The Nick Bare Podcast - 028: How To Master Dopamine And Find Happiness, Motivation, and Discipline - Dr. Daniel Lieberman

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Today, we have Dr. Dan Lieberman on the podcast. Dan is the coauthor of the international bestseller The Molecule of More, senior vice president for mental health at Hims & Hers Health, and clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University. He is incredibly knowledgeable and credentialed on many topics, but today we narrowed our sights on the powerful chemical of dopamine. Dan breaks down what dopamine is and how it can be used for both good and bad, offers practical steps to help control it, and paints a shocking picture of what humanity would look like without dopamine. Dopamine increases motivation, discipline, and true happiness when used for good, which he teaches us how to achieve in this episode. Enjoy! Save 10% at BPN Supps: https://bit.ly/nickbare10audio Follow for more:  IG: https://www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ YT: https://www.youtube.com/@nickbarefitness Keep up with Dan here: Website: https://www.danielzlieberman.com/ Topics: 00:00 Intro 1:28 What is dopamine? 04:04 Daniel’s background 08:53 Social media's effect on dopamine 13:12 Desire vs. pleasure circuits 19:05 Controlling dopamine 25:18 Discipline over dopamine 28:41 Finding happiness in the modern world 31:46 “To travel hopefully, is better than to arrive.” 33:03 Companionate vs. passionate love 42:08 Humanity without dopamine 42:57 Modern-day addictions 49:40 Overcoming bad dopamine behavior

To anticipate something that you want is better than actually having it. And I think that that's a sign of the modern disease of too much dopamine. Everything in our society persuades us to live a dopaminergic life. So I think what we need to do is pay attention and ask ourselves, is this really giving me the enjoyment I'm expecting and what's the price I'm paying? Is it maybe making me unhappy? Is it taking up large amounts of time I could be spending otherwise? There's this constant, constant stimulation of the dopamine circuits, and it makes it so challenging

for us to be happy in this modern world. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to thank you for tuning in and supporting the brand. Now, I have spent the last decade plus of my life building bare performance nutrition, and we create effective supplements that you can trust to support your wellness, endurance, and performance goals. We offer high-quality, great-tasting weight protein powders, effective pre-workouts, superfoods, sleep support, electrolytes, and much more. So if you want to support the content that we produce and the message that I am sharing

through my content and on this podcast, I would greatly appreciate it if you went to BPNsups.com and you can use code Nick Bear 10 to save 10% off your next order. So thank you guys. I appreciate you. And let's dive into the show. All right. What's going on, guys? Welcome back to another episode.

I have Dan Lieberman on the show today, and I was just telling Dan, this episode is full circle for me. Because if you guys have been following my content for the last couple months, even years, I have referenced dopamine and the book The Molecule of More on many occasions. And today we have the author of The Molecule of More. So, Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. I would love to kind of dive in right away before talking about your background. What is dopamine?

You know, where does it come from? What's it do? What is the importance of dopamine? So dopamine is a chemical that is active in the brain. And in some ways, it's like a conductor. It sort of determines which parts of the brain are going to be active and which parts are going to be less active. And dopamine plays a lot of different functions.

I think most people who've heard of it, the first thing they think of is it's the molecule of pleasure, right? It's what happens when we eat some dessert or have sex or use drugs. But in some ways, that's not the most important thing that it does. What dopamine does is it drives us to make the future better than the present. It gives us motivation, it gives us passion, which are wonderful things, but it also gives us dissatisfaction so that we have to constantly keep striving to get those things that we want. So would you say that dopamine is a good thing or is it a bad thing or does it depend? Yeah, I would say it's a very powerful tool.

And powerful tools can be good and bad. Chainsaw can do great things. It can also do terrible things. Same with an automobile. So we need to be careful. I think dopamine is largely responsible for all of the blessings we have today in terms of our technological society, from antibiotics, anesthesia, automobiles, airplanes, fiber optic cables. These are all things that the development was driven by dopamine.

But at the same time, dopamine doesn't have a break. It never says enough. Dopamine always wants more and more and more. and so when we take things too far, the chemical that can save lives can also destroy lives. I would love to learn more about your background and where you got started and how you ended up doing what you're doing today and what led you to writing the book, The Molecule of More. So I think of myself as pretty strongly driven by dopamine. I'm a dopaminergic person. And so, yeah, I've done a lot. I started out at a little tiny,

tiny college called St. John's College. And I mention it because it's such a special place and it's had such an effect on my life. At St. John's, there are no textbooks, there are no lectures, there are no tests or exams. What you do is you read the great books. These are the most important influential works of civilization. And you read them in the original source as they were written and then you discuss them in groups. And you start out with the ancient Greeks, the Iliad, Plato, Aristotle. You work your way all the way up to modern times with Newton, Einstein, Lobachevsky, James Joyce. Where's this school located? There's two little campuses, one in Annapolis, Maryland, one in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Student bodies about 500 in each place. And do they still operate the school in the same

way? Yeah, yeah. I think it's the second oldest school in the country, found in the 17th century, and yeah, it's the great books. And it's a very great. And it's a very, classical education. And what it does is it teaches you how to think. It teaches you how to understand complicated concepts and evaluate them analytically. And, you know, we hear so much about people's dissatisfaction with education these days that, you know, people are taking classes on Taylor Swift when they don't know the basic heritage of Western civilization. And I think that the great books program that St. John's developed is the solution to that. That's amazing. I actually never heard about that at school and curriculum, but it sounds, I mean, very, very interesting.

Yeah. I'm definitely going to follow up on that after this for sure. Fantastic. Yeah, it's a wonderful place. So what led you to wanting to study or discovering this powerful tool that is dopamine? Because, you know, like I was saying, over the last year and a half, I've read the molecule of more three times now. And I learn more every time I read it and I've become very interested.

And I think I've become more interested because as I get older and as my focus, my priorities have evolved and shifted, I'm starting to become more aware of where I spend my time and how I spend my time. And I'm also someone who chases dopamine. I mean, I am always looking into the future and living for what could be and these expectations. And I personally struggle with being content and living in the present. It's something me and my wife and my family and friends talk about all the time. And as I've read and reread this book and have learned more and realize that I chase dopamine and I'm aware of that, now I'm trying to figure out what can I do to not always be looking into the future and not being able to live and enjoy where my feet are in this moment right now. So what was that moment for you

that really, you know, you learned about dopamine and it sparked and said, I got to pursue this. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I ended up in medical school and became interested in psychiatry, went into my psychiatry residency. And I noticed that dopamine kept cropping up. Dopamine was attributed as the major problem with schizophrenia, but also ADHD and also addictions. And I was like, these three illnesses don't appear to have anything in common. What's going on?

What's the commonality? Residents are crazy busy. They work long hours. I didn't have time to look into it. after I finished residency, I joined the faculty at George Washington University, and I started to teach. And I thought, wow, someone's going to ask me this question about dopamine, and I'd better know the answer. So I started doing some digging, some reading. And what I found basically blew my mind. And I said, I didn't know this. And I'm a psychiatrist. I bet nobody knows this. I need to write

about it because it's incredibly important. How much information and research was out there when you first got started and how have you seen it kind of evolved? I guess going taking a step back. When was that? What was the year that you got involved? It's about five or six years ago. Okay. And have you seen the research and information? I guess as social media and media in general has evolved, have you seen the research on dopamine evolving as well? Well, you know, dopamine has, since I started researching this, dopamine is the number one research brain chemical out there. It seems to have the most profound effect on our behavior and on our lives. So there was a lot of research out there.

It was a little bit difficult to go through because research studies tend to focus on teeny tiny details. And I was looking for a big picture. But eventually I was able to put it together. It's a guy named Previck, who we quote a number of times in the book, who really pulled it together. So I don't think the research in the scientific literature has changed that much. continues to be very active, but you're seeing it a lot more in the popular press. And I think you're exactly right. I think it's because the excitement around social media has evolved into caution and fear, and that we're seeing young people die doing these TikTok challenges.

We're seeing them develop eating disorders, self-harm, even suicide. So dopamine plays a huge role in the influence of social media. And so I think we're seeing a lot more about that in news articles. Yeah, I think back to, you know, the way I was raised in kind of my childhood. I was born in 1990. So up until I was 18, 19 years old, social media wasn't really a thing. Cell phones, smartphones weren't really a thing. I remember being in high school and texting started becoming popular. Like that was the first thing. Everyone was texting each other.

But now that I'm getting older and we just had our first child almost a year ago, and I'm thinking about raising children in this next phase of life, you know, when I'm sitting on my phone at night and I'm just scrolling mindlessly for 15, 20, 25 minutes and I'm mentally and emotionally fatigued after scrolling. I think back to when I was younger and I was playing outside. and I was engaging and socializing. And just in this short amount of time, how technology has evolved,

but it's also taken over our minds and our abilities and our actions. I think about that a lot, especially as I start to build my family in the future and seeing younger people and younger children being heavily influenced by technology. The new economy is so much about dopamine. You know, you're sitting there scrolling, you're bored, you're maybe even unhappy.

With every scroll, you get more bored, unhappy, and fatigued, but you can't stop. And the reason is that the social media companies understand dopamine so well, and they are exploiting it. What's happening is that your dopamine system is telling you one more scroll and you might find something that'll give you a little bit of a hit.

You might find something that's about you, that triggers dopamine. You might find something you think increases the, Your future, the quality of your future, that's going to trigger dopamine. And it's very difficult for us to resist dopamine. And these companies are hiring psychologists. They're hiring experts who understand this better than everyone. And it's a strong word, but I'm going to use it.

They're trying to enslave our brains. They're trying to make us act in ways that rationally we know are not in our best interest. But like a drug addict who does another hit of crack, we can't control it. Don't you find that unethical? You know, ethics speak to, you know, rules that professionals have. And these guys don't have rules. Their rule is to make as much money as possible. So I would say it's immoral.

It's a stronger word. I mean, doctors have ethics. Tech companies, as far as I know, they don't have a body of ethics. So I think we have to go and say they're immoral. They're exploiting people. They're harming people. They're leading to deaths of children knowingly in order to boost the bottom line. So from my understanding, dopamine stimulates our wants.

The things that we want in the future, which, as you said in the book, the future isn't real. The present is real. The future is a hope. It's a dream. It's an aspiration. If dopamine desire is stimulating our once, why don't our wants? why why don't our wants match our likes sometimes and I think we've all experienced this

where there's things that we think about for days and weeks and months and it's something that we desire we want we can think about it we can visualize it but the time we get it we actually don't like it what is that chemical reaction the brain look like what are we experiencing yeah yeah

you know when we think about ourselves when we think about our minds we tend to think about it as unified. You know, I'm me. That's it. But it's not. There are competing circuits within the brain that have different goals, different aspirations. And so, for example, a very simple example.

I'd like to eat healthy. I'd also like to eat that donut, competing needs. Sometimes one is going to win, sometimes the other. So the circuits in your brain that are responsible for desires and wants, i.e. dopamine are different from the circuits in your brain that allow you to enjoy things. Uses different chemicals. So doesn't use dopamine, uses things like endorphin, the body's version of opioid, endocannabinoid, the body's version of marijuana, serotonin, oxytocin. And so these want circuits, the dopamine circuit might be saying, we got to get that new shirt. Oh, my God,

you get that new shirt. It's going to change your life. the enjoy circuits are not playing a role because they're shut down when you're thinking about the future. Now you got the shirt. Shirt's no longer a possibility in the future. It's a reality in the present. Dopamine shuts down. And the here and now circuits may be saying, hey, we didn't want this shirt. We had nothing to do with this decision.

And not only that, the experience of having dopamine shut down when something moves from the future to the present is really unpleasant. And in this situation, we would call that buyer's remorse. Why did I spend my money? I don't need this darn shirt. Yeah, I was thinking about this concept as I was preparing for this podcast. And I'm writing another book right now. It's called Go One More. Sounds very dopaminergic.

Extremely. And I tell this story in the book. You know, we were approaching our 10-year and business anniversary this past year. And I was approaching this celebration, and I was thinking, you know, I should, I should treat myself. I should do something for myself. But there wasn't really anything I really wanted, but I kept telling myself, I should. You know, I was on social media. I'm seeing all these other entrepreneurs and business owners and founders.

They're celebrating these wins and they're treating themselves occasionally. I thought, you know what, it's that time. Ten years in, I've been building for a while, let's do it. So I was like, you know, I see a lot of people buy these nice sports cars to celebrate certain things. That's what I should do. So I ordered a brand new Corvette online and I decked it out. I wrapped it matte black. I put new wheels and tires on it.

And it arrived six months later. I took it out for a spin and parked in the garage and just left it there. You know, I was thinking about it for those six months leading up to you. You know, I'm calling the dealership. hey, where's it at? When's it getting here? When's it going to arrive? Finally arrives and I look at it coming off of the truck. I'm amazed. It's beautiful. I drive it once. I put it in the garage. And then I drove it into work the next day and I was embarrassed by it. I wasn't proud of it. I was like, this is showboaty. This isn't me. This doesn't match my personality and what I represent

and who I am. And for people listen to this podcast, like I, they probably never knew. that I owned this Corvette because I never posted about it. I was embarrassed by it. So I drove into the office. I drove back to the house, parked it into the garage, and I let it sit in there. And it became a collection of like, you know, we'd put boxes on top of it and we'd move it around the garage. Exactly.

And I ended up selling it a few weeks later. And when I was reading the book and I was, you know, like I said, prepping for this episode and this conversation with you, my mind instantly went back to that moment where I wanted this thing and I wanted it so badly and the closer it got I wanted it even more but when I got it I actually didn't like it. I didn't like it at all.

I hated it. I was embarrassed by it. And I think there's a lot of things we experience in life. Food, jobs, moves, relationships. You know and you realize after you become aware of these wants and likes and dislikes how strong and powerful dopamine is and how it controls everything we do.

And the trick is to become aware because dopamine doesn't mess around. It will lie to you. Dopamine will say if you buy this corvette, it's going to change your life and you're going to be happy for years. And by paying attention, we learn that it's not true, that dopamine is a salesman that doesn't always tell the truth. And so we just got to keep a record of it. So, you know, next time this happens, you know, I don't know, maybe you'll be super successful

and you'll think about buying a $20 million house. You'll remember the Corvette. You'll say, it's not going to make me happy. Is there anything we can do to control? Our wants and our likes in dopamine, is there a supplement we can take? Is there something that we can actively do other than being just aware that it's there? Yeah, what we want to focus on in life are the quick fixes, right? Pills, et cetera.

Yeah, I mean, of course, that's very dopaminergic. And the answer is, yeah, there's plenty we can do, but none of them are quick fixes. There are no pills. There's no videos we can watch. There's not one easy, simple trick. You know, having a healthy mind is really no different than having a healthy body. You know, we've all tried those miracle supplements, and they don't work. maybe to help a little bit around the edges.

But if you want to have a healthy body, you need to develop habits. You've got to exercise, you've got to eat right, and you've got to get sleep. And the same is true with a healthy mind. There are no shortcuts. If you want to have a healthy mind, you need to make effort. You know, the analog of exercise for the mind is meditation. And I don't know if you've ever done any meditation, but it's very, very similar to physical exercise. You don't want to do it in the beginning, but after you're done, you feel so great.

And it does take a lot of willpower in the beginning. And, you know, just like you want to stop, get off the treadmill. You're in the middle of meditation. You want to stop because it's hard. Is there a scientific explanation of why meditation works? Yeah. So your dopamine circuits are deep within your brain. They're very, very primitive circuits.

You know, they evolved millennia ago. and their job just to keep us alive. Their job is not to make us happy, right? Their job is when we want to kick back by the campfire to get us out there searching for more food so that our tribe doesn't die. Now, the surface of the brain, which we call the cerebral cortex,

is something that is more recently evolved. And that's really the frontal lobes, the frontal cortex, that's really what makes us human. That's what gives us rationality and the ability to go beyond our instincts and to evaluate what is my instinct telling me and is this really something that's going to contribute to my happiness? What meditation does is it exercises that part of the mind. And we can actually measure in brain scans that this part of the cortex thickens,

just like a bodybuilder's biceps get bigger from doing curls. your cerebral cortex thickens by doing meditation. When that enables you to do is to act more deliberately. Instead of always being at the mercy of your instincts and overeating and consuming too much pornography and overspending on your credit card, you've got this thicker cortical layer. So you can say, no, I'm going to choose to do otherwise

and I'm able to do it. I have the strength to resist the destructive impulses. That's very interesting. I guess in terms of individuals and, you know, kind of the way people are born and developed and the tools and skills and abilities they are born with, you know, some people, you can take two people, for example, and they can both have this dopamine desire and want. one person can control it better than the other and vice versa is is that um genetic is that part of their DNA or they born with that ability and the amount of amount and concentration of dopamine they're experiencing and whether they can practice the willpower to not pursue yeah yeah how much someone is influenced by dopamine and how well they're able to utilize

and control it is dependent on a number of factors, and genetics is one of them. We don't know the whole story, but we do know that there are different kinds of dopamine receptors and other aspects of the cell that manages dopamine behavior that are genetically determined. And if you've got this, we can actually measure it. We can measure the gene. We can make some predictions about your risk for addiction, your risk for obesity. We can even make some predictions about political affiliation if we know about your dopamine system. If dopamine influences motivation, is it the here and now chemicals that influence discipline? No. It's a little bit ironic, but it's dopamine that influences discipline. You know, there are more than one

dopamine circuits in the brain. In the book, we focus on two. The first of the mesolimbic, that's deep in the brain. We call that the desire circuit. And that's the one that makes you want things. That's the one that's overactive in substance abuse disorders. But then there's another one. There's one called the mesocortical, which we call the control circuit. And the mesocortical circuit is the one that allows us to think rationally. It's what allows us to plan. It's what allows us to use abstract concepts like language and mathematics and the laws of physics. It's also the one that gives us discipline. So it's funny, discipline is really dopamine versus dopamine, ancient dopamine versus more modern dopamine. But all of the dopamine circuits are focused on one thing,

and that's the future, making the future better than it is today. The deep dopamine circuit, the desire one, that gives us the motivation and the passion. The control circuit gives us, these very, very powerful, cognitive, intellectual, scientific tools to accomplish those goals. Is there anything we can do to improve that? You know, like we were talking about meditation can thicken and strengthen that part of your brain. Yeah. And that adaptation and stimulus helps develop and grow. Is there anything we can personally do to be more disciplined people? I think that the first step is just to pay attention. When I was writing this book, I started checking in myself temporarily and saying, what kind of a state am I in?

Am I in a dopamine state or a here and now state in the present? And is that the state I want to be in? You know, if I'm at work, I want to be in a dopamine state. I'm working for something better. I'm working to accomplish something. But if I'm at home with my family, I want to be in a here in now state. You know, this is what I'm working for so I can have this wonderful family and put food on the table and a roof over the head. I shouldn't be thinking about what I'm going to do tomorrow.

And the same is true if I'm taking a walk in the park or hanging out with friends or enjoying a meal. But what I found was that most of the time I was in a dopamine state. Instead of enjoying the wonderful meal that my wife spent so much time cooking, I was thinking about what podcast do I have tomorrow or what meetings do I have? or what am I going to do after dinner? I'm going to check out that cool website. And so I started paying attention. And when I found myself in a dopamine state,

when I really wanted to be in the here and now, I tried to pull myself into the present moment by focusing on the senses. What am I seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling? In terms of food, that's where I can really relate to dopamine. because I will wait an entire day for this dinner we're going to that I made reservations for six months ago.

I'm thinking about this, the days leading up to, what I'm going to order. I'm looking at the menu. I'm searching their Instagram. I'm looking about, you know, what they're offering that's, that's, you know, a special or flown in or something like that. And I'm thinking about this meal for days leading up too. And as we're driving to the restaurant, like my mouth. starts watering. I can barely focus on the conversation my wife because I'm thinking about

this food. But once we get down at the restaurant and we sit to the table and I order the food and it comes out and me and my wife start talking, I forget that I'm even eating. I'm enjoying every other part of that experience but the food. Yeah. And then often what I'm doing while I'm eating that meal and wrapping it up is I'm already thinking about what I'm making for breakfast. So I'm constantly focused on the future and the next thing. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we talk about genetics, and I think the unfortunate fact is that natural selection selected out the most dopaminergic of our ancestors. They probably weren't the happiest people in the tribe, but they never stopped working. They never stopped seeking out new resources,

reproductive partners. And so in some ways, it was the survival of the most aggressive. and least happy, least satisfied, the survival of the unsatisfied. Do you think it's possible to actually be content in the present? Or are we fighting this chemical in our brain that makes it literally impossible to do that? Yeah. I think the question is, what are you willing to sacrifice? I think it is possible to be happy in the present, but I think it requires enormous sacrifice. For example, you know, dry January is becoming more popular. You've heard about that?

I have, yes. And I have a lot of patients who've done dry January, and they all say that they're so surprised at how good they feel, but most of them go back to drinking anyway. Why? You know, if this is before dry January and this is after in terms of your happiness, you're up here, going, wow, this is great. And if I have a drink, oh, I'll be up here. And so we, we forget that more sometimes leads to less. So yeah, we can be happy in the present moment, but we're probably going to need to give up cell phones and social media and junk food and alcohol. And, you know, all of these things that are stimulating our dopamine and live a more natural life. And most people just aren't willing to do that. Have you come across or met anyone who has eliminated all these things

in their life and has a positive impact? I once met the Dalai Lama. He was real happy. You know, there's a way you can tell from a brain scan how happy somebody is. And that's by brain asymmetry, the left part of the brain being much more active than the right part of the brain. And the Dalai Lama visited Stanford once. And he talked to, some Stanford neuroscientists, and he was absolutely amazed at what they had to say. And so he asked his followers to cooperate with these neuroscientists so that everyone could learn more about the brain and how meditation and that sort of thing affects it. And what they found was nobody has more happy asymmetrical brains than Buddhist monks who have meditated for at least 10,000 hours.

Can anyone go out and get a brain scan like that? Because I'd be very curious to see Yeah, no, you can't. They're very expensive. You know what? I take that back. These days, you probably could. You probably get very, very expensive, but you probably could. I'd be so interested to see, you know, if what my brain tells me I am in terms of happiness.

And then comparing that to my perception based off of emotions and feelings and kind of where I'm at in my life. I think it was the Oracle at Delphi that said the most important thing is to know yourself. And if we don't know ourselves, if we don't pay attention to who we are and what's going on inside of us, it's very difficult to achieve growth. I know you reference this quote in the book. And it grabbed my attention. And I've also heard you reference it in other interviews you've done. To travel, hopefully, is better than to arrive. Yeah. What does that mean to you?

It's the saying of the dopaminergic. You know, when I first heard that, I thought, oh, that's so lovely, you know. And now that I wrote this book, I don't think it's so lovely anymore. Basically, it means that to anticipate something that you want is better than actually having it. And I think that that's a sign of the modern disease of too much dopamine. You know, everything in our society persuades us to live a dopaminergic life. Because if we were happy, it wouldn't be so good for the companies that want to try to sell us things. And so companies are constantly trying to make us unhappy with the promise that if we just hand over our money to them, that problem will be solved.

And so there's this constant, constant stimulation of the dopamine circuits, and it makes it so challenging for us to be happy in this modern world. You know, I was listening to part of this book in preparation for this conversation on a run earlier this week. And there was a part that really just stood out. And it was talking about how, you know, a relationship changes typically after the those first 12 to 18 months. And that first 12 to 18 months, it's this passionate type of love.

And it's driven by dopamine and desire and it's beautiful. And then at some point it transitions to, I believe you said, companion in love. And then it becomes a whole different type of relationship in love and wants and likes and needs. And I would love for you to explain what that transition looks like and why it happens, why some relationships fail, why some succeed. Because that's something we all experience. I'm sure we've all started a new relationship. The honeymoon phase starts to kind of fall apart a little bit. And then we view that relationship completely differently.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some people have said that falling in love is one of the most. intense experiences that human beings have, most intensely pleasurable experiences that human beings have. And we feel like we're taken out of ordinary reality.

And all of a sudden we're living in this fantasy land that's so wonderful. We idealize our beloved, similarly the way you idealized your Corvette. We think, wow, this person is gonna change my life. And if I can only be with them, I will be happy forever. And that's lovely and it's wonderful, but after 12 to 18 months, that kind of passionate love fades.

And when it happens, we need to transition over into companionate love. In the old days, that was easy because part of passionate love is an extreme desire for the beloved's body to have sex with them. And in the old days, in order to do that, you would get married. and then you would be hitched, so to speak. And when the passionate love transitioned into companionate love, you had that tie of marriage that would hold you together during that very difficult transition.

Now, of course, we don't have that. And so what happens is when passionate love ends, a lot of people think, oh, my gosh, I must have made a mistake. This must not be my soulmate. I need to go find somebody else. And maybe even as the passionate love is fading, they actually met someone that they're kind of becoming interested in. And they're saying, you know what, I'm going to get rid of this person and start it up with that person. Not only because it looks like I might have made a mistake,

but because I want that dopamine back. I want the dopamine passionate love back. So, but in some, so passionate dopaminergic love is absolutely wonderful, but companionate love is pretty wonderful too. Because unlike passionate love, companionate love can endure. It can last a very, very long time, sometimes a lifetime. And as your life becomes more and more intertwined with another person, as you get to know this person on a deeper and deeper and more intimate level, you establish a relationship that's unlike any other in your entire life. And if it's a good relationship, you know that this person always has your back. This is someone you can always rely on. You bring your troubles to them. They will always be there for you. So companion at love is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

And the trick is to be aware that when passionate love ends and it will inevitably end, that doesn't mean the relationship is over. It means you're about to go through a difficult transition to something that might be better. Is this the reason that younger people, jump from relationship to relationship to relationship. And typically people who start relationships when they're older have a higher success rate. And I know you mentioned in the book how your frontal lobes don't fully develop until your early 20s. So you make these impulsive decisions without weighing the consequences. And I would assume, I mean, even looking back in my personal life when I was younger before my early 20s,

you go from relationship to relationship to relationship. and as soon as it starts fizzling out and it's not passionate anymore, you just change directions. Does this have anything to do with it in terms of that the development of the brain and our experiences in life and just how old and wise we become? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the frontal lobes don't develop until the 20s, a little bit earlier in women than in men,

which I think we can tell from the behavior of men and women. in their late teens, early 20s. But yeah, it's those frontal lobes that are part of the control dopamine circuit that's going to look a little bit farther into the future. So the desire, primitive, instinctual dopamine circuit may see a pretty woman and say, wow, I'd like to go talk to her. But the control circuit, frontal lobes, might say, you know what, my wife probably wouldn't appreciate that, and so I'm not going to do it.

If you're younger and you don't have that frontal lobe development, you know, you're maybe going to be unfaithful to your girlfriend. Maybe you're just going to dump her. Maybe you don't even care. Maybe you don't even have relationships. It's just casual sex one after the other. I wrote in the book about this young man I was treating who had a real hard problem with this.

He desperately wanted a long-term relationship with a woman, but as soon as he slept with her, he lost interest in her because she was no longer a dopaminergic future. she was now here and now present, and all he was driven by was dopamine. It got to the point where he would be in a bar picking up a woman, and it wasn't even a question of having sex. As soon as she agreed to go home with him, he lost interest because there was no more dopaminergic chase. He didn't even want to have sex with women anymore.

So, yeah, I can get out of hand. As we get older, our dopamine does become less active, which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, going out there, taking chances, making bold moods, that's better for young people. So as we get older, dopamine goes down, and happiness goes up. We, you know, in our society, we sort of idolize youth.

Nobody wants to grow old, but scientific studies have identified and others have confirmed that after age about 45, life, happiness goes up. And we're happy when we're older than when we're younger. What kind of happens in the middle? Because I've always referenced when I was younger, you know, I was naive and ignorant to risk and consequences and death and destruction in the world.

So you're kind of just happy, go lucky. And then you get a little bit older and you're not as naive and ignorant anymore. but then you're saying, you know, when you cross that around 45-year-old age limit, you get happier again. What's happening in the middle, in your opinion? Is it just lifestyle, the things we're experiencing in life that makes it kind of, I guess, maybe more bland than the beginning and towards the back half? Yeah.

You know, the happiness that comes in older age is a result of a shift in focus away from oneself towards other people. And it's hard to do that until we've gotten settled in life, till we feel comfortable in our careers, comfortable in our relationships. Then we can start to focus outward. And, you know, older people are, you know, looking at passing along their knowledge to younger people. They're not struggling up the corporate ladder as much as wanting to pass along the knowledge that they've gotten. So middle age is the least happy because you're more.

your youth, you know, the loss of the freedom and perhaps the, you know, the ability to drink all night and then go to a football game the next day without feeling too bad. We're mourning our physical loss of physical prowess and all of that, but we have not yet acquired the wisdom that enables us to make that rotation, focus away from ourselves towards other people, which leads to happiness. Did you personally experience this yourself? I feel like I'm in the process of it. You know, I'm trying to, I'm trying to do it. It's not easy. It's not an easy thing to do, but I'm trying to do it. What would the world look like? What would our lives look like if dopamine didn't exist? I mean, would we exist at all? You know, we certainly wouldn't have science and

technology without dopamine. We wouldn't be able to work with abstract, we wouldn't have art. We wouldn't be able to work with abstract concepts like truth and beauty and justice. You don't see any other species of animal except humans making representative art. And so you need the dopamine for that. So I think humanity would not have evolved without dopamine. Be a sad world. I mean, I probably wouldn't be here right now. That's right.

I mean, dopamine is not a bad thing. It's just a dangerous thing. It's like fire, right? Fire is very, very dangerous, but it gives us so many wonderful things like light and heat and all that. It's just powerful. I wanted to talk about addiction. And I think that we can talk about social media simultaneously as we're talking about addiction

because a lot of the use on social media is addicting as well. Is addiction and social media and technology, does this hijack our brain? Is it hijack the dopamine circuit and completely rewire it? Yeah, yeah. You know, dopamine, our dopamine circuits evolve. in a setting of hunter-gatherer society. And so dopamine responded to things like berries and mammoth meat and that sort of stuff.

And so its sensitivity is tuned to that. But now, with all of our technology, we have found ways to hyper-stimulate the dopamine system, and we're pushing it too hard. So we've got junk food. Junk food stimulates dopamine a lot more effectively than natural whole foods. You know, instead of sitting around the campfire telling stories, we've got social media, and that stimulates it a lot harder.

And then we've got drugs, which are a direct chemical stimulation, the most powerful of all. The problem is that we make behavioral choices based on what's going to lead to, the most dopamine, right? So if you have the opportunity of interviewing some ordinary Joe off the street or the most famous celebrity in the world, you're going with the most famous celebrity in the world. That's obvious. That produces the most dopamine. Unfortunately, that also leads us to engage with social media instead of socializing with friends, eat junk food instead of healthy food and sometimes take drugs in sort of seeking out other forms of gratification. I was thinking about social media driving into the office today.

And what I find myself doing more frequently than I would love to admit is I pick up my phone and I check these five certain apps and I go through, I go through email and then my Slack and then I check sales for our. our company and I'll go to Instagram and I'll check YouTube and I'm refreshing these not necessarily looking for something in particular but I and what I identified today being more aware is that I'm just looking for the unknown of the future. Am I going to get a new email? Is there going to be a new Slack message? I'm not expecting one, but what if there is? Is someone going to send me a DM that can be really important that could change the trajectory of my life and business did my subscriber account

increase on YouTube and I'm not going and using my phone in search and expectation of anything in particular that I'm expecting but it's the unexpected it's the unknown that's pulling me in and it's just this addiction now where you pick it up you check the same apps you refresh them you put it down, you do it again. And part of me is like, how do you break this circuit? Is it physically removing yourself away from that situation? How do addicts stop using? How do we stop chasing and pursuing this dopamine that we're so driven by?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I did something similar with my book sales. I was checking the Amazon charts obsessively. reading the reviews. And what happened was that in the beginning, it gave me so much pleasure and maybe even happiness. And my dopamine circuit locked onto that. And because it gave me pleasure once, I kept doing it and I kept doing it. And it would continue to give me pleasure, but less and less and less and less, and then I reached a point where I got nothing out of it, but I kept doing it. And cocaine addicts that I've worked with have told me the same thing, that they reach a point

in their use where they no longer get high. They've developed complete tolerance to the drug so they're no longer getting high, but they still compulsively use it. And they can't imagine why. They say, why am I ruining my drug, my life? Why am I emptying my bank account to use this drug when I don't even like it? And again, it speaks to the complexity of the brain. The circuit that's making the music compulsively is different than the circuit that's

registering pleasure and they're completely different things. So I think what we need to do is pay attention and ask ourselves, is this really giving me the enjoyment I'm expecting? And what's the price I'm paying for it? Is it maybe making me unhappy? Is it taking up large amounts of time I could be spending otherwise? Now, if you identify, let's say you say, okay, maybe I shouldn't check my YouTube subscriber account every day because I kind of don't get any buzz from it anymore.

I'm going to stop. I think the tool that we naturally reach for is willpower, and that's a mistake, because willpower is pretty weak and it tends to fatigue easily. If you resist temptation once, the second time you get tempted, you're going to be less likely to be successful because your willpower succeeds. So in the addiction community, we say it's better to be smart than to be strong. Strategize. So, for example, if someone is a recovering alcoholic, they need to stay away from alcohol. I've had so many alcoholics tell me, I understand the drinking is a problem.

But, you know, I socialize in bars. That's where all my friends go. So I'm going to go to a bar and drink a diet Coke. Never. In history of humanity, has that ever worked? Our willpower is just not that good. You've got to think, what's going to take this out of my control? So there's a drug called antibuse.

You take that in the morning. If you drink on it, you will start throwing up uncontrollably. that's a smart way to approach it. It doesn't depend upon willpower. So we look for these things that make it impossible for our dopamine system to get the better of our good judgment. Makes me think of this app I downloaded it for my phone a few months ago. And you can set timers on your phone for certain apps.

You can't access them at certain times of the day. So I set this whole thing up where I couldn't access certain social media accounts before I got to the office or after I got home from the office because that's my time to spend with family, my daughter, be very present. And I picked up my phone

on the second day I had this app installed and I go to access the account because I was trying to look for something and it pops up this little notification says, you've locked this app for the time being, do you want to unlock? No.

The buttons right there. And I'm thinking, just this one time. I'm just going to unlock it for two minutes. I need to do one thing. Unlock. And then it became this thing that in order for me just to get into the app, I would just click unlock every time. Right.

And that wasn't a, that wasn't enough to hold me back from the willpower of accessing that app during the times that I was intending not to use it. So yeah, willpower is tough. In the brain, there's one thing stronger. than dopamine. And that is the circuits that mediate social interaction. That's why AA is one of the most effective treatments for alcoholism. A.A. is not a treatment. It's a fellowship. It depends on other people. So here's what you do. If you don't want to check your social media when you're at home, tell your family. I guess your kids too little to be told. But if you tell them,

You say, listen, I've made a decision that I'm not going to look at social media at home. Unless it's something urgent for work, I've got to look something up. But otherwise, I won't. Then when you feel the urge, the desire not to appear weak in front of people that you care about. The desire not to let them down, they might say, oh, thank you so much. We're so grateful. We value the attention you pay to us, and we're so grateful. then you don't want to let them down. So the strongest antidote for bad dopaminergic behaviors

are social support and social reinforcement, but real, not social media, actual flesh and blood human beings. Do you think the pandemic had negative consequences on dopamine and their response just by social isolation? Yeah, I mean, as a psychiatrist, I've been watching the rates of mental illness just skyrocket since the pandemic. And there are so many reasons for that. But, you know, we heard stories about people not being able to visit their loved ones in the hospital, people not being able to go to their grandfather's funeral, people not being able to attend worship services. And these were just things that were devastating for mental health. Yeah, I could only imagine. Well, Dan, this is an amazing conversation. I'm very intrigued by double

me, as you can probably tell, I've read the book, The Molecule of More, three times now. I highly recommend it gets better every time I read it. I learn more. I learned a lot throughout this conversation. And I think you're doing great work. And the message you're sharing, bringing you more awareness is helping a lot of people. So I wanted to thank you personally for the book, the things you talk about and the message. My pleasure.

It's been so wonderful to see the effect this has had. and this book needed to be written. Well, thanks, Dan. Thank you.