experiment. This is where you go back into the world with a new pleasure pain set balance and a plan for how to maintain it. You can experiment on other things that you are addicted to and start to get even more healthy levels of dopamine. It's important to realize that just because you succeed in the short term with enacting the DOPAMINE process, you can at a moments notice fall back into your addiction. Many many addicts have gone clean and then suddenly got back into the addiction from one bad day even years later. ## [[Self-Binding For Productivity]] Anna's DOPAMINE framework is a great help in coming to realize and enact a plan for dopamine fasting. What we need now are actual protocols and actionable tips that we can use to help us during our fasting journey. My goal is to reduce chamomile tea intake but you can find something completely different for yourself. Self-binding is a set of three strategies that can be used to help in your dopamine fasting efforts. They include physical strategies, chronological strategies, and categorical strategies. Physical self-binding Physical self-binding works by making it physically harder to access the addictive drug or enact the addicted behavior. One of the most classic examples of this is shown in Homer's Odysseus. One of the many dangers that awaited Odysseus on his journey home from the Trojan War was the Sirens: half women, half bird creatures whose enchanted song lured sailors to their death on the rocky cliffs of nearby islands. The only way that sailors could pass the Sirens unharmed was by listening to them sing. In an act of physical self-binding, Odysseus ordered his crew to put beeswax in their ears and tie him to the mast of the sailing ship, binding him even tighter if he ever put up a commotion or struggle. The idea was that by physically binding Odysseus to the ship, he wouldn't be able to fall for the call of the Sirens during their voyage. This strategy can be used in real life as well. Lets run through some easy examples you can probably relate to: Unplugging the TV and putting it in your closet after use Banishing your game console to your garage Only bringing with you cash when you go out instead of Credit Cards Putting your chocolate in the back of the cupboard Chronological self-binding Another form of self-binding is the use of time limits and finish lines. By restricting consumption to certain times of the day, week, month, or year, we narrow our window of consumption and thereby limit our use. For example, I never drink coffee past 1:00 p.m. This is a chronological self-binding I have made for myself that will help me get better sleep at night. You can do this in other ways as well. You can tell yourself you will consume only on holidays, only on weekends, never before 5:00 p.m., never before Thursdays etc. The reason it's so hard to stick to routines like this is because of a psychological phenomenon known as delay discounting. Delay discounting refers to the fact that the value of a reward goes down the longer we have to wait for it. Most of us would rather get twenty dollars today than a year from now. The way we get around this is by setting in feedback loops that remind us of our bad behavior. One easy way to do this is by tracking the amount of time that you spend consuming and using it to more mindfully set chronological barriers. I was working out in the gym a couple of weeks ago when one of my good Cornell friends came up to me and put his hand on my left shoulder. I turned around to face him but his phone was directly in front of me opened up to the timetracking app. The average amount of time spent on his phone during the days of the week was 3.5. "Why are you showing me this," I asked. He explained to me that it was 2.5 hours less on average than the last couple of weeks. He had watched on of my videos on time tracking and decided to give it a shot. Every time that he spent too much time using Tik Tok or some other phone application it become abundantly clear when he checked his screen time app later that day. He looked at me with genuine happiness and said that he now had an extra 2.5 hours every single day to do what he wanted with. Time that he didn't even know was there. The power of awareness. Categorical self-binding The last form of self-binding works by sorting dopamine into different categories: the subtype that we allow ourselves to consume and the subtype that we don't. This strategy is especially helpful for drugs that we can't eliminate altogether but that we're trying to consume in a healthier way, like food, sex, and smartphones. Some classic examples include diets like eganism, carnivorism, vegetarianism. Some other examples are we aren't allowed to play gambling games on our phones but are allowed to play snake to pass the time. One of the ways I use this most in my own life is through constricting my ability to watch YouTube. I used to be addicted to watching YouTube all the time. I would watch it before school, during study halls, and before going to bed at night. To curb my addiction, I gave myself a rule: I was only allowed to watch YouTube if I was running. This not only curbed my addiction to YouTube, but made my running habit more fun as well. The Pursuit of Pain Is simply reducing pleasurable things the only way that Anna thinks we can go through a dopamine fast? Anna brings up in the book that we can actually use pain to help in our dopamine fasting ventures as well. Can we use pain for pleasure? Earlier we talked about how dopamine works on a pleasure pain balance. When tipped toward one side of the balance, we will be more prone to tip to ward the other side in the coming hours and days. Using this fact, we can actually use pain to shift the balance toward pleasure. Pain leads to pleasure by triggering the body’s own regulating homeostatic mechanisms. In this case, the initial pain stimulus is followed by a tip toward the pleasure side of the balance. I take a cold shower every single night before sitting down to read some books. Cold exposure therapy for just five minutes has been shown to increase the average levels of dopamine in the body by up to 2.5 times over the coming hours. Exercise does the same thing in the body. While we are exercising we experience drastically increased levels of Cortisol, the stress hormone which often leads to us feeling pain during the exercise bout itself. In the hours afterward, however, countless studies have shown the benefits that exercise has on the other areas of our life. Pain is also addicting The one thing to be mindful of is that just like getting addicted to pleasure you can actually also become addicted to pain. Just as we become tolerant to pleasure stimuli with repeated exposure, so too can we become tolerant to painful stimuli, resetting our brains to the side of pain. This phenomenon happened to me when I got addicted to seeing my 5k time increase during my first semester at Cornell. It got to the point where I was attempting to beat it every other day to the extreme detriment on my ability to recover effectively. At one point I managed to get it down to 18:15 but because I wasn't waiting long enough between runs, I never got past that point. I had become so addicted to the number I was seeing on the treadmill that I forgot to allow myself time to recover. If used responsibly, pain can absolutely be a fantastic way to reset the dopamine balance towards the side of pleasure. A Changing World The beautiful thing about fixing your dopamine levels is it's a contagious process. When one person succeeds in their recovery from addiction it can often lead to their friend group adopting new behaviors or their family trying to do so as well. I myself have noticed insane differences in my friends and family from who they were just months ago. Dopamine fasting isn't an isolating experience. It's actually an incredibly social one. Unlinked References