"Don't Let It Ruin You!" - After A Few Minutes of Social Media, This Happens | Andrew Huberman

The amount of pleasure that you will eventually experience is directly relation related, excuse me, to how much pain you experience. So, we know this from actually what nowadays would be considered quite barbaric and unethical experiments where they would give people electrical shocks and they would measure their response. And then they say, "We're going to increase it. We're going to increase it." Eventually, they get to the point where a slight a shock that was previously very painful actually evokes a sense of pleasure. Now, you couldn't do these experiments anymore. These are not the experiments I do in my lab. These are older experiments. But, for instance, and this has been discussed in scientific research papers, giving somebody a like a a 10-minute ice bath, for instance, or even a 3-minute ice bath or 1-minute ice bath is quite painful. But, there was a study from University of Prague, European Journal of Physiology, showed that after a painful ice bath stimulus, the amount of dopamine release goes up for 2 and 1/2 hours to 250% above baseline. And that's not because the ice bath itself evokes dopamine release. A lot of people think, "Oh, cold water evokes dopamine release." No, pain evokes dopamine release after the pain is over. Yesterday, I tweaked my back cuz I do this stupid thing every few years, the same stupid thing, and it it's really painful. And then you just remember all the ways in which you can't move around. I was like standing up this morning. I'm like, "Ah." And just walking is so painful. As the pain has started to dissipate, you get a little bit of a high, right? You get a little bit of a euphoria. That's dopamine because of the the degree of pain that you experienced previously predicts how much pleasure. So, when you start a company down in the dregs and you're shoveling again, that's beautiful because that means that the win that you achieve is going to be as good or greater than the one you had previously, in your case with Quest. And so, we go back to this example of the person that's not motivated, that can't get off the couch, that's doesn't want to do anything. Well, this is the problem. We Remember the rat experiment? They are effectively the rat with no dopamine, but they can still achieve some sense of pleasure by consuming excess calories, by consuming social media. And look, I'm not judging. I do this stuff, too, right? Scrolling social media. If you've ever scrolled social media and you're like, "I don't even know why I'm doing this. It doesn't really feel that good." And I can remember a time where you'd see something was just so cool or you'd you see something online. I remember this when TED Talks first came out. I was like, "This is amazing." These are some you know, some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights. And then now that there are like a gazillion TED Talks, I remember spending a winter in my office at when I was a junior professor cleaning my office finally and binging TED Talks in the background thinking this is a good use of my time. Pretty soon, they all sucked to me. I was like, "This isn't good." So, what you need to do is stop watching TED Talks for a while, wait, and then they become interesting again. And that's this pain-pleasure balance. And so, for people that aren't feeling motivated, the problem is they're not motivated, but they're getting just enough or excess sustenance. So, they're getting the little mild hits of opiate it becomes an opioid system. And if you think about the opioid drugs as opposed to dopaminergic drugs, dopaminergic drugs make people rabid for everything, you know, drugs of abuse like cocaine and amphetamine make people incredibly outward directed. Right? They hardly notice anything except what they want more of. More more more more more. It's very it's bad cuz those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward. It's very circular. The only the drug can give that much dopamine. Nothing they could pursue would give them as much dopamine as the drug itself. So, there's that and then there's the kind of opioid-like effects of constantly indulging oneself with social media or with video games or with um with food or with anything to the point where it no longer evokes the motivation and craving. And this is really the new evolution of the understanding of of dopamine in neuro in neuroscience, which is that dopamine itself is not the reward. It's the build-up to the reward. And the reward has more of a kind of opioid bliss-like property, which itself is not bad if it's endogenous, released from within, but when we can just sit there like the like the rat with no dopamine gorging ourselves with pleasures, so to speak, what you end up with is somebody that feels really unmotivated, and those pleasures no longer work to tickle those feel-good circuits. And so, there's no reason for them to go out and pursue anything. And that's a pretty dark picture. So, the the keys are to pursue rewards, but understand that the pursuit is actually the reward if you want to have repeated wins, okay? You the celebration has to be less than the pursuit, and that's hard for some people to do. They, you know, that they It's got to be that your celebration is slightly less dopaminergic. It can be very reflective, you can be in gratitude. Those are other neurotransmitter systems, but you don't want to be on that high as you celebrate the win. You want to be trickling out your dopamine regularly until you pursue things. And then just understand there will always be a crash of pain, and the more pain you experience, the more dopamine you can achieve if you get back on that avenue of pursuit. Yeah, this gets into unintended consequences of modernity. And so, we're living through this time where we, you know, going back to that flag that we planted of these unintended consequences of oh, I can make myself smell good. Oh, I can you know, watch the coolest video. Oh, like TikTok. Dude, I don't have an addictive personality. That's the first thing where I'll lose an hour and be like, what the [ __ ] did I just do? Well, that's the the problem is not pleasures. The problem is that pleasure experienced without prior requirement for pursuit Yes. is terrible for us. It's terrible for us as individuals, it's terrible for us as as groups, and I I have great confidence in the human species to work this out, but we are finding now and we are going to increasingly find that those who will be successful, young or old, are going to be those people who can create their own internal buffers. They're going to be able to control their relationship to pleasures because the proximity to pleasures and their availability is the problem. If you look at the increase in uh use of drugs of abuse or prescription medication, which at least at the first pass deliver pleasure, pain relief, the whole issue with the opioid crisis and and dopaminergic drugs like Ritalin, Adderall, you know, there is sometimes is a clinical need, but tons of people are taking those recreationally now or to study. Huge dopamine increases are what those cause. That is a problem. That's a serious problem because it creates a cycle where you you need more of that specific thing. I always say addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. God, that's such a good definition. And you know, and I don't like to comment too much on enlightenment cuz, you know, I don't really know what that is as a neurobiologist, but a good life we could say is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. And even better is a good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure and includes pleasure through motivation and hard work. And understanding this pain-pleasure balance whereby if you experience pain and you can continue to be in that friction and and exert effort, the rewards are that much greater when they arrive. And so, I think that if you look at any drug of abuse or any situation where somebody isn't motivated or thinks Now, they may have clinically diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but a lot of what people think is ADHD, it turns out, is people just over consuming dopamine from various sources. And then and also the context within a a TikTok feed is the context switches insane. The brain has never seen First of all, this is the first time in human evolution that we wrote with our thumbs, but that's a pretty benign shift. And then the other shift is normally you walk from one room to another or from a field into the trees or from a hut into or a house or whatever it is, but now you can get 10,000 context switches in that 30 minutes of scrolling on Instagram or TikTok. And so it's all about self-regulation. We are going to select for the people that can self-regulate. And so then people say, "Well, how do you self-regulate? How do kids self-regulate?" Well, this is my hope and one of the reasons I've gotten excited about public education and teaching neuroscience is that this is a place where knowledge of knowledge actually can allow oneself to intervene. When you think, "I'm feeling low. I don't feel good. Nothing really feels like it. Am I depressed?" Maybe, but maybe you're just you've saturated the dopamine circuits. You're now in the play pain part of things. What do you do? Well, you have to stop. You need You need to replenish dopamine. You need to stop engaging with this behavior, and then your pleasure for it will come back. But you have to constantly control the hinge. It's not just about being back and forth on the seesaw. You have to make sure the hinge doesn't get stuck in pain or in pleasure. So it's a it's a dynamic process being a a human being. It's not easy. And remember these circuits didn't evolve for this purpose. They They evolved primarily for making more of ourselves. That's why they're so closely tied to the reproductive circuits, and that's why it was interesting and very relevant that you said that your desire to have sex with your wife is one of the most powerful feelings. And it kind of as a from a neurochemical perspective, it wicks out into all these other pursuits, right? Those other pursuits aren't about sex per se, but it's the same molecule. So the feeling is the same. It's just that some people For some people the amplitude of that dopamine sig signal for craving sex is very high. For some people that's lower, and it's higher for um video games. You know, whatever you lean into and and you think about often in these pursuits will start to reshape these circuits, cuz these dopaminergic circuits are are to everything. Uh you know, there are examples of people getting addicted to the most incredible things. There also examples of people getting very good, but not addicted to chess, for instance. It's all the same general set of mechanisms. Yeah, you talked earlier about um the the knowledge of knowledge, and that was the big breakthrough for me at the darkest period of my life. I happened to grab a book. We talked about this briefly in our first interview. I happened to grab a book that talked about neuroplasticity, and they were hypothesizing maybe this is a thing. And that gave me hope, because I could imagine what was going on in my brain. And once I can visualize it, then I feel like I can insert myself into it. It's why I've gotten so interested in health, why I'm so interested in neuroscience. Is for me, if I were sliding towards depression, I would do exactly what you're saying. I would assess that and be like, "Okay, wait a second. I know that I can insert conscious control. I know that this is a biological experience, and I'm I'm obsessed with that idea that you're having a biological experience." And to me, like there's some people that see the way the magic trick is done, and it loses the magic. Then for other people, it's like you see that it's This is somebody that's spent 30,000 hours learning how to move their hands so that you don't notice that they just moved the coin, you know, from this hand to this hand. It's it blows me away. I love I love magic. Uh, before the pandemic, a a friend took me up to the Magic Castle here in Hollywood, and there's some incredible stuff going on. Magic is actually really cool. We could uh just as a a from a neuroscience perspective. Magic, it's all about um creating gaps in your perception. That's obvious, right? And when that happens, because the the brain is so accustomed to the laws of physics, like objects fall down, not up, etc., when that happens, it clearly triggers the surprise circuitry. And that itself, that feeling of delight and surprise, is absolutely tied also to these dopa- dopamine circuits. It's interesting though that that doesn't send us into like terror. Like the people don't shriek and I when I went there there was this crazy trick that the guy did. He took out cards and I was invited up to sit next to him. I signed my name on a card. Mhm. I took the card. I took the card. I I tore it up. I put it in my pocket. And at the end of the show we went through a series of things. At the end of the show he took off his shoe and presented the card to me with the signature intact and the card intact and that was my signature. So he clearly created gaps of perception. Um but at some point as adults so I think as long as we know the context is right then we can we can do this. One thing about dopamine that I just want to make sure I uh mention and it based on something you said earlier is that one interesting question about the brain is we is just asking the question, you know, how do we segment time? How do we How do you know that this podcast has obviously has a beginning and a middle and an end but you know, how do we segment time? And so there've been some beautiful experiments done recently showing that uh for instance if you're watching a sports game regardless of whether or not your team scores like let's say basketball goes down court let's say they miss the three-pointer and then that you know, it's a close game. There's a little blip of dopamine that says that was one segment of time. Mhm. And so dopamine is a big way in which we segment time. The other way are blinks. Believe it or not. What? Yeah that every time we blink there's a paper published in current biology. Every time we blink we reset our perception of time. understand more I guess than the dopamine. Why would dopamine be involved in time? Perfect question. Turns out that the frequency of blinking is set by the level baseline level of dopamine in the brain. What? Yes. So when people are wide-eyed with excitement and they're and they're just they're not blinking very often or someone is on a drug that kicks out a lot of dopamine they're hardly ever blink their pupils are huge. They are they are actually not segmenting time in the normal fashion. Oh. And so much of your life in retrospect is segmented by those peaks in dopamine. They those mark key events in your life. When you met your wife, there there are all the segments of your life are are noted by peaks in dopamine or the way that you happen to conceptualize dopamine. And so also people who are depressed are often very focused on the past. They ruminate naturally they default to ruminating on the past. When you adjust people's dopamine levels to healthy levels, they start becoming more forward thinking and more present. And so there's this relationship between blinking and time perception, dopamine and blinking, how you conceptualize time has a lot to do with these peaks in dopamine and when they occur. And this is a big deal because we're you know 2020 was a rough year for most people. 2021's feeling a little better but we don't really know where we are in this whole arc of everything that's happening. There's a lot of uncertainty. Yeah. The dopamine peaks and the frequency of those dopamine peaks have everything to do with how we carve up our experience of time. And anyone who spent a lot of time in deep meditation starts to develop a kind of intuitive internal representation of the fact that time is very fluid in this way. When we say time is fluid, what we mean is the secretion of dopamine in these pulses is very fluid. They are under control of our of what's happening externally but also how you conceptualize your life. Like where are you in your life? Are you know, hopefully we'll if David Sinclair has his way and hopefully he will, we will all live to be you know more than 100 years old. Hopefully in good vitality. So this is the more esoteric aspect of dopamine. before we get off the time thing, let me ask you. So there was a period in my life, I'll peg it at about two years, where for whatever reason I it could have been six hours since I last looked at a clock, I would be within three minutes of what time it was. And my wife I it hilarious and so she'd be like, "What time is it?" And I'm like, "Oh, it's 4:58." And she'd look at it It was so weird that it like made my radar as like, "Oh my god, I have like this special power." And then it went away. And now I can probably get you within 15 minutes, but like uh it was really eerie. Is Is there Does that make a prediction or around like a consistency of dopamine release or something? Yeah, you nailed it. It's the consistency. That's an internal It's an interval timer, as we say. So, when people's dopamine is low, they tend to overestimate. Okay. Okay? And when people's dopamine is high, they tend to underestimate time. Now, it is true that dopamine, when it's released, is a little bit of a stimulant in the system cuz of the way it works with epinephrine. How finely you slice time is very dependent on dopamine and your internal level of autonomic arousal. Really good example would be you're really excited about something or you're really stressed about something, doesn't matter. Dopamine is elevated in excitement, but norepinephrine epinephrine tend to be elevated anytime we're agitated or or excited. Just imagine you need to catch a flight, you're in line at the security, and the person in front of you seems like they're going really really slowly. Your frame rate is faster. You're just carving up time more finely. People who are in car accidents and then they report everything being in slow motion, your frame rate is is smaller. You're You're essentially getting You're taking larger time bins. And this is why, let's say you wake up and you're really tired or you're just you're kind of out of it and you're looking at like text messages and emails and all this stuff. The world seems like it's going by really really fast. Dopamine is what is the is the dynamic process by Dopamine release, I should say, is the dynamic process by which you adjust time perception. So, if you had a very keen perception of the passage of time, right down to the minute or so, that suggests very regular intervals of dopamine release. And that's probably tied to outside events that are below your conscious awareness. Uh dopamine releases I I sort of not to make this uh PG-13 or R-rated, but if we go back to the example of sex, sex and sleep are the two times when space and time have a very fluid type relationship. It's very hard to conceive space and time in sleep. That's actually the nature of sleep is we do the long blink, no joke. We close the shutters, stop bringing in external information, and in sleep, space and time are very fluid, right? Things can happen very fast or very slow. Slow motion, you can be flying. There's a lot of, you know, some of it is dreaming, but space and time are very fluid. In wakefulness, space and time are very anchored by physical events in the world, but our perception of those is dynamically regulated by how much dopamine is in our system. So, it's beginning to sound like dopamine does everything, but it's really associated with motivation, craving, and time interval keeping. And so, I would be willing to bet that your pulses of dopamine were very regular, just like drops. So interesting. If you like that clip, check out the full powerful episode here, and I'll see you there.