HealthyGamerGG - I’m Walking Through Life With No Emotions

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Feeling like you have no emotions can suck, that's why today Dr. K dives into emotions, emotional suppression, anhedonia, and resetting your dopamine! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you feel hunger, then you're going to go eat something, but if you have no appetite that you don't, your body needs the food, but you're not driven or motivated to do it. Do you guys ever go through periods of just feeling nothing? I'm not talking about seasonal depression or whatever. At least then you're feeling down and well depressed. I don't feel anything, period. I don't get angry when I feel like I should be angry. I don't feel accomplished when I feel like I've accomplished something. I don't feel pleasure nor sadness, nor hate, nor anything.

It's all emotions. It's like all emotions have been drained from me. I don't enjoy learning new things, and I'm not as curious as I once was. I don't feel anything when I solve an enigmatic puzzle. I used to enjoy watching anime, but now it's more like I don't mind watching anime. I feel like all of those things that define me are used to. I feel no more than a shell. I'm 18 now, and I don't think I'm supposed to feel like a shell, right? I visited R-slash-Anne Hadonia and I related to most of the posts to a scary degree. I want to say I'm scared to be living like this, but I'm not actually scared. I don't feel scared. It's just that I realize that this is not how it ought to be. I know that I don't want to be living like this. I feel like this has been developing for the past year or so,

and I did not, and I did get depressed from time to time, and at some points I was even suicidal, but the general decline towards Anhedonia was always in progress. Mind you, this is all self-diagnosed. I never asked for help. If there is any hope I'm clinging to, it's because I occasionally feel something, but it's very faint. What should I do? Should I be concerned?

Is this temporary? So, let's talk about this. Sometimes we feel numb. And the tricky thing about feeling numb, when we stop enjoying things, we don't even feel fear. It's like you look at yourself and you're like, man, I'm not really enjoying life. This should bother me more than it is.

I should be concerned about this. I should feel fear. You even acknowledge that like you should be experiencing more negative emotion. But like you don't. And so it sort of bothers you, but you're not worried about it, right? Or you're worried about it, but you don't feel worried about it. It's like there's some part of you that's floating above, which is like, this is not right, this is not okay.

But the challenge is that normally, when things in our life are not okay, that negative emotion can actually be motivation to go and fix it. Right? Where it's like if you feel hunger, then you're going to go eat something. But if you have no appetite that you don't, your body needs the food, but you're not driven or motivated to do it. So sometimes we feel numb. And then we talk about Anhedonia. Anhedonia is a term that means the inability to experience pleasure. Anhedonia is oftentimes associated with clinical depression, major depressive disorder or depressive

episodes, bipolar disorder. And so the interesting thing is that we may think, okay, so like if I'm an hedonic, what a lot of people will jump to is that means I'm depressed. I need clinical treatment. But anhedonia is just a feature of depression, just like insomnia is a feature of depression. or weight changes are a feature of depression. It doesn't mean that all people who are Anhedonic are depressed in the same way that everyone who has difficulty sleeping is not depressed.

So Anhedonia describes our experience, but there's actually studies on people who are an hedonic who are not depressed, for whom Anhedonia is the primary problem. And I'd love to share with you all some of the learnings of what those studies show and like how we can understand the situation. Okay? So let's take a look at some neuroscience. This is some super cool translational research, by the way. So this is going to be my attempt at explaining

if you should feel worried about your life, but you don't even feel worried, and you have difficulty feeling anything at all what's going on. So the first thing, we can talk about three parts of the problem. brain. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex, part of our frontal lobe, nucleus accumbens, which is our dopamine reward circuit. And then third thing is going to be our amygdala and limbic system, okay, which is over here. So this experiences negative emotion. This is essentially a controller.

So what does that mean? So let's talk about anxiety. So when I feel anxiety, okay, so let's use the color yellow. So when I feel anxiety, this activates this part of my brain. When I get my anxiety under control, when I overcome my anxiety, my ventrometrial prefrontal cortex inhibits this, basically overrides my emotion. So anytime we control, get control of our emotions, it's the ventromedial prefrontal. frontal cortex that controls it. The other thing that happens is as I get anxiety, this is going to go over here and control my behaviors. So the nucleus accumbens in the dopamine circuitry is what

essentially governs behavior. It says, hey, go do this thing because it is rewarding. Okay? So it's like where motivation comes from. So if you're numb, we're going to start with a clinical observation, which is that when you numb yourself, you can't selectively numb yourself. It's just not how it works. We can't really selectively stop feeling negative emotions and just feel all the positive emotions. There are sort of ways that we do that, usually drugs of abuse are good examples of this, that will just increase your sense of euphoria artificially. But generally speaking, our natural intrinsic brain mechanisms cannot just numb all the sadness.

and just make us feel happy. Why is that? It's because the reason we've evolved to feel sadness is because it's actually like for survival benefit. So anxiety like helps us survive. Sadness helps us survive. Fear helps us survive. And so our brain actually evolved

to experience happiness and sadness. So what's going on in people who are numb? What's going on in essentially the pathophysiology of people who are completely numb? So there's some really interesting studies that have been done. First is that this part, So now let's talk about numbness. Okay?

This part is altered. This part is altered. Generally speaking, what we say is that when we want, and this part is altered to. Generally speaking, we want to strengthen our frontal lobes so that we can get control of our anxiety. And then we can act independent of anxiety. When you look at studies of people who are an hedonic both with depression and without depression, what you find is alterations in this circuit. And essentially what we tend to see is overactivity of the ventrometrial prefrontal cortex.

When we meditate, we strengthen the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. But in people who are anhydonic, this is very, very strong. So isn't that a good thing? Because that's the goal of meditation. It's the goal of meditation if you're anxious. Because in the case of someone whose anxiety controls their behavior, their ventrometrial prefrontal cortex is weak. In this case, it's weak.

But in people who are numb, it's actually very strong. Now, why is that? What does that mean? What that means is that it's suppressing our emotions very, very powerfully. There's also other things going on where in people who are anhedonic, there's a really interesting study about the pleasure from sucrose. So if I take people and I give them an increasing sucrose concentration, so I tell them to drink something sweet.

What I tend to find is that, let's say, normal people, let's say this is the pleasure threshold. So above this point, a normal person experiences pleasure. When someone is anhydonic, their pleasure threshold is here. because they literally need more of the same stimulus to start to experience the same amount of pleasure. So to get one unit of pleasure, I need a higher level of sucrose. So what's going on there? That comes to the dopamine reward circuitry.

This is lower. So what's actually happening is our ventrometrial prefrontal cortex directs our attention. And so it almost compensates from a reward circuitry that's stunted by increasing its activity. Does that make sense? Because my ability to feel pleasure is weakened. So what I need to do is actually like ramp up this so that I can try to boost this. The interesting thing is when I ramp this up, it also numbs me out. So it's kind of weird that way.

My ability to feel pleasure is negatively. impacted. Therefore, my cortices try to compensate for the other parts of my brain. That's what the controller does. It's always trying to compensate, always trying to compensate. And so as it ramps up its activity, it suppresses everything else. So if you're anhedonic, let me see if I can actually find this paper. Yeah, this is a fantastic paper. Neurobiological mechanisms of anhedonia. Translational research. There's one thing that I want to show you all in specific. Neural basis of positive emotion, neuropharmacology of

anadonia major. Yes. Neural basis of trait anhedonia in non-depressed subjects. Oh, you guys can't see that.

There we go. This is the coolest part of this whole paper because it looks at anahedonia and people who are not depressed and figures out

what's going on. So, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex for the processing of positive emotion is positively correlated. Okay.

So we won't go into too much detail in the paper, but... So if you're numb, is it normal? No. Should you be worried about it? Sure. Are you worried about it? No, because you're numb. What's going on?

It's actually an interesting circuit of underactive reward circuitry, a compensatory change in your prefrontal cortex, and when your prefrontal cortex gets activated, it numbs your negative emotions as well. Basically. Oversimplifying, because the brain is complicated. There's no way you can reduce it this employee. So then the question is, what do we do about it?

Right? So where does the problem originate? Chat? What do you all think? How do we reset some of this stuff? You need more anxiety? That's possible. it's funny. So someone's

meming, right? So what's the, what answers are y'all going to give me? Number one, need more anxiety. You think you're trolling, but you're not wrong. Ah, someone's talking about dopamine detox. Okay. Y'all are actually precisely correct. I can't even tell if people we're being serious or they're meaming. So the first thing that you've got to do is reset this nucleus accumbens.

Okay, so what is the most common cause of underactivity of the nucleus? accumbens is dopaminergic overstimulation. So when I've worked with people who are an hedonic, and we sort of know this, right? Like, if I play a video game for one hour, it's fun. The 10th hour I play it is the game even fun. Am I actually like enjoying it? No.

If I spend 60 hours a week playing a video game, do I have more fun or less fun than if I play a game for six hours a week? So first thing you've got to do, reset your dopamine. So we've done videos. We've had Discord events about dopamine detoxes. We've also debunked other dopamine detoxes, which are largely BS. But you've got to reset your dopamine. So what I'd say is for two weeks, you know, drastically decrease or cut out YouTube, social media, Twitch,

gaming, because you've got to reset your nucleus accumbens. Once your nucleus accumbens resets, hopefully your ventromedial prefrontal cortex will start to calm down. As it'll calm down, you'll start to feel negative emotions. So y'all aren't wrong. The second thing you need to do is become aware of negative emotions. So if we paid attention to this person's post, they were saying, like, you're not completely numb, right? You just feel a lot less than when you.

you should, then what you should. So when you feel something negative, try to understand what you're feeling. Really try to increase your emotional awareness. And what you'll tend to find is that when you become aware of your negative emotion, even the smallest negative emotion, what you're going to find is that there's a response to the negative emotion. And when you have this response to the negative emotion, there's going to be a reflexive action. So when I'm feeling sensitive. So when I'm feeling sad without even realizing it, I'm going to start browsing Reddit. And guess what this reflexive action does? Messes up your dopamine.

So ironically, feeling more anxious is actually the right answer. So there are going to be small moments throughout the day where you experience emotions. Observe the emotion. And most importantly, acknowledge what it is, and then don't stop the reflexive action. And as you stop the reflexive action, the emotion will increase.

It'll feel a little bit uncomfortable. But since your brain is pretty good at numbing, it's going to be a slow process of letting it out a little bit by little bit by little bit. And as you stop the reflexive action, you're going to stop messing with your dopamine. And so we sort of see that it'll sort of fix the problem. The problem with this is that as you fix the problem,

What are you actually going to experience? You're going to feel more negative emotion. So be aware of that. And as you feel more negative emotion, the good news is that you'll feel more positive emotion. And then you'll recalibrate. So it's interesting because we see this kind of situation a lot nowadays where people are numb.

and then they think about anhedonia. They're like, oh, man, it sounds like I'm anhodonic. So one thing that we should also say is that if you are an hedonic, this is not a good idea. You should probably go see a provider and get evaluated. Because if you have a clinical illness that is causing the anhedonia, because remember that neuropharmacology of anhedonia in major depressive disorder, there are two different things that could be going on. You could be depressed or you could not be depressed.

the pathway for each of those things is different. You could definitely do this one as well if you're depressed, but there's a whole other set of stuff that's going on in the case of actual depression, right, and how we assess anadonia and how we treat anahedonia. So you should get a clinical evaluation, but then recognize this cycle that the numbness is through hyperactive activity

of the ventrometrial prefrontal cortex, which is to compensate for a hypoactive nucleus ofcom. And then once your nucleus accumbens, by the way, is hypoactive, you're going to, like, have trouble with motivation as well. So you don't enjoy things as much. And then you try to balance that negativity by activating your prefrontal cortex. The thing is, when you activate that prefrontal cortex, it suppresses your negative emotion as well.

And so you end up being completely numb. And you can reverse that cycle. Through, first of all, dopamine detox goes a long way. But secondly, awareness of the negative emotion. not distracting yourself or suppressing that negative emotion through the reflexive action. The problem is that when you stop suppressing it, you're going to start feeling more. And that's going to be like too much to handle. So you've got to learn how to swim in more chaotic waters.

Right? You got to get out of the kiddie pool and like get into the big pool. And then eventually like get into a pond, get into a lake, get into a river and get into the, the ocean. The ocean of emotion, baby.