← Dr. Trish Leigh Podcast
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Let me start with a question that might sound simple at first, but the answer turns out to reveal something much more important about the modern brain In a digitally overstimulated world, why are more and more people noticing that attraction today can feel fragile, not gone, but much less easy to access than days to of yore. If you meet someone new, they can feel exciting one week but not so exciting the next week. Or something that used to feel automatic with curiosity, excitement, or even natural sexual arousal now suddenly seems like it requires a whole lot more stimulation than it used to. When people notice this shift, the first place they usually look for an explanation is inside themselves. They assume that something must be wrong with them. And sometimes that's the case. Maybe they're tired. Maybe their motivation is gone. Perhaps it is their relationship in and of itself that is the problem. Well, I'm Dr. Trish Lee. Welcome back to the podcast. We are going to dive into why attraction is so tricky in today's day and age. This episode is brought to you by my Harper Collins published book, Mind Over Explicit Matter. Learn how artificial stimulation miswires your brain and what you can do to rewire it back to purpose, intimacy and connection. Go to drtrishleigh.com book the reason this is so important is because clinicians started to notice a pattern that suggested that maybe the question of what's wrong with me isn't actually the right question. And this is how it happened. More and more men went to therapists, to their urologists, to their doctors, and increasingly reported that their bodies worked normally when they were alone with self stimulation sometimes facilitated by the screen, but that they struggled with arousal when they were with a real partner. So here's the idea for the day is if you stop and think about this pattern, then it can't be something internal inherently, right? Of course there's a twist. I wish every question had an easy answer, but in my line of work, it usually doesn't. There's a pattern to this thing. When arousal happens, okay, or it does happen by yourself, but it doesn't happen with a partner. It is telling us something very important. So if your body is physically able to become aroused in one situation but not another, then it can't be the body in and of itself. It must be the situation. Right? The physical system is fine, ish, but the situation in which it becomes aroused, now that is a different story. The observation shifts away from what's going on with the body and instead, in my world, it now shifts to what is going on with that person's brain. What is it conditioned to do? In neuroscience, this is known as signal activation. So today we're going to dive into signal activation in the brain and how it impacts baseline arousal, but also sexual arousal function. So let's open the conversation to a larger conversation about the environment that modern brains are being conditioned in. For the first time in human history, we are surrounded by unlimited stimulation digitally. Right? We are being overstimulated by our phones, and that's especially the case if explicit matter is in play. Now, my work focuses on how modern stimulation affects the brain's reward system, attention, motivation, and importantly, their relationships. And, of course, how you can retrain your brain to reclaim vitality and connection. And to me, one of the most important things, purpose and true, authentic identity. So today I want to talk about attraction, dating, and intimacy and why it can feel so challenging in the modern world. And of course, we're going to focus on the neuroscience behind it and what is happening in the brain. Okay, so for most of human history, attraction developed slowly. People saw the same people day in and day out. The environments were the places in the world where you would see other people. You would go to work, you'd go to school, you would go into the community and connect with another person. Shared gatherings. There was an ordinary rhythm. And it's interesting because the word ordinary might suggest being boring, but it had a rhythm to it. It had a familiarity. And bonding could happen in the unfolding of seeing people out in the real world. Over time, shared experiences happened and they created connection. And that connection with other people is what slowly deepened attraction. Now, let me tell you about how the Hubs and I met. The Hubs and I had this group of friends, and we would hang out with them, and we would go to breakfast at this place. I wish I could think of the name, but I can't. So we would go to breakfast every Thursday morning. Me, him, this group of friends. And then he asked me out, and I'm like, no, because if we go out, then I won't be able to go out to breakfast with everybody, and that will stink. Because if we go out and we break up, then breakfast ends. And I love this ritual of going to breakfast. Well, of course we. We ended up going out. And we continue. We still continue to go to breakfast with friends. 24 years later. It's going to be my anniversary. 24 years. So the going out and seeing him, he. His office was in a gym at the time. I would go to the gym to work out. He would come out to my treadmill and talk to me, of course. Then I owned a restaurant at the time. He would come into the restaurant for dinner. So we would see each other in our natural environments and we would go visit each other. And then of course, we made this group of friends when we were going to new environments together. Shared connection and bonding over time. But of course, the environment surrounding the brain and attraction and connection looks very different in today's day and age. Instead of a limited number of social interactions, now your brain encounters millions of them. Dating apps, social media feeds, streaming entertainment, and unlimited explicit content. Online porn in your pocket. All of these experiences share one feature that the brain responds to very strongly. Constant novelty. Each swipe, each video, each new image delivers something new, something slightly different, something the brain has not seen before. And of course, with the algorithm being the way that it is in today's day and age, it's curated for what will keep your interest. So when we take a step back and we look at this shift, an important insight appears. The modern brain is not struggling because people are weak or because something about human nature has suddenly changed. What is happening is due to the environment, that brains are being conditioned within. The environment has become incredibly, unnaturally stimulating. And in many ways, we are living inside what could be described as a super stimulating environment. Now, in my own life, I notice this in small ways, but that can be surprisingly revealing. You know, I consider myself to be someone who is very present with my family the vast majority of the time, thankfully. Right. I've worked hard to get there. I listen closely to each one of them and what they're saying. I care deeply about what's happening in their lives and, and I make a conscious effort to stay engaged. Yet every once in a while, last Friday included, I was multitasking and I realized, you know, I wasn't present. I said the wrong answer to a question, I missed details in search of story. And that really weighed on my mind. I thought to myself, I'm it's milkshake multitasking in my brain. I'm not focused on her in the way that I typically am when we're in the car together. We just crank up the tunes and we sit next to each other and we share funny stories. She's not on her phone, I'm not on mine. But in this particular case, I was doing meetings in my air pods. She's got, she's in noise canceling mode so she doesn't have to listen to me. Then she talks and I give her an uh huh, even though I didn't even hear her this is what we're talking about. Many people are moving through the world like this at all times. So attention today is constantly being pulled in multiple directions. I'm not even a person who has notifications on, and that was a derailing experience for me. Now this is partly because we now live inside what researchers are calling the attention economy. In this environment, many technologies are designed specifically to capture and then hold your attention. Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman often explains that dopamine is widely misunderstood in conversations about behavior. Many people think that dopamine simply represents pleasure, but dopamine is more accurately described as a signal for, check this out, motivation and pursuit. Dopamine teaches the brain what to seek again in the future. So you know what happens when the brain repeatedly experiences novelty. It begins to expect novelty. Lots of it. Over time, the brain organizes behavior around the search for the next super stimulating experience that has a high level of novelty. That stimulation might appear in the form of short videos, social media posts, dating apps with their swipe right or explicit matter. Although the content itself varies, the reward system being activated in the brain is the same. The brain does not differentiate very much between the sources of stimulation. It primarily learns the pattern of stimulation that any given person has taught it. In neuroscience, there is a concept known as supernormal stimuli. A supernormal stimulus is an exaggerated signal or an exaggerated version that activates the brain much more strongly than the natural version or the natural cues the brain actually evolved to respond to. Pornography can function. It does function as a supernormal stimulus for sexual reward circuits because it delivers an extremely concentrated combination of novelty, rapid switching, and intense visual and auditory signals. These signals arrive faster and more powerfully than the natural cues that occur in real relationships, especially if your partner isn't happy with you because of the explicit matter. This is where an interesting paradox of modern attraction begins to appear. Real intimacy tends to unfold slowly, and it involves emotional complexity, vulnerability, and relational depth. Digital stimulation, by contrast, is immediate, predictable, and endlessly novel. These two experiences operate at very different speeds, and the brain can begin to adapt to the faster system. Neuroscientists call it fast dopamine versus slow dopamine, and it is what can change the way that arousal works within your brain and your nervous system. Author Mel Robbins often points out that many modern struggles are not caused by lack of motivation, but instead by a brain that has been trained to avoid discomfort. Real intimacy requires willingness to tolerate being vulnerable and emotional exposure in front of another person, and patience. Each of these experiences can feel uncomfortable in the short term. I was in the car with Declan and Saoirse the other day, actually the same day, Friday, which involved a lot of multitasking. I had to pick Declan up, take him to the automotive shop and then meet him there, then go back, pick Saoirse up from a horse show. Anyways, it was a long day. And then we are stuck in Friday evening traffic out of the city, back to our house. It was very slow. And I said to Declan and search, search was chill, Declan not so much. But I said to him, patience is like a muscle. You only get to exercise it in these moments of impatience. And we got to exercise that muscle together for a little while and it worked out great. I've already built that muscle, so I'm just big, chilling, put some music on and gradually make our way home. But the kids got the opportunity. Yep. Overextending the word opportunity yet again. Digital stimulation offers something easier by comparison because it provides immediate easy button reward without requiring vulnerability or emotional risk. Right. There's no risk because you're by yourself with a screen. When the brain becomes accustomed to instant stimulation, experiences that should unfold more slowly begin to feel less engaging. Even very meaningful experiences may feel less stimulating simply because they operate on a different time scale. Think fast dopamine from the screen, slow dopamine from a real world experience with your honey. So if we go back to that clinical observation that therapists were making earlier, the pattern of erectile dysfunction that occurs with a man with his partner, but not in solo situations, becomes a lot easier to understand when it's viewed through this lens, the lens of fast and slow dopamine. If the brain is continuously learning and it's continuously going back to repeated high level stimulation and it adjusts its sensitivity accordingly, one way that the brain protects itself is by down regulating sensitivity. It's called dopamine down regulation. It's a protective mechanism when the brain has been exposed to excessive stimulation with frequency and consistency. Intensity, frequency and consistency leads to dopamine down regulation in the brain for protection. But that also leads to sexual arousal dysfunction, what I call sad, which is why I've developed Laugh the LI arousal function protocols to help retrain the brain back to healthy baseline arousal, which allows your brain to feel that sexual arousal and to respond bond in the moments that it's supposed to in those slower dopamine moments. So when the reward system is activated intensely over and over again, the brain gradually reduces its sensitivity to protect from overload. When that sensitivity decreases more and more, the natural signals may no longer Activate at the same level as they once did, they may not activate at all. If there's very high levels of decentralized sensitization, it doesn't mean that anything is broken. From a brain perspective, it's an adaptation, it's actually a mal adaptation to the level of stimulation that the brain has been experiencing over and over. Another way I think about it and I explain it to my clients this way is by using a metaphor of a sound mixing board, which this reminds me of my eldest daughter, A.A. who is a musician. So imagine that different experiences in life control different volume sliders. You know that volume slider on the board? Some sliders represent connection, some represent touch or emotional bonding, while others represent novelty and excitement. If one of those sliders is all the way up, it will repeatedly signal with amplification over time. So if that slider is all the way up, the other aspects can't shine through because the stimulation and the novelty are too high. The connection, the touch, the emotional intimacy that doesn't even register. It's reminding me of the movie which AA and I saw together about Queen, which of course I'm forgetting the name of that movie too, but it was, oh, it's Bohemian Rhapsody. And if you remember at the end when they're playing in Wembley Stadium, the producer takes the red line that the, that the sound isn't supposed to go over and he puts it under it. So he pushes the volume up. If the volume is so high for stimulation, intensity, novelty, all of that, the rest of it doesn't even register. It's not that it disappeared, it's just no longer the signal that's being picked up. It's not loud enough. And the loudest signals are the ones that are going to shine through. So in a super stimulating environment, novelty becomes the loudest signal that the brain receives. As novelty increases in volume, other signals, such as emotional connection, can appear quieter and they no longer register. So researchers have begun exploring these patterns more systematically. One international study that was published in 2021 and it involved over 3,000 men. This is a big number when it comes to studies. I love a big end study, right? It showed that over 21% of these young men experienced erectile dysfunction and that these same men had higher levels of problematic pornography consumption. In a lot of the literature, it's called ppu. Problematic Pornography Use. So those people were correlated or associated with the higher probability of ed. While correlation isn't totally causation, we know that they are very strongly linked, that the stimulation from the environment is likely influencing the sexual responses and the way that men responded to that high intensity stimulation versus lower intensity, fast dopamine versus slow dopamine. But you know how I feel about this. Through the wonders of neuroplasticity, the brain can adapt again. So no longer taking that mal adaptation pathway towards that high intensity signal. Instead your brain can be retrained and can adapt to the signals that it's receiving and those that shine through the brightest. So it's the same idea that a brain that learned through frequency, consistency and intensity can also learn through bonding connection in the real world. Vulnerability, emotional closeness. When the stimulation pattern shifts, the brain begins to experience different signals in different ways and it will re calibrate. This is how your brain can be retrained for healthy sexual function. Again, you reduce the overstimulation. Notice when your brain's looking for high levels of stimulation, those cravings, they will decrease, your mood will stabilize, your attention will improve, and attraction will begin to feel healthy and natural and like it's coming online again. Here's the reality. Healthy sexual arousal is not built primarily on intensity. Pornography and explicit matter has taught your brain that. It's actually built on regulation. It involves two nervous systems interacting together. That's what healthy arousal is supposed to look like. It involves presence, eye contact, emotional attunement and a sense of safety. Now of course it involves pleasure, but it also involves joy and connection. In my work, many people can benefit from having a brain map or neurofeedback to accelerate their process in healing healthy arousal function. What I do is I offer something called qeeg brain mapping. It measures the electrical activity across the brain and it identifies the networks that are overactive or underactive. That's how the map works. Then, in my regulate first neuroregulation program, we use a high level type of neurofeedback that helps guide the brain toward a more regulated pattern. Thankfully, I'm able to provide top tier services to people around the world. We map your brain, we see where the arousal dysfunction is coming from, the root cause. Then we make a plan with the laugh protocols. We identify the sad, we identify the laughter, the li arousal function protocols. This way the brain can be trained again back towards that slow dopamine and no longer needing the fast dopamine. Neurofeedback can help guide the brain back toward regulated patterns of activity and help to rebalance the reward system on its own. That's neuroplasticity at its finest. Rather than forcing the brain to change through willpower alone, which doesn't Work. This type of training helps the brain to learn those healthier patterns of regulation through feedback. Over time, this can support improvements. Now feedback is just like the feedback that the brain learned that maladapted pattern, except for this is the feedback that teaches it back towards healthy adaptation. So when people begin to notice the shift in arousal function, it's because the brain is more regulated. Then of course, if you have a honey. Spending time with that person in real human connection reinforces the regulation pattern that's facilitated through technology. So it means more eye contact, more feeling, engaged conversations that are more interesting, and deeper emotional closeness you might not have felt in a long time. And you will feel alive again instead of numb or dull. It won't feel muted anymore because your brain will be trained back towards a slow dopamine. This is the brain sensitivity being recalibrated. This is what allows healthy baseline arousal to come back online, which allows sexual arousal function to be felt again. So it brings us back to the larger idea. Attraction itself has not disappeared from the human experience. The capacity for connection has not been lost, it's muted. What has changed is the environment that the brain has adapted to. This is an environment filled with constant high level stimulation and novelty. And the brain has learned to respond to those signals, the ones that it encounters most frequently. So hopefully that realization is shifts the conversation away from personal blame or failure toward awareness. That's what I'm on a mission, helping people to understand that your brain is responding to the signals around it, so that you can make a different choice which signals you allow your brain to be trained by and from which environment. And you can create the environment around you that supports regulation, attention, meaningful connection. Instead of a brain that's looking for fast dopamine for constant high level stimulation. So I want you to remember we are in the first time in human history where the brain is living in a digital world or simulation, honestly, that stimulates your brain essentially into infinity infant stimulation. But that puts a new responsibility on every single one of us, including you. It makes it so we have to choose and we have to curate our feeds. We have to balance our screen times. Awareness is one thing right when you become aware, that's great. But now your awareness has to lead to new action steps. This understanding on how your brain works and how it's being conditioned by the algorithm, it becomes imperative in today's day and age to exercise discernment. Deciding what you want for yourself and deciding what what screen use is leading you towards your best life or leading you away. Think slow. Dopamine and the happiness trifecta lead you to the life that you want and deserve. Fast dopamine seeking, scrolling and clicking that's leading you away. So in many ways, this is the most important skill that you can develop in the digital modern world. And then of course, the question is no longer simply whether we have access to stimulation or information. The deeper question is whether we understand how to direct our own attention and reward systems in a way that supports the life we actually want. Okay, I want you to remember that ultimately your brain is going to learn or be trained by the experiences and the stimulation that you give it consistently. And this powerful idea can help you step away from a digital simulation filled with constant stimulation back into the real world to foster the attraction with your honey or with the honey that you want, with the moments and the real life experiences that help you to not only get the dopamine that your brain needs. Dopamine is not a bad thing. It's the role that it plays in your life. Fast dopamine will keep you stuck. Slow dopamine in the happiness trifecta will help you become free. All right, if you are looking for more help on the journey, please go over to Dr. Trishleigh.com you can read about my masterclass, the do it Yourself program that you can join at any moment and with the click of a button you can be on that road to recovery. If you're struggling with explicit matter or with sexual arousal dysfunction, you can also look at Regulate first with which is the program that I offer that uses top tier technology. And as always, remember, control your brain or it'll control you. I'll see you next time.