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Hi there. Welcome back. Thanks for listening again to Calm your caveman. Today in this episode, we are going to get into something which is absolutely crucial for your anxiety management and that is being able to manage your dopamine budget. We are going to draw on the work of three different experts, two psychiatrists and a neurobiologist. So first from a book called the Molecule of More, which is by Daniel Z Lieberman, who is a psychiatrist in the Washington DC area. The second is from a book called Dopamine Nation, which is from Dr. Anna Lemke, who is a psychiatrist at Stanford. And the third thing that we're going to draw on is from Andrew Huberman, who is a professor of neurobiology at Stanford, his two hour podcast episode, where he talked about dopamine. So we are going to be taking the different puzzle pieces from these three sources and putting them together into a single picture. These three sources have some overlap in the way that they talk about dopamine, but they each focus on slightly different aspects of dopamine. So it's useful to be able to take these different puzzle pieces and Mount them together in a single picture to be able to talk about all of these different things that these experts address and how they relate to our anxiety, how they relate to managing our anxiety.
So, first of all, before we get started with anything else, we need to understand what dopamine is. So we're going to get into a definition. Dopamine is a neuro modulator. It is responsible for many different things in our bodies and brains, but we are going to focus on its role in pleasure, motivation, drive and craving because this is the part of dopamine's role that really has a big impact on your anxiety levels. Dr. Daniel Lieberman talks about in his book how for a biological organism, the most important goal related to the future is being alive when it comes. So dopamine is really about helping us to meet that goal of being alive in the future. So he explains that the dopamine system is more or less obsessed with keeping us alive and it motivates us to constantly scan the environment for new sources of food and shelter and mating opportunities and other resources that will help keep our DNA replicating.. The dopamine circuit he explains, evolved to promote behaviors that lead to survival and reproduction. And it's important to note that the function of the dopamine system is not to make us happy. It's true that dopamine is responsible for pleasure. But the function of the dopamine system is not to make us happy. Instead it is to make sure that we reproduce, to make us seek those things, to give us a reward for doing those things that we need to do in order to survive. So it evolved to maximize our future resources. And what's really important, crucial to understand about dopamine is something that we have referred to over and over again, which is that it, this system evolved in an environment very different than the one that we have today. Our environment of evolutionary adaptation, this concept that we've been talking about over and over again in different episodes, was crucially different from today's environment in that it was a very strenuous lifestyle. We lived as hunter gatherers in small bands of people. Survival was difficult. Lifespan was short. Infant mortality was high. And those PR behaviors that produce dopamine, those substances that trigger dopamine release in our brains, were sparse. They were hard to access. They were hard to come by. And our brains evolved in this environment. Giving us dopamine when we did certain behaviors, because they were necessary in order to keep us surviving an order to keep us replicating our DNA. So the dopamine system was crucial, it evolved so that we would be motivated to do these ultra energy intensive activities and behaviors, and seek these substances that were necessary for our survival, but that were very difficult to obtain in those times. So Ana Lembke compares it to us being cacti that evolved in a desert. So if you compare dopamine to rain, In our environment of evolutionary adaptation, there was very little rain. There was very little access to dopamine triggering behaviors and substances. It was very little rain and we evolved to adapt to that environment. We are cacti. We do well in an environment where there is not very much access to these dopamine producing behaviors and substances. Our brains are optimized for that environment. The problem is, as she says in her book ,that nowadays in our modern day environment, These dopamine producing substances and behaviors are not difficult to access anymore. They are all around us. And so it is like being a cactus in a rainforest. We are just drowning in dopamine, we are drowning in access to behaviors and substances that will trigger the release of this chemical, that used to be very sparse, but now they're everywhere. So in this modern day environment, it is absolutely crucial that we learn how to manage our dopamine budget because in our environment of evolutionary adaptation, as we said, our environment basically managed our dopamine budget for us. Whereas nowadays we have too much. And so we have to learn to consciously manage that dopamine budget, where we used to be able to have our environment manage it for us. Now we are going to have to learn how to consciously manage it ourselves. Otherwise, if we don't, we will end up with some undesired consequences.
And let me explain about that a little bit more specifically in relation to anxiety, and in order to do this, we need to review just a tiny bit about what we know about how emotions are produced. We know that anxiety is an emotion. We want to know, just review for a minute, how emotions are produced. We've talked from the beginning of this podcast about how appraisals are the central organizing thing that determines our emotions. So in other words, the way that our brain interprets our environment, our situations, that is our appraisal and our appraisal is what organizes our emotions. And we also talked about how we have two different modes, so to speak, in which we can generate appraisals. We can generate appraisals automatically, our unconscious can just automatically instantaneously, without conscious interference, generate appraisals. So in other words, we have an autopilot mode where our brain will automatically generate appraisals and emotions that our brain unconsciously determines will be adaptive for us for our environment. But as humans, we have an additional advantage. Other animals do not have a neocortex. They do not have a part of the brain, which allows them to have what we call higher thinking powers. Humans do. And so we, with this neocortex, we can also consciously interfere in our appraisals, we can consciously generate appraisals. We can consciously modify appraisals. And that's what we're really talking about a lot in this podcast is how you consciously regulate your emotions. Because we all know, we've all experienced it, when we leave our brains on autopilot, a lot of times the appraisals and emotions that we produce are not going to be adaptive. They are not going to be helpful for our goals. For example, in the case of anxiety, let's say you've got a big presentation tomorrow, and you're so anxious about it, that you're not even able to sleep. And then the next morning, you're not ready to be fully alert with all of your mental faculties for that presentation. And so there's a case where the emotion of anxiety, the appraisal that generated the emotion, and it was automatic, you know, by our brains, was maladaptive. It didn't help us to perform well. So if we leave it up to our autopilot, to our automatic appraisals, We will end up doing things sometimes that are maladaptive, that are not helpful toward our goals. So, what we really need is, we need to strengthen this capacity to think about our thoughts, this administrative capacity of our brains, the part of our brain that is able to assess whether or not this emotion is adaptive or maladaptive, and then be able to make a plan and determine how we can change that emotion. So in order to regulate our emotions, in order to generate conscious appraisals, we will depend on that neocortex. We will depend on our capacity to access our higher thinking powers to be able to interfere in those automatic generations of appraisals. So it follows that things that interfere in your ability to access your higher thinking powers will hamper your ability to consciously self-regulate. And one thing that can really interfere in this higher thinking, this access to higher thinking is if your dopamine budget is mismanaged. If it's dysregulated that will directly hamper your ability to access those higher thinking powers. And we are going to talk specifically about why, why that is. But there is one additional problem. So that's the first problem is that you will have a harder time accessing your higher thinking power. So you will have less autonomy in choosing the emotions that you want to have, and when you want to have them, and how you want to experience them . In addition to having less access to that higher conscious power to interfere, your automatic default appraisals, your autopilot that your brain goes on, will be tipped toward anxiety. Your autopilot with no interference at all will default toward anxiety. And we will also talk about why that is. So these are the two crucial reasons why we need to learn about our dopamine budgets: how they work, how to manage them, and what to do when they're dysregulated.
So let's talk about it. Let's talk about the dopamine budget. I'm calling it a dopamine budget. Dr. Huberman calls it a more scientific name, the readily releasable pool of dopamine, the readily releasable pool of synthesized dopamine in your brain. So in other words, your brain makes a certain amount of dopamine. It has this pool of dopamine that it can release and that you can compare it to your dopamine budget. That's the amount of dopamine that you have to spend. And there are different ways that you can spend this dopamine. We spend it in a daily way on daily expenses. And we also spend it on exceptional expenses. So let's compare it to the following. Let's say that you have $200 of dopamine bucks in your budget. And it usually takes you $50 a day just to run your baseline level, but then let's say that you have an enormous peak. You win the marathon at the Olympics and you have a huge peak of dopamine. And so it spends this huge peak, spends 150 bucks of your dopamine budget. The next day, your budget hasn't had a chance to recuperate yet. It takes a little while to restock that pool of readily releasable dopamine, but you've spent so much on this exceptional expenditure, this thrill of having won the marathon. You spent 150 bucks and you took your account all the way down to zero. So you don't even have that baseline 50 bucks to keep you going the next day. So it's important to, first of all, understand that we have a limited finite amount of dopamine that our brain produces, and that we spend it both in baseline and in peaks. Both of these expenditures will draw on our dopamine balance. When we spend a lot in our peaks, then our baseline levels will drop because there isn't a lot of dopamine around to keep that baseline going. And when we overspend an overspend and overspend, then we can end up in a situation where our budget is pretty much always at zero or maybe even in the red. We'll talk about that a little bit more, which basically means that we will be feeling pretty darn crappy if we spend that budget down to where we don't even have enough to keep our baseline levels going.
Okay. So the second thing that's important to understand, besides the concept that we have a budget, a finite amount that we can spend it in different ways. Another important thing to understand, which is taken from Dr. Lemke book, is that pain and pleasure are processed in overlapping portions of the brain or in other words, Pain and pleasure are processed basically in the same part of the brain. They work in in an opponent process mechanism, or in other words, they work like a balance. So you can picture like a Teeter totter and you have pain on one side and pleasure on the other. And every time you press on the pleasure side, Like looking at social media, eating some chocolate, doing some gaming, looking at some porn, doing some shopping, the balance will tip toward the pleasure side. And the faster it tips, the more pleasure we will feel. Now, this is really important to understand. Our brains are always trying to bring things back to homeostasis, bringing things back to equilibrium. So if we press on the pleasure side, our brains will afterwards press on the pain side in order to bring the teeter-totter the balance back to equilibrium, back to flat. So when we press on that pleasure side, Our brains will afterwards press on the pain side. And interestingly enough, the way that it works is every pleasure exacts a price. When we press on pleasure, we will have pain following it. And the pain will be longer lasting and more intense than the pleasure was. Now this seems like a really rotten deal, right? If you're going to have a pleasurable experience, why do you have to have even more pain afterwards in order to compensate? Why would this have been an adaptive way for our brains to evolve? Well, picture that primitive hunter gatherer lifestyle that is so difficult that the resources are so sparse. It's so difficult to find those things that produce dopamine. Let's say that a hunter gatherer, for example, find some honey, tastes the honey, and there's a big release of dopamine and that is just a wonderful feeling. Now afterwards the balance will tip toward pain. And so that hunter gatherer will actually feel worse after they eat the honey than they did before they ate the honey, as far as dopamine goes, Because this balance is trying to create a craving for more. They're not back at balance level. There, they're less than balanced they're tipped toward the pain side. This is where we feel that craving for more, that hunter gatherer will crave honey so much that they will search far and wide and pay attention to all of the signs and really invest a lot of energy in trying to find some more honey. It's not going to be easy for them. Honey doesn't grow on trees. It's difficult to find. And so it's going to take a long time before they find the next honey. It's going to involve a lot of work. And so it's important. It was important in those times for our brains to have evolved, to really motivate us, to crave, to repeat those behaviors that produced dopamine. Because we needed that craving, that drive to keep us doing all of those energy intensive behaviors that would allow us to repeat that dopamine triggering activity. So you can see why that would be adaptive in that period of time. However in our modern day, what happens when we have that craving after we have a spoonful of honey. Well, it's not that hard for us to find some more honey, we just take another spoonful. We eat the whole jar. When the jar is gone, we can just walk to the store or drive to the store and get another jar of honey and eat more honey. So in our modern day, we have ultra easy access to these dopamine producing, dopamine triggering behaviors and substances. So it makes it really easy for us to repeat them when we have that craving. So we push on the pleasure, pleasure side. We eat a spoonful of honey. We have a craving for more. And then it's really easy for us to get more. So we satisfy that drive for more. And what happens when we repeatedly push on that pleasure side, like it's so easy for us to do in our modern day, what happens with prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli? Dr. Anna Lemke explains is that, two things: our capacity to tolerate pain decreases. So we become more sensitive to pain. And our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases. So we are less sensitive to pleasure. So we need more and more of the reward in order to feel pleasure. And we need less injury in order to feel pain. So this is the great irony, is that the relentless pursuit of pleasure, and avoidance of pain leads to pain. What will happen is that, that balance that we were talking about will get weighted toward the sides of pain. It will get kind of stuck on that pain side. Because we were pushing so often on that pleasure side. And our brains get less and less sensitive to pleasure. And every time we press on the pleasure, there's a price we end up having greater pain. And so then we ended up just kind of stuck with a teeter-totter down on the pain side. We seek more pleasure. The pleasure gets weaker. The after response gets stronger and longer and we have more and more pain as a res, as a response. And that is what um, psychiatrists call tolerance. That's basically addiction. When that pleasure pain balance gets weighted to the side of pain. And this is where anxiety comes in. Because when we are continually pressing on that pleasure side, and we're not giving it a chance to rebalance itself, but we're just satisfying our craving immediately and pressing again and pressing again and pressing again, our brain keeps having to press on that pain side. We have more and more pain that we have to pay back. And what happens is that we end up with craving our substance of choice just to feel normal. We don't seek it in order to find pleasure. We seek it just in order to feel normal.
So we end up sort of in this constant state of withdrawal from our pleasure stimuli. We've pushed so much on the pleasure side that our balance gets weighted toward the pain side. So Dr. Lemke explains that the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance, are anxiety, irritability, insomnia and dysphoria. And dysphoria is basically the inability to feel joy, the inability to feel happiness or pleasure with anything. So this is the paradox. It's that hedonism or the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.
This is the way that our brains are wired. We are cacti. We evolved in a desert. We evolved to do well with just little tiny amounts of dopamine triggering substances and behaviors. That's what we do well with. In this modern day where we are inundated, we are just drowning in dopamine triggering substances and behaviors. This means that we too often, because we are working on outdated urges, urges that are adapted to a different environment, in trying to satisfy those urges, we end up creating a state where we are perpetually anxious, and we are perpetually unable to feel joy, because we have relentlessly pursued pleasure.
So Dr. Lemke explains that there is a risk. That any substance or behavior can become addictive if we have access to more and more potent forms of it, greater and greater quantities of it, in greater and greater duration. Anything which triggers dopamine release can become addictive. So we usually think of illegal drugs and alcohol and things like that when we think of addiction. And certainly these are big addictors. But there are all kinds of other things that we have great access to in our modern day, which also triggered dopamine. So food, social media, shopping, you name it, anything which produces dopamine, which we have the capacity to continue seeking, that's not going to be scarce, that's not going to be hard for us to obtain, anything that is, that we have access to that we can increasingly consume more potent forms of it, greater quantities of it for longer durations those can become addictive. So addiction is the progressive narrowing of things that give you pleasure. Addiction is simply when this balance starts to get weighted toward the side of pain, because you have pushed on pleasure so much, and you have not allowed your brain to keep up. Your brain can only make so much dopamine and it can only do so much dopamine production. You've only got so much dopamine budget. If you're continually spending it and spending and spending it then you are perpetually in this state of having nothing in your dopamine account. Which means you feel really bad.
Okay. So that's the first thing that I want you to understand about your dopamine budget and how your expenditures go in your brain. In this brain that was adapted to a different time in a different situation than what we have nowadays when you seek pleasure, when you spend dopamine on a pleasurable activity, it will cost something. It will exact a price. You will have pain. And it will cost more. That pain will be more intense and last, longer than the pleasure. So that's the first thing. There is another way, however, to spend dopamine. So that first way that we talked about, that's kind of like buying on credit. Because you are getting the reward first, the pleasure first, and then you have to pay for it later, with the pain, right? And so when you buy it on credit, you end up having to pay interest. You end up having more pain than you had pleasure. So you end up having fees and interest and things like that. That is a more expensive way to spend your dopamine.
There's a cheaper way, a more smart way to spend your dopamine. And that is in, seems counterintuitive, but if you press on the pain side of the balance, if you do something, which is inherently painful, Then your brain will press on the pleasure side afterwards. And the dopamine release that comes when you press on pain first is potentially more enduring then the reverse. So, for example, when you do things that are inherently painful or unpleasant, like exercise, or like getting in cold water, Initially, this is painful. You press on the pain side of that balance in your brain, your brain will press on the pleasure side in response . And you will have a dopamine release. This is basically an indirect way to stimulate your dopamine system. By pressing on the pain side first, which triggers a dopamine release in order to balance it. And the cool thing about this is that it doesn't come with interest. It doesn't come with fees, so to speak. So we have the model where we pay with credit. Where we get the pleasure first and we pay for it later. And that comes with interest. The pain costs more than the pleasure. If you do the reverse, however, and you pay for it upfront by doing something inherently painful first, then you get the pleasure afterwards, but you don't have to pay for it with interest. So it's a more economical way to spend your, your dopamine budget. It's still spends it. It's still possible to overspend. It is actually possible to get addicted to painful behaviors. We've probably seen people who seem addicted to exercise or who have been addicted to extreme sports, things like that, that, that really press on that pain side. If you consume too much pain, in to potent a form, then that can, you run the risk of compulsive, destructive, over consumption. So it is possible to go too far in that pain direction. But regardless of how you're spending your dopamine budget, either way, it is possible to get overspent. It is possible to get into dopamine debt. And this is what we call addiction. This is where you have that progressive narrowing of things that give you pleasure. Your balance gets weighted toward the side of pain. Your baseline levels of dopamine are really depleted because you've spent way too much on peaks over and over and over again, your budget is minuscule or zero. And so you just feel crappy as your baseline. And then you engage in your substance or behavior of choice, your addictive substance or behavior of choice it, just in order to try and raise that balance a little bit off the pain side. That's what we call addiction.
Now it's important to note, and this is from Dr. Lieberman's book that addiction is not a sign of weak character or lack of willpower. It occurs when the desire circuits get thrown into a pathological state by overstimulation. One of the hallmarks of addiction, Dr. Lemke points out is that you don't know that you're addicted. This is a well-recognized phenomenon in addiction that you do not know that you are addicted. And she explains that it's because when you get this overstimulation of the dopamine system, of the reward system, and it gets so out of balance and you get weighted toward that pain side, what happens is there is a disconnect between your reward pathway and your higher brain functions. So your higher brain functions are not able to oversee the reward pathway. They're not able to be conscious of what's happening, what the problem is and what to do about it. So Dr. Lemke talks about how this even happened to her. She is the one of the world experts on addiction. She helps people all day long get free of addiction. She is the chief of the Stanford addiction medicine dual diagnosis clinic. But she even, she, she got to the point where she was addicted to romance novels. Remember I said that anything can be addictive, anything that we can consume in greater and greater quantities and more and more potent forms, that we can spend more and more time doing it, can become addicting. She became addicted to reading romance law, novels, to the point where it became compulsive. And she says that when it was happening, she was only partially aware of the behavior. She said she was aware of it, but at the same time, she wasn't aware of it. It was interfering in her ability to show up for her family, in her ability to give her best at her work. And she didn't actually recognize that that was happening. But this is how she was able to finally recognize it. She was teaching a group of students, psychiatry students about how to talk to how to converse with patients who are dealing with addiction. And she had paired them up for the students to converse in pairs. And there was one extra student who didn't have a pair. So Dr. Lemke had to be that student's pair. So she paired up with the student. The students started asking her the questions that she had taught them to ask. "Is there a behavior that you would like to change?" at that moment Ana Lembke replied that she would, she, she would like to stop reading so compulsively late at night. And it wasn't until she said that, that she realized that it was true. She didn't hadn't even realized that she wanted to stop that behavior. The next question that the student asked her was "why is it that you want to stop this behavior?" And she told the student that it was because it was interfering with her ability to show up for her family in the way she wanted to. It was interfering with her ability to perform well at work. And it wasn't until she said that that she recognized that that was true. And it was after that interview that she had with her student that she realized that she was addicted. She realized. Here this world expert in addiction finally was able to tag herself as addicted. And then she was able to take steps to mediate that. But it was crucial for her to be able to talk to someone. And so that's why I want to emphasize that because this disconnect happens when we're addicted, and we don't have the proper connection between these higher thinking powers and our reward pathways it becomes nearly impossible for us on our own to fix this problem. And that is why it is so important to seek treatment. Find a psychiatrist, find a support group like alcoholics anonymous, narcotics anonymous. Because these treatments can afford. The kind of experiences that you will need in order to heal. Because many of the forms of addiction treatment, they involve strengthening and renewing that, those connections between those higher thinking powers and your reward pathways. And so one of the reasons Dr. Lemke talks about that, these support groups like alcoholics anonymous and narcotics anonymous are so potent and so helpful in helping people to recover from addiction is because they interrupt a cycle, which she calls the destructive shame cycle. So the destructive shame cycle goes like this. You have over-consumption that leads to shame then that leads to lying about it because you're ashamed and that leads to isolation which then leads to more consumption. So it's this cycle which feeds on itself and gets worse and worse and worse. That's destructive shame. But when you are in one of these support groups, the social support groups, and also with psychotherapy as well, but even perhaps even more powerfully with a larger group you have this potential to interrupt that cycle. So you have, again, you have over-consumption. And then you have shame, but then after that, instead of the lying. You have this opportunity to have radical honesty. To take accountability in your storytelling of it while at the same time receiving acceptance and compassion from the group. And that acceptance and compassion combined with the honesty allows those parts of your brain to reconnect. And that then gets you, leads you out of that cycle. Instead of leading you back to isolation, now you are connected. You are connected socially, which is crucial for getting out of any kind of um, addiction. So you are socially connected and that then leads to reduced consumption. This is not just something nice. It's not just a feel good experience, but it's something that actually uh, re forges those connections between those two disconnected part of your brain, those parts that get disconnected when we press too hard on the pleasure circuit, when we overstimulate that pleasure circuit.
If you're interested in learning more about this, I encourage you to read these books. I'll have links to them in my show notes so that you can understand a little bit more about how to manage your own dopamine budget, how to engage in what Dr. Lemke calls, self binding, where you limit the amount of pleasure that you allow yourself to engage in so that you can keep it within your income, your dopamine income, and the importance of doing that. How that is really the key to optimal wellbeing and lowest levels of anxiety. So I want to make sure that you understand that.
Thanks again for joining me today. Have a good week.