## Metadata author:: [[@Huberman Lab]] publish_date:: reviewed_date:: ```dataview TABLE notes FROM "" where file.name = "% 2023-03-01 Controlling Your Dopamine for Motivation Focus and Satisfaction Episode 39" ``` ## Highlights - Speaker 0: It also led to increases in dopamine and these increases in dopamine were very significant. They kicked in around 10 or 15 minutes after submersion into the cold water and I should mention the head wasn't below water is just up to the neck and The dopamine release continued to to rise and rise and rise and eventually reached 250% above baseline. Now, what was interesting is after subjects got out of this cold water, that dopamine increase was sustained. And I know nowadays many people are interested in using cold water therapy as a way to increase metabolism and fat loss but also to improve sense of well being, improve cognition, improve clarity of mind. You know, there's [(Time 0:03:10)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7ce7ad9bdc7e23ff9c2e5) - notes:: Cold water therapy, a.k.a. ice baths can increase dopamine released by 250% above baseline and maintain a higher than baseline release for an extended period of time - Speaker 0: I'm going to feel even better because I just had this great event, not the case. What actually happens is that your baseline level of dopamine drops and I will explain the precise mechanism for that. Okay, and the neuroscience literature, we refer to this as tonic and physic release of dopamine tonic being the low level baseline that's always there circulating, released into your brain all the time. And then physic these peaks that ride above that baseline. And those two things interact and this is really important. I'm gonna teach you the underlying neurobiology. But even if you have no background in biology, I promise to make it all clear. I'll explain the terms and what they mean. And I'm excited to teach you about dopamine because [(Time 0:11:10)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7cff1d9bdc7e23ff9f70c) - notes:: Tonic release is the baseline level of dopamine. Phasic is the peaks and valleys of release and both phasic and tonic dopamine release mechanisms have interplay. - Speaker 0: or 20 or hundreds of people neuro modulators are coordinating that dance in the nervous system. What this means is that dopamine release changes the probability that certain neural circuits will be active and that other neural circuits will be inactive. Okay, so it modulates a bunch of things all at once and that's why it's so powerful, it shifting not just our levels of energy, but also our mindset also our feelings of whether or not we can or cannot accomplish something. So how does dopamine work and what does it do? 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 [(Time 0:13:13)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7d048d9bdc7e23ffa0319) - notes:: Dopamine is responsible for motivation Drive and craving not just pleasure and also the modulation of time perception - Speaker 0: it some of it docks or parks on the other side in the other neuron. And by virtue of electrical changes in the what we call the post synaptic neuron. That chemical will make that neuron more electrically active or less electrically active. Dopamine can do that like any other neurotransmitter or neural modulator. So it can have one neuron influence another neuron. But dopamine can also engage in what's called volumetric release. Volumetric release is like a giant vomit that gets out to 50 or 100 or even thousands of cells. So there's local release what we call synaptic release and then there's volumetric release. So volumetric release it's like dumping all this dopamine out into the system. [(Time 0:19:01)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7d1d9d9bdc7e23ffa3d53) - notes:: Dopamine can work on a localized level like any other neural transmitter, but it can also utilize volumetric release where it basically vomits in large amount of itself, and can manipulate hundreds or thousands of other neurons - Speaker 0: Many drugs and indeed many supplements that increase dopamine will actually make it harder for you to sustain dopamine release over long periods of time and to achieve those peaks. That most of us are craving when we are in pursuit of things. Why? Because if you get both volumetric release the dumping out of dopamine everywhere and you're getting local release. What it means is that the difference between the peak and baseline is likely to be smaller and this is very important how satisfying or exciting or pleasure fela given experiences doesn't just depend on the height of that peak. It depends on the height of that peak relative to the baseline. [(Time 0:20:23)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7d247d9bdc7e23ffa4d3f) - notes:: Dopamine, releasing drugs, can reduce the gap between the Volumetric release and the tonic (Baseline) levels in the brain. Reducing overall motivation and pleasure received from activity i.e. the gap between the peak and the baseline is key here. - Speaker 0: a different impact on the levels of dopamine depending on how much somebody subjectively enjoys that exercise. So if you're somebody who loves running, chances are it's going to increase your levels of dopamine two times above your baseline, not unlike sex, people who dislike exercise will achieve less. Dopamine increase or no increase in dopamine from exercise and if you like, other forms of exercise like yoga or weightlifting or swimming or what have you. Again, it's going to vary by your subjective experience of whether or not you enjoy that activity. This is important and it brings us back to something that we talked about earlier. Remember that miso cortical [(Time 0:43:33)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7e9e2d9bdc7e23ffdd2ec) - notes:: If you enjoy exercise, it can bring your dopamine peak to 200% of baseline, the same as sexual activity. If you do not enjoy exercise that peak could be lower or nonexistent. - Speaker 0: 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 at all. 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 up regulation of certain dopamine receptors. So caffeine actually makes you able to experience more of dopamine effects because as I mentioned before, dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or it's released volumetric lee but then it has to bind someplace and trigger those g protein coupled [(Time 0:47:11)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7ebeed9bdc7e23ffe14db) - notes:: Caffeine can increase the effects felt from dopamine - Speaker 0: we often think, okay, I'm going to pursue the wind. Alright, let's let's move this to modern day. I'm gonna I'm gonna run this marathon, I'm gonna train for this marathon, then you run the marathon and you finish, you cross the finish line, you feel great and you would think, okay, now I'm set for the entire year, I'm gonna feel so much better. I'm gonna feel this accomplishment in my body, it's gonna be so great. But that's not what happens. You might feel some of those things, but your level of dopamine has actually dropped below baseline. Now, eventually it will ratchet back up. But two things are really important. First of all, the extent to which it drops below baseline is proportional to how high the peak was. So if you cross the finish line pretty happy, it won't drop that much below [(Time 0:53:20)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7edcad9bdc7e23ffe5459) - notes:: Peaks and valleys in dopamine production are mirrored, meaning the higher, the high, the lower, the low as she comes to motivation and drive thinking of this and a hunter gatherer since it tracks so you continue together more and more, and are not just immediately satisfied with current acquisitions - Speaker 0: if we really like chocolate, there's some pleasure but then there's a little bit of pain that exceeds the amount of pleasure and it's subtle and we experience it as wanting more of that thing. Okay, so there's a pleasure pain balance and I'm telling you that the pleasure and the pain are governed by dopamine to some extent. Well how could that be right I said before, when you engage in an activity or when you ingest something that increases dopamine dopamine levels go up. You know, to substantial degree with all the things I listed off, Where is the pain coming from? Well, the pain is coming from the lack of dopamine that follows and you now know what that lack of dopamine reflects? [(Time 0:57:31)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7ee88d9bdc7e23ffe6d54) - notes::  After the peaks of a definite response, the valleys leave a somewhat inverse effect of pain versus the initial pleasure of an activity, such as eating chocolate in this manifest, as that craving afterwards, for more just driven by a now lower than baseline amount of dopamine - Speaker 0: 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 [(Time 1:00:04)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7ef7bd9bdc7e23ffe904c) - notes:: When you have an extreme higher peak and then suffer the valley from that affect, there’s not enough releasable dopamine available to bring you back to the prior baseline so now you’re basically his lower leading you to want to do more of that activity and if you pursue that want that is addiction - Speaker 0: activity or substance again thinking mistakenly that it's going to bring up their baseline, it's going to give them that peak again. Not only does it not give them a peak, their baseline gets lower and lower because they're depleting dopamine more and more and more and we've seen this over and over again. When people get addicted to something, then they're not achieving much pleasure at all. You can even see this with video games, people will play a video game, they love it, it's super exciting to them and then they'll keep playing and playing and playing and either one of two things happens. Typically, both. First of all I would say addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure so oftentimes, what will happen is the [(Time 1:00:42)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7ef7cd9bdc7e23ffe9093) - notes:: “Addiction is a narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure “ - Speaker 0: 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 look 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 I would say. Yeah you know I'm feeling kind of burnt out. I'm just not feeling like I have the same energy that I did a few years ago and of course there are age related reasons why people can experience drops in [(Time 1:02:57)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f7ef80d9bdc7e23ffe915c) - notes:: There is only one currency of motivation, and that is dopamine. It’s not just drugs, alcohol and sex. That will evoke this exercise and activity, and Hardwork can do it as well. It’s no wonder that somebody even leading a balanced life can get burnt out. - Speaker 0: droppin baseline who has addictive tendencies whether or not their behaviors or substances that is always going to be the path forward is going to be either cold turkey or through some sort of tapering to limit interactions with the what would otherwise be the dopamine evoking behavior or substance. So let's talk about the optimal way to engage in activities or to consume things that evoke dopamine. And by no means am I encouraging people to take drugs of abuse? I would not do that. I am not doing that. But some of the things on these lists of dopamine evoking activities are things like chocolate coffee. Even if it's in direct um sex and reproduction [(Time 1:07:27)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63f8e97dd9bdc7e23f1af698) - Speaker 0: have to imagine there's something that appeals to you, something that you do repeatedly because you enjoy it. And almost inevitably it's because there's an intermittent schedule, there's a intermittent scheduled by which dopamine sometimes arrives, sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot, sometimes a medium amount. Okay, That intermittent reinforcement schedule is actually the best scheduled to export two Other activities. How do you do that? Well, first of all, if you are engaged in activities, school, sport relationship, etcetera, 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 [(Time 1:10:27)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63ff83ccd9bdc7e23fd79e71) - notes:: This immediately makes me think of stoicism in the general five of don’t let the highs be too high. Don’t let the lows be too low and my memories stamping down excitement and expectation for Christmas. - Speaker 0: it is great except that by layering together all these things to try and achieve that dopamine release and by getting a big peak in dopamine, you're actually increasing the number of conditions required to achieve pleasure from that activity again. And so there is a form of this where sometimes you do all the things that you love to get the optimal workout. You listen to your favorite music, you go at your favorite time of day, you have your pre workout drink if that's your thing. You do all the things that give you that best experience of the work out for you. But there's also a version of this where sometimes you don't do the dopamine enhancing activities. You don't ingest anything to increase your dopamine. You just do the exercise. You don't [(Time 1:11:39)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63ff8647d9bdc7e23fd7e8f4) - notes:: Layering, dopamine producing activities or stimuli, such as pre-workout, or your favorite music to exercise, makes it so you have conditions to meet to elicit the same response in the future, making it harder to enjoy the actual activity - Speaker 0: process and inevitably it might not happen tomorrow might not happen in a month but inevitably you will have challenges with motivation and drive related to those activities. Now some people can keep it right in check. They can just do the one can of the energy drinker. They only do their pre workout before really hard days for instance more power to you mm I actually do that sometimes frankly. But people who are trying to get into that peak, super motivated driven driven state. Really focused every time they engage in an activity. You are absolutely undercutting the process and you are undermining your ability to stay motivated and focused. So just as we talked about intermittent rewards schedules a moment ago, [(Time 1:21:20)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63ff8806d9bdc7e23fd82d5d) - notes:: I am curious how ammonia inhalants might play in to this equation - Speaker 0: to do. No one was telling them to draw what this relates to a so called intrinsic versus extrinsic reinforcement. When we receive rewards. Even if we give ourselves rewards for something, we tend to associate less pleasure with the actual activity itself that evoked the reward. Now that might seem counterintuitive, but that's just the way that these dopamine ergic circuits work and now understanding these peaks and baselines and dopamine, which I won't review again, this should make sense. If you get a peek in dopamine from a reward, it's going to lower your baseline and the cognitive interpretation is that you didn't really do the activity because you enjoy the activity, you did it for the reward. [(Time 1:39:49)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63ff8b2fd9bdc7e23fd89ffc) - notes:: Extrinsic rewards for activities, you already enjoy can cause you too enjoy that activity less, and therefore do it less for the enjoyment more for the reward moving forward through reinforcement - AirrQuote [(Time 1:43:15)](https://www.airr.io/quote/63ff8c25d9bdc7e23fd8bd09) - notes:: Sounds like the stereotypical struggle for female weight loss goals