It 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,
watch pleasure inducing things on the television,
but they have very little motivation to go
pursue things that will deliver them pleasure.
Yeah, so, you know,
human beings have evolved tons of technologies and currencies,
bitcoin, ethereum are not topics I know a lot about,
but when you think about dollar, euro, bitcoin, ethereum,
you think about wins and losses
in sport and life and relationship in 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, or they can access food.
There's a little bit of dopamine
that's released any time 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 level,
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,
watch pleasure inducing things on the television,
but they have very little motivation to go
pursue things that will deliver them pleasure.
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?
Many people find it hard to
subjectively attach dopamine to something they don't want to do.
This is something that
if we'd spoken a year ago,
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,
"Ok, I really am hungry for this,
I'm just going to tell myself that".
"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 the 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.
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 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 up right,
but just know that you can be forward center of mass at any point.
And to take it back to sex and reproduction because it's a salient example,
the arc of sex is very interesting,
because when you think about autonomic arousal,
it turns out that the arousal stage
of sex actually involves release of dopamine,
but is what we call parasympathetic dominant,
it actually has to be relaxed enough in order to occur.