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

So in the last five years, there's been a lot of stuff online about dopamine and how it causes us to be addicted to things like our phones, and in particular, the idea of dopamine detoxing. Today I'm talking about dopamine detoxing. Dopamine detox. You do not control dopamine, dopamine controls you. And so given all these trends, I wanted to better understand the actual science about what dopamine is, but also how we can manage our dopamine levels to improve our overall productivity and wellbeing. So me and my team spent absolutely ages reading a bunch of research papers, listening to tons of podcasts, and going through some books to try and figure out exactly what is going on with dopamine. And in particular, this involved going through Dr. Anna Lemke's work. She's a psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine, and she recently published a book called Dopamine Nation, Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. And she's got some really helpful takeaways that I hope will be genuinely needle moving for your productivity. So in this video, we're gonna be looking at what dopamine is, the science behind how to control dopamine, and four actionable tips that will hopefully help boost your overall productivity. And by the way, if you're new to the channel, then hello, my name is Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur, and I'm the author of the book, Feel Good Productivity, which is about how to do more of what matters to you in a way that's enjoyable, effective, and sustainable. And I've actually got a personal interest in dopamine, given that A, I went through med school. B, I did an extra degree in psychology with some modules on cognitive neuroscience, which featured dopamine pretty heavily. And so exploring dopamine for this video was kind of fun because it was sort of revisiting some of the stuff I did at university, but with more of a focus on how understanding dopamine can genuinely help us boost our productivity and ideally improve our lives as well. Part one, what is dopamine? Okay, so this is dopamine. It is a small molecule called a neurotransmitter that works in our brain mostly, and it helps our neurons or our nerve cells communicate with each other. Now dopamine is involved in a bunch of different things, including movement and sleep and mood, but most importantly for this video, it's involved in reward and motivation. And the way we can think of it is that in our brain's reward system, dopamine is the major currency that motivates us to actually do stuff. Okay, so how does it do that? Well, there are broadly two different ways in which dopamine works in the brain. There is tonic transmission, and then there is phasic transmission. So to understand these, let's imagine that you're in a restaurant. Now tonic transmission is like the constant hum of the people who are chattering around you. It's basically background noise, and you can't really make out any individual conversations. And tonic transmission is when your neurons are randomly but continuously releasing small amounts of dopamine, and this sets your baseline dopamine level. And then you can think of phasic transmission as if someone is calling your name out in the restaurant, which you can make out and respond to, even though there are lots of other people talking. And this represents a surge of dopamine, which is sort of the signal above the noise. This, by the way, is sometimes called the cocktail party effect, where you're in a cocktail party, there is a hum of chatter in the background, and if someone says your name. Oh, hey Ellie. You'll be able to hear it. Now here's how this might work in reality. So imagine getting an Instagram notification on your phone for some likes on a new Instagram post that you've just posted. Now at first, your dopamine is set at its baseline because of tonic transmission. But then when your phone buzzes and lights up with a notification, this is called a cue, and this causes a phasic release of dopamine because we expect to open Instagram to find a message from someone, and that is the reward. And this short burst of dopamine creates this feeling of wanting or craving, and it motivates us to do something. So in this case, we feel the urge, and we feel motivated to unlock our phone and open Instagram. Now at this point, there are three potential different outcomes. Outcome number one is that we get more likes than we predicted. So in this post, I got 11,000 likes, and maybe I predicted only getting 5,000 likes. And so when I open this post and I see 11,000 likes, I get a release in dopamine. So here in blue, we've got the tonic release of dopamine. We get a little bit of phasic release of dopamine when I see the cue, i.e. the ping and the buzz of the notification. And then once I open my phone and I get the reward, which is more likes than I thought I would get, suddenly we get an increase in dopamine, and that is the surge of dopamine. And this is called a reward prediction error. Our brain made a prediction of how many likes we're gonna get. We made an error in that prediction, and we ended up getting more likes than we thought. And this unexpected reward is what causes that increase in dopamine. That is option number one. Now we've got option number two, which is let's say we get exactly the same amount of likes as we predicted. So I predict I would get 5,000 likes for this picture, and I got about 5,000 likes for this picture. Now I still get the increase in dopamine from the cue, i.e. seeing the notification pop up. But in this case, because the reward was expected, I got exactly the same number of likes as I expected. My brain did not make an error in the prediction. The prediction was correct, and I get no dopamine release. So when you get an unexpected reward, you get an increase in dopamine. But when you get an expected reward, a reward that you knew was gonna come, you don't get any dopamine release. That's very interesting. Now option number three is what if you get fewer likes than you predicted? What if I predicted 5,000 likes and I only got 1,000 likes? Now in this context, I still get the increase in dopamine from the cue, i.e. the buzz of my notification, because that's the cue to dopamine release. But then the reward is absent. I made a prediction error. I predicted 5,000 likes, I only got 1,000 likes. And this very interestingly causes a decrease in dopamine levels. Now as you might appreciate from this example, when dopamine is released, we feel pretty good. When dopamine is at its baseline, we feel like whatever, that's pretty normal. But when dopamine is decreased, we feel pretty bad, which is why it feels kind of bad to get fewer likes than you expected, and feels kind of good to get more likes than you expected. Now in a lot of cases, this relationship between dopamine, prediction, reward, and feeling good or bad is actually quite good. Like when we get hungry, dopamine motivates us to find food. If that food is particularly tastier than what we predicted, i.e. unfortunately, if it has more sugar and fat in it than what we potentially predicted, we're gonna release dopamine, that's gonna make us feel good. And obviously, this sort of thing is very useful for the survival of our species. But in other cases, like social media, for example, our dopamine system can be manipulated by social media companies to change our behavior and keep us on these apps for way longer than we should. So for example, these companies know that we release more dopamine when we don't expect something. So sometimes you'll be scrolling through Instagram reels or whatever, and none of them will seem particularly interesting, but suddenly you're hit with something super funny. Or you might've been browsing Instagram for some time, and then it randomly will send you a notification telling you how many likes you got on your most recent post. And this is what is called a random intermittent reward, where you are shown something rewarding at random intervals. And social media algorithms use this to keep giving us hits of dopamine, and it keeps us on the apps for longer. And the rise of social media and gaming and other addictive stuff is why dopamine is becoming an increasingly bigger topic of discussion. Oh, by the way, on route to being able to control your dopamine figuring out all this stuff, you might like to check out a really helpful app called Rise, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Rise is a really good automatic time tracker. So what you do is that you install it on any device. And what it does is that in the background, it figures out what app you're using or what website you're on or whatever. And it will then categorize things into work or entertainment or emails or communication and a bunch of different categories. You can create custom categories as well. I've been using Rise for the last two and a half years now, and it's just super helpful to see exactly where my time is going. So I can see things like last month, I spent an ungodly amount of time watching random YouTube videos during working hours where I sort of intended to work, but then I ended up getting distracted by YouTube. It's also got a built in Pomodoro timer, which is kind of nice for being able to time your work sessions. And the other nice thing about it is that it pops up with these like distraction reminders. So if it senses, like for me, if I'm on Google Docs because I'm working on a writing project, and then I open a new browser window to go on a new site or YouTube or something like that, it will recognize, hang on, that's probably a distraction, will pop up with a big pop-up asking, hey, are you getting distracted? And then you can say, yep, thanks for the reminder. Or you can say, nope, this is not a distraction. And even just that, it's just like a, oh yeah, I am getting distracted. Whoops, thanks for the reminder. Let me go back to the thing that I was actually trying to do. If you're interested in checking it out, you can get a free trial at rise.io forward slash Ali Abdaal, and that'll be linked down in the video description as well. So thank you so much Rise for sponsoring this video. Okay, so now that we know all of that, let's talk about how can we control our dopamine and use it potentially to our advantage rather than becoming a slave to the social media algorithms. Part two, how to control your dopamine. Okay, so one thing that's fairly common here on YouTube around how to control your dopamine is the idea of a dopamine detox. And the general idea here is that if you're feeling particularly addicted to social media or video games or porn or whatever the thing might be, then by completely abstaining from those things and going cold turkey for a period of days or weeks, you can, in theory, reset your dopamine levels and you can stop the addiction to that specific behavior. Now, a lot of people don't understand the term dopamine detox. They think it means detoxing from dopamine, but you can't detox from dopamine because you need dopamine to live and move and survive. And it would be very bad if you tried to detox from dopamine. Instead, dopamine detox is when you detox from dopamine-inducing activities like the addictive behaviors or the social media or the video games or whatever the thing might be. So let's imagine two different scenarios. We've got scenario one and scenario two. And scenario one is someone who tries drugs for the first time. The blue is their tonic background level of dopamine release. And then at some point they try a drug and they get a phasic release of dopamine. And this feels wonderful because you get lots of dopamine and dopamine feels good. And this makes you want to continue using the drugs or whatever addictive behavior the thing might be. But then the problem is if you use the addictive thing, the drug, the video game, whatever the thing might be, if you use it too often, you actually increase your tonic levels of dopamine transmission. And that means the next time, you know, after a while, if you take the drug, you get a phasic release. But this phasic release doesn't really stand out compared to the tonic background level of dopamine. And so to get the same hit of euphoria, you need to increase the dose. You need to take double the dose of the drug or play video games for even longer or go even more extreme in whatever the thing might be to get any sense of feeling good. And when you're in this cycle of constantly having to seek out more to get that same sense of feeling good, this is sometimes called a dopamine deficit state. I believe that what's happening is that we as both individuals and nations are exposed to so many high reward substances from our coffee in the morning to that first text that we read to our Netflix binge at night that we're all in a chronic dopamine deficit state, barely able to enjoy the modest rewards of life and experiencing more and more anxiety and depression. That was Dr. Anna Lemke, who we mentioned before is a dopamine expert and the author of this book, Dopamine Nation, Why Our Addiction To Pleasure Is Causing Us Pain. And so really, in this chronic dopamine deficit state, the problem is that things that don't release a lot of dopamine like reading or watching a slow TV show or taking a walk in the park or hanging out with friends, those things no longer make us feel good because we've got such a high tonic level of dopamine that we need an enormous signal to feel anything at all. And that's one of the reasons why a lot of us find it hard to watch a TV show or a movie without checking our phone because we kind of need that extra hit of dopamine to feel anything at all, which is kind of scary. And so if you wanna do a dopamine detox, the idea is that really it's about resetting the balance between tonic and phasic dopamine release. And you can almost think of it as resetting your baseline levels of enjoyment. We actively want the phasic signals to be heard above the tonic background noise of dopamine again. And to do this, we need to stop doing too much of the things that give us those big spikes in dopamine and those instant feelings of pleasure. Things like scrolling TikTok for too long or video gaming or gambling or eating too much sugary food late at night. And really in short, a dopamine detox is kind of just a fancy way of saying that we need to learn to enjoy the simple pleasures in life. And the idea is that by resetting this balance between tonic and phasic dopamine release, we will learn to become happier in a less stimulating environment. Oh, by the way, if you're enjoying this video so far, you might like to check out my completely free Focus Crash Course. It's at focuscrashcourse.com. It's a seven day series of emails where each day I'll email you some actionable strategies and tools that you can use to improve your focus and to really help take control of your dopamine. It's completely free. You can unsubscribe whenever you want. There's a link down below or head over to focuscrashcourse.com. Part three, four actionable strategies for controlling your dopamine. Strategy number one, the rule of pain before pleasure. So there's this nice diagram in Dr. Anna's book that shows this seesaw between pleasure and pain. If you press too much on the pleasure side, the brain will want to achieve homeostasis and go back towards pain. It wants these things to be level. But crucially, if you press on the pain side, then you're more likely to then experience pleasure. And that's why this strategy is the rule of pain before pleasure. Because if you can get yourself to feel some sort of pain or do an uncomfortable thing first, you're more likely to then experience the pleasure of doing the more pleasurable thing afterwards. Like for example, when you've just finished watching an episode of your favorite Netflix show, then you're gonna wanna watch another one and then another and then another. But if you decide at any point not to continue watching that episode, that next episode, you're gonna start to feel the sense of pain. And so the way that I personally think about this is that if I'm about to do something that's highly dopamine inducing or highly pleasurable, I'll sort of think, how can I pay for this upfront by experiencing a little bit of discomfort? So on the weekends, for example, I've got the whole day to myself and I know I wanna play some Horizon Forbidden West on the PS5. On the days where I just play Horizon Forbidden West all day, I actually don't feel that great. But if I can talk myself into going to the gym first or getting my 10,000 steps by walking around the park first, and then it's almost like I'm rewarding myself for experiencing that discomfort with the video game, the video game feels better. And then also like going to the gym or going for a walk in the park, those generally low dopamine activities also start to feel good. And there's an interesting way of thinking of this, which is sort of separating out two types of fun. There's type one fun and then there's type two fun. Type one fun is the pure fun type of fun, like playing a video game or whatever. But type two fun is the fun that sort of fun in hindsight, like running a marathon or like going on a big challenging hike. Those are also fun, but they're like kind of painful in the moment, but they give you this incredible feeling of joy afterwards. And that's this idea of the pleasure pain seesaw tipping in the pain direction so that you get more pleasure afterwards. All right, strategy number two is the rule of avoidance. So we talked about how always having these high dopamine activities like social media or videos or whatever, always having them on increases our tonic levels of dopamine. And so the rule of avoidance is basically to cultivate moments where you are not doing a high dopamine activity and you're ideally slowly phasing out those activities. Now it's worth appreciating that it takes about four weeks to reset our dopamine balance according to Dr. Anna Lemke. And in those four weeks, we need to avoid the addictive behavior altogether if we can. This is the idea of dopamine detoxing. And one of the best ways to do this is to avoid anything that reminds you of the thing that you find addictive. And triggers are things that make us want to go back to using our drug. And the key thing about triggers, whatever they are, is they also release a little bit of dopamine, right? So just thinking about whatever the trigger is that we associate with drug use or just thinking about drug use can already release this anticipatory dopamine, this little mini spike. So for example, if you find yourself scrolling on TikTok too much at night, then you might need to turn off your notifications entirely or just uninstall the app and get rid of notifications so that you don't have any cue or craving to open the app. Now breaking the cycle will take a bit of effort and you're definitely gonna feel worse before you feel better because you'll experience this almost as withdrawal symptoms. And this might include feeling agitated, feeling angry, and sometimes even not being able to sleep. But the idea is that over those four weeks, as we explicitly avoid that behavior or detox from it, we need to learn to enjoy ourselves without relying on those things that release lots of dopamine. Next up, we have the rule of barriers. So avoiding something entirely can be really hard, especially if you feel kind of addicted to it. So another way to help with this is to put up barriers and personal rules. And this is more about creating a healthy balance of these kind of high dopamine behaviors rather than necessarily cutting them out completely. And there are these three types of barriers that Dr. Anna Lemke talks about. There is chronological, geographical, and categorical. Now chronological barriers are time barriers, like limiting the amount of time you spend on social media apps or on your phone or in video games, for example. One thing that I personally do is I use the app Opal, which is a very good distraction blocker, and it blocks all social media apps from 9 p.m. at night all the way through to 9 a.m. in the morning, which means I just don't end up scrolling, whoops, which means I just don't end up scrolling on my phone at nighttime. Now geographical barriers are simply physical barriers, like if you're addicted to chocolate, just not buying the chocolate and putting it in your house in the first place, it's a lot easier to avoid chocolate if there's none in the house. And then categorical barriers is placing rules or limits on yourself for the types of games or the types of activities that you do. So for example, you might put a categorical barrier that you're no longer gonna drink any sugary drinks, for example. And then finally, we come to my favorite one, which is the rule of boredom. So we live in a world where actually being bored is ridiculously rare. You always have your phone with you. There is always something that you could be doing. But the idea behind this strategy is that boredom is something that we should learn to become more comfortable with. What people in recovery from addiction talk about is to some extent having to learn to live with things being a little boring a lot of the time, right? So trying to avoid some of this intensity and thrill seeking and escapism that really is at the core of addictive tendencies. Now, I really like this rule. One thing I often say to myself is if I'm going for a walk in the park or if I'm driving, I will often tell myself the goal here is to be bored. So I don't then put my AirPods in and start listening to an audio book at triple speed or listen to a podcast to watch a YouTube video in the background with YouTube premium, blah, blah, blah. And when boredom is the goal, then it's like, all right, cool. Well, if boredom is the goal, I would just take a stroll in the park and not really think about too much. And ironically, or perhaps expectedly, when I do that, there's a part of the brain called the default mode network that becomes active, we start daydreaming. And then often like a lot of my most creative ideas happen when I am not experiencing like the stimulation of an audio book or a podcast or Instagram or YouTube, all of that fun stuff. And so really for me, after thinking about all of this dopamine stuff, the main takeaway is that there is incredible value in allowing ourselves to appreciate the pleasures of the small things. We don't have to go on that fancy holiday to have fun. We don't have to play those ridiculously addictive video games. We don't have to be always scrolling on social media to feel something. And if we're in that position already, it's not really our fault. It's more like the social media companies are hijacking our minds and attention, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there is definitely stuff that we can do to control our own dopamine levels and to use the phone as a tool rather than as something that controls us. And if you enjoyed this video, then I think you'll get a lot of value out of my book. It's called Feel Good Productivity. It's about how to do more of what matters to you in a way that's actually enjoyable, meaningful and sustainable. And really it's a practical actionable guide on how to enjoy your work a little bit more. Anything boring that you're doing, even though we've got the rule of boredom, you can find ways to make it a little bit more interesting for you. And if you do that, you're more likely to be productive, you're more likely to be creative, you're less likely to be stressed, and you're also gonna have more energy to give to the truly important things in your life. It's available everywhere books are sold. It's translated into like 34 different languages, available all around the world. So you might like to check it out. And if you have already read the book, then Amazon reviews are my love language. So if you enjoyed this video, I would love it if you could please leave a review on Amazon for the book. And if you're struggling with all this dopamine stuff, then chances are you're also probably struggling to focus. And in that case, you might like to check out my three part video series over here, which is all about the actionable philosophies, strategies and tools that you can use to improve your ability to focus. So thank you so much for watching. I hope you got value out of this video and I'll see you hopefully in the next one. Bye bye.