The Dopamine Trap That Keeps People Lazy, Addicted, and Unfulfilled | Andrew Huberman

then what you realize is your capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator not just seeking dopamine rewards that is infinite and i i can say with with great certainty that this is how you were able to build a big company and sell it how you've been able to build a successful podcast and sell it how you constantly seeking because seeking is the reward andrew huberman welcome to the show man it's great to be here i should say dr andrew just just so people know what they're what they're about to get dude it's awesome to have you back our first interview completely melted my brain researching you is one of my favorite things to do the breadth of topics that you cover is incredible none more so than the fact that we can get to our mind through our body which i think is one of the most incredible things before we started rolling though i had this whole interview planned i knew exactly where we were going to go and then you made a comment i was bringing up bitcoin and uh cryptocurrency as i do because i'm obsessed and you said well there's only one biological currency and that's dopamine that's right and i was like well now i know where we're starting what do you mean by that yeah so you know human beings have evolved tons of technologies and currencies bitcoin ethereum are not topics i know a lot a lot about but when you think about dollar euro bitcoin ethereum you think about wins and losses in sport in life in relationship and anything something in your brain and body has to keep track of that did you win did you lose what's a letdown what's a celebration and i think one of the most important findings in the last few years in neuroscience is that while the molecule dopamine is associated with reward it's more about motivation and craving there's a really classic experiment now that people use to demonstrate this take two rats and the rats independently separate cages can lever press for food uh when they can access food there's a little bit of dopamine that's released anytime they get some food so we always thought that food like many other rewards like food sex warmth when you're cold cool when you're too warm is triggering the release of dopamine but someone had the good idea to deplete dopamine in one of those animals and then what you find is that the animal without dopamine still enjoys food still enjoys other pleasures so dopamine is not really involved in the enjoyment of those pleasures it's involved in motivation because if you make the animal have to move just one rat's length believe it or not to get to that lever the animal with dopamine will work to go get that thing it will work through some effort to go get the reward whereas the animal or turns out the human without much dopamine can still experience pleasure they can sit on their couch and cram their face with pleasure inducing calories or what have you watch pleasure-inducing things on the television but they have very little motivation to go pursue things that will deliver them pleasure so when i say dopamine is the universal currency of everything what i mean is it's driving the motivation to develop new currencies when somebody can sit back and say uh i'll just throw this number out let's say somebody has a hundred thousand bitcoins which presumably now is worth oh my god certainly more than it was a few years ago the way they can register whether or not they are in a position of wealth or not has everything to do with the the number they see on the screen or in their bitcoin wallet but that number is converted into a chemical signal that has everything to do with how much you had previously so so we could talk about the so-called reward prediction error how good you feel with an experience has everything to do with how much you had previously and dopamine itself is what's driving the human species to create these new technologies and so while we think of currencies as the goal it's actually what's really driven the forward evolution of our our species has been the desire to go seek things beyond the confines of our skin and when i say the common currency is dopamine what i mean is the molecule dopamine when secreted in the brain makes us pursue things build things create things makes us want new things that we don't currently already have and so it has a lot of dimensions to it but rather than think about dopamine as a signal for reward like a dopamine hit we classically think to talk about it it's more accurate really to think about dopamine as driving motivation and craving to go seek rewards that's the rad experiment and it's a way of tabulating where we are in our life are we doing well or are we doing poorly and that happens on very short time scales like do you wake up feeling good or do you wake up feeling kind of low or on long time scales if you're halfway through a long degree or you're halfway through your life how are you doing how do you gauge that well it has everything to do with how much dopamine you were releasing in the previous days and weeks and years so you're always comparing and all of this is subconscious but what's cool is that once you make these processes conscious once you understand a little bit about how dopamine is released and how it changes our perspective and our behavior then you can actually work with it so it's one of the um instances where knowledge of knowledge actually turns out to be a really useful tool dude that's crazy to me so one of the things that i get hit up about all the time is people feel stuck and as you like really push on them to figure out why they feel stuck they'll be like yeah i want to do that and but i just you know i can't get out of bed or i don't have the energy to pursue it or whatever and you get into this common thing that people say in mindset and i really believe it but i find it far more interesting when you're talking about it from a neuro chemical standpoint which is you just don't want it badly enough and when i think about my own life i sometimes worry that i'm either more malleable than other people or that i have a greater ability to manipulate my dopamine release or whatever because i'm very good at building desire and i like the way that desire feels now when you use the word hunger i think people get confused because i actually don't enjoy being hungry for food i find that totally unpleasurable however being hungry for sex i find incredibly i feel alive i feel focused i feel energized i feel aggressive it's complex for sure but i find that feeling incred the the act of wanting something in the future in in that kind or in business and trying to build something i've in fact that's an interesting insight into my own self about i like to build and do we know so we dopamine is the neurochemistry of the pursuit of making sure that i have the energy to go but do we know how we can spike that well first of all it's clear to me based on your description that you've tapped into these uh channels that release dopamine because craving and wanting whether or not it's sex or or uh money or connection or anything all right uh is that's the the primary trigger for dopamine release yeah now sex and reproduction makes the most sense from the perspective of evolution uh i mean any species every species has tends to have two primary goals one protect it's young and second make more of itself usually in reverse order right so even for people that don't want children i mean you might not or people of course not everyone is having sex just to reproduce but at a primordial level that's what those circuits are there for so every species in particular mammalian species where there's a lot of parenting and caretaking of the young tries to take make more of itself and everything that you see like maternal aggression which is a powerful circuit that gets activated after females of any species in particular mammals give birth they will fight to the death and they gain superhuman strength in order to protect their young that's a there's a known circuit for that in the brain that gets activated once a female has offspring and it's robust inside tracker is offering our listeners 25 off their entire store including inner age 2.0 just visit insidetracker.com impact theory all right guys check out inside tracker today take care and be legendary so interesting man like have you read the book the female brain i have not oh my god so i just probably lost a lot of points but no no but you're one it'll be super interesting because you'll know if she's on the right track from a neuroscience perspective i remember reading the book at the time i thought i was going to have kids and i remember thinking whoa like this book chronicles what happens to a woman's brain and how things change and i was like when you have kids man you are inviting a neurochemical change in your significant other that is going to play itself out in a very real way and i'd be lying if i said that wasn't one of the things one of the many things but one of the things that i factored into not having kids interesting uh and then the same with menopause that it's this really dramatic sort of reorganizing might not be the right word but that it it has real implications in the way that the person moves just as the decline of testosterone has in men well in on a on the positive side during pregnancy the woman's hippocampus her brain area associated with memory and retention of information it goes through a period in which it gets worse for certain types of information but then achieves superior levels of working memory once the babies arrive because there are a lot of things to manage so this makes sense this is true in rodents this is true in humans and then in terms of the biology of the father we now know that when because typically parents have uh you know does seem like one spouse always does more than the other but even in the most evenly divided households the there's usually some co-parenting of some sort but that the father has a big increase in the hormone prolactin when the mother is expecting and the prolactin lays down body fat it prepares for sleepless nights for women it it sparks um the circuitry for milk letdown for for nursing so the dad bod has a lot to do with prolactin this is true in in birds in small mammals and in humans and this is now there was a paper published in nature on humans specifically about this and when you think about the relationship between dopamine and prolactin it's it's interesting and it takes us back to this motivation and craving that you were describing earlier which is that dopamine and prolactin work in in opposite fashion so the the most salient example of this is sex and reproduction where anticipation of sex and reproduction greatly increases dopamine but posts reproductive post-sex it doesn't have to be for reproduction there's a spark in prolactin in the mail that's the spike excuse me in prolactin and that spike in prolactin is actually what sets the refractory period during which he can't mate again so it sets a period of quiescence to keep men it's repair bonding for the exchange of chemicals through the nose to the through the skin and through the sweat mainly through odor uh we could talk about pheromones if you want but that's a topic that's somewhat controversial the actual identity of pheromones in humans has not been identified but there are pheromone effects in humans controversial in that people don't agree what's really happening well okay so there's this culture of biologists that have clearly identified pheromone effects in other in non-humans and non-human primates but whether or not those are the classic definition of a pheromone effect is that it's subconscious that you can't actually detect the smell however we know that smells themselves conscious detection of them can evoke very robust physiological responses one one example to just stay in this arena of of of thought is that a guy by the name of gnome sobel who's at the weizmann institute he used to be at berkeley he has a lab over in israel his amazing lab works on olfaction smell and they discovered that the scent of women's tears causes a dramatic and significant reduction in testosterone in men what absolutely and this was published if anyone wants to go look it up it was published in science magazine you know you can smell tears yeah we have you know the super bowl of publishing and science is science nature and self those are the three top journals this is published in science magazine very stringent uh the smell of tears now it's subconscious at some level but the other thing that if we were going to kind of play around in this hormones and behave interactions between humans um there are some really interesting examples so for instance men will rate the smell of a woman's skin or sweat or the perception of her face as more beautiful during the pre-ovulatory phase of her menstrual cycle that pre-ovulatory phase is associated with a number of different changes in hormones okay just that smell will increase testosterone in a male oral contraception in the female women taking oral contraception it adjusts their hormones such that men no longer detect this change in how attractive women are doesn't mean they find them unattractive but it means they don't find them increasingly interactive during this certain period of the of their of their menstrual cycle so we are constantly signaling back and forth through hormones in fact we met over there and shook hands because we've been tested for covet and the rest we shook hands and what happened and what happens within 30 seconds of any human being contacting one another is they shake hands and then they wipe their the chemicals of the other person on their face gnome's lab has also shown this and so we are constantly signaling through through chemical exchange sometimes it's subconscious and those are the so-called pheromone effects sometimes it's low levels of odors that are beneath our conscious detection and sometimes it's outright wow this person smells really really good or they look particularly good today oftentimes that's tied to the of the period in which they are ovulating in their menstrual cycle so i want to plant a flag here about all the things that we do that are messing with these mechanisms like cologne or deodorant or oral contraception of which i'm not saying is pornography like all interception has served a great role in it for certain people some people might say was this an ethical discussion or is it good is it bad but um either way it is having an effect right so to remove i only look at things through the lens of biology not through the lens of of whether or not we should or shouldn't do things i love it okay so we're planning that we're coming back to it but now i want to get to how do we spike intentionally you've talked about we can spike testosterone but i want to know can we spike dopamine yeah so um and you've done this so your example of craving is actually what you crave you crave the feeling of craving is beautiful because it would what it means is that you don't allow yourself to go so far down the arc of the dopamine trajectory to get to the other source of motivation so there are two sources of motivation as it relates to dopamine and then we can think about tools that we could export from these that are nested in neurobiology the first is to do what you do which is to be able to sense the craving as its own form of pleasure this has kind of remnants of carol dweck's growth mindset that you eventually develop a pleasure in the seeking and the striving has you know uh has flavors of a david goggins type approach where where it seems like he gets pleasure from the friction itself and so there are elements of that you seem to have that as well but if you can start to identify the craving as its own internally released drug this thing dopamine that is a source of motivation then what you realize is that capturing the reward is wonderful but attaching dopamine to the reward is actually a little bit dangerous attaching yeah this is celebrating the win celebrating the win more than the pursuit it actually sets you up for failure in the future and so this gets us right into something called dopamine reward prediction error and reward prediction error is basically if you expect something to be really great and then it's not quite that great your dopamine baseline lowers and now understanding what we know about dopamine that means that not only did you you feel as if you lost because it wasn't as much a celebration as you thought it would be but it also means that you're starting from a lower place meaning you are less motivated now the simpler way to conceptualize this is have a colleague at stanford she runs the addiction dual diagnosis clinic at uh her name is dr anna lemke she has a book called dopamine nation that's out right now and she's really described as pleasure pain balance where anytime you have a bunch of dopamine and you're in pursuit pursuit pursuit after you achieve a win now this could be a business win a relationship a win of any kind but inevitably there's going to be a tipping back of the scale on the pain side and that pain side is always going to go a little bit higher than the dopamine side so this is what you would feel if you pursued a goal like building a big company here it comes here comes the big sale and then there's the well what now the kind of letdown now if you wait if you simply wait and stop pursuing dopamine for a short while the scale starts to reset the problem is a lot of people immediately roll right into the next pursuit and then what happens is that scale starts to get stuck on the pain side a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more and pretty soon no amount of seeking will allow you to experience that craving and motivation so what what does this mean in terms of an actual tool well first of all if people can do what you do they're going to be in a much better position in life it doesn't matter if it's school sport relationship any domain of life if you can start to register ah that craving and that friction and that desire that almost kind of low level of agitation sometimes high level of agitation that is that i'm trying to impose my will on the world in a benevolent way we hope that's dopamine it's working with its close cousin which is epinephrine which is adrenaline they are very close cousins in fact dopamine manufactures epinephrine a lot of people don't know this but adrenaline is actually made from the molecule dopamine okay so those two are hanging out together it's like crave work crave work craving work craving work craving work and then you get the win and some people allow the big peak in dopamine to be associated with the win and smart people learn to adjust their celebration internally right this is all internal you could throw the biggest party in the world but as long as you're kind of in laid back and looking at this not letting yourself get manic crazy you won't necessarily crash as hard and pretty soon your system will reset so you take the day you clean up the dishes you relax you go what now i'm feeling a little low well rather than going out and spiking your dopamine again just wait understand that the scale will reset again give yourself a few days where you're going to feel a little kind of underwhelmed things aren't going to be as interesting it's going to be hard to trigger that big release because you just had the peak well if you adjust that you relax you understand there's always a little bit of a postpartum depression we sometimes hear about postpartum depression that's a clinical thing but there's always that kind of today's not as exciting as the previous days what am i going to do with my life but then if you let it start ratcheting up again then what you realize is your capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator not just seeking dopamine rewards that is infinite and i i can say with with great certainty that this is how you were able to build a big company and sell it how you've been able to build a successful podcast and sell it how you constantly seeking because seeking is the reward and i think for most people we think of the reward as the finish line and so the key is to get to the finish line step into the end zone but no end zone dance it's just like yep and now i'm gonna go do it again that's really the key that's that's the key to doing it over and over and when i see big athletes or academics or anyone or musicians and they rise and crash it's clear they've lost the touch with the motivation evoked dopamine and they've lost touch probably because it hasn't really been described by the neuroscience community until anna has started talking about this stuff publicly and i'm just kind of echoing what she's beautifully said said much better than i am which is that you should always expect that after a bunch of pleasure there's going to be that low and then that craving how do i get back to there again and the key is you have to walk the staircase again you don't get to do this as a square wave pull you know you don't get to just ascend ascend ascend it's always up down up a little bit higher down up you know it's that's the function so um i don't know if that resonates with your experience i'm over here freaking out so you've literally just explained what i will say is the single most important loop if you want to be successful and you used words attach right you had another one which was about your t i forget the exact word but you're taking you're inserting yourself consciously into the process because what i learned very early on and i'm so grateful in the same way that you are grateful that your upbringing wasn't perfect but it ended up giving you a frame of reference and insights that have propelled you forward i'm very grateful that i spent a decade just trying to get rich that was the stated mission i would say it every day like i'm here to get rich i show up to work to get rich it's about getting rich rich rich rich and it didn't work and so and my wife pulls me aside and she's like you're now damaging the marriage like you're just so fiendishly focused on the goal that there's nothing as integrated in your life you're doing something you hate for an end state that may never come and that was so profound and it shook me so deeply and it suddenly became clear that from a neurological perspective what i wanted was to feel alive and once i put everything in the pursuit i'm just interested in can i show up every day and sincerely pursue this thing which i may never get but i'm gonna honor myself celebrate myself big up myself as the brits would say for just showing up today and actually trying to make it happen and one that's way more sustainable and then two you don't you don't get tricked into thinking that oh when i get this thing that i'll feel good because it's the craving that makes me feel alive so it's the state of wanting that is in and of itself the pleasurable act that's right and so i began to use the metaphor of i'm gonna climb this mountain only to want the next mountain to climb and once i knew that well then you have to be totally comfortable dropping back down and starting all over now the interesting thing and i don't know if i'm fooling myself or if i have so integrated that trick but the come down isn't hard for me so i i think my last day at quest was a monday and tuesday i started impact theory and so that went from i had 3 000 employees your position matters you get a lot of deference uh you've got a privileged parking space you know what i mean like there's there's a lot of things that go into it and but i didn't none of like my reward system was tied to that so it was very easy for me to start the next day with there was only seven of us and no one had time for any deference of any kind and i went from having an ea which you can't imagine how amazing that is to not and you're doing everything for yourself again but that wasn't a painful thing because i was so focused on all right cool this is step one again and now can can we repeat well it helps if you can expect that there will be a little bit of a dip post win or post whatever um that's helpful there's always a refractory period of any kind so to speak if you expect it that's great because you eliminate the the downside of the reward prediction error reward prediction error can also be conceptualized as i tell you we're going to go this restaurant i keep building up the food building up the food i actually raised the expectation and the requirement that that food be really spectacular better off i just tell you it's gonna be pretty good and then you're wowed by it right because if your dopamine was higher in anticipation than the actual food evoked well then it makes sense why would you're always integrating over the dopamine release you had previously now there are a couple things that you said in there that i want to highlight which i find so interesting uh and we can get a little bit eastern philosophy mystical here but tie it back to some real neuroscience which is you said you know that's the juice the motivation is the juice you know that if you look at eastern philosophy and they talk about qi you know in this you know what is that i i wager that is dopamine the desire to pursue things and to create more of oneself and as a species whether or not you decide to have kids or not those circuits all use the one universal currency dopamine of wanting more things that are outside the confines of your skin and that's what's driven forward evolution of individuals and families and cultures and our our species as a whole and again the circuitry has been there for many many tens if not hundreds of thousands of years and so it's and it's highly conserved and so what that means is that it doesn't matter if it's bitcoin or ethereum it doesn't matter if it's putting rockets on other planets it doesn't matter if it's building the first automobile it's the same currency so understanding those cycles is really key the other thing is the element of pain i think that understanding that pain and pleasure and this really dynamic balance can also help us which in the following way any pain that you feel the longer day the less sleep the the kind of agony that things aren't working that power outlet doesn't work or the internet is slow whatever it is 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'd say we're going to increase it we're going to increase it eventually they get to the point where a slight 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 uh giving somebody a like a 10-minute ice bath for instance or even a three-minute ice bath or a one-minute ice bath it's quite painful but there was a study from the university of prague uh european journal physiology showed that after a painful ice bath stimulus the amount of dopamine release goes up for two and a half hours to 250 percent above baseline and that's not because the ice bath itself evokes dopamine release a lot of people think oh cold water of ox dopamine release no pain evokes dopamine release after the pain is over yesterday i tweaked my back because i do this stupid thing every few years the same stupid thing and 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 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 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 wind 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 the person that's not motivated that can't get off the couch that doesn't want to do anything well this is the problem we remember the rad 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 it was just so cool or you see something online i remember this when ted talks first came out i was like this is amazing these are some at least some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights and then now that they're 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 dead docs 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 opioid it becomes an opioid system and if you think about the opioid drugs as opposed to dopamine dopaminergic drugs dopaminergic drugs make people rabid for everything you know drugs of abuse like cocaine amphetamine make people incredibly outward directed or they hardly notice anything except what they want more of more more it's very it's bad because those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward it's very circular that 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 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 dopamine and 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 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 wind 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 the avenue of perfect 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 tick tock 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 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 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 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 there's 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 that's such a good difference and you know and i don't like to comment too much on enlightenment because 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 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 that 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 tick tock feed is the context switch is insane the brain has never seen first of all there's a first time in human evolution that we wrote with our thumbs but that's a pretty benign shift and that 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 to talk 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 am i depressed maybe but maybe you're just you've saturated the dopamine circuits you're now in the 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 dynamic process being a human being it's not easy and remember these circuits didn't evolve for this purpose they evolve 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 molecules so the feeling is the same it's just that some people for some people the amplitude of that dopamine 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 we'll start to reshape these circuits because these dopaminergic circuits are tied to everything you know there are examples of people getting addicted to the most incredible things they're 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 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 move the coin you know from this hand to this hand it's it blows me away i love magic uh before the pandemic 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 from a neuroscience perspective magic it's all about 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 dopamine dopamine circuits it's interesting though that that doesn't send us into like terror like the people depends on the magic trick 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 i took the card i took the card 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 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 in the middle and an end but you know how do we segment time and so there have 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 missed the three-pointer and then you know it's a close game there's a little blip of dopamine that says that was one segment of time and so dopamine is a big way in which we segment time the other way are blinks believe it or not yeah that every time we blink there's a paper publishing current biology every time we blink we reset our perception of that when i 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 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 hardly ever blink their pupils are huge they're they're actually not segmenting time in the normal fashion and so much of your life in retrospect is segmented by those peaks and dopamine they those mark key events in your life when you met your wife uh that their their all the segments of your life are are noted by peaks and 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 ruin 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 and 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 and 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 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 a hundred years old hopefully in good vitality so this is the more esoteric aspect of dopamine real fast before we go about the time thing yeah let me ask you so there was a period in my life i'll take 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 found it hilarious and so she'd be like what time is it and i'm like oh it's 4 58. it was so weird that it like made my radar is 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 a round 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 because of the way it works with epinephrine how finely you slice time is very dependent on dopamine and your internal level of autonomic arousal a 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 any time 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 are in car accidents and then they report everything being in slow motion your frame rate is is smaller 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 look and it's 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 diagno 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 but 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 it 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 so we do a lot of things who knows what i was doing at that period if it had to do anything just that i'm getting older and so it starts to disrupt itself who knows but what are some things so one thing i've heard you talk about which i find really interesting when i think about all the things that we're doing that are disrupting things all these unintended consequences of modern behavior i am truly glad that cell phones the internet and pornography did not exist when i was younger because i don't know if at 14 i could have been disciplined enough if i had access to that and what like when you think about the things that we're doing right now that are sort of the that have maybe the most grand unintended consequences where do you land yeah on the time scale of 24 hours one of the the huge mistakes that we all make and i'm i've said this many times so if people have heard me say this before forgive me but it turns out it's still true uh getting too much bright light exposure from the hours of 10 pm until 4 am unless you have to work shift work which is a unique case that bright light exposure between 10 pm and 4 am even if you adjust the colors of the lights you still need to get everything really really dim because it actually blocks the release of dopamine through a pathway that involves a structure called the habenula the habenula was a kind of cryptic structure in the brain for a long time but now we know there's a punishment signal in the brain you get neurochemically punished for viewing bright light at those hours how how would that be wired in we'd never be able to expose ourselves to bright light ah so that's a great question so firelight won't do that moonlight's fine candles lights that are dim are now in your environment so the the pathway to the habenula and then to these dopamine reducing circuits are the pain pathway that we're referring to earlier it's a generic pathway through which lots of different types of signals and stimuli and events can punish us internally this is so good dude and so i'm going to call this the rich kid effect like there and you mentioned hard work earlier there is a reason i think that children of wealthy parents end up imploding because there is a an evolutionary the punishment pathway evolutionary thing that's going on that says you didn't have to work hard for the things that you own and because from uh i need you to go hunt and gather and face a saber-toothed tiger i have to reward you for doing hard things and punish you for not doing hard things well and you know in the case of the the the generic model of the of the spoiled rich kid it they actually can't access dopamine uh remember that that a movie from the 80s it was a uh it was called like the toy or something with richard i was like if this [ __ ] says toy i'm gonna have a seizure yes richard pryor in that movie and the kid has everything and he's the he's the epitome of the spoiled brat all the toys all the cars all the things now we see this with people who actually go from rags to riches and then bathe in all their the luxuries they didn't have as a child these are often the athletes that don't go on to perform well again these are people that crash because of other dopamine-seeking behaviors you know i'm not going to call out names but there are far too many examples of these and i don't call out names mostly because we are all capable of this we all would like to think that oh if i had all that money or if i had all that success i would really be a good human being and i wouldn't do those things anyone any human being that is immersed in these dopamine circuits too much or who gets too much pleasure without having to pursue it first and really work and actually experience pain pleasure ratcheting back and forth along that climb because it wasn't just dopamine like this for you it's probably pain pleasure pain pleasure pain pleasure pain right they're always proportional to one another so anyone that does that it has a tremendously hard time accessing pleasure they can't do that and and we often think about the extremes of addiction and those are really severe but we also have to think about the more subtle forms of something we really love but indulging in it just a little too often so that it no longer has that edge you know there have been really good studies of people who jump out of airplanes with parachutes you know i'm sure it's a lot of fun it looks like a thrill but people do over and over and over again often die doing other things they often become drug addicts because it's a huge high oh yeah yeah a lot of that and you know there are a lot of examples of this i mean you can get addicted to anything the key is to regulate that behavior so you asked what you know what should people do well certainly i'm trying this now and i have some good examples some young people i know and work with are taking breaks from not just social media but no cell phone whatsoever i'm actually trying an odd experiment which is for the first hour of every day no phone mostly because part of your 25 no-gos yes right so we have circuitry in the brain related to the so-called basal ganglia and we have go sort of activating you know think gas pedal and then we there's a lot of no go circuitry and learning how to keep that no go don't circuitry as we could call it uh tuned up is very important and so many times throughout the day but i try and get 25 a day where i actively refrain from doing something that i impulsively want to do could be looking at my phone but it could even be something trivial like i want to walk to the kitchen and get a glass of water so i'm actively engaging in self-den in denial not cognitive denial probably that too but how would i know um but in action-based denial so restricting my behavior in some way as a way of keeping these dopamine circuits tuned up also not looking at my phone first thing in the morning for an hour because knowing what we now know about the second phase of sleep and rem sleep being more predominant the second wave of sleep and the fact that you're working through a lot of emotional and logistical contingencies you're reshaping your brain in sleep that's when neuroplasticity occurs during sleep it's triggered in wakefulness but it actually takes place in sleep especially that second half of sleep when you wake up in the morning you are in a perfect position to what i call receive the download of all the work that your neural circuitry has been doing the night before but if you immediately go to a sensory experience especially a rich sensory experience of stuff scrolling by you're actually missing the information that you processed at night and even more importantly that second half of the night during rem sleep is when the emotional weight of things start becomes let's say you put it on the shelf properly things that are important to emotional emotionally registered get put in one shelf things that were like the comment you got on twitter that was triggering doesn't seem like such a big deal after a good night's sleep and that's because that second half of sleep is actually when you re-experience these things but your body can't secrete adrenaline it's kind of an internal form of therapy or even trauma therapy and that's why people who don't get that sleep are very you know they're easily agitated they feel like the world is crushing down on them so when i wake up in the morning i want to receive ideas that i want to learn from my learning and if you take in new information you are not in a position to do that and 60 minutes is a tough one so i give myself two no-gos for the 60-minute block if i can do it and i'll tell you a lot of mornings i fail tom i don't do it interesting i just i found that shocking but i heard you say that in another interview and i was like well i mean i'm human you know there are mornings where um i get enticed or worse worse i find myself reflexively picking up without having made the conscious decision and that's when i realized that you know we are all deep in this process and i think uh we have to regulate it the the experiment i'd like to do maybe you'll do this with me as a challenge because the challenge is always good is in the new year i actually want to take every odd waking hour of the day off the phone so even hours of the day as long as it's waking i'm willing to have it on and work with it but odd hours just turn it off no matter what i don't know if this will destroy most of the relationships but just to see can i do it on a rigidly externally imposed schedule because if you think about most of the growth in life comes from these rigidly externally imposed schedules and we hate them but they are where we learn restraint dude this is so important i don't know if i hate them anymore so people will often ask like how i do this that or the other whatever it is like tom how do you um so i work 93 hours a week that's like my average that's your average so tom why do you work 93 hours every week and the answer is because 93 are joyful and 94 wouldn't and when i start working more than that it usually means that i'm juggling so many things that my brain seems to be using sleep as a way to track some of them or something yeah so i find myself waking up a lot no i have a trick that allows me to fall back asleep very fast but it's still not as restful as just sleeping through the night what's the trick if you don't mind me entering i don't at all so i have two pairs of airpod headphones and i put them in and i put them on a uh fiction book and i turn the volume down such that if i don't put a little bit of pressure on my ear i can't make out what they're saying so as soon as i drift off the pressure releases and i can still hear that noise is being made but i can't track it and so i'm usually out probably in about three minutes wow that that changed my life in terms of when i get stressed i can still fall back asleep such a great skill and just reflecting on what you use that murmur in the background and this kind of low level i can't quite detect it is actually the way that your brain detects things as you're falling asleep so i wonder if you've triggered your circuit to run in reverse where you actually can send yourself back under what what it makes me think is that i can't process the problems and listen to a story at the same time and so my brain clicks over into story mode and it's like oh we're digesting this story i i'm getting input so because i'm getting input because it's story my brain lets go of i have to solve problems and then that allows me to fall right back asleep that's great such a great skill and waking up in the middle of the night from time to time to use the bathroom is actually quite normal and some people are really obsessed by the fact oh no i woke up and then they get triggered but i learned this last year um that the peak in our alertness is actually about 90 minutes before our natural bedtime and a lot of people they you know they reach the point in the evening where they're ready to go to sleep and then they feel all this you know excitement and surge of energy and they think oh no i'm not going to be able to fall asleep but that's actually a natural surge that's followed by a dip a lot of people also have the trouble of waking up in the middle of the night and wondering why they can't fall back asleep this is dreadfully hard for a lot of people i struggled that for years yeah and one of the solutions is to go to bed earlier because it means that your melatonin is starting to get released early in the evening and so we all have the natural ability to push to stay late stay up later if we really need to this has obvious adaptive utility but some people by who should go to bed quote unquote should go to bed at 9 or 10 p.m they're pushing to 11 or 12 and then their melatonin signal is starting to drop off now they can't fall asleep or they're waking up at two or three in the morning and they're they're in trouble but it sounds like you've hit the right schedule 93 hours is an impressive output that's a lot of years of making an obscene amount of mistakes and to close the loop on so people how do you accomplish xyz and the answer is partly rules so you have to be obsessed with your goal right so for me that's all obsessions start with a goal what do you want is that thing exciting and honorable assuming it's exciting and honorable there's ways to like create feedback loops which is largely what we've been talking about today about attaching the dopaminergic response specifically to the pursuit of that thing rather than having it and by to because i'm so excited and because i so believe in the reality of my goals that i actually could have them and that having them would be awesome i can create rules in my life and then i really stick to those rules so once i'm very careful about what rules i put in place because i have to believe that they will actually lead me to this goal that's really exciting for me but if i believe it then i can put them in and then also part of my identity is that i'm the type of person that when i set a rule i follow it so i can create this loop of like feeling good about myself and the thing that i'm pursuing but it really works and i'm shocked how few people have the kind of rule that you're talking about in the new year to say hey i'm only going to do odd hours there's no phone yeah well and like i said i'm not perfect i'm not as disciplined as you are about my no goes i try i actually find that tabulating is is kind of fun um it's also fun to get really triggering comments and and to not close the dopamine loop for them i think if people understood um the dopamine reward prediction error that we could end all the um amplifying comment battles online because what happens is if someone takes a a jab at you of any kind there's actually an open dopamine loop waiting for you to respond and any response actually gives them that that dopamine response of success it's a little bit of a it's like scoring a three-pointer and the no response actually drops their dopamine below baseline and that's its own form of retaliation and i have to be careful because i don't want to encourage people to retaliate but any anything that short-circuits the kind of madness of getting pulled into some online battle that's totally meaningless it's taking people away from other powerful good things that they could do in the world you know we've been talking mainly about dopamine and its scheduling and about the fact that it can be attached to anything i think many people find it hard to subjectively attach dopamine to something they don't want to do this is something that uh if we'd spoken a year ago i would've i my answer would have been a little bit different to the question of how do you get motivated well one way to do that is if you are good at subjectively attaching dopamine to the pursuit just knowing okay i really am hungry for this i'm just i'm going to tell myself that you know making you know making it one percent of the way is a success and i'm going to keep going and i'm going to keep ratcheting on and that's great if you can do that but for people that can't do that understanding this relationship with a pleasure pain balance can be more powerful just understanding the more friction and pain that you experience the greater the dopamine reward you will get later and that serves as its own amplifier of the whole process of pursuing more dopamine and then the other aspect of it is that any time that we're leaning into action you know it has the possibility of being an amplifying process or a depleting process and the key to that is making sure that you're balancing the dopamine and epinephrine systems you know epinephrine being this molecule of universal currency of energy output it could be out of hate or it could be out of love epinephrine doesn't care and actually dopamine doesn't care none of these systems care about us they just work underneath our underneath our conscious control but when you start to understand that hitting the gas pedal is great but hitting the gas pedal and then coming off the gas pedal a little bit you can kind of sit in a more relaxed rpm actually allows you to go much further i think that people leaning into action is terrific i always say you can either be back on your heels flat footed or forward center of mass the best situation is actually to be right upright but just know that you can be forward center of mass at any point and you know that to take it back to sex and reproduction because it's a salient example the arc of of sex is very interesting because when you think about autonomic arousal it turns out that the the arousal stage of sex actually involves release of dopamine but is what we call parasympathetic dominant it's actually has to be relaxed enough in order to occur okay everyone can read between the lines on this orgasm is actually a i want to say full blown it's a it's a it is a sympathetic nervous system driven response it's identical to the stress system it's driven by the same neural circuits as stress and then what comes afterward the parasympathetic system goes back up again it's that deep relaxation so why do i say this not to talk about sex to be you know to to serve as a highlighter but rather our species arrived here because of this dance between arousal and relaxation arousal and relaxation and one thing we can say for sure about every human being that's alive now is that their parents at least once mastered this dance of relaxed but not and excited but not too excited then really excited and then relaxed that dance was mastered by all of our parents and that's what delivered us here to some extent and so i what this means is that all the neural circuits from the ones that led to our conception to the ones that lead to us pursuing goals have this balance that's almost like a like a seesaw right there's activation and calm activation and calm and it's that dynamic process that's important to master in every endeavor so we use sex as an example but in pursuit of goals you have to learn how to pursue short-term goals and like the goals within the day make a cup of coffee and goal and long-term goals and when i said dopamine is what's setting the your time perception it's an interval timer what you're saying is it's like the two marshmallow experiment done at stanford def defer the dopamine and actually if you can turn the waiting into the dopamine and then you can extend out the reward for you know waiting for the second marshmallow 15 minutes later et cetera et cetera and there are many many examples of this in the psychology and neuroscience literature and i would say finally in 2020 we finally as a field got a clear idea of how dopamine is really working because before it was all about work dopamine hit right sex gives you a doubling hit the internet gives you a dopamine what we didn't realize is that repeated engagement with these things leads to dopamine depletion and that the pain and pleasure balance is always at work dude that's so brilliant dude one the huberman lab is amazing on youtube people need to check that [ __ ] out and your instagram page is also amazing where do you want people to follow you at yeah so well thanks um for those kind words um yes i mean them so aggressively i'll bite through the camera to let people know how seriously i mean that thank you yeah so i i have an instagram page it's huberman lab and there i teach neuroscience in anywhere from one minute to you know five minute tidbits and a lot of actionable tools that relate to all sorts of things sleep and motivation etc and then the huberman lab podcast is apple spotify and we have a youtube channel for people want to watch and listen to it and they're it's a little bit different than most podcasts because i will do four episodes all on one general theme like food and the brain and these are long hour to two hour long lectures where i just kind of blab on and on myself but they're all time stamps so people can get information there and it's tools and science and then we have great guests on who are expert in their fields people like anna lemke um luminaries and the you know matt walker folks of that sort of robert who i've been stocking there's a there's a there's a trick