Mark Bell's Power Project - MBPP EP. 618 - Food & Pornography Are Just As Addictive as Drugs ft. Anna Lembke

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

Anna Lembke is an American psychiatrist who is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University. She is a specialist in the opioid epidemic in the United States, and the author of The Dopamine Nation, Drug Dealer, MD, How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop. Buy Anna’s book, Dopamine Nation: https://amzn.to/3bp7CHo Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Vuori Performance Apparel: Visit https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order! ➢Magic Spoon Cereal: Visit https://www.magicspoon.com/powerproject to automatically save $5 off a variety pack! ➢8 Sleep: Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro! ➢Marek Health: https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT15 for 15% off ALL LABS! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Subscribe to the Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Power Project Familia, how is it going? Now, working with a lot of different clients and also talking to so many different coaches that have come onto this show, I've seen that and I understand that people have cravings. We all have cravings. And the crazy thing and the rough thing is that when you're dieting,

you can't just eat as many donuts or eat all the cereal you wanna eat, but that's why we have good, healthy treats. And our new sponsor, Magic Spoon, has amazing cereal. Now, number one, a lot of cereals have a lot of carbohydrates and a lot of sugar. Let me tell you the macros on this. Zero grams of sugar, four grams of net carbs, 14 grams of protein per serving, and 140 calories per serving. might be good a lot of times these healthy snacks taste like cardboard and crap but when you eat magic spoon when you take your first bite you're going to be reminded of the childhood cereal used to eat i'm serious bro when i had that peanut butter man i was like oh my god is this reese's pieces like damn man it's good yeah so you guys need to check him out andrew how can people learn more absolutely there's one more thing i wanted to add. So like my wife, she has a gluten intolerance.

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So again, that's at magicspoon.com slash power project. You'll receive $5 off that variety pack links to them down in the description, as well as the podcast show notes head over there right now. What's up, Power Project? My name is Allie, and I'm here to introduce you to our next guest, Dr. Anna Lembke. Dr. Lembke is the Chief of Addiction Medicine and Assistant Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also a diplomat of the American Board of Addiction Medicine. She began her career with a desire to help those with mental disabilities.

However, throughout her career, she uncovered how many of her patients were truly addicted to opioids and couldn't get off. She had never intended to be an expert in the area of addiction as she was not trained to treat people with addictions throughout her schooling. She was unable to avoid treating addiction and discovered that many of her patients with mental disorders were also tangled with addiction. Dr. Lemke is the author of Dopamine Nation and Drug Dealer MD. As a young doctor, she never imagined she would be qualified to write a book about addictions. She was one of the first in the medical community to sound the alarm about the opioid overprescribing and epidemic. Using her public platform and her faculty position at Stanford, Dr. Lemke has developed

multiple teaching programs on addiction, safe prescribing, and opioid tapering. Dr. Lemke continues to educate policymakers and the public about causes of and solutions for the problem of addiction. Please enjoy this podcast with Dr. Anna Lembke. People are weird with the mics. Maybe they're not used to it. That has to be it. Yeah.

Maybe with some people we can have them do like a little test. Just like 100 milligrams a week. Okay. Just like 100 milligrams a week. We're rolling, so whatever you guys are doing. I got dad jokes. Just come at me anytime. That was a good one. That one caught me way off guard.

That was a good one. That was a good one. Quinn is unaccepting of the dad jokes. Just shakes her head, walks away. It's a teenage girl thing. Yeah, she's like, no. Your daughter does the same thing? Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, I'm over here. Like, I'll make the dumbest one. And you're laughing your ass off. It is the funniest thing I had ever said in my whole life. Killed yourself. If I was on stage, I would get a standing ovation. And she's just like, you're so lame. I'm just like, no, you don't.

Just wait. It'll make sense one day. Hey, in a dopamine nation, does Anna Lemke, does she talk about like laughing? Cause I know you, I think you looked at the book quite a bit. Does she talk about like laughing and stuff? Like what that can do for you from like a dopamine perspective? Did you see anything like that in there? No, I did not.

I'm curious. I'm curious. Like a good question, you know, cause I know she's been on like Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan's comedian. And I wonder what those types of things kind of do for our mindset. We have a good laugh. I mean, it feels good. Probably does something for you, right?

It's always helpful. And that's why, like, you know, people love social media. People love funny videos because it number one, it helps you not be bored. But number two, it brings you a little bit of joy. It brings you a little bit of happiness when you're not feeling it. But I wonder if, you know, like as stress can like, I don't know, it can cause a whole like domino effect of things. But like even like getting sick easier or something like that. So I wonder if like laughing a lot can actually like help protect you against, I don't know, just getting sick or or something like that. So I wonder if like laughing a lot can actually like help protect you against,

I don't know, just getting sick or anything weird like that. I don't know. I mean, probably like if it, if you are in better spirits, maybe like, maybe it helps if you're always in a good mood.

I think this is really interesting that, you know, your plane and pleasure, uh, they come from like the same spot in your brain. And, um, you know, your plane and pleasure, uh, they come from like the same spot in your brain. And, um, you know, initially, uh, one of the questions I was going to ask right off the bat was about, uh, you know, why study dopamine when it's like the thing that quote unquote, like makes you happy.

Like, why wouldn't you study the thing that makes you sad? Cause the thing that makes you happy doesn't seem to be that problematic. As long as we can figure out what makes us happy, we'll just do that here and there and we'll be good to go. Right. But it's really complicated. I guess there's like a pain and pleasure like balance. And then like, what is pain like your debt, you know, your definition of pain versus somebody else's like definition or interpretation of that pain. And one of the greatest like sedatives for pain ever is pain itself. And so how weird is that?

But sometimes what do you mean by that? So just as an example, one of the examples I think she gave in her book was a subset of people that were exposed to extra radiation and they ended up living longer. Yeah. I think it was from like a war or something. I'm sorry that I'm fucking that up and don't have the good reference for it, but you know what I mean? Uh, because they got, uh, you know, a little bit of, uh, a little bit of poison can go a long way, a little bit of something bad and go a long way. So pain, you know, kind of, I guess, depends on our interpretation of the pain. But even something like your parents yelling at you about not to go on the road, or maybe they slap your hand real hard.

And that pain, like, holy, like, that shit hurt. Like, why did my mom hit me? You know, and it hurts your feelings. And it physically kind of stung a bit. And you cry. But that emotion gets kind of stamped on you. And that pain is like a scar that you can rely on for something that's really good. So that that experience of having some pain, while it's not necessarily inducing any sort

of pleasure, it is it is protecting you from something in the future. And then we know low doses of pain in the gym are fantastic. And we're not talking about severe joint, ligament, muscle pain. We're just talking about kind of the burn, the burn that you get and being able to work through that, a lot of times that's what our training is all about. And I don't know about you guys, but, like, you work out and you're not in a great mood. You warm up. You're still not in a great mood.

But once you push past, like, I don't know, maybe 60% effort or so, then it all kicks in and you're breathing hard and now you're starting to feel really good. So you induce some pain. You certainly induced, um, and maybe it wouldn't even be considered pain for some people, but you certainly induced from discomfort. Yeah. And I think she had an example of a book of a guy that like he started to, uh, he started doing cold showers and then he started doing like ice baths and because of the dopamine release and how good he felt from that, he started just like doing that over and over. And he said it was like doing a drug.

I think he, he used that to help get off of something, but he said he had a drug like experience by doing it really often. But that's Matt, like that's discomfort. You know, it's like you don't want to sit in a sauna for five hours, but sitting in a sauna for like 30 minutes to 40 minutes can yield a lot of benefit, even though it's extremely uncomfortable. And for some, a little bit painful. Why would you sit there in 200 degree heat?

You know, like what, I think that's what most people would, would think. But, um, you know, getting used to some of that can be can be really beneficial i guess the hard part sometimes determined is like i guess i don't know how much pain are we talking about one of the examples she gives which i think is an excellent one is any sort of like massage therapy you know anyone can relate to that the you go to bench press and the front of your shoulders, not feeling great. And you have access to someone who's a good practitioner at some active release therapy, maybe chiropractic. And they start to kind of work in on you. And, yeah, it it hurts.

But then you move your arm at the end of the session and you can move your arm a little bit further, a little bit better. a little bit better the pain that was uh not allowing you to exhibit full range of motion now is has subsided quite a bit to where you can move more i mean think about like the uh think about kind of the meaning of that you know you you just get rid of a little take a little bit of that pain you get rid of a little bit of that pain and now look what your body's uh look what your body's capable of. So I don't know. A lot of this stuff is super fascinating. She had a tech talk, which was really good.

But she talks quite a bit about like a psychiatrist kind of over-medicate, you know, and how people just, you know, they come in with any problem. And there's statistics of like how we're in the United States. We are like 5% of the world, but we take 80're in the united states we are like five percent of the world but we take 80 of the world's medication that's kind of wild you know i i think it's going to be a really good topic for us to delve into as far as like because she she has um when she was in her book she talked about anxiety actually being something that is beneficial for people and that it's something that people should potentially learn how to lean into rather than, uh,

medicating, you know? So coming from someone who is a psychiatrist like herself, that's very interesting because people are like, Oh, I, okay. There are some people who have actual like chemical imbalances that leads

to depression, but many people might not need certain medications that they're currently taking. Yeah, I just, I mean, just to kind of check in, I contacted a family member that has struggled with anxiety for a long time. And based off of hearing some of that stuff that you're mentioning, I said, hey, you know, what has been your own personal experience? He was taking like adhd medication from a young age and all these different things i said uh in the long term do you really because now he's older so do you think it really did anything he's like in the short term it appeared that it like kind of helped but uh in terms of the long term he's like, it really didn't do much.

And there's actually some scientific literature showing that in terms of outcomes in the classroom, that there wasn't a lot of great improvements, which you think that there would be because these medications are supposed to or they're touted as being helpful. And I'm not saying that it can't help anybody. I also am not a researcher. And I also don't have a child that's in that position. So I'm not placing any judgment. I do not know what it's like to have a kid that's compromised, that's upset, that's dealing with anxiety. So I don't want to place any judgment on that. But what I will say is like a lot of these medications, a lot of times they seem like they're being over prescribed. And so just something to give second thought to

something to just think about, like, why, why is my kid or why am I going through this experience? And maybe there's a couple of things you can check. Maybe there's some things you can check off the list, make sure that you're doing doing make sure you're exercising and sleeping correctly and doing some of the basic stuff before you go and take a pharmaceutical. Hello there. Hi. Hi. So great to have you on the show today. We really appreciate your time. Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. What got you interested in doing this deep dive into studying dopamine and writing the book, Dopamine Nation?

Well, I mean, I've been practicing psychiatry for 25 years, so obviously interested in the brain, interested in what makes people tick. And then in particular, you know, I've been a student and a scholar of the neuroscience of addiction for quite a while now, because most of my patients struggle with some form of addiction. And, you know, dopamine is at the heart of the disease of addiction. So very interested in that really all my career. How does food impact some of the things going on in our brain, some of the chemistry of our brain? I think a lot of folks have kind of gotten behind and maybe at some point in their life, maybe didn't take their nutrition very seriously. And then maybe that compounds on top of itself. And we end up in a state where it's very difficult to exercise, difficult to kind of take on anything extra because we're fatigued from the day. Like what have you kind of seen in terms of food and

what it can do for our brain potentially? So food in the modern age is a drug. And the way to understand that is that we have adulterated our food with more salt, fat, and sugar than what nature intended us to ingest or tolerate. And sugar, fat, and salt essentially release dopamine, our brain's pleasure and reward neurotransmitter in very large amounts. And the fundamental difference between something that's addictive and something that isn't is how much dopamine it releases in the brain's reward pathway. So, we're not just ingesting food for survival, we're ingesting adulterated food turned into drug. And therefore, we are all preoccupied, appropriately so, with limiting our intake in some form or another. We all, you could argue, are on the spectrum of having an eating disorder because we must limit our intake in a world of overwhelming overabundance in which food has become drugified. There seems to be some debate on whether we're addicted to food or not.

What are your thoughts on that? So again, I mean, we are driven to seek out food, clothing, shelter, and a mate. The way that our brains get us to do that is to release dopamine when we find those natural rewards. And dopamine makes us feel good, which makes us want to do it again. But we have managed through technology to change these natural wards, food, clothing, shelter, and finding a mate, and essentially drugify them, make them more potent, more accessible, available in larger quantities, and more novel, such that they release way more dopamine than our primitive brains are wired for and may become a drug. So yes, I do think that

we can get addicted to food. Now, let me just emphasize that different people have different what we call drugs of choice. And what might be reinforcing for one person is not necessarily reinforcing for others. There is a subset of people for whom food is their primary drug. And they will crave food and compulsively overconsume food in a way that they may never do with alcohol or stimulants or sex. So I think it's important also to keep that concept in mind. So is there kind of like, I mean, with almost everything, is there a level of consistent self-control that we have to continue to have with every input? Just because like, for example, our phones, you know, if there's at any point that we don't want to be bored, all we have to do is pull up our phone, pull up an app and we could just scroll away.

So do we have to continue to just police everything that we do, even if we enjoy it, just because it can easily be taken to any sort of excess? short answer is yes. That we are living again in a drugified world where these natural rewards have been made more bountiful, more potent, and essentially have become drugs, including digital products. So I do think that we are living, you know, when you look at sort of human existence, we are living in an unprecedented time where all of our basic survival needs are met and where with the touch of a single finger, we can lived in a world of scarcity and ever-present danger. We lived to, on average, 30 years of life. Starting about 150, 200 years ago, that all began to change through the Industrial Revolution and the exponential explosion in technological innovation. Now, not only do we live on average to be about 80 years old, especially in rich nations, but we have more leisure time on any given day. So 100 years ago, the average person had two hours of leisure time. Today, the average person in the United States has about five hours of leisure time. By 2040, we're predicted to have about eight hours of leisure time. We've got more time. We've got more money. Even the poorest of

the poor have more access to luxury goods than ever before in the history of human beings. And we've got more goods, more drugs at our disposal. So it's a brand new problem. And I do think that is why the problem of addiction, not just for those who are vulnerable to that problem, but for everybody is going to be really one of the most pressing problems of the modern age. So I have a, hopefully it doesn't sound like too silly of a question, but how come we don't have a natural or yeah, just a natural limiter for dopamine. It seems like with food, even if we are chasing dopamine with food, eventually you'll get full and you can't eat anymore. But with dopamine, it just appears that no matter what, we're always seeking more. Why is that?

In order to understand that, you have to understand the neuroscience of how pleasure and pain are processed in the brain. And one of the most interesting findings in neuroscience in the last half century or so is that pleasure and pain are co-located, which means the same part of the brain that processes pleasure also processes pain, and they work like opposite sides of a balance. So when we do something pleasurable, like eat ice cream, okay, that is going to tip our balance to the side of pleasure, and we're going to get a release of dopamine in our brain's pleasure pathway. But one of the overarching rules governing this pleasure-pain balance is that it wants to remain level for what neuroscientists call homeostasis. It doesn't want to be tipped for very long to the side of pleasure or to the side of pain, and the brain will work very hard

to do whatever it can to restore homeostasis. So when we do something pleasurable like eat ice cream and we get a release of dopamine, no sooner has that happened than our brain starts to down-regulate our own dopamine transmission and our own dopamine production, not just back to baseline levels, but actually below baseline levels. So we don't just run out of dopamine. We actually go into a dopamine deficit state. One of the ways to imagine that is that imagine there are these little gremlins hopping on the pain side of your balance to bring it level again, but the gremlins like it on the balance. So they stay on until it's tipped an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. And that's that moment of wanting a second piece of chocolate

cake or a second bowl of ice cream. That's that dopamine deficit state. If we wait, the feeling passes, the gremlins hop off, and homeostasis is restored. But if we don't wait, if we have another bowl of ice cream, because in that state when we've got those gremlins on the pain side of the balance, that's what we have is craving for another bowl. Then the second time, or maybe it's the 10th time, or maybe it's the 100th time, our brain remembers and we don't get the same amount of pleasure and we don't get it for as long a period of time. So with repeated exposure, and this is the second rule of the balance, with repeated exposure, that initial pleasurable feeling gets less intense and shorter in duration. But, and here's really the clincher, that after effect or that come down, that craving, that dopamine deficit state gets longer and gets stronger.

And if we then continue to try to chase that initial good feeling, we need more ice cream. We need more potent flavors. That's what's called tolerance over time. And if we continue to try to overcome tolerance, we end up with so many gremlins on the pain side of the balance that we're essentially in a dopamine deficit state. And once we get there, we are in the land of addiction. Because when we're in that place, now we need our chocolate ice cream, not to feel good and give ourselves pleasure, but just to restore homeostasis and feel normal.

And when we're not eating ice cream, we experience the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, depression, and intense cravings for our drug of choice. And nothing else is pleasurable. So our focus has really narrowed on that bowl of chocolate ice cream. Kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't type stuff. Do you think that this is maybe like what's meant by sometimes hearing people say that life is suffering because it seems like you're kind of screwed either way, whether you go and pursue the thing. I mean, obviously we need food, we need the nutrients. But I'm a believer of you'll never have enough of what you don't need, but you, for some reason you're sold on

the fact that you really need these things. Yeah. And I think, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I think a reward, a reward, um, structured life is ultimately not a happy life. Although most of us structure our day around all kinds of rewards. Um, and the, you know, the reason for this is because of this pleasure-pain balance and that the way that the brain restores homeostasis, and homeostasis is the driving biological imperative for many physiologic and biological systems, but the way that the brain restores homeostasis is that there's a cost. What goes up must come down. For every pleasure, there is pain to pay. This kind of mechanism, if you think about it, millions of years ago when we lived in this

incredibly harsh world, when we were running from the saber-toothed tiger, when we had to walk tens of kilometers a day just to find food, This is a great system because it guarantees that we will be eternal seekers, that no matter what we find that's good, after a while, it won't be good enough and we'll be off to the next thing. And when we're not searching, we're in pain, right? Because our brains want the next good thing. But it's a really crap system in today's modern ecosystem when we have all of this overwhelming abundance. Well, this makes me kind of curious about the dopamine fast that people tend to do and people tend to talk about. Because I'm wondering

if everything like from the time you wake up in the morning and you pick up your phone, immediate gratification, then you have a cup of coffee, then you get a little bored, then you're back to your phone or you're at work, et cetera. You always, there's always an immediate gratification thing that's happening with a lot of people, even myself to an extent. And I've been trying to pay more attention to it. And I've been trying to kind of go down the rabbit hole of saying no to myself for certain things. But what, what would you say would be the best way for somebody to be able to maybe reset this in a manner that it would actually be possible? Yeah. So what I recommend to patients, and I've done this experiment with hundreds of patients over many years now, so I know it works.

I've also done it in my own life because I'm just like everybody else. I got my morning coffee and I'm checking my email and getting little dopamine hits from that all the time. But essentially, number one is to acknowledge exactly what you said, that we are constantly priming our reward pathway with these hits of dopamine. And that from a biological and evolutionary perspective, we were not designed for that. And the result is that we're making ourselves all more depressed and anxious and craving because of it. So a lot of our modern misery is because of these constant rewards. So it's really worth it to try to reset the reward pathway and restore baseline homeostasis

or tonic baseline levels of dopamine because we're always secreting a baseline level of dopamine. And that's a healthy, happy place to be, a level balance. Why? Because that can respond to new things in the environment. We can get pleasure. We can experience pain, but not too much pain. And then we can be resilient and restore homeostasis in between. But the way to do that,

given that we're all basically chasing dopamine and have all these gremlins camped out on that side and are in a dopamine deficit state, is to actually do a dopamine fast and cut out all of those small and large rewards for long enough for the gremlins to hop off the pain side of the balance, and for homeostasis to be restored. Once that happens, we can feel the difference. And then we're motivated to keep doing it, not necessarily abstaining, but maybe going back to using our various drugs, but using less and using in more moderation. And that's then where self-binding strategies come in, And that's then where self-binding strategies come in, where we use time, space, and meaning to limit our consumption, to create metacognitive as well as physical barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice, so that there's just a little bit more time and space in between. narrowing the hours in the day when we're on a device. Just like you might do intermittent fasting, we could do that with our devices and say, you know what, I'm going to fast from digital devices one day a week, right? That's, by the way, after we would go back after we've restored

homeostasis, or I'm going to narrow my digital device use to an 8-16 pattern so that in between, I leave enough time for those gremlins to hop off and for homeostasis to be restored. Is dopamine an interpretation and is it possible to have reinterpretation of dopamine? An example would be maybe you had a girlfriend that you placed at a high value assignment. They really meant something to you and you thought they were smoking hot. Three weeks later, they make you want to throw up and you no longer like that person anymore. And so maybe when you get a text from that person or a phone call from that person, like,

man, they are super annoying and you get like frustrated rather than get like what happens in the brain in those circumstances. Well, that that that is hard to dissect because there could be a lot of different things going on there. But let's just focus on the possibility that what you're describing is an example of somebody who has basically compulsive sexual problem or a sex addiction. I'm not saying that that explains every scenario, but that's very common that basically it's... Now remember, the drug itself releases dopamine, but it's chasing the drug that also releases dopamine, right? So when we have a trigger or a reminder, for example,

if we have a sex addiction and we see the object of our desire, just seeing the object of our desire releases a little bit of dopamine, followed by a mini dopamine deficit state, which is craving, which motivates us then to do the work to obtain the drug. So that's also important. It's not just the drug itself. It's the triggers or reminders or cues of the drug that get us into this little loop. or reminders or cues of the drug that get us into this little loop. Then we put in the effort, we woo that person or whatever it takes. And then we get our eye object of our desire. And presumably we have sex with that person, which seemed like it was what we wanted. But remember, with the pleasure-pain balance, no matter what it is, if you're chasing dopamine, it's never going to be enough. Because no sooner have you had sex with that person,

then you go into a dopamine deficit state. And then all of a sudden that person isn't enough or you're restless and anxious and depressed and you blame that person for those feelings. And then you're, you know, you're onto the next person. So again, if the primary driver is some satisfaction, is the pursuit of this kind of immediate gratification of a sexual impulse that's really rooted in our own pleasure, then invariably, if it's not the day after or three weeks after, there's going to be a point at which we have a comedown and then we're, you know, we need something more or better, you know, a better looking object of our desire or whatever it is. Is that, is that a reasonable answer? I mean, there's a lot of, you know, I can't,

I can imagine a lot of other reasons why that, why in a relationship would have led to that. But, I'm just curious if you can have a, like a, I guess like a reinterpretation of what you once thought was good for you. And does that maybe cause a shift in the way that dopamine is released? So let's say it's with a certain type of food. And normally when you smell pizza, you get excited. But then you recognize at some point like, hey, pizza made me well over 300 pounds.

And I don't really want to associate with that anymore. And so maybe you train yourself to not even enjoy the smell of it any longer. Maybe you're like, that's gross. I don't even want to be near it. I don't know if that's like enough to trick your brain, but I guess that's kind of the question. Yeah. Okay. So I didn't understand that before, but I get it now. I think pizza is a better analogy for me to get your question because people are so complicated, you know, so I don't want to assume something about the relationship example. But yeah, so you're hitting on something that's really been shown to work, that if we tell ourselves or convince ourselves that what was previously pleasurable is now aversive,

that is a way to unlearn that behavior. And so let me give you a couple examples which pertain to this, which I think are interesting. That's essentially how hypnosis works. So when people use hypnosis to quit smoking, for example, what the hypnotist says in that treatment is when they're under and in hypnosis, it's kind of like inception. The hypnotist basically says, inserts thoughts into their brains like smoking is really bad for you. You hate smoking. You care about your body. You want to take care of your body. You know that smoking is going to harm your body.

So you don't want to smoke anymore. This is the induction in a smoking cessation hypnosis. And when it works, people will come out of that and they'll be like, oh, I hate cigarettes. You know, they smell bad. I don't want to smoke cigarettes. Kind of amazing, right? Really a lot like that movie Inception. The other thing is that there used to be treatment centers for addiction. And I think they may still exist, but they're not popular now. And I don't know too much about them, where they will actually do this. Well, they'll show like for people with an alcohol addiction,

they'll show a picture of like, you know, an alcoholic beverage. And then they'll use an aversive correlative stimuli, like shocking the person, so that they come to associate that image with a painful shock. And then that's another way to kind of retrain the brain. You know, what Mark's talking about, it's really funny. And you mentioned also hypnosis, and it's good we're on this topic anyway. When I started watching porn at a really young age, we had Andrew Hoopman on, we kind of talked about this. I started at 11, I was finally able to break it at 24. But as I learned more and more about what it did to the brain um it start

like like nowadays when i look back at it when i was in it um i didn't like everyone was saying oh it's not that big of a deal whatever but when i look back at it i kind of i kind of look at it like oh that's kind of pathetic like you're sitting in front of computer screen in a dark room alone watching fantasizing watching people do the thing you want to do you know like it's like it kind of pathetic. Like you're sitting in front of a computer screen in a dark room alone, watching people do the thing you want to do. You know, like it's like it kind of brings me a level of disgust. But I wanted to talk about this just because when we talked about that with Andrew, a lot of men were in the comments. A lot of men have been DMing me that they have had those addictions to a lot of them started at 12, 13, 11, and they're finding it hard to quit,

even though they know how it's affecting their lives negatively. And there's another sub subgroup of men who are like, Oh, it's not a problem at all. It's perfectly normal because societally it is somewhat normal to view porn consistently. And I was curious, can you educate us?

Cause a lot of people are like, Oh, there's no research to be shown that it's a negative at all. It's not a big deal. What is it? Is's not a big deal. What is it? Is it not a big deal? Is it something that people can do safely without without affecting them negatively? Is the novelty aspect of it not a big deal?

OK, so the answer, the short answer is yes and no. The ways in which it really is a big deal is often on the person. There are some, again, this is this drug of choice concept. And I can tell you absolutely that sex addiction and porn addiction can be a life-threatening, severely debilitating addiction for some people because I see those people in my practice. And they come in and they are not functioning. They are not sleeping. They are not going to work. They are not accomplishing their life goals. They are in trouble with the law and they are contemplating suicide because of their pornography, sex addiction, compulsive masturbation. So this is not just, you knowto-be-you-and-me lifestyle choice.

This is serious. Having said that, that's probably maybe about 10% of the population. And then you've got a whole bunch of other people who can probably take it or leave it or use it as a recreational drug. And that's true for any drug, whether it's alcohol or cannabis or nicotine or our smartphones. But here's the deal. Again, we all have our own separate lock and key. And for the person for whom pornography is their drug of choice, it can be a really serious addiction. I talk in my book, Dokmin Nation, I open with the case of a patient who had a very severe sex and compulsive masturbation addiction, which absolutely wreaked havoc on his life. That was a no joke pornography addiction. I talk about my own

addiction to romance novels, which progressed over time to erotica, which is basically socially sanctioned pornography for women. And although I had a very mild version of it compared to, you know, my patients, it was still real. It interfered with my ability to be the mother I wanted to be, to be the wife that I wanted to be, to be the doctor that I wanted to be. Furthermore, it's really important to note that what happens with pornography, as with any drug, is that over time, we need more and more to get the same effect, or we need more potent forms to get the same effect. And this is more potent forms to get the same effect. And this is very true in pornography addiction. People will start out with kind of like, you know, average images, but over time, their fantasy life and the images will become,

need to be more potent in order to get the same effect. And it can progress to a point where people are then, you know, consuming images that really are quite deviant and are inconsistent with their values and maybe even illegal. And now we're talking about seriously crossing a line, but this is the natural progression of any addiction. Again, that you need more potency. So I'll have patients come in and say, well, do I have like a paraphilia or a sexual paraphilia? And I'll often say, it's not that,

it's that you're addicted. You started out looking at this and now 10 years later, you're having to look at that because what you were looking at 10 years ago isn't going to work anymore. One more thing I want to add to this. When we're in our addiction and chasing dopamine, we do not see the damage often that it is doing unless it's super extreme. For me, it wasn't until I gave up romance novels and erotica for a month that I was able to get out of that compulsive vortex, look back and say, oh my God, that was really weird. My focus got so narrowed on that one type of pleasure. All these other things in my life that have been a source of pleasure for me were no longer enjoyable. Why? Because my pleasure-pain balance had been usurped by this drug and I was chronically

tilted to the side of pain in a dopamine deficit state when I wasn't using. So of course, my husband no longer seemed interesting to me. My kids no longer seemed interesting to me. My profession no longer seemed interesting to me. But when I stopped and those gremlins got off and I was able to restore baseline dopamine levels, not only was I able to enjoy other things, but I looked back and I was like, wow, weird. This happens all the time in clinical care. People will get out of their addiction. It usually only takes about a month if they're able to abstain on their own and look back and feel a kind of surrealness at the person that they were and the amount of time and energy that they put into using their drug.

So for your viewers out there who feel like it's no big deal, I'm not addicted, what I would suggest to them is the experiment that I suggest in my book, which is to stop using pornography or whatever their drug is for one month. To know that in those first two weeks, they're going to experience the universal symptoms of withdrawal, anxiety, irritability, depression, craving to use. But if they can make it through a whole month without using, they can get to that place where they've restored homeostasis. Other things are enjoyable again.

And most importantly to this question, look back and really say, wow, do I really want to use in that way? That's kind of strange. I really was over- to use in that way? You know, that that's kind of strange. I really was over invested in that behavior. Yeah, I've had way too many friends die from drug addictions and drug overdoses. My own brother, my uncle, my mother was even addicted to some prescription therapy or some prescription drugs. And just a brutal thing to have, you know, kind of rip apart your family.

I want to say that I think that you are the first person we've done. I've done a few thousand podcasts, and I think that you're the first professional that we've had on that has really laid something out like that to us about your own addiction and your own vulnerability. So I want to congratulate you on that because that is some really powerful stuff, and that just gives people a stronger connection to you. And I think it also helps people open their mind a little bit more to some of the information that you're sharing. I do agree with Nsema that a lot of times people think these things aren't a big deal, that they're addicted to this or addicted to that. aren't a big deal, that they're addicted to this or addicted to that.

I would also say that having my brother, Chris, who is still alive, be addicted to drugs and alcohol, he has mentioned to me some of the steps that he went through in recovery and some of the things he experienced. And a lot of the things he has shared with me, you know, getting up in a room where, you know, everything's supposed to stay in a room where, you know, everything's everything's supposed to stay in that room and that that that type of thing, getting up and sharing these really emotional and powerful things amongst other people seems to be very freeing. And there was a lot of other things that he mentioned where I'm like, fuck, man, I could use that.

And I feel pretty good. I feel pretty good about a lot of stuff. But, man, I would be nice to get some of these things off my chest and to, uh, you know, like Alcoholics Anonymous, you're, you're, you're saying these things in confidence. And one person after another is saying these really revealing things. And my brother at first, he's like, I was getting super nervous as it was coming around the room to me, but he was like, I'm not as bad off as some of these guys. So I'm going to let her, I'm going to let her rip. And he was able to kind of get some of those things out.

Do you think it's powerful to, for people to almost live their life as if they are addicted or got trapped into some of that? I mean, it seems like some of the principles are really interesting and great ways to perhaps live some of our lives. Oh, absolutely. So in my book, I hold up people with severe addiction and recovery as modern day prophets for the rest of us because they've tapped into a universal wisdom that we could all benefit from. And one of the things that I've learned from my patients in recovery is the importance of radical honesty. And by that, I mean being honest, not just about using drugs, but also about every little thing in their lives. I remember I had a patient once who said to me, yeah, you know, when I was using, if I'd be at McDonald's and somebody called me, I'd say,

yeah, man, I'm a Burger King. Then when I was at Burger King and they called me, yeah, man, I'm a McDonald's. And it was like, he said, I just lied about everything. It didn't even make any sense anymore. But that's what happens when we get in our addiction, we get into that lying habit. And of course, we're all natural liars. I think on average, we tell, you know, something like one to two lies a day, it's really hard to tell the truth, especially when we're telling the truth about little things that we feel like, oh, it doesn't really matter. I'll just say I was late because of traffic when really I was late because I wanted five more minutes to read the paper. But the truth is that there's a lot of benefit in being, as I describe in the book, radically honest. I learned this from

my patients. I try to practice it in my life. I'm not always successful. But in trying to be honest about everything, large and small, it really does change us in so many important ways. And it changes our relationships with other people. One of the things that it does is it probably activates the prefrontal cortex. That's the big gray matter area right behind the forehead that's involved in delayed gratification, storytelling, executive function, planning. And because it's actively difficult to tell the truth, this actually stimulates the prefrontal cortex, which in turn is really important for managing consumption. Because if you think about

the prefrontal cortex up here, it's always communicating with our limbic brain, our emotion brain, what's sometimes called the lizard brain down below. And when that communication is happening, we can manage our urges, our desires. But when we cut our prefrontal cortex off from those lower brainstem functions, then we're driven by impulse, by desire, by immediate gratification. So telling the truth actually, I think, activates these important brain structures. Also, when we're radically honest with other people, we think that they're going to go run away because they find out about all the ways in which we're broken and flawed. But in fact, the opposite happens. It

brings people closer to us because we all are flawed, right? And so, when we know we're not the only ones, there's that shared humanity. And that's one of the wonderful things that people with addiction and recovery have discovered that you can have these really incredible intimate bonds by sharing weakness instead of always trying to be perfect. You brought up the prefrontal cortex, which is what I was going to ask you about. Once that is fully developed, can we handle dopamine more responsibly? Just thinking like when Simo was talking about, you know, younger kids have access to so many things. I would imagine if they had access when they were older, like I did myself, I was able to handle porn pretty easily. It was

available, but it didn't consume me. But I'm wondering if that's because I just happen to be older. So are those things kind of correlated once that prefrontal cortex gets developed, we can handle dopamine a lot more responsibly? Well, I mean, there are data showing that the earlier you start using a drug, the more likely you are to get addicted to it. Also, we do know that the way that the brain changes and develops over childhood and adolescence, that we see intense changes in the first 25 years of life where there's a pruning back of the neurons that we're not using actively. There's a pruning back of the neurons that we're not using actively. And then a myelination, which is kind of like an insulation on the wires of the neurons that we use most. And that whole process finishes by about age 25.

So we create our fundamental scaffolding in those first 25 years. So if you have healthy habits that you develop early on, it's better, obviously, because you've now nurtured those neural circuits and they can last you a lifetime. Having said that, I really had no classic addictions in my early life and came to erotica through the Twilight Saga in my early 40s, and I was off and running. So vampires, right? What? Vampires, right? Is that?

I know, right? I know. Yeah. I've seen all the movies multiple times. Sparkling vampires though. Yeah. My wife was reading that and like a lot of her friends and like one of her friends actually not too long after ended up getting divorced from it. It was.

Oh yeah. I believe it, man. That thing was like, whoa. Yeah. I'm not even going to go there, but in terms of the friend and the divorce, but yeah, no, it was a drug for me. I mean, I cannot explain to you. I just started reading it and it was like, it took me to this other world that I didn't want to leave. It was a wonderful form of escapism. And then I just read every

single vampire novel there was. And then I was off to different types of romance novels. And then I was reading really graphic kinds of things and getting, you know, doing things that I didn't want to be doing. So, and also epidemiologically, we're seeing more and more older people presenting for the first time with addiction, severe addiction. So these are people who've been able to manage their cannabis or alcohol or whatever consumption through most of their adult life. But then something happens around retirement or once they hit their 50s or 60s, it's probably a combination of having more time. But also the brain is a muscle like any other muscle and it ages. And so there probably is that we get to a point where our sort of limiting

or coping strategies are no longer as effective. And we see people present with full-blown alcohol and cannabis addiction who were moderate users through most of their life. You know, I was, I was really curious about, um, I have quite a few friends who, and we were talking about this before the show started, but I have quite a few friends who talk about depression and being depressed. And we all know that it's a very real thing. Like a lot of individuals do have chemical imbalances, but I have a friend of mine who has talked about ADHD. And for some reason, I feel like I've seen a really high occurrence of people saying they have ADHD and talking about ADHD on social media.

And and I want to know, are any of that is any of that misdiagnosed these days? I want to just butt in a pinch because I suffered from a lot of learning disabilities when I was a kid. And something you said almost made me cry when I heard you say it. You said a lot of these children are actually just dreamers. And I was like, that was me. I don't think I really need. Luckily, I never got diagnosed. My parents were like, hey, math and some of these things are just a little more difficult

for you. But you have great thoughts on this. You have great thoughts on that. And they pointed out these other strengths that I had. So I just wanted to kind of add that in. Yeah, I'm curious. Yeah, please go ahead. No, I was just curious, like, how can people maybe really see if that is something that they truly have or if it's something that comes from maybe overuse of different technologies and it's messing with their ability to focus?

OK, so let me start by saying that we do have different brain wiring. I mean, and thank God, right? It's all the colors of the rainbow that we need to make the human race. And we have different types of brains. And some people have these really sort of robust frontal lobes, and they're really good at executive function and linear thinking. And other people, that's not how they're wired. They're drifters, they're dreamers, they're cross-pattern thinkers, they're narrative thinkers,

they think in images, they think in movement, they're experiential learners. And what really saddens me is that we have a school system that favors one type of learner and one type of brain and doesn't give room for different types of learning and different types of brains. And that's a shame because what the result is that when you have a child who has a different type of brain, who's not excelling in our traditional school system, we label that child as having some sort of psychopathology. And we often call it ADHD. When in fact, it would be much better if we recognize that those kids learned in different ways, that they're not going to learn from a book. They're not going to learn from someone talking to them. They're going to learn by going out in the world and doing and trying it themselves

and messing up, or they're going to learn by drawing it, or they're going to learn by seeing it drawn, or they're going to learn through music. So, I mean, you know, again, I don't want to get too kumbaya about it because, you know, we can't have every type of different kind of school for every unique brain, but we've really done an injustice to kids who are kinetic, kids who have high energy, and kids who are cross-brain thinkers and drifters and dreamers. And, you know, thank God for your parents and the way that they could celebrate your differences. And I don't even think I would have said science and math is too hard for you. You're probably great at science and math if you could get access to it in a different way.

ADHD is overdiagnosed, in my opinion, and we certainly prescribe way too many stimulants. I hear many, many testimonials from people who say that, you know, ADHD medications change their lives. But for every one of those, I've seen people for whom it really didn't help them in the long run, they misused it and got addicted to it. So that's a big concern of mine as well. Also, the data show that college age kids who take stimulants tend to do worse in school than kids with ADHD who don't take stimulants. And that in the long run, although stimulants are helpful, sorry, in the short run, although stimulants are helpful in the long run, they're probably not. Why? Because of this process of neuroadaptation

and the balance basically getting tilted toward the side of pain and constantly needing more and more of that stimulant over time to get the same effect or just needing the stimulant to medicate withdrawal from the last stimulant rather than treating an underlying disorder. So I, I think you asked me a part B to that question, which I did not answer. It was about like depression. And a lot of individuals like, they're like, Oh, I feel depressed. I feel depressed. And some people have clinical depression. But, you know, there seems to be a really high occurrence of young kids saying they're depressed here in the United States where you have mentioned that, like, we have a lot of free time. We have a lot of we have a lot of things. We have a lot of, I guess. Great things. We have access. Access, right? And, you know, on the side, I know that depression isn't necessarily linked to your ability to have things. But, you know, when I've talked to my mother, who's an immigrant, or I guess a lot of my immigrant family, when we talked about these things quite a bit, even though we know that people in other countries who don't

have so much opportunity, they do get depressed. I've heard my mom and other individuals that haven't had as much opportunity to talk about the idea that we didn't necessarily have the time to focus on that. And I wonder about that. It just makes me think. So I'm curious what your thoughts are about that. Yeah. So, I mean, the whole premise of my book, Dopamine Nation, is an effort to understand why rates of depression have increased 50% worldwide in the last 30 years, and that people in rich countries are more depressed and anxious than people in poor countries. Why is it that in world, the world and the rich nations where we have more of everything we could ever want, including better education, better healthcare, all kinds of luxury goods, why are we more depressed? And my hypothesis is that we are more depressed because we are bombarding our dopamine reward pathway with too much reward. And in order to compensate for that, our brains have down-regulated our own dopamine

production and our own dopamine transmission just in an effort to try to restore homeostasis. But the result is that we are more depressed and anxious because we don't have enough hardship in our lives, because we don't have enough friction, and we were not evolutionarily designed for this hyper-convenient world. And this is not just hypothetical on my part. One of the things that I do in common, commonly do in clinical practice when patients come to me seeking help for depression and anxiety, I say, how are you spending your time? Oh, I'm playing video games 14 hours a day. I'm smoking pot. I'm drinking. I'm shopping. I'm eating. I say, you know what we're going to do as a first pass? We're going to eliminate that drug for one month. Now, this is assuming the

person can do it. If they're so severely addicted, they can't do it on their own. That's a different scenario. This is also assuming that they're not going to go into life-threatening withdrawal because withdrawal from alcohol can be life-threatening. Withdrawal from Xanax can be life-threatening. So all of that excluded, they can actually stop on their own. They're willing to stop on their own and they're not going to go into life-threatening withdrawal. I say, let's stop for a month and let's see what happens with your mood and your anxiety. And they almost always say to me, why would I do that when this behavior or this substance is the only thing that relieves my depression and anxiety? And I say, I know subjectively it feels like that, but I'm telling you that you're possibly medicating withdrawal from your last dose.

You're just bringing your balance level. And what we need to do is have you stop your drug long enough for the gremlins to hop off and for your own endogenous innate dopamine production to upregulate to restore homeostasis. I warn patients that they're going to feel worse before they feel better. Those first two weeks, they are going to be in withdrawal, but if they can make it to a month, I can tell you in my clinical experience, 80% of these patients come back feeling less anxious, less depressed, sleeping better, paying better attention than they have in years. It really does work. You have to believe me. So whether your drug is your smartphone or it's cannabis or it's chocolate cake, cut it out for a month.

No, it's going to be terrible suffering, especially in those first two weeks. But see how you feel when you get to a month and see if you notice you are less depressed, less anxious, more able to enjoy modest rewards, less mentally preoccupied with your drug. You mentioned some friction. I think sometimes the friction needs to come from a parent. Sometimes the parent needs to, you know, kind of break their foot off in the kid's butt, you know, get the kid, kind of make sure they're heading in the right direction. And we just don't, we don't see maybe as much of that anymore. There are a lot of kids that are

on their tablets and they're preoccupied, which the parents think is good because the kids not, you know, bugging them or or however they want to put it. But that's kind of a lot of what I see. Is that something you experience as well? Yeah. Parents today are very afraid to set limits for their children. They think that good parenting means being friends with your children. They don't realize that children need limits, that children under the age of 12 should not have their own devices. And if they are on screens, they should be very heavily supervised because there's a lot of bad stuff out there

that kids have access to and do get access to. And then once the kids get their own devices, which happens anyway, once they turn teenagers, whether we like it or not, there's very little ability to police what they're doing. Instead, there has to be a lot of discussion about what is appropriate digital etiquette and about limiting use in our lives. And that means cutting kids off. Every night, I have to go down and get my 14-year-old's phone. 8, 9 p.m., I say, give me your phone. Okay. One more thing. Okay. Wait a minute. I just, I just, one more thing. Crash Royale. Okay. I just gotta, I gotta do, I gotta do like this. And I got, I got my streaks and they're like, give me your phone,

give me your phone. And that's because I don't believe he has the impulse control to manage himself. He has it all day. Trust me. He's on that thing two to four hours a day. Does that make me happy? Absolutely not. But I make it very, very clear to him that that's actually not okay. And that it is a drug and that he is going to need to figure that out. He needs to pay attention to not just how he feels in the moment, but how he feels right after he stops and his dopamine levels plunge down. And I have to help him limit his consumption by setting limits and taking the phone away. How do we justify it as parents? Because it's very easy to shut your kid down and say, no, no, I'm using mine for work. I'm emailing people like what I'm doing.

I see a lot of parents do that. And they're like, well, I'm they're kind of setting the example of what I'm doing. Super important. You chit chatting with your friends on Snapchat is not important. Oh, you're absolutely right. I mean, you know, it's it we need to model what we want our kids, you know, to do. And that means that we have to put our phone, I think, I think I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm hoping that this intermittent fasting idea with digital products is going to take hold. to say, come the end of my workday, I'm off. I'm off. I'm not on my phone. I'm not on my laptop. Not checking email. I'm not checking any of it. I'm trying to be in the world without a digital device. And the things I do to help me with that, I actually turn them all the way off. I power them

off because then there's that, not only am I not able to send, I'm also not able to receive. And believe it or not, when we're not able to receive, it feels better. It feels like, okay, it's not like people are trying to reach me through cyberspace and I'm not responding. It's like they can't even reach me because the device is turned off. So, I mean, little tricks like that, whatever works for you, putting it in another part of the house, I don't know, praying, doing some physical thing that gets you in your body and out of your mind, all those tricks. Yeah, that's actually what I was going to ask because it seems like to help aid depression, you want people to get into a really, really depressing state so that way when they get

out of it, they're like, okay, well, it maybe wasn't that bad. But when you ask them to fast from their drug of choice, do you recommend that they substitute it with something else, whether it be just a better habit, exercise, journaling, or anything like that? Well, I warn them about cross addiction. If they just replace that drug with another drug, it's not going to work because they'll still be bombarding their reward pathways with dopamine. And they might then just get addicted to that second thing. bombarding their reward pathways with dopamine, and they might then just get addicted to that second thing. So a lot of people will be like, well, I cut out alcohol, but I still smoke cannabis, or I cut out cannabis, but now I'm binging on Netflix or doing pornography or playing video games. That is not what I recommend. You really need to cut it all out. And instead, remember how

when we pressed on the pleasure side of the balance, the gremlins hopped on the pain side? Turns out if we press a little bit on the pain side of the balance, the gremlins hopped on the pain side. Turns out if we press a little bit on the pain side of the balance, those gremlins will hop on the pleasure side. And that's called hormesis. It's Greek for to set in motion, but essentially with mild to moderate painful stimuli in many different forms, exercise, ice cold water baths, reading a difficult book, doing something that makes us anxious, cleaning out something that we've been meaning to clean out for a long time, you name it. What we end up doing is upregulating our own endogenous dopamine, endocannabinoid, endo-opioid systems. I was actually literally about to ask you about leaning into discomfort and things that

aren't as comfortable because another thing about these things that you just mentioned, exercise, ice baths, maybe things like sauna, et cetera, is that there is a benefit, but the benefit comes way later. Like if you exercise long enough, you're going to be able to get certain types of results that you're looking for. The benefits of cold therapy, sauna, like it doesn't, it does happen right then, but there are also long-term benefits that happen. Is that an aspect of things that we need to lean into things that give us delayed gratification, like the time it takes to finish a hard book, and then when you finally finish, that was gratifying? Beautifully said. And this is not just on sort of like moral or philosophical grounds. Physiologically, that's exactly how it works. So experiments show that

an ice cold water bath, if you sit in that bath, what you get is that during the bath, you get a gradual increase in dopamine levels in the brain, which sustains and stays level for hours afterward. Very different than cocaine, for example, where you get a sudden spike in dopamine, and then basically you're plunging down right after you're using. So any kind of source of dopamine where it's the opponent process or the after effect is a much better source of dopamine because it's more enduring, right? Because it's not immediate elicitation with that substance. It's our own endogenous re-regulating healing mechanism compensating for the initial stimulus that is the source of dopamine. So it's more enduring. And then you're absolutely right. What you have is that an iterative process where you invest a little bit every day and then you get the payoff

later. I do this quite often when I'm walking. I'll periodically run. And when I run, I'll tell myself I'm going to run to that stop sign. But really, I'm actually lying to myself a little bit. I know I'm going to run past the stop sign and I might run for an additional like 30 seconds or so. But it's just a way for me to kind of trick myself. I get excited that I made it not only to the destination that I said was in my best interest, I went through it, I went past it. And so for me, that kind of keeps me excited. And what will happen is by the end of the walk run, I'll end up have running way further than what I set out to do.

And I feel great about it. Nice, yeah. So that's the same idea, kind of leaning into pain, inviting pain in your life, finding ways to get your reward through trying harder or doing something that's more difficult, extending yourself in that way. That's great. Power Project Family, how's it going? Now, we talk a lot about supplements on this podcast, and one of the biggest supplements that's making a difference for us this year has been the addition of electrolytes.

Whether you're sweating in the gym, taking walks outside, doing whatever, you lose hydration. And most people just reach for a jug of water and drink it. But the thing is, is you're not replenishing your electrolytes. Now, Element comes in easy to use packets that have a thousand milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium per packet. Put it in some water, replenish your electrolytes like that. It's that easy. Andrew, can you tell the people how to get it? Yes. You guys got to replenish that body by heading over to drinklmnt.com slash power project. Do what we do.

Load up on a value bundle because you're going to get four boxes, any flavor that you want for the price of three. No code needed. Just head down to drinklmnt.com slash power project. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Head over there right now. How are you able to kick the books and how long did it did it take? Like were these fantasies were these thoughts in your head?

You know, because it's not like it's great to make a decision and it's great that you have all this knowledge of it. But still, even for you, it's not like, oh, I just shut this right off. No more books. I'm going to give them away or whatever. How long did that process take? And how long were these things maybe still dancing around in your head for? Yeah. Thanks for asking me.

So I did a 30 day dopamine fast and I cut out all books and I was shocked at how difficult it was. Oh, wait a minute. I need to plug me in my Mac or the thing is going to run out. Oh, no. One second. And what's that picture? Every time I look at that picture, it almost looks a little bit like our studio, but sorry about that. Oh, that's okay. All right. Um, so what I did was I, I, I said, I'm going to cut it out for a month. And again, what was so shocking to me was how anxious I got in the evenings and then how much difficulty I had falling asleep because I had really, I had

unlearned how to fall asleep in any other way. So it was shocking to me. And that's why I think this experiment is a great one to do, even if you're not sure you are addicted, just to sort of open your eyes to the physiology of the attachment. And then I got to a month and I felt really good about myself. And, you know, again, I was able to enjoy other things. And I thought, okay, well, I'm going to go back to reading now and then. And what happened is I binged. And I ended up going into this crazy, like, weekend-long binge where I got almost no sleep. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's exactly what my patients describe. And it's often

called the abstinence violation effect, which, again, is another really good indicator that we've become addicted, that when we do go back to using and we plan to use in moderation, we binge instead and find ourselves in an even worse place. So when that happened, I decided to give it up for a year. And I did. I will say that I gave up not just the books, but the other things that went along with the books, which you can infer from without me having to say it. And you're so serious about that. I'm not going to get a chuckle out of you guys. I didn't want to, but I guess you got it. I'll chuckle. I mean, come on. Let's just have a laugh over it. Right? You were good. You were trying to

be polite with this woman doctor, but it's all good. So I made it and I made it the year. And now, you know, this has been now almost, I don't know, 10 years ago or so, but honestly, um, and I, and I, in that year, I also tried not to, I tried to avoid triggers, tried not to engage in a fantasy around that either because that's fantasy. The, the fantasy itself is essentially a trigger. Um, and, and our thoughts, we, we really are what we think. Um, and so, um, for a year, I didn't fantasize in that way. I now intermittently still use fantasy in that way that we're talking about. And the's kind of what my patients will describe too, is that part of what brings patients in is their drug of choice just doesn't work anymore. It's like they've burned out those circuits. And that's kind of what happened to me.

I almost, I can't really read any romance. Not that it just, they don't work anymore. It's just the whole thing just sort of that I've expired that drug. I know we're kind of running low on time, but you mentioned something in terms of triggers. And I think like with everything, if anybody has any type of addiction, they need to try to figure out what their triggers are. I mentioned like one of my triggers in the past was just social media itself. Literally, you'd be scrolling through and then you'd be seeing some stuff and that just

lead you down a rabbit hole. So I cleaned up my social media feed as I realized that was one of my triggers. So my question to you is like, I don't know if it can be even something that's asked as a general thing, but how can, how can people really figure out, learn and try to control those triggers? Like what do people need to be paying attention to there? Well, um, you know, the trigger is exactly what it sounds like. It's the thing that gets you craving and wanting to do your drug of choice. And it does that through purely physiologic mechanisms. We get a little bit of elevation in dopamine. So we actually experience the reward from the trigger in a small dose. And again, our own thoughts can be a trigger,

our own euphoric recall, our own fantasy life. And then that increase in dopamine is followed by dopamine deficit state, which is the craving, which is why we then turn off the road or whatever and go and get the drug. So yeah, just being mindful of what your triggers are. For me, I realized that triggers was actually pop music. So much pop music is about romance and love. I actually stopped listening to certain types of music because that would really get me craving. For you, you discovered it was social media. So really trying to be mindful and pay attention to what your triggers are and then try to minimize or eliminate those triggers and instead do the healthy things that keep you out of that craving

space. Were some of your relationships restored and did that take a while with your children and your husband? Yeah. So, you know, I'm very open with my husband. We actually have a wonderful marriage. So I did, I was a bit leading a double life in that I wasn't transparent with him about what I was reading, but it never went beyond the reading in my fantasy life. Thank God, you know, but I could have, right? I mean, it could have done. So, and my husband, he's really nonjudgmental and he's so supportive. And I just, I want you to know I'm doing this and this is,

I'm giving this up, you know, because of this reason. He's like, okay, okay. So, he's very sweet. And then with my kids, again, transparent with my kids, they've read my book, so they know about this. And we talk a lot about addiction and how we're all vulnerable. I think for me, the way that it manifested with my kids as I got really sad because childhood is so brief and I love being a mom and I've always loved it. And somehow I lost that for a while. Thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. Where can people find out more about you? Well, I'm not on social media because I wouldn't be able to handle it. So they're really, I mean, my book is sort of out there. That's a way to learn more about me and about this problem. And then watching podcasts like yours, these conversations. Which vampire book is it where they're bench pressing tremendous amounts of weight?

I don't remember that from the Twilight Saga. I mean, there are so many vampire romance novels out there. That's really. There's one vampire book. I forget what there are so many vampire romance novels out there that's really... There's one vampire book. I forget what the hell it's called, but my wife was telling me about it. She's like, all these guys want to do is have sex and bench press. I was like,

sounds like you already got it right here. Sounds like the Power Project. 100%. Thank you so much for your time. was amazing thank you thank you so much have a great day you too man that was dope she is awesome it's funny how she made that joke towards the end and she's like you guys couldn't laugh i was like thank you i'm like please guys please guys hold it together hold it together okay good job and then she's like come on like hell yeah

like excessive or compulsive masturbation it's like this combination of words anytime anyone says masturbation yeah it's like right i know you're just like shit but it is interesting how you could have these uh you know things that are so compulsive they come to you like second nature you just end up going to them repeatedly and then years later when you are removed from those things you can look back and think man that was kind of i can't really believe that it's kind of ridiculous like when you mistreat somebody when you maybe said the wrong thing to somebody or something you kind of feel like crap about it you're like man i was i was crappy i'll never do that again you know um but man it is hard to get yourself out of any sort of loop of addiction

i know we've done things with like caffeine and different things and it's tough man it's hard yeah i like what you were saying about um just being able to or if we you had asked her if we're able to kind of reinterpret things and that's absolutely real dude like i i used to think i couldn't she said you could i was shocked actually i was thinking she was going to be like no it's chemistry and i was and she did i was like fuck yeah because like thinking back like i have zero interest in drinking beer but there was one point in my life where i had zero interest in not you know like in the opposite like i had to have it and it just so weird because thinking at that now i'm just like no like i definitely like have no no uh impulse whatsoever to even you know go for a beer now and it's just really strange because like when you're

in it though you're just like this is who i am this is what i do and it's fine yeah yeah oh yeah yeah don't tell me it's not fine yeah because i'm not wrong you're wrong no it's it's that that's why i'm happy that she mentioned that because, okay, like not everybody is like, and not every dude that you watch is addicted to porn. But, um, if you, if it is somewhat problematic, sometimes you wouldn't even know. So sometimes it is a good idea to step away from something, whether it be video games that you love and enjoy, whether it be binging TV shows, whether it be porn, step away from it a little bit and see if like you feel the need. You know what I mean? I think it's kind of tough if, you know, there's something that you're doing and it's, you feel like, oh, if you go without it, that's a problem, especially when it's something

like that. Working out is somewhat different. There are some people that are, you know, they know they're uh maybe they might take it too far but overall it's a healthy habit you know what i mean it's better to have things that like like jeremy avia you know what i mean i when we were talking to her i was thinking a lot about him and how he got off his addiction of whatever now he's a freaking world just world beater power lifter and he's somebody you want to be around. Absolutely. Cause he's like enlightened or something in some weird way. And he,

um, he's just a different, he's just a different kind of person. You're just like, you're captivated by him. Like this guy is awesome, man. And I think it's almost like you get a sense that this guy is a survivor.

This guy can figure it out. If shit really went down and shit went sideways, like, uh, this would be a guy that you'd want to have, to have in your corner, even without really knowing his story. And he's just he seems to be so grateful just to be walking around. He's got a big ass smile. I mean, you can't look at that guy without getting a smile on your face yourself because you see him across the room and he's already, you know, lighting up the room with his smile and you can't help but start laughing and want to give him a big old fat hug.

Just the way he is. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Oh, no. The thing you always say about leaning into discomfort though, like that, you know, when she talked about that, that's something to really think about there. I went, I went to a coal plunge with a friend and she was like, this is masochistic. I'm like, I don't think it's masochistic.

It's a little bit uncomfortable right now, but it's going to feel great later. That's a lot of reasons why those things are beneficial, like taking cold showers. It feels horrible in the moment, but you feel really good for hours after that. You know what I think the most dangerous thing in the world is? What?

Is not wanting to improve yourself, is just staying the same. Like when you have good knowledge on the things that you can do to make progress, even if you fuck up, even if you mess up, just that step, that step towards,

even if it's a step in the wrong direction, it's a step that you took that counts as an extra step for the day. You know, it's important. And so, yeah, getting into cold water, I mean, maybe just find out like it's not for you. Maybe you like almost hyperventilate and you're like, that was really not a good idea. But is it possible that you can still get some good benefits from cold therapy? Maybe you don't get into water that's 50 degrees. Maybe you have to get into water that's 70 degrees or 65.

But maybe you can get yourself used to it and not be a pussy anymore. Yeah. I remember the first time I tried a cold shower, like, you know, regular shower in the last little bit, like turn it all the way cold and try to just be there for whatever, 30 seconds. It was completely coincidental. I can't speak today. You can speak. Coincidental. Everybody knows what you mean, so it's fine got it thank you sir i got so sick afterwards sick like i got like the worst cold of that time like this was i don't mean who knows i 2018 maybe we'll say

but i got so sick and i'm like fuck that i'm never doing that again but i think it was just because i probably had the the you know the bug or whatever at that time or you had a weak immune system and that cold did it for you yeah well because it's all of the good for you all of the above and it was just like i said i think i just contracted whatever it was at that moment and i mean prior to that moment and then that moment is what's like was like all right cool here's what we needed we need your body temp at this temperature so So, yep, you're sick now. And I just remember like, yep, I give up. I'm never doing that again.

You think about some of the words that have been like kind of taken away from us via like YouTube. You know, there's certain certain things we can't say on here because we it messes up our algorithm and all that kind of stuff. Explaining what I just said. I took out many different words I wanted to use. Yeah. And I wasn't even talking about that thing. But because words i had to change my whole yeah yeah so but even just think about anything that has been uh real political as of late um whether it be the thing that helps you against the thing that we're talking about or it'd be the thing itself or any any of

that information. Think about it like a cold plunge. Think about it like you're going into a sauna and think about it as a challenge. You know, can you do, I don't know, can you figure out how to do 50 pushups in the course of like three minutes? You take it as a challenge, whatever your level of fitness is, whatever your, but it's a skill set to be able to do these things. Are you getting moved? Are you getting moved off of your normal, your, your normal mood set just because you read something in particular on the internet, on Instagram or Facebook or something that somebody said somewhere. And now all of a sudden your mind is, that's a sign of some weakness. I mean, we would say that if somebody can't get into water that's 70 degrees and can't be in there for a minute or two, we would say you're kind of being a baby.

Like 70 degrees is not, like it's not comfortable, but it's, it's, um, you know, you should be able to do that. How do you develop a skillset to be stronger than you were yesterday and to be able to mitigate these things that are coming in? So you don't end up with a lot of the stuff we talked about on today's show. You don't end up as anxious. You don't end up with maybe as much depression. And I want to point out, you know, we are sensitive to the fact that anxiety,

depression, those things, they do exist and people have them at heightened levels. But what I'm talking about is developing skill sets that allow you to just have less of that or to be less impacted. If you think about your mood being like a band, you know, like rather than your mood being like a line, like you just got this little dot on a line and, and Seema says something to me that I don't like and I'm immediately triggered. And now I'm way up here and I'm way off my normal bandwidth for my ability to, uh, for my ability to keep my mood calm and cool and collected. And I'm, I'm way up. Why not work on expanding that bandwidth out so that even if he was to say

something that bugged me a bit, I was like, Oh, that's odd. I wonder what crawled up his ass today, but I'm not really moved by it too much. I'm just kind of like, Oh, that's a little weird. And then I kind of level back off and I'm even again, or if something happens to me that quote unquote makes me or shifts me towards being sad and my levels go down a little bit, I could still be within this band, within this confines of feeling very safe and feeling very healthy. And I'm not getting that flutter in my heart of like a little bit of anxiety and those types of things. When you have a good, strong skillset,

you'll notice that those things are massively reduced. A good example of it was when Ben was here. I was on a walk on Saturday. I was like, oh, shit, tomorrow was like, you know, tomorrow's the day. And like, I'm going to get up in front of people and talk. And then I thought about it for like 10 seconds. And I'm like, oh, shit, you're going to crush that. That's going to be great.

That's going to be what an awesome opportunity is going to be to speak in front of all these people. And my mind totally shifted. And yes, for a second there, I did get a little anxious, but as we talked about some anxiety, some stress is good, but I took that stress. I reinterpreted it for myself to my advantage and went from there. Now that reinterpretation aspect of things is a massive deal. Um, yeah, I remember, I've heard Andrew Hoobman talk about, you know, when he gets up in the morning, he tries not to touch his phone for a certain amount of time. And he mentioned it's not, this isn't the technical term, but this, the way he said, it's like, I'm trying to train those

no pathways, telling yourself no, right. Towards doing the things that you might want to do in the moment um and i think that's the same thing that is done when you take a cold shower that's very uncomfortable or you go into a sauna for a long time that's very physically uncomfortable and you want to get out you go into a cold plunge very uncomfortable you want to get out you do a long workout that's maybe a bit uncomfortable and you wish you could go home right you're you're you're pretty much training yourself to be a more resilient individual. And people that listen to this podcast, the men and women that listen,

a lot of them, a majority of you guys are into self-development or into trying to figure out how to be stronger. If you're into trying to figure out how to be more resilient. And a lot of these things and telling yourself no from the things that may be pleasurable to you,

the foods that might be pleasurable to you, telling yourself no will train you to become a more resilient and stronger individual. You want to do that more often. Think about afterwards, you know, think about it from a perspective of like you just got done with it. So you're about to work out, but you're wishy-washy and you're halfway talking yourself out of it. Fast forward yourself, say it's two hours from now and you're like i deadlifted 315

for three sets of three and i walked with the sled once you kind of think once you kind of think that you're like yes that that is like that is what i want that is kind of what i need just go and do it and you go and do it and maybe your back's tight and maybe you have a bunch of other uh complaints and maybe you have a bunch of other excuses that you're kind of pumping into the world for the day. But again, once we get moving, we're going to get some motivation. And remember what she said about hormesis, which is like just getting a little dosage of something negative, almost a little bit of poison. She mentioned it being, it means to set in motion.

That sounds amazing so you go to do your deadlifts and 225 backs feeling a little weird you did a set of five and you're working your way up and then you do 275 and like that actually doesn't feel amazing it doesn't feel so good right but that little bit of not feel so good is going to help you make make you feel way better than even when you started in the first place. So that wishy washy feeling that you had recognized that you can beat it out by starting. Beat it out. Recognize that you can beat it by by just getting into it. The action will will keep you keep you motivated, keep you fired up to do it. Let's not use the word beat. Let's just stay...

Actually, you know what? Let's use the word beat more. Beat it. Beat the meat. Beat it. Just beat it. Michael Jackson. Man.

She was really getting into those books, huh? You know what? The Twilight Saga is really good. I never read the books. No, it's not. But I've seen the movies. Sparkling vampires? Yeah. Yeah. When they get into the sun. I only know that because... It says they turn those into movies, right? good i've never read the books no it's not but i've seen i've seen the movies sparkling uh vampires yeah when they get right yeah it's i only know that because they turn those into movies right

yeah yeah yeah so i know that because joe rogan thought it was really lame and then my wife was into him back in the day too but yeah i don't know whatever whenever your like wife gets into something or excited about something you gotta got to just shut it down. You got to say, no, that stuff's stupid. Yeah. Like hormesis and stuff. Because you're jealous right away. You're like, no, no, no, no. It's like a total threat to you.

You're like, no, that's stupid. What are you reading about? Yeah. Oh, my God. What's this dumb vampire book you're reading? I can't believe it. Y'all ever see Fifty Shades? No.

Never have. Yeah. I think I've seen. Yeah. I've seen. I've seen i've seen i saw those movies my wife's friend she read all that stuff and she just she disappeared remember after 50 shades you just started seeing people all into bdsm oh yeah yeah yep holly weird is what they call it amazing amazing information uh some really incredible information about addiction. And she she does kind of she did refer to the phones in her book as being like hypodermic needles. You know, you're you're walking around with this is this thing that you can just sort of inject dopamine into your body at any time. And, um, it makes sense. Like we don't know how to really regulate it really well. The thing that she said about your children, I think is really cool. Like, um, you know, as a parent, like, you know, encouragement, in my opinion is like one of the

strongest things that you can do for your kid is to give them encouragement, especially in the face of them, like doubting themselves and stuff like that, especially as they get older. But one of the other strongest things you can ever do for your kid is to tell, you know, just flat out, tell them when they're wrong and to protect them more so like in the future so that they understand, like they can't act certain ways. They can't do things certain ways. And it's just a, it's sometimes just a form of discipline.

Yeah. You know, sometimes it's just, you know, we don't, we don't eat that way in this household. We don't, we don't do things that way. We don't. And then also give them good explanation. You know, I think maybe parents of the past, they would say, this is just the way it is, which, Hey, it worked to some extent, but I think nowadays i think it'd be more important to with the internet and with kids having so much access to stuff i think it'd be a great idea to tell them why and with my daughter um i have to you know i still take her phone from her at night and that's always like a weird thing she never wants me to take it from her i don't want but like it's one of the few rules i have i don't't, so I can always tell her, I'm like, Hey, I don't have that many rules, but I just don't want you to have technology in your room. And then she'll kind of say, well, why does

Jake have it? And I'll say, well, Jake 17, he drives a car. He's like, I'm trying to give him, if he, if Jake at this point wants to make bad decisions, um, it's kind of, it's sort of, I'm trying to leave it up to him, you know, I'm, I'm working on trying to leave, uh, trying to leave it up to him. But when you're still only 14, you know, I want to still, uh, protect you. So it's, um, it's important. It's not easy. It's, it's a extra work. I think that's important though. Like she mentioned that she educates her kids on how it is literally a drug. And even though they still don't want to get it, well, they're 14 and they're not fully developed up here for a while. So she mentioned they do not have probably have the inhibitory ability to say no to such high things that are so highly stimulating.

So it's important that you step in because some parents are like, I want my kid to have autonomy. I want them to have freedom. And as much as that's important, there are certain things that you just can't let them have that much freedom with yet. I know we've talked a little bit on this podcast too, about like, uh, capitalism and like people making money and sort of sometimes people frown upon some of these things, but it's really interesting to hear that this depression, anxiety thing is a problem of in most cases of countries that are doing better in terms of finances rather than doing worse. for people to pile on Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or these big companies, these pharmaceutical giants that are making money and some of these different companies that make, you know, millions and billions of dollars. It's also now, you know, shifted into where the a lot of people, a lot of people in the United States that aren't necessarily even like rich are, you know, running the a lot of people, a lot of people in the United States that aren't necessarily

even like rich are, you know, running into a lot of these problems that we saw mostly confined to a lot of socio economical type of situations where we saw a lot of different types of drugs throughout like inner cities and stuff. And now we're starting to see pharmaceuticals and all other kinds of drugs kind of spread flat throughout, not even just the country, but throughout the world where this is becoming a, like this is becoming a global epidemic where it seems like almost everyone, not almost everyone, it seems like almost everyone, not almost everyone, but like, I guess almost every person is in with arms reach of somebody or a family that has had issues and problems, uh, with addiction in terms of drugs or alcohol.

It's wild. Yeah. No, her, her hypothesis was really interesting. She said there's research to back it up, but the fact that, yeah, you know, in the United States we have some of the highest rates of depression even though we are one of the more well-off places even she's mentioned like she mentioned this how even the poorest individuals have more than many others right and that for some people depression is yourself literally tapping in on the pain side because you like there's too much.

There's like there's too many things that can feel some pressure. So you're literally just tapping on that side because there's a necessity for it. So maybe I don't even you got to be careful when you talk about this because maybe sometimes it is good to lean into things that are uncomfortable or maybe lean into those things and get rid of things that bring you so much immediate pleasure all the time. You know, but we know again, I want to say this again. We do know that there are some individuals that really are suffering with this because of chemical imbalances, etc. But there are many others that could potentially fix it on their own. Put very simply, less choices sometimes is great. You know, less choices and word opportunity is a weird one, but sometimes even less opportunity. I just remember like when

my gym was a lot smaller, we had like a really, really crazy strong team. When my gym was the absolute smallest that it could possibly be, that's when we were the absolute strongest. And a lot of that was because it forced everyone into a situation where we all had to work together and we all had to make the most of the time that we had. And we didn't really have a lot of time to fuck around. And we didn't have time to like think about,

hmm, should I do the GHR? Should I do Nordics over there? or should I do Nordics over there? Or should I do this exercise over there? So I guess my main point is like, if you're a factory worker and you're somebody that's working a lot every single, every single day, and you're just having not a ton of time with your family, maybe you're not as attached to your phone. You know, maybe you're a little bit more of like a blue collar worker and therefore just kind of more difficult for you to even get to your phone.

You're not really worried about that selfie in the gym. You're worried about, you know, being able to provide for your family and being able to do some other things. So it is it is it is an interesting thing. But depression, anxiety, you know, clearly is on the rise. And hopefully we can continue to have people like Anna Limke help us, you know, with with the tremendous books and tremendous information that she's spreading about this topic. Get that book. If you guys haven't get the book, Dopamine Nation, guys, it's number one.

It's a very enjoyable read. Like, it's really it's Get that book. If you guys haven't get the book, dopamine nation guys, it's number one. It's a very enjoyable read. Like it's really, it's a fun read. Um, but you learn a lot and you'll learn a lot for yourself and maybe how you can handle certain things in your life. It's super informative. So please grab that.

And what a weird system we got pain and pleasure and trying to balance those things out. I've never heard that before. And it made a lot of sense what she was saying. But I mean, just because where we are, my instant thought was like, yeah, you want, you know, a good amount of testosterone, but if you have too much and then too little estrogen, like you kind of get fucked up. So you need a solid balance.

And so that's where I was kind of thinking when she was talking about the gremlins jumping on both sides. And when she put it that way, it made a lot more sense to me yeah it's weird it was really weird yeah if you chase the dopamine all the time it seems to be maybe a little bit less effective than if you are like seeking some level of discomfort like pain is like i I don't know, just maybe too harsh. Maybe you don't have to be in pain, but some sort of discomfort, maybe there's a lot of reward building things in that, you know? One thing we didn't get a chance to talk to her about, which hopefully we'll get another opportunity to talk to her, but was just what happens when you do hit your plan. I mean, she mentioned it briefly, but I would like to dive into that a bit more. When you hit your goal, you know, she kind of did mention that a bit. Um, you know, so somebody

wants to weigh, uh, 180 pounds and they, you know, weigh 200, you know, four months from now, they, they get to that result. They'd lost to 20 pounds. Um, I think it's really, uh, awesome to note that from what I heard is that you can oftentimes produce more dopamine. And she did talk about it when she talked about delayed gratification, that you actually get like a little bit more reward and it's a little bit more balanced because the entire time you were leaning into the discomfort that it took you to lose that weight in the first place. So that's pretty interesting. It took you to lose that weight in the first place. So that's pretty interesting. I think whenever you're faced with a chance to go off plan, you can kind of rethink it a bit and say, man, I'm actually just going to get way more out of this if I just keep leaning into this a little bit more. I think that can also kind of line in if we're talking about weight loss, the way in which you reach your goal.

Because when you think of some people, when crash diet crash dieting is uh crash diet is instant gratification for dieting you do whatever it takes you restrict your calories as much as you can you do as much as you can to every single day you see the scale drop oh oh oh oh oh right and then you get there and then what do a lot of people that end up crash dieting what happens to them they rebound shit the golf plan just even for like a day and they gain like six pounds and they, you know, previously they lost like eight and now they're like, they're freaking out cause they think they're all the way set back the other way. But if you take a slower, more delayed, more consistent approach, when you get there, you have a much higher likelihood of being able to maintain that because what you did

was number one, more sustainable in the long run. Um, but you were probably also familiar yourself with familiarizing yourself more with the process and it wasn't always as pleasurable every single day because you don't always see the scale go down. You know what I mean? So it's another way to look at it. Andrew, take us out of here, buddy.

Sure thing. Thank you everybody for checking out today's episode. Uh, please follow the podcast at Mark Bell's power Project on Instagram at MB Power Project on TikTok and Twitter. My Instagram and Twitter is at I am Andrew Z and at the Andrew Z on TikTok and SEMA. Where are you at? I didn't see my Indian on Instagram and YouTube and see my Indian on TikTok and Twitter. You have plans to pick on any more professional football players. Oh, I'll look at i'll look

and look into it see what i can figure out see who i can be it'd be cool if you took on so if you took on challenges from like different things like i you know you did tyreek hill thing uh and coach house i gotta send you i gotta show you these videos he showed me like his son like busting out like 12 of these things oh snap um from like a long time ago he's like here's my son he's like 15 or whatever okay he's like tell him he ain't shit or he was trying to mess with you but um did you see the post that was on my instagram this morning of that girl like uh hanging off a chin-up bar i did were those real weights i i don't know i actually checked out some of her ig and started

looking at more shit and i was just like what the hell she had chains and weights on her and i was like see if our boy and sema can handle this shit that was pretty wild oh she like what she like pulls weights out of like behind her and stuff and that's definitely real yeah yeah but those are what like they're probably yeah they're probably not super heavy, but even if they're 10, there's like... Sorry. I mean, she has like seven different plates hanging from her. My question is, how's she going to get down from there, man?

I think she does it. And she's like flipping a plate, which that plate... That plate's probably like five pounds. Because it's like a bumper or whatever. The amount of strength that it takes to do that from one hand, like holding herself up with one hand. And I think she lets go of her legs too, right?

I think she just lets her. Oh, yeah, she pulls the other weights out. Oh, my God. And she's already been holding herself up for a long time. This is on my IG at Mark Smiley Bell. Beast. If you're wondering what the fuck we're talking about. Okay, I need to see this come down. How are you going to do it?

How are you going to do it? I thought at first she was going to let herself go, but I'm like, she's got a totally blood and knee. Yeah. Okay. Oh, wow.

Jeez. That's so impressive. What's her IG, Andrew? Uh, Stephanie Millinger. Yeah. S T E F A N I E M I L L I N G E R. Stephanie Millinger. Shout out to her, man. Unbelievable. Yeah, S-T-E-F-A-N-I-E-M-I-L-L-I-N-G-E-R.

Stephanie Millinger. Shout out to her, man. Unbelievable beast. I'm confused, man. Fuck that. I'm confused with how strong people are. It's unbelievable. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we just had John Hack. Oh, yeah. Hackenschmidt. Is his podcast up? Yep, yep. Mr. Hackintosh, his is up now. Bilbo Swaggins. Fuck, damn.

We'll just sit here and watch this all day long. Yep. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.