A (7:29)
While most experiences and most things that we do and take and eat and etc. Won't create enormous highs and enormous lows in dopamine, even subtle fluctuations in dopamine really shape our perception of life and what we're capable of and how we feel. And so we want to guard those and we want to understand them. All of us have different baseline levels of dopamine. Some of this is sure to be genetic. Some people just simply ride at a level a little bit higher. Some people are a little less excitable. What dopamine does is dopamine really colors the subjective experience of an activity to make it more pleasureful, to make it something that you want more of. So what sorts of activities, what sorts of things increase dopamine and how much do they increase dopamine? Well, let's take a look at some typical things that people do out there or ingest out there, and let's ask how much dopamine is increased above baseline. Chocolate will increase your baseline level of dopamine 1.5 times. Okay, so it's a pretty substantial increase in dopamine. It's transient. It goes away after a few minutes or even a few seconds. Sex, both the pursuit of sex and the act of sex increases dopamine two times. Nicotine, in particular, nicotine that is smoked like cigarettes and so forth, increases dopamine two and a half times above baseline. It is very short lived. Cocaine will increase the level of dopamine in the bloodstream two and a half times above baseline. And amphetamine, another drug that increases dopamine, will increase the amount of dopamine in the bloodstream 10 times above baseline, a tremendous increase in dopamine. Exercise. Now, exercise will have a different impact on the levels of dopamine depending on how much somebody subjectively enjoys that exercise. So if you're somebody who loves running, chances are it's going to increase your levels of dopamine two times above your baseline, not unlike sex. People who dislike exercise will achieve less dopamine increase or no increase in dopamine from exercise. And if you like other forms of exercise, like yoga or weightlifting or swimming or what have you, again, it's going to vary by your subjective experience of whether or not you enjoy that activity. This is important. And it brings us back to something that we talked about earlier. Remember that mesocorticolimbic pathway? Well, the cortical part is important. The cortical part actually has a very specific part which is your prefrontal cortex, the area of your forebrain that's involved in thinking and planning and involved in assigning a rational explanation to something, and involved in assigning a subjective experience to something. So certain things, chemicals, have a universal effect. They make everybody's dopamine go up. So some people like chocolate, some people don't, of course, but in general, it causes this increase in dopamine. But sex, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamine, those things cause increases in dopamine in everybody that takes them. Now, I've been alluding to this dopamine peaks versus dopamine baseline things since the beginning of the episode. Now, let's really drill into what this means and how to leverage it for our own purposes. In order to do that, let's take a step back and ask, why would we have a dopamine system like this? Why would we have a dopamine system at all? Well, we have to remember what our species primary interest is. Our species, like all species, has a main interest, and that's to make more of itself. It's not just about sex and reproduction. It's about foraging for resources. Resources can be food, it can be water, can be salt, can be shelter, can be social connection. Dopamine is the universal currency of foraging and seeking. Right. We call, sometimes talk about motivation and craving, but what we mean in the evolutionary adaptive context, what we mean is foraging and seeking. Seeking water, seeking food, seeking mates, seeking things that make us feel good, and avoiding things that don't make us feel good, but in particular, seeking things that will provide sustenance and pleasure in the short term and will extend the species in the long term. Once we understand that dopamine is a driver for us to seek things, it makes perfect sense as to why it would have a baseline level and it would have peaks, and that the baseline and peaks would be related in some sort of direct way. Here's what I mean by that. Let's say that you were not alive now, but you were alive 10,000 years ago, and you woke up and you looked and you realized you had minimal water and you had minimal food left. You need to be able to generate the energy to go seek those things. So dopamine drives you to go out and look for things. Maybe you hunt an animal and kill it, or you find an animal that was recently killed and you decide to take the meat you are going to achieve, or I should say, experience some sort of dopamine release. You found the reward, that's great, but then it needs to return to Some lower level. Why? Well, because if you just stayed there, you would never continue to forage for more. It doesn't just increase your baseline and then stay there. It goes back down. And what's very important to understand is that it doesn't just go back down to the level it was before. It goes down to a level below what it was before you went out seeking that thing. We really all have a sort of dopamine set point. And if we continue to indulge in the same behaviors or even different behaviors that increase our dopamine in these big peaks over and over and over again, we won't experience the same level of joy from those behaviors or from anything at all. Now, that has a name. It's called addiction. But even for people who aren't addicted, even for people don't have an attachment to any specific substance or behavior, this drop in below baseline after any peak in dopamine is substantial, and it governs whether or not we are going to feel motivated to continue to pursue other things. Fortunately, there's a way to work with this such that we can constantly stay motivated, but also keep that baseline of dopamine at an appropriate, healthy level. Earlier, we were talking about how dopamine is released between neurons, and I mentioned two ways. One is into the synapse, where it can activate the postsynaptic neuron. And the other was what I called volumetric release. Where it is distributed more broadly, it's released out over a bunch of neurons. In both cases, it's released from these things we call synaptic vesicles, literally little bubbles, tiny, tiny little bubbles that contain dopamine. They get vomited out into the area or into the synapse. We can only deploy dopamine that is ready to be deployed, that's packaged in those little vesicles and ready to go. It's just the readily releasable pool. And now it should make perfect sense. Why, if you take something or do something that leads to huge increases in dopamine, afterward, your baseline should drop because there isn't a lot of dopamine around to keep your baseline going. Fortunately, most people do not experience or pursue enormous increases in dopamine leading to these severe drops in baseline. Many people do, however, and that's what we call addiction. When somebody pursues a drug or an activity that leads to huge increases in dopamine. And now you understand that afterward the baseline of dopamine drops because of depletion of dopamine, the readily releasable pool, the. The dopamine is Literally not around to be released. And so people feel pretty lousy. And many people make the mistake of then going and pursuing the dopamine, evoking the dopamine releasing activity or substance again, thinking mistakenly that it's going to bring up their baseline, it's going to give them that peak again. Not only does it not give them a peak, their baseline gets lower and lower because they're depleting dopamine more and more and more. And eventually what typically happens is, is they will stop getting dopamine release from that activity as well. And then they drop into a pretty serious depression. Now, of course, we all should engage in activities that we enjoy. The key thing is to understand this relationship between the peaks and the baseline and to understand how they influence one another. So let's talk about the optimal way to engage in activities or to consume things that evoke dopamine. How are we supposed to engage with these dopamine evoking activities in ways that are healthy and beneficial for us? How do we achieve these peaks, which are so central to our well being and experience of life, without dropping our baseline? And the key lies in intermittent release of dopamine. The real key is to not expect or chase high levels of dopamine release every time we engage in these activities. Intermittent reward schedules are the central schedule by which casinos keep you gambling. The central schedule by which elusive partners or potential partners keep you texting and pursuing on either side of the relationship. Intermittent schedules are the way that the Internet and social media and all highly engaging activities keep you motivated and pursuing. There's something called dopamine reward prediction error. When we expect something to happen, we are highly motivated to pursue it. If it happens, great, we get the reward. The reward comes in various chemical forms, including dopamine, and we are more likely to engage in that behavior. Again, this is the basis of casino gambling. This is how they keep you going back again and again and again. Even though we're on average the house really does win, you can transplant that example to any number of different pleasureful activities. Now, some activities naturally have this intermittent property woven into them, right? We sometimes have classes that we like and other classes we don't like. We don't always get straight A's. Sometimes we don't get rewarded with the outcome that we would like. But understand that your ability to experience motivation and pleasure for what comes next is dictated by how much motivation and pleasure and dopamine you experienced prior. There's one exception, which is caffeine, because it does upregulate these D2 D3 receptors. So it actually makes whatever dopamine is released by that activity more accessible or more functional within the biochemistry and the pathways of your brain and body. While coffee or tea or other forms of caffeine will have this effect of increasing dopamine receptors, Yerba mate, something I've talked about before on this podcast, has some interesting properties. First of all, it contains caffeine. It's also high in antioxidants. It also contains something called GLP1, which is favorable for management of blood sugar levels. Yerba mate, it turns out, has also been shown to be neuroprotective, specifically for dopaminergic neurons. Ingestion of yerba mate and and some of the compounds within yerba mate can actually serve to preserve the survival of dopamine neurons in both the movement related pathway and the motivation pathway. If one were going to consume caffeine, you might consider consuming that caffeine in the form of yerba mate, both for sake of upregulating dopamine receptors and getting more of a dopamine increase, and of course, for the stimulant properties of caffeine, if that's what you're doing seeking. And in addition to that, because yerba mate does appear to have some sort of neuroprotective and in particular dopamine neuron protective properties, I'd like to take a.
