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Tame the Dopamine Drive — How to Stop Chasing and Start Living

The Art of Manliness

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  • Dopamine Drives Future Anticipation
    • Dopamine is unique among neurotransmitters as it looks to the future and drives anticipation, unlike others that focus on the present moment.
    • It motivates us by making us want what we don’t currently have, based on mere possibility rather than certainty. Transcript: Brett McKay All the neurochemicals in the brain have to do with life in the present, except for one, dopamine. Dopamine is the one neurochemical that looks to the future and anticipates what may be to come and drives you towards it. That can be a good thing. Dopamine is one powerful motivator, but it also has its downsides. Here to help us understand how the most important chemical in the brain works and how to deal with its pitfalls is Michael Long. Michael’s a trained physicist turned writer whose latest book is Taming the Molecule of More. Mike and I discuss how dopamine, for better and worse, makes you want what you don’t have. He shares what causes low dopamine activity, how to know if you’re experiencing it, and what increases dopamine. We then talk about how to deal with the consequences of dopamine and some of the scenarios in which it plays a role, like losing the spark in a relationship, getting stuck in a smartphone Scroll habit, and why so much of taming dopamine comes down to living in the here and now. We enter a conversation with why The Great Gatsby is really a novel about dopamine and the fundamental answer to not letting the dopamine chase lead you around. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash molecule. All right, Michael Long, welcome back to the show. Hey, it’s good to be here, Brett. How are you? Doing great. So we had you on the podcast several years ago, I think it was back in 2018, to discuss a book you co-authored called The Molecule of More. It’s all about dopamine. You’ve written a sequel to that book called Taming the Molecule of More. What prompted the sequel? What did you flesh out in this book that you and your co-author didn’t flesh out in the first one? Michael E. Long Well, you know, the first book is about the science of dopamine and its effects on modern life, or I should say its effects on us and struggling in modern life. And we explained as much as we could, you know, as much as you can in 70,000 words, just how this plays out. And it turns out to affect everything from your political beliefs or your political behaviors, I should say, to why you get so wrapped up in your phone and even things like online pornography. And people read the book and they said, this is very interesting science. I love these stories. What can I do about it? And that’s the second book. How do you tame the stress of dopamine in modern life? Hence the title, Taming the Molecule of More. And I wrote this one alone with a nice foreword by Dr. Dan. Brett McKay So let’s do a quick recap of the big ideas of the molecule of more, since I think that’ll help guide the rest of our conversation. You call dopamine the most important chemical in the human brain. So what is dopamine? Michael E. Long Well, the best way to understand what dopamine is, is to first understand what it is not. Okay. And in general, when we talk about neurotransmitters, these are chemicals in your brain that guide your behavior and your feelings. All right. Behavior and feelings. And there are dozens of these chemicals, if not a couple of hundred actually, but for our purposes, we’re interested in a handful. And so as I said, to understand what dopamine does, first understand what it is not. Every neurotransmitter except one deals with the here and now. That is how things feel how things taste and smell, how things sound. Those neurotransmitters let us live in the moment, but there’s one that doesn’t let us live in the moment at all. There’s one that does nothing but anticipate what is possible, one that looks forward, and that one is dopamine. Not only does it make you look forward to the future, anticipate the future, it also makes you want what you don’t have. And it does so in sort of a vicious and wonderful way. And what it does is it makes you believe that if there’s something out there that you’ve just come across that might possibly improve your life, you have to break down walls to get it. That’s what dopamine is. It’s the molecule that makes you want, anticipate. It’s the molecule that makes you desire more. And it does all this on the basis of the mere possibility, not even evidence that it’s so. And I’m sure in the course of our conversation, we can offer all sorts of examples where this begins to mess up our days. (Time 0:02:23)
  • Uncertainty Fuels Dopamine Drive
    • Dopamine activity spikes with uncertainty and rewards that exceed expectations, fueling our anticipation.
    • Once a reward becomes predictable and normal, dopamine response and excitement significantly diminish. Transcript: Brett McKay I got from your description of dopamine, I took away from that first book, and then again, when I read this book, uncertainty is an important factor of dopamine. If there’s no uncertainty, you’re probably not going to have dopamine. So you don’t know if it’s going to be good or bad, and that’s the thing that kickstarts that dopamine drive. Well, I’ve got to find out. I want to resolve this uncertainty. That’s exactly right. Michael E. Long My favorite example is this, and it’s one that Dr. Lieberman and I have used for years, and everybody can recognize this. Let’s say, for the sake of numbers, let’s say you get at the end of every week, you get a check for $1,000, and that’s your pay. Congratulations. There you go. You get $1,000. At the end of the week, your boss comes to your desk, puts the thousand dollar check in your hand. You put it in your wallet and you don’t think anything about it. Now, the next week, the boss comes to your desk and the boss gives you a thousand dollar check. And then the boss says, she says, you know, you’ve done so well. I’m going to give you an extra hundred bucks. Here’s another hundred dollar check. And you’re like, wow, an extra hundred bucks. This is fantastic. Notice that the thousand dollars, you’ve just been slipping in your wallet. No big deal. She gives you one-tenth of that, and you’re ecstatic. That’s the thing we’re talking about. Dopamine is that as long as something’s a little bit better, we’re going to go chasing it. So now the next week comes, and all of a sudden, you’re thinking, I wonder if I’ll get another $100 this week. Oh, that would be exciting. So she gives you a $1,000 check and you’re waiting and waiting. And sure enough, she says, another great week. Here’s another $100 bonus. Oh boy, that great feeling you’ve had anticipating and it turned out to be wonderful. So fast forward six or eight weeks down the road. You’ve been getting a $1,000 check, which you yawn about. One-tenth of that, a $100 check, and you are excited about it. But once a few weeks pass and you realize, oh, she’s always going to give me a hundred dollar bonus, you stop being excited about it. You stop looking forward to that little extra thing on Friday because it’s no longer extra. It’s become normal, nothing to be excited about. And that’s what dopamine drives us to, is to try to get that next thing. But once it becomes normal, part of the wallpaper, the dopamine buzz goes away. (Time 0:08:20)
  • Dopamine Versus Here-and-Now Neurotransmitters
    • All neurotransmitters except dopamine act in the “here and now,” responsible for sensory and mood responses.
    • Dopamine uniquely motivates anticipation, while others like serotonin and oxytocin enhance present feelings and bonding. Transcript: Brett McKay What are those here and now neurotransmitters and how do they interact with dopamine? Michael E. Long Well, the here and now neurotransmitters, as I say, deal with sensory matters, consummatory matters or consummatory matters. And there are lots of neurotransmitters we could talk about, but I’ll just go through a few of them that are in the realm. And when I say literally all the others are here and now, literally all the others, Brett, are here and now. There’s only one that truly deals with anticipation. One you’ve heard a lot about is serotonin. Serotonin deals with mood and sleep, and it’s a major player when we’re trying to get treatment for depression. There are others that simply act like an accelerator or a decelerator on all the activities in the brain. One of those neurotransmitters is called glutamate, and it causes things to get boosted a little bit. Things go a little faster. There’s another called GABA. GABA, if you’ve ever taken Xanax or Klonopin, that’s what it is. It’s a GABA-acting chemical. It pushes GABA, and that calms us down. It slows down some of the reactions. And what’s interesting about it is it doesn’t flow through the brain like oil does. It’s, oh, put some oil in so it’ll smooth it out a little bit. It actually acts in a discrete way, in a separate way. So all these circuits in your brain, all these receptors that are scattered about in a particular system, mixed among those receptors may be GABA receptors. And so those GABA receptors could be acted on at the same time the dopamine receptors are acted on. So instead of slowing it down like oil does, it’s like, oh, here’s another fellow who shows up to do a little work himself, and he’s going to slow it out. Now, there are a couple of other H&N neurotransmitters that I like to mention, but they’re actually not technically neurotransmitters. Now, 99 people out of 100 don’t give a damn, but technically we want to be correct. These are actually neuropeptides, and it’s just chemically a little different, but for our purposes, they’re the same thing. They tend to act a little more slowly than neurotransmitters. One, you’ve heard of oxytocin. Oxytocin, and that acts in bonding, that acts in trust, and if you think about it, that makes sense that that would be a here and now thing because bonding is about the person that you are With in the moment. That’s where that happens. The trust comes from what might happen to you in the moment you are with someone in the here and now. (Time 0:10:55)
  • Dopamine Spurs Pursuit and Addiction
    • Dopamine motivates us to pursue rewards, while other neurotransmitters help us enjoy those rewards.
    • Dopamine’s intense motivation also underlies addiction, pushing us toward more even when pleasure fades. Transcript: Brett McKay And so it sounds like dopamine will drive you to get those good feelings. It’s like, this can make me feel good somehow, possibly. And then once you achieve the thing, dopamine drops off and then the here and now neurotransmitters, the oxytocin, the serotonin, they kick in to enhance the experience, help you enjoy The experience and strengthen your bond with the person you’re with. Michael E. Long Well, yeah, you just nailed it. The idea of dopamine driving you to get something that you can enjoy or consume is just a parallel to what happens in the real world. In fact, the simplest way to think of it is like exerting effort and then having a trophy. You don’t get the trophy. You don’t get the pleasure. You don’t get to hold the trophy in your hand until you’ve done the work to get there. Dopamine is the motivator to do that work. And the trophy is the feeling, the physical feeling, the sound, the touch, the taste, or pursuing someone that you want to date. You go through a lot of anticipation, a lot of effort in order to get to the point where you actually touch them, where you’re actually sitting with them and interacting with them in the Here and now. Everything up to that point is quite literally anticipation. What can I do or rather what will it be like when I reach my goal? And that’s what all those other neurotransmitters do is they indulge the goal. Dopamine pushes us toward the goal. And it’s worth noting that that dopamine feeling, although it has nothing to do with the here and now, is typically more intense and more, I’ll use the word motivating, even though that’s Literally what it does, more motivating than all the others. (Time 0:13:28)
  • Recognize Low Dopamine Signs
    • Signs of low dopamine activity include lack of interest, reduced motivation, brain fog, and less pleasure.
    • If these symptoms interfere with life, seek professional help rather than self-diagnose. Transcript: Brett McKay Absolutely, there are. Michael E. Long With one caveat, Brett, and that is I’m going to tell you a lot of symptoms that you can look for, a lot of phenomena you can look for. But I want to offer the warning, as I say, that these are in broad terms. They can signal a lot of things. So just because you hear some of these that I say that click with you doesn’t necessarily mean the problem is dopamine. If it’s interfering with your life, by all means, call a psychiatrist, call a psychologist, go see your GP, get some help to find out if there’s something truly pathological that you Need some help with. But having offered that warning, here are some things that are typical about low dopamine activity in the brain. One is a lack of interest in the things that used to intrigue you. You loved it before, now not so much. If you’re less interested than you used to be in new things, if you’re not as easily intrigued, that can suggest a decline in dopamine activity. If you are lacking interest in things that by all rights intrigue everybody else and ought to intrigue you too. All this can take the form of reduced motivation, for instance, a lesser ability to concentrate, brain fog, less interest in sex is a hallmark of this as well. Just an overall decline in the ability to feel pleasure. You’ll notice that a lot of these aren’t about suddenly you wake up one day and here’s a symptom. It’s a change in the way you felt before to the way you feel now. And generally that decline involves less pleasure in life. Those are good signals that you’re, and I’m going to take a little side note here. When we say low on dopamine, what we’re really talking about is in most cases, a reduction in dopamine activity, which, again, won’t matter to most people, but we want to be precise. It’s not as if you could take a dopamine pill and boost it. (Time 0:16:19)
  • Dopamine Desensitization Explained
    • Excessive stimulation from drugs or activities can reduce dopamine receptor sensitivity, dulling pleasure responses.
    • This desensitization is similar to stretching out a sweater until it no longer fits snugly. Transcript: Brett McKay So you could have low dopamine activity because of some organic biological reason, or it could be because you just hit a dopamine stimulating activity over and over again. So this could be with drugs or it could be with something else, just like social media. It’s just whenever you flood the brain with high levels of dopamine, it reduces the number of dopamine receptors. And it’s kind of like closing windows during a wind storm. (Time 0:20:11)
  • Use Dopamine Fasting Wisely
    • To reset dopamine sensitivity, abstain from stimulating activities but fill that emotional gap with here-and-now experiences.
    • Engage in sensory activities like conversations, art, exercise, or meditation to replace dopamine-driven habits. Transcript: Brett McKay And this is where you temporarily abstain from pleasurable or stimulating activities like social media or porn to reset the brain’s reward system, like reset your dopamine. So you resensitize yourself to normal everyday levels of pleasures. We’ve actually talked about dopamine fast on the podcast and our website before. Is there anything to this idea of dopamine fast? Michael E. Long Absolutely there is. And if you want to do it, you got to be sure you’re doing it right. Because if you don’t, you’re going to make it worse. There was an article in the New York Times a while back about a couple of entrepreneurs who tried to do this on a weekly basis. And they did things like getting away from their phone or turning the lights off or never looking at a screen. All these things are sort of in the realm of dopamine to some level. In the same way, driving a car is sort of related to going to the gas station. There’s a lot more to it. But if you’re going to do a dopamine fast, let me tell you the best thing to remember about it is that dopamine stuff you’re feeling is filling a hole. It’s filling a gap in your emotions, in your life. And if you get rid of dopamine by saying, I’m going to cut myself off from these activities. That hole is still there, except now it’s empty. And you won’t be able to keep that up. If you’re going to pull back from dopamine, you have to fill that hole with something else. And what you want to do is fill it with here and now activities. We spend so much time anticipating. That’s what your phone is all about. We’re scrolling down the phone looking for something that might be interesting because last time I saw something interesting, maybe I’ll see something fun again. You have to fill that with here and now, which means sensory things. Perhaps you could talk to a friend, read a book, go outside and draw a picture for Pete’s sake, pick up an instrument. Do some exercise. Anything that involves your engagement with reality in the moment. So if you’re going to dopamine fast, by all means, knock that stuff out. But be sure you fill the hole that remains because it will not stay empty for long and dopamine will win that battle every damn time. (Time 0:29:42)