Priscilla Xu

Practical Takeaways

• Dopamine is the molecule of motivation, drive, craving, and seeking. It also influences. It has a significant influence on how you experience life.
• A cold shower for one hour increases adrenaline and dopamine. It increases dopamine 2.5x from baseline for 3 hours.
• The goal is to maintain an intermittent dopamine schedule because, in the wild, you won’t always find water and food when you need it.
• Turning effort into rewards by turning on the internal reward system of pleasure from the effort. This is the powerful thing of dopamine biology.
• Dopamine is not only about pleasure. It also means avoiding pain by seeking experiences.

What is Dopamine? And how does it influence your mood?

“Dopamine is a currency and it’s the way that you track pleasure, track success, track whether or not you are doing well or poorly.”

Dopamine also influences your time perception.

If you do not have enough dopamine, you can experience a flat mood and not have motivation.

The Functional Frame Works of Dopamine

• Understanding the relationship between dopamine peaks and baseline is crucial in understanding why the intermittent schedule of dopamine works from an evolutionary standpoint.

• Tonic vs. Phasic release of dopamine
  • Tonic: baseline dopamine from small doses of dopamine in your system
  • Phasic: dopamine peaks from the big release of dopamine from your neurons.

• You don’t want your baseline to go lower and lower this may lead to a flat affect, depression, or lack of motivation.
  
• The goal is to maintain an intermittent dopamine schedule because, in the wild, you won’t always find water and food when you need it.

How Does Dopamine Control Pain and Pleasure?

• Pleasure means seeking excitement and euphoria.
  • Pleasure also means avoiding seeking new things.
• The pain and craving for something come from a drop below the tonic baseline.
  • Sex increases dopamine baseline by 2x and chocolate by 1.5x.
  • Amphetamine increases dopamine baseline by 10x
    • Always using your things to increase your dopamine may do the opposite effect because decreasing the baseline.
      
• How much pleasure you experience depends on the tonic baseline.
  • If the tonic baseline is too low, the pleasure will be lower.
    
• Subjective enjoyment of the activity can determine the amount of dopamine released.
  • If I like to exercise more. I will release more dopamine after doing the activity.
    
• You do not want to bring your phone to the gym or other activities because your phone makes things boring.

How to Enjoy Things You Hate?

• Growth mindset with dopamine. You focus on the effort instead of the result.
  • Tell yourself that the effort is pleasurable.

• If you tell yourself, “Oh, I am doing this hard thing and pushing for the end goal.”
  • With the above mindset, you will not enjoy the process and will be undermined the next time you enter the activity.

• Do not layer other sources of dopamine when you do things you hate.
  • The dopamine baseline will be lowered too much when you spike it with other sources.
  • The baseline cannot be maintained, and one will be in a flat affect (depressed mood).
• Do not reward yourself at the end (external motivation) because you want to use your effort as the reward.

• Attach effort to the internally generated reward system of the mesolimbic pathway.
  • Tell yourself: I know this is painful, but the effort is the reward.
• In moments of intense friction, it is painful. However, dopamine release will release later. At the moment, I will do it because I love it.

Socializing, Food, Sugar, and Dopamine?

• Ingest something sweeter you won’t like the other food.
  • Big dopamine release will make it harder for another big dopamine release because of the lowered baseline.
• Intermittent fasting can come from deprived food. Food can be more rewarding after restricting from eating. I am going to live long etc.
• Social connection is related to dopamine and oxytocin release.