Notes: Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction

I recently listened to a very insightful podcast by Andrew Huberman on the topic of dopamine, how it works and actionable steps that can be taken to leverage dopamine to reach maximum focus, motivation and overall life satisfaction. While listening to it, I also made sure to jot down points that I felt were important, so that I could refer back to them at any point and really let this valuable information sink in. Below, you will find the same notes for your own understanding and reference. Use it wisely :)

Spatial aspects of dopamine

Two main modes of communication between neurons with dopamine (or 2 ways that dopamine is released in the body): one is more local release, one with volumetric release.

If you were to take a drug that increases dopamine levels, you would be increasing both the local release and volumetric release. This relates to the baseline of dopamine and the big peak above baseline. This is important to note because many drugs that increase dopamine levels will actually make it harder to sustain dopamine levels for a longer period of time and to achieve those peaks that most of us are craving when we are in pursuit of something. Why? Because if you get both volumetric and local release, it means that the difference between the baseline and peak gets smaller. And how satisfying/exciting/pleasureful an experience becomes doesn't just depend on the height of the peak but it depends on the height relative to the baseline.

There's a better way to optimise the peak to base (which we'll get to in a bit).

What about the duration of action of dopamine?

Neurons communicate by 2 modes (mainly):

Fast electrical synapses (ionotropic conduction): one neuron activates another neuron and little holes open up in the neuron and ions rush in (sodium is the main ion by which one neuron influences the electrical activity of another neuron, because sodium ions contain a charge). This is really fast.

Dopamine doesn't communicate that way, dopamine is slower, it works through something called g-protein coupled receptors. What happens is: dopamine is released in these little vesicles, get released out into the synapse. Some of that dopamine will bind to the postsynaptic neuron and then it sets off a cascade– one thing getting handed off to the next and to the next (like a bucket brigade). They are slow, but can also have multiple cascades of effects (they can change what a cell becomes, how well/poorly that cell will respond to that signal in the future.) This aspect of dopamine transmission is important. Also dopamine, does not work on its own.

Dopamine is the universal currency in all mammals, but especially humans, for moving us towards goals. How much dopamine is in our system at any given time compared to:

1. how much was there a few minutes ago
2. how much we remember enjoying a particular experience in the past

dictates our so-called quality of life and our desire to pursue things. It's the currency that determines the way you track pleasure, success, or whether or not you’re doing poorly.

Important: Your experience of life is dependent on how much dopamine you have RELATIVE to your recent experience(s). This is something that's not accounted for in the simple language of ‘dopamine hits’. A common simplistic way we like to think about dopamine is you eat a piece of chocolate–dopamine hit. The problem with thinking about it in this simple way is that it is an inaccurate way to look at it.

When you repeatedly engage in something that you enjoy, your threshold for enjoyment goes up. If you understand this process, you’ll be in a great position to take advantage of dopamine enhancing tools and also be able to modulate your own dopamine release for optimal motivation and drive.

dopaminergic neurons health is important for:

• Movement
• Mood
• Motivation

Dopamine is perhaps one of the most powerful molecules we have inside of us and we have to be careful how we leverage it. Even subtle fluctuations in dopamine really shape our perception of life, what we are capable of and how we feel.

So let's find tools to leverage dopamine to keep the baseline in a healthy appropriate place and still be able to access those peaks in dopamine because that's what makes life enjoyable and worth living.

All of us have diff levels of baseline dopamine. Dopamine does not act alone. It has close cousins and friends like:

Epinephrine (adrenaline) - we can't do anything without some level of this. Its release tends to wake up various aspects of our body's physiology and gives us a readiness. It's more about energy. Alone, it can be fear, paralysis(mental) or trauma. Dopamine colors epinephrine to modify person's subjective experience to make it more pleasurable.

Let's recall that we all have a baseline level of dopamine and that this has to do with genetics, your previous recent experience, and previous remembrance of experiences in the past.

When you ingest certain things to do things, dopamine level rises transiently. It will rise either more or less and it will be either brief or long term.

Example:

• Chocolate: increases baseline 1.5 times. It's transient (means it goes away) after a few seconds/minutes.
• Sex (pursuit of sex and act of sex): increases baseline 2 times (basically double) – this is average increase in baseline by the way. Different aspects of sex have different impact on dopamine levels.
• Nicotine: 2.5 times above baseline. Very short-lived.
• Cocaine: 2.5 times above baseline.
• Amphetamine: 10 times above baseline. Tremendous.
• Exercise: has a different impact on dopamine depending on how much the person enjoys the activity. If someone enjoys 2 times above baseline. People who don't enjoy it will experience little or no increase above baseline. Other examples like exercise are: studying, hard work, working through a challenge in a relationship, working through something difficult
• Caffeine: increases dopamine a little bit. It's pretty modest compared to the above list of items. However, regular injection of caffeine increases up-regulation of certain dopamine receptors. Caffeine helps you experience more of the effects of dopamine. (increase the number of the g-protein receptors) that's why people combine cigarettes with coffee– so that they get bigger dopamine increases, or pre-workout energy drinks before a workout– this approach to increase dopamine as high as you possibly can in order to get the most out of the experience, is not the best approach– layering things together: multiple things, substances and activities, that lead to big increases in dopamine can lead to severe issues with motivation and energy right after the completion of those experiences or even a few days later. Once in a while is fine, not all the time, because your capacity to release dopamine and your level of motivation, drive and energy overall will take a serious hit.

Side note:
Synapses: little spaces between neurons. Neurons communicate with one another by making each other more or less electrically active.

Why would we have a dopamine system like this? Or a dopamine system at all?

Our species has a primary interest– to make more of itself. This isnt just about sex and reproduction, its about foraging for resources (food, water, salt, shelter, social connection). Dopamine is the universal currency of foraging and seeking. 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, peaks and the two would be related in a direct way.

Example:

Lets say you’re you're alive 10,000 years ago. You woke up, looked around and you notice that you had minimal water/food left, you have a child/partner, you realize you need things. You need to be able to generate energy to seek those things. Chances are there were danger in seeking those things (Sabertooth tigers and other dangers like a cut to the skin that could lead to infection, storms, cold climate, leaving your loved ones behind). So you go out and forage (hunt, gathering). The going out and foraging process was driven by dopamine. Dopamine drives you to go out and look for things. Lets say you find berries, or hunt an animal. You are going to experience a dopamine release (you found a reward) and then the dopamine needs to return to some lower level because otherwise you would never forage for more. IMPORTANT: it doesn't go back down to what it was before. It goes back down to a level lower than it was before. This is counter intuitive. When you finish a marathon, you cross the finish line and you feel great and you think you'll feel this accomplishment for a year. But actually, it goes down below the initial baseline level. Eventually it'll ratchet back up.

2 things to note:

1. The extent to which it drops below baseline is proportional to how high the peak was. Ex: if you cross the finish line pretty happy, it won't drop that much below the baseline. If you cross the finish line ecstatic, well a day or 2 later, you're gonna feel quite a bit lower than the baseline.
2. If we continue to indulge in same behaviours or even different behaviours that increase our dopamine in these big peaks over and over again, we won't experience the same level of joy from those behaviours, or anything at all. This has a name: addiction.
   
   But even for people who aren't addicted; even people that don't have an attachment to any substance or behaviour, this drop in dopamine below baseline, is substantial and governs whether or not we will feel motivated to pursue other things.
   
   Fortunately, there's a way to work with this so that we can stay motivated constantly but also keep the baseline of dopamine at an appropriate level.
   Ref: Anna Lempki - book: “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence”.
   Pleasure/pain balance
   Pain comes from the lack of dopamine. There's a pool of dopamine that's synthesized (readily releasable pool of dopamine). You can only release the available dopamine. A big part of pleasure/pain balance hinges on how much dopamine is there and how much is ready and capable of being released into the system. That's why when you take or do something that leads to huge increases in dopamine, afterwards, your baseline should drop because there isn't a lot of dopamine around to keep your baseline going.
   Ref: book - “The Molecule of More”
   Addiction is the progressive narrowing down of things that brings you pleasure.
   Ex: a person only has excitement and can achieve dopamine release to the same extent doing that behaviour and not other behaviours. So what happens is that they lose interest in other activities such as school, relationships, fitness/well-being and it depletes their life. Eventually they’ll stop getting dopamine release from that activity as well, and then they drop into a pretty serious depression. This can get very severe and people commit suicide from these sorts of patterns of activity.
   Heres a more typical scenario:
   Ex: a person is really good at working during the week, they exercise during the week, they drink on the weekends. This person is only consuming alcohol maybe 1 or 2 nights a week, but oftentimes that same person will be spiking their dopamine with food during the middle of the week. Lets say, they're eating foods that evoke a lot of dopamine release in the middle of the week, drinking 1 or 2 days on the weekend. Swimming a couple miles in the ocean in the middle of the week. Going out dancing once in a while on the weekend.
   Here's the problem: dopamine is not just evoked by one of these activities, but by all of these activities. Dopamine is one currency of craving, motivation, desire, and pleasure. There's only one currency. If you look at the activities, they're different, but if you look at dopamine as a chemical function of peaks and baseline, it might make sense why this person after several years would say “I'm feeling kinda burnt out, I'm just not feeling like I have the same energy as I did a few years ago :/”
   They're spiking their dopamine levels through several activities throughout the week, that their baseline is progressively dropping. In this case, it can be very subtle. It's quite sinister. At some point, it reaches a threshold of low dopamine, then we feel like “Huh, I can't get pleasure from anything anymore! O.o” So it starts looking like the 1st example above.
   Of course, we all should engage in activities that we enjoy in life. The key thing is to understand the relationship between the peak and the baseline and also how they influence each other. Then, you can make really good choices in the short run and in the long run, to maintain your level of dopamine baseline, maybe even raise it and still get those peaks (elevated desire and craving).

What to do if you experience a drop in base-line of dopamine due to some activity or substance

Fast from things for 30 days at least.
Example: social-media dopamine fast.
The first 14 days are the most difficult (generally) when it comes to these fasts.
So go cold-turkey or limit interaction with the activity or substance.
Then the dopamine system can replenish itself.

Dopamine inducing activities:

• chocolate
• sex/reproduction
• Food
• Exercise (if it evokes your dopamine)

How to engage with dopamine inducing activities that are healthy and beneficial without dropping our baseline?

The real key lies in intermittent release of dopamine. The key is to not expect or chase high levels of dopamine release every time we engage in these activities.

Dopamine reward prediction error - when we expect something to happen and it doesn't

Intermittent reward schedules- intermittent schedule by which dopamine sometimes arrives, sometimes a little bit, sometimes alot, sometimes a medium amount. This intermittent reinforcement schedule is actually the best schedule to export to other activities. How? Well firstly, if you're engaged in activities (school, sports, relationships, etc) where you experience a win, you should be very careful about allowing a huge peak in dopamine (unless you're willing to experience the crash that follows and waiting a period of time to allow it to come back up)

Ex: you could do this by supposing: you kinda only enjoy exercising, but then in order to enhance the experience you layer on other things such as taking pre-workout, playing your favourite music tracks, going at a particular time etc. But then there's a version of this where you don't do the extra stuff and just do the exercise.

So if you want to maintain motivation for school, relationships, exercise or pursuits of any duration for a long period of time, the key is to make sure that the peak in dopamine (if it's very high) doesn't occur too often and if something does occur very often that you vary how much dopamine that you experience, with each engagement in that activity. You can't schedule it, it has to be random! For activities you'd like to continue, start paying attention to the amount of dopamine you achieve with those and start modulating them at random.

There are a lot of different ways to do this. Its up to you how you do it.

Maybe flip a coin.

The smartphone

Dopamine can be used to understand why digital technology can potentially lead to disruptions or lowering in baseline levels of dopamine.

Example: Using phone at the gym maybe?

All this is misinterpreted as ‘people can't be alone now’. But whats actually happening is, we achieved the great dopamine increase that comes with this incredible thing which most of us personally enjoy. But then what happens is, it doesn't have that same fulfilling aspect to it, and it tends to move the excitement of the very activities that we are engaged in. So, this is hard, but try removing multiple sources of dopamine release from activities that you want to continue to enjoy or enjoy more.

For this very same reason, take caution of using stimulants when doing things like studying, exercising, if you want to continue doing that activity. However, you can continue with caffeine, which can be helpful for the reason listed earlier.

Big no no’s: energy drinks, pre-workout drinks, drugs taken repeatedly overtime will reduce the overall satisfaction of the activity that you get while under the influence of these substances.

Intermittent spiking of dopamine is the way to go, not continuous/chronic spiking (this would undermine your motivation and drive).

Source of caffeine matters: coffee, tea are good. Yerba Mate contains caffeine, high in antioxidants, also contains GLP-1 (favourable for management of blood-sugar levels). Also shown to be neuro-protective specifically for dopaminergic neurons.

MDMA - is it neuro-toxic? Controversial. Caffeine has been shown to increase the toxicity of MDMA receptors. So it is bad (even dangerous) in this case.

Meth Amphetamine is neuro toxic.

Amphetamine and cocaine can cause long term problems with the dopaminergic pathways (largely based on a paper published in 2003 but still holds a lot of merit. Author: Kolb Title of journal: Amphetamine or cocaine limits the ability of later experienced or promote plasticity in the neuro cortex and the nucleocompbance)

Healthy activities we can do to give us healthy sustained increases in dopamine

(both the peaks-when they happen- and to maintain or increase the baseline levels of dop)

Activities:

• Cold Exposure: cold showers, ice baths, can increase levels of dopamine as well as the neuro modulator norepinephrine.
  
  Benefits: Changes in adrenaline & noradrenaline were immediate and fast.
  
  Then dopamine levels started to rise slowly and continued to rise up to 2.5 levels above baseline (similar to cocaine but it wasn't a rise and crash, it was a sustained rise in dopamine that took a very long time up to 3 hours to come back to baseline) There's increase in cortisol, but it was transient, meaning it subsided a bit.
  
  To remain calm in cold showers: calm yourself, slow breathing. Another approach is to get really energized and go into the cold.It doesn't matter what you do for the sake of dopamine release.
  
  Safety parameters: shouldn't be too cold, approach with caution.
  
  The best time is early in the day. How often? However often you want to. But once you feel adapted, then it will no longer evoke this release.

Positive & Negative aspects of rewards for our behavior

Hard work is hard. Most people don’t like this and only do it to achieve the end goal. Working hard for the sake of the reward can make the hard work more challenging and make us much less likely to lean into hard work in the future.

Example:

Experiment done at Stanford many years ago: Children in nursery and KG drew pictures because they liked to draw. The researchers took these kids and gave them a reward for drawing. The reward was generally a gold star.

Then they stopped giving the gold star. They found that the children had much lower dependency to draw on their own, no reward. Prior to receiving the reward the children intrinsically enjoyed and selected to do.

No one was telling them to draw. This is intrinsic vs. extrinsic reinforcement. When we receive rewards (even if we give ourselves rewards for something), we tend to associate less pleasure for the activity itself that evoked the reward.

The cognitive interpretation is that you didn't really do the activity for the enjoyment of the activity, but for the reward.

We are actually extending the time-frame by which we are perceiving that experience and because the reward comes at the end, we start to disassociate the neural circuits for dopamine and rewards that normally would have been active DURING the activity, and because it all arrives at the end, over time, we have the experience of less and less pleasure from the activity while were doing it. This is the antithesis of the growth mindset.

Growth mindset: Learning to access the rewards from effort/doing. This is difficult to do because you have to engage the pre-frontal component of the mesolimbic circuit. You have to tell yourself that the effort is great (this is hard). This evokes dopamine reward from friction.

You completely eliminate the ability to generate those circuits (of being able to reward friction while in effort) if you are focused only on the goal that comes in the end (because of the way dopamine marks time).

The beauty of this mesolimbic reward pathway is that it includes the fore-brain - so you can tell yourself that the effort part is the good part- “I know its painful, I know its hard, but I'm focused on this, I'm going access the reward inside of this effort itself”

This then starts becoming reflexive for all types of effort.

Here’s an actionable step:

When you are in the moment of most intense friction, tell yourself: “This is very painful, and because it is painful, it WILL invoke an increase in dopamine release later (meaning it’ll increase my dopamine baseline)” BUT also tell yourself in that moment “ I am doing this by choice and I’m doing this because I love it”

Things that can interfere with getting dopamine release form effort itself: Don’t spike dopamine prior to or after engaging in effort. Learn to spike your dopamine from effort itself.