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How to Control Dopamine (You're Destroying Your Mind)

2024-06-18 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 18:53 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Health, sleep and habits · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Evidence-based framing, Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present, His medical past

Ali explains how dopamine works (tonic and phasic release, reward prediction error), how social media exploits it, and, following Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation, gives four rules for controlling it: pain before pleasure, avoidance, barriers and boredom.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Why talk about dopamine; the deep dive into Anna Lembke's work and his own background

  • ★ Ali's deep dive into dopamine with his team drew in particular on Dr Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine and author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. — 00:00:35
  • ★ Ali says he has a personal interest in dopamine: he went through medical school and did an extra degree in psychology with cognitive neuroscience modules that featured dopamine heavily. — 00:01:05

00:01:28 — Part 1: what is dopamine; tonic and phasic transmission, the Instagram likes example, reward prediction error, random intermittent rewards

  • ★★ Dopamine, Ali explains, is a neurotransmitter that helps nerve cells communicate; it is involved in movement, sleep and mood, and above all is the major currency of the brain's reward system that motivates us to act. — 00:01:35
  • ★★ Ali likens tonic dopamine transmission to the background hum of chatter in a restaurant: neurons randomly but continuously release small amounts of dopamine, which sets your baseline dopamine level. — 00:02:05
  • ★★ Phasic dopamine transmission, Ali explains, is like hearing someone call your name across a noisy restaurant: a surge of dopamine that is the signal above the background noise. — 00:02:38
  • ★★ A cue such as an Instagram notification buzzing on your phone causes a phasic release of dopamine in expectation of the reward, Ali explains, and this burst creates a craving that motivates you to open the app. — 00:03:05 · Instagram
  • ★★★ Getting more Instagram likes than the brain predicted is a reward prediction error, Ali explains: the unexpected reward is what causes the rise in dopamine. — 00:04:13 · Instagram
  • ★★ An unexpected reward raises dopamine, Ali says, while a reward you knew was coming, such as exactly the number of likes you predicted, releases no dopamine at all. — 00:04:42
  • ★★ When dopamine drops below its baseline we feel bad, Ali explains, which is why getting fewer likes than expected feels bad and getting more likes than expected feels good. — 00:05:27
  • ★★★ Ali says social media companies can manipulate our dopamine system to keep us on their apps far longer than we should be, knowing we release more dopamine when we don't expect something. — 00:05:56
  • ★★ Social media algorithms use random intermittent rewards, Ali explains, such as a sudden funny reel or a random notification of likes: something rewarding at random intervals keeps giving us hits of dopamine and keeps us on the apps. — 00:06:25 · Instagram

00:06:40 — Sponsor read for Rize

00:08:01 — Part 2: how to control your dopamine; what a dopamine detox is and the dopamine deficit state

  • ★★ The common idea of a dopamine detox, Ali explains, is to abstain cold turkey for days or weeks from what you feel addicted to, such as social media, video games or porn, to reset your dopamine levels in theory and stop the addiction. — 00:08:15
  • ★★ Ali explains that a dopamine detox means detoxing from dopamine-inducing activities, such as addictive behaviours, social media or video games, since we need dopamine itself to live and move. — 00:08:44
  • ★★★ With too much use of a drug, video game or other addictive thing, Ali explains, its phasic dopamine hit no longer stands out against the tonic background, so you need ever more to feel good: a dopamine deficit state. — 00:09:28
  • ★★ Anna Lembke (quoted): Anna Lembke says that, exposed to so many high-reward substances from morning coffee to a Netflix binge at night, we are all in a chronic dopamine deficit state, barely able to enjoy life's modest rewards and ever more anxious and depressed. — 00:09:57 · Netflix
  • ★★ In a chronic dopamine deficit state, Ali says, low-dopamine things such as reading, a slow TV show, a walk in the park or friends no longer feel good, which is why many of us cannot watch a show without checking our phone. — 00:10:26

  • ★★★ To reset the tonic-phasic dopamine balance, Ali says, cut back on big spikes such as TikTok, gaming, gambling or late-night sugary food: a dopamine detox means learning to enjoy life's simple pleasures. — 00:10:55 · TikTok

    “we need to learn to enjoy the simple pleasures in life”

00:11:25 — Plug for the free Focus Crash Course

00:11:51 — Part 3: four strategies: the rules of pain before pleasure, avoidance, barriers and boredom; the main takeaway

  • ★★★ Ali's first strategy for controlling dopamine, from the pleasure-pain seesaw in Anna Lembke's book, is the rule of pain before pleasure: do something uncomfortable first and you will enjoy the pleasurable thing afterwards more. — 00:11:51
  • ★★ Ali pays up front for pleasure: on weekend days when he only plays Horizon Forbidden West on the PS5 he does not feel that great, but after the gym or his 10,000 steps in the park first, the game feels better and the walk or gym starts to feel good too. — 00:12:29
  • ★★ Ali links pain before pleasure to type one and type two fun: type one is pure fun like a video game, type two is fun in hindsight, like running a marathon or a challenging hike. — 00:12:58
  • ★★★ Ali's second strategy for controlling dopamine, the rule of avoidance, is to cultivate moments without any high-dopamine activity such as social media and ideally to phase those activities out slowly. — 00:13:27
  • ★★ According to Anna Lembke, Ali says, it takes about four weeks to reset our dopamine balance, and during those weeks we should avoid the addictive behaviour altogether if we can. — 00:13:27
  • ★★ Avoid triggers, which release anticipatory dopamine themselves, Ali advises: if you scroll TikTok too much at night, turn off its notifications entirely or uninstall the app so that nothing cues the craving. — 00:14:11 · TikTok
  • ★★ Breaking a dopamine habit takes effort, Ali warns: you will feel worse before you feel better, with something like withdrawal symptoms such as agitation, anger and sometimes sleeplessness. — 00:14:41
  • ★★★ Ali's third strategy, the rule of barriers, is for when avoiding something entirely is too hard: barriers and personal rules, of Anna Lembke's three kinds (chronological, geographical, categorical), keep high-dopamine behaviours in healthy balance. — 00:15:12
  • ★★ As a time barrier, Ali uses Opal, which he calls a very good distraction blocker, to block all social media apps on his phone from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m., so he does not scroll at night. — 00:15:12
  • ★★ A geographical barrier is a physical one, Ali explains: if you are addicted to chocolate, don't buy it and bring it home, since it is much easier to avoid when there is none in the house. — 00:15:41
  • ★★★ Ali's favourite of his four dopamine strategies is the rule of boredom: being bored is ridiculously rare now that the phone is always with us, and we should learn to become more comfortable with boredom. — 00:16:10
  • ★★ On a walk in the park or while driving, Ali often tells himself the goal is to be bored, so he does not put in his AirPods for an audiobook at triple speed, a podcast or a YouTube video. — 00:16:36 · AirPods
  • ★★ When Ali lets himself be bored, the brain's default mode network becomes active and he daydreams; many of his most creative ideas come when he is not stimulated by audiobooks, podcasts, Instagram or YouTube. — 00:17:13 · Instagram
  • ★★★ Ali's main takeaway from his dopamine research is the incredible value of letting ourselves appreciate small pleasures: we don't have to go on a fancy holiday or play addictive video games to have fun. — 00:17:13
  • ★★ Ali says being hooked is not really our fault, since social media companies hijack our minds and attention, but we can still control our dopamine and use the phone as a tool rather than let it control us. — 00:17:42

00:17:55 — Plug for Feel-Good Productivity and his focus video series

In the description and comments

  • ★ Replying to a viewer who finds boredom unhelpful and rarely creative, Ali grants the point and admits that he does not follow the rule of boredom very much himself. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Anna Lembke · dopamine · dopamine deficit state · Dopamine Nation · reward prediction error · rule of boredom · rule of pain before pleasure

Also: Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Organizations: Instagram · Netflix · Stanford University · TikTok

Concepts: 10,000 steps a day · default mode network · random intermittent reward · type two fun

Products: AirPods · Horizon Forbidden West · Opal · PlayStation 5 · YouTube Premium

Also centred on dopamine: How Dopamine Actually Works 🧠 · How much dopamine do you get from sex? · This dopamine study is mind blowing 🐀 · How to Reset Your Dopamine (And Change Your Life)

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