415. The psychology of dopamine

00:00:04
Speaker 1: Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here. Back for another episode as we break down the psychology of our twenties. Today, I'm back with another bonus episode. I know, two in how long has it been? Two in two weeks? What is that all about? But I thought, why not? It's my podcast and I want to talk about this topic because I think it is the perfect candidate for some debunking and some fact checking, which you guys know we love to do on these like smaller episodes, our bonus episodes for those of you who may not No, basically just bite size twenty minute pps where we break down a popular psychology term, psychology concept that is generally quite misunderstood, but which you know, we don't have all the time in the world to do a full episode on it, but I still feel like having the right information about it is important, and today we have possibly our biggest concept yet in this mini series we are talking about the psychology of dopamine. Yeah, dopamine. If there was like a pop star, celebrity, royal figure amongst neurotransmitters, or even like amongst psychology concepts, it would be dopamine. I genuinely think I've had this discussion that if you asked somebody to name a psychology term or a psychology concept like, dopamine would be up there with one that a lot of people would probably say or would probably know, alongside things like attachment style or like Pavlov studies. It's just dopamine is one of those terms that, like the moment you.

00:02:06
Speaker 2: Mention it, it gives you an air of legitimacy. It gives whatever you're saying a sense of importance and that it's factual. You know this thing releases dopamine. Therefore, it must be addictive. It must be motivational. It must influence your behavior. It must be good for you, bad for you. It might end up controlling you.

00:02:24
Speaker 1: The thing is, what I've come to realize is that our fundamental and very basic understanding of dopamine is wrong. Maybe not wrong. It's simplistic, It lacks a lot of detail. Dopamine is traditionally seen as the thing that makes us happy and brings us pleasure. It's why we like chocolate, it's why we like sex, drugs, gambling, all those things. But it is much much more layer than that. And I think when you actually understand when dopamine is released in your brain why, and its role in motivation, in anticipation, movement, how it works differently in different areas of the brain and of the body, you can actually use the term properly and use it in reference to your own brain and behavior accurately. So let's get into it. I love starting these episodes with a bit of history. I feel like if I was ever going to do another podcast, it would definitely be on the history of psychology or like the scientific history of certain concepts that we take for granted for because it is so fascinating and dopamine is no different. The history behind this is just interesting. The man who allegedly first pinpointed this fantastic little neurochemical or neurotransmitter and its role in the brain what was a Swedish man called Arvid Carlson. He actually went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in synthesizing dopamine, to treat Parkinson's, to treat depression, to treat a post stroke fatigue, to name a few things. But here's the secret history for you. Whilst he may have gotten all of the credit, and he definitely did do some fantastic, incredible work in his lifetime, the first person to actually demonstrate the presence of dopamine in the brain was a woman. Her name was Catherine Montague. She published her findings, her findings that basically were like, dopamine is real.

00:04:29
Speaker 3: I have found it here. It is.

00:04:31
Speaker 1: She published those findings six months before Carson did, and you know, she wrote for the first time conclusively about this tiny chemical that is only produced by zero point zero zero zero zero zero five percent of all brain cells, but seemingly has an excessive influence on behavior. Dopamine. Like before Catherine's research, because let's give her the credit here, was kind of like a bigfoot lockness monster kind of mystery to the psychology and neuroscience community, like maybe a little bit more serious, Like they knew it existed, they knew there was some interaction with other hormones like adrenaline that was going on, but it was only in the fifties that the mystery and the role of dopamine in the central nervous system was revealed, and it's gone on to be Probably this is crazy to say, but like the most famous neurotransmitter now, when the release of dopamine is triggered, it acts really really fast, and it acts on different zone sites across the brain and body to make us do things that we think are helpful. And the reason there is such a fuss around dopamine is because it drives so many of our behaviors as humans, even though our body and our brain doesn't necessarily make that much of it. This is where we have to tackle I think the first big myth about the psychology of dopamine, and that is that dopamine is what makes you happy. It is the pleasure hormone, It is the pleasure neurochemical. This idea first emerged from some really early research back in the seventies and eighties that showed dopamine producing regions and dopamine neurons lighting up in response to the promise of reward, promise being the key word. This kind of led the researchers who were in charge of the study to prematurely assume that this meant that it dopamine was why certain things felt good and therefore why we felt good and therefore played a big role in our happiness. This we now know is actually false. It isn't what makes us feel pleasure. It's what allows us to forecast or predict or imagine how good pleasure can and will feel, therefore making us chase after it. Its role is in craving and they're anticipating it is the do more of that chemical. As one article from The New Philosopher puts it, dopamine spikes when we anticipate something exciting or pleasurable happening, and it dips when the experience comes about. So dopamine it's really present. It happens in the lead up to something, and that is why it's actually critical, not for happiness, but for motivation.

00:07:26
Speaker 3: Rats, for example, who have.

00:07:27
Speaker 1: Depleted dopamine levels don't work as hard to get food. They just can't be bothered compared to normal rats. Super high dopinogenic people like people who have a lot of dopamine, on the other hand, are the types who you meet who are forever planning. They have a new business and new scheme, a new partner, and they've always got something that they want to do. They're never at rest, They're always seeking the next thing. They are living from one dopamine high to the next. Now, are those people necessarily happier.

00:07:58
Speaker 3: Than most people?

00:07:59
Speaker 1: Though? No, even though they have more dopamine per se, or we assume they do, the studies would say they do. It's seratonin that gives us that stable mood, and it's dopamine that pushes us to achieve and gain and have things that we think will give us happiness, that we think will give us stability, but are probably quite shallow because they only work to make us want more and more and more, and to get slight reward and to experience the high of anticipation followed by the crash. I think a lot of us are familiar with when we obtain the thing, we obtain the object of our desire and we find that it's actually not that satisfying. The best way I like to describe this, or at least imagine this for myself, is shopping. Particularly people who really covet an item, who are like really pursuing a specific peace or a specific watch, or they always buying clothes, thinking this will be the thing that makes them happy to find that when they have it in their possession, they've bought it, They've got it.

00:09:04
Speaker 3: Nothing much about.

00:09:05
Speaker 1: Their baseline happiness changes because they're confusing a dopamine hit, which is meant to be motivational with long term contentment. Dopamine is short.

00:09:15
Speaker 3: Term, not long term.

00:09:18
Speaker 1: This is why dopamine is heavily implicated in literature and in research around addiction. It drives us to fulfill an immediate desire, only to fulfill our expectations, meaning that it will keep leading us back to drugs, back to gambling, back to nicotine, sugary food, poor financial decisions, whatever your vice is, because it knows these are the fastest pathways to anticipation fulfillment. There's an amazing two thousand and five study that discusses this, and it talks about how dopamine actually also has a secondary role in attention, meaning people with disrupt to dopamine levels or systems find it hard to physically look away, physically ignore, or avoid what they desire. Hence why this neurochemical is so powerful in your addiction and getting cooked to things Because the things that it's leading us back to the things that are going to give us immediate reward, meaning that the anticipation is going to be greater, meaning that this object is going to be more motivational. So that's really what's happening now. Of course, when we're depressed, when we're in a rut, when we're just like stuck and pessimistic about life, a dopamine deficiency definitely may play into this because we can't motivate ourselves to do or to want anything, including the things we know may help. We can't motivate ourselves to strive. We don't have any ambition, we don't have any vision that we could change, that life could get better.

00:10:51
Speaker 3: So it does.

00:10:52
Speaker 1: Definitely play a role in unhappiness in that it if we don't have enough dopamine, right, if our dopamine levels are depleted, it's going to feel difficult to want, want, or desire or anticipate anything. But a lack of dopamine alone is not why we are unhappy. On a deep level. Dopamine is not it's not about it's not the happiness hormone. It's not the happiness chemical. It's the motivational chemical. So here's the second function that dopamine is heavily responsible for and it's probably one you don't hear much about online or in discussions about dopamine like on TikTok or Instagram or wherever. It's movement. Dopamine acts on the basil ganglia again deep in our brain. Deep in our brain, that's where a lot of our dopamine producing cells are. Dopamine acts on the basil ganglia to stimulate movement, to help us direct our muscles, to control our nerve cells our body. The reason we know it's so vital just for our body's ability to move itself is because of diseases like Parkinson's, the progressive neurological disorder.

00:12:00
Speaker 3: Probably know it from Michael J. Fox.

00:12:02
Speaker 1: It causes tremor's, muscle stiffness, confusion. Dopamine and Parkinson's have a long history, and we now know that a lot of the reason why the park Parkinson's symptoms show up is because of a lack of dopamine. Basically, Parkinson's is caused by the progressive death of dopamine producing cells in the substantia niagra deep in the brain. Literally, the cells that could produce this vital chemical die and the reason that we don't know. We don't know why that happens, like they have some there's all.

00:12:39
Speaker 3: These theories, right.

00:12:41
Speaker 1: Genetics obviously plays a big role in it. Exposure to certain chemicals also, but.

00:12:46
Speaker 3: We don't really know why.

00:12:48
Speaker 1: It's just those cells that die off, and when they do, it means that less dopamine is available, and that seems to be directly correlated to this reduction in the ability to control deliberate or uncutch and conscious movement to just get our body to do what we wanted to do. People with Parkinson's will talk about wanting like say, for example, you have like a I don't know, like a cup of a cup of juice, I don't know, a cup of tea in front of you, and you want to reach out and grab it and take a sit. People with Parkinson's will talk about sitting there having the thought, willing, their willing, begging their arm to just simply do like it's so easy, just move, just move, grab grab the grab the cup, and they it just doesn't work. And what's happening is that the command gets stuck in the brain because there aren't enough of those little dopamine messages to shoot the message down and get our body to comply. So when people talk about dopamine and only talk about it and it's you know, in reference to happiness and pleasure, they miss this vital element. And we're going to talk a little bit more about why that's so important in a second. But the final big thing dopamine is implicated in is learning, which makes sense because it is what drives us to seek out novelty and seek out newness because of the anticipation of excitement, rewards, stimulation, new experiences. It is especially linked to the formation of emotional memories. This was indicated by a twenty twenty one study where they talked about how.

00:14:25
Speaker 3: Dopamine. Oh my god, what was the study about.

00:14:28
Speaker 1: Again, It's basically emotional music triggered dopamine and actually meant that we could memorize lyrics better because of that emotional link. There was also another paper i think published the same year in Molecular Psychiatry that talks about how dopamine is linked to stronger fear memories, which is funny because our traditional understanding of dopamine is this happy hormone.

00:14:51
Speaker 3: You wouldn't think of.

00:14:51
Speaker 1: It as having a role in encoding how we think of fear and things that have hurt us and frightened us and yet terrified us in the past. So this is what we miss when we see dopamine purely through the pleasure lens. The other thing that happens is that a misunderstanding about dopamine can mean that we how do I say this like? It can be used for pseudo scientific purposes. Because dopamine is such like a flashy catch word, any random person can pop it on an Instagram slide, or pop it in a video, or put it next in a marketing campaign and make us believe that what they are saying is true because dopamine.

00:15:36
Speaker 3: Has such a reputation. Right.

00:15:39
Speaker 1: The biggest example of this is, or the biggest example of ways that dopamine can become like the ways that dopamine can become pseudoscientific and people can talk about it in an incorrect way is dopamine detoxes. What is a dopamine detox if you haven't.

00:15:57
Speaker 3: Heard about it?

00:15:58
Speaker 1: Basically, it is a practice been popularized in the last ten years. It was firstly introduced by this man named doctor Cameron's SAPA I think sypath doctor Cameron. I'll call him doctor Cameron, and the premise is that you abstain from easy dopamine activities with the hopes of reducing your baseline sensitivity to dopamine so that you feel rewarded by less. Basically, if you're addicted to sugar, let's say, artificial sugar, going days without artificial sugar, testing your self control such that when you have artificial sugar again just a little bit feels as amazing as when you used to have a lot of it. That is the premise of a dopamine detox. You switch switched artificial sugar with dopamine. The idea is we can reset our brain and therefore certain compulsive behaviors by essentially starving our brain of easy dopamine. Now I'm going to call myself out here, and I'm going to say I have mentioned dopamine detoxes on the podcast before in a very positive light, specifically with regards to our smartphones. I read a few studies about how interrupting your brain's and media anticipation of dopamine when you pick up your phone it's like essential for breaking an addictive loop. And I have talked about it, but I've recently dug a little bit further into it. And it's not that experts are necessarily opposed to these kind of like abstinate stints. They just really disagree with the idea of the use of the term detox dopamine. Detox detoxifying dopamine isn't a toxin. It's not something your body needs to be rid of in order to build back.

00:17:45
Speaker 3: Up a purer or healthier reserve.

00:17:48
Speaker 1: As one Harvard article as well in twenty twenty put it, you also can't fast from a naturally occurring brain chemical like you if we could deliberately deplete dopamine, we know the outcome of that Parkinson's Literally, that is what a lack of dopamine. That is what a fast depletion of dopamine does, Do you know what I mean? So it's you actually don't want that, You don't want your brain to be without it. Dopamine definitely does rise in response to rewards. The availability of dopamine increases with anticipation and the anticipation of pleasurable activities. But there's no way that you can go into your brain or you can directly influence the level of dopamine available in your brain through behavioral choices. Other than like maybe maybe diet, but only then in terms of like increasing levels and the availability and the health.

00:18:50
Speaker 3: Of your own brain.

00:18:52
Speaker 1: What's really happening is not with dopamine detoxes. Is not that you're increasing sensitivity. It's not that you are literally reducing dopamine levels, because that's impossible unless you have a neurodegenerative disease. It's that you're practicing mindfulness. That is why dopamine detoxes work. Again, not that they're the right term, but that's why the premise behind them works. A dopamine fast is basically just reasserting control over behaviors that have become and manageable because you're finally paying attention to the ways that they become detrimental to your life and the self control that you may or may not be able to have over them. The results we see of needing less to feel a similar level of reward or gaining control over certain habits is not the depletion or the It's not that you are asserting control over dopamine. It's a completely different psychological system.

00:19:48
Speaker 3: What you're really what's really.

00:19:49
Speaker 1: Happening and what you're really experiencing, is executive function and executive control that interrupts a previously enforced loop behavioral. Essentially, your brain has learned a very efficient cycle of Q craving action reward. You know, if you feel slightly uncomfortable, if you feel bored, anxious, understimulated, and you reach for your phone and you receive the reward of that behavior. Over time, the loop becomes automatic. Being on my phone makes me happy.

00:20:23
Speaker 3: So I should do it more.

00:20:25
Speaker 1: What a dopamine detox actually does is not you know, by abstaining, you're not actually depleting dopamine levels. What it does is just insert conscious awareness back into the equation. Instead of immediately obeying the craving, you pause, you observe it, you tolerate it. And every time you do that, you strengthen the brain systems involved in self regulation and you weaken the automatic reinforcement cycle that was running unchecked before. So that's really what's happening in these detoxes. This is what's happening when we talk about being able to control dopamine, and that is the true psychology behind dopamine that we get wrong. More dopamine doesn't make you happier. Something triggering dopamine doesn't mean it will become addictive. The reason certain drugs or activities are addictive isn't because they spike dopamine and give us something that's only a small part of it. It's often because they take away or mask a different, more unpleasant sensation, and so our body has learned that the presence of this thing makes us feel better. Dopamine's role in that is that it just helps you learn that association. It's not responsible for the end feeling, and it's definitely not something that you can detox control. And dopamine certainly isn't this bad addictive thing that you need to avoid. What we can take from this, I think, my God, look at me, I'm soor what we can take from this? I sound like a lecturer, But what we can take from this is just really important shift in how we understand motivation.

00:22:03
Speaker 3: Most of us.

00:22:04
Speaker 1: Assume that we are driven by the reward itself, the promotion, the text back, the dopamine hit from social media, from impulse shopping, from dessert achievement. But psychology and euroscience show that what actually drives behavior far more powerfully is the anticipation of the reward. It is the possibility of pleasure, not always the pleasure itself that keeps us moving, and this knowing this can change how we motivate ourselves. If anticipation is what energizes you or energizes us, then creating small moments of reward is better than large, massive ones. Goals work better when they feel just within reach. Breaking down tasks and giving yourself micro rewards along the way is going to improve your motivation to carry through. Habits become easier when there's some sense of emotional payoff and there's some anticipation attached to their achievement. That is how we can use this new understanding of dopamine to actually apply principles of reward and motivation and anticipation to our lives and just get more stuff done.

00:23:12
Speaker 3: So there you go.

00:23:12
Speaker 1: That is the end of our little mini bonus episode on the psychology or the debunked psychology of dopamine. I hope that you've enjoyed it. I hope that it's given you some fun facts to share at the dinner table or with your friends. I think I said this in our last episode, but now you can be that annoying person who like corrects people when they use the word dopamine wrong. It's satisfying the first time, and then you start to realize that your people don't like you as much. But I just think it's good for our own self knowledge and our own self awareness. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Remember we have a bunch more episodes just like this, debunking popular psychology myths. We did one last week on the myth of the frontal lobe developing at twenty five. If you want more fun history behind psychological principles, that is an amazing one to listen to. The link between here's a spoiler. We talk about Leonardo DiCaprio, we talk about the death penalty, and we talk about pseudoscience, So if you want to understand how all of those are linked up, great episode for you to listen to. Of course, all of our regular episodes are now on Netflix if you want to watch. Not this one because this is just an audio episode for my og audio listeners, but any number of our other episodes are on Netflix if you ifould prefer to watch video podcasts. What else have we got for you, substack, We've got Instagram. All of the links will be down below, But until next time.

00:24:41
Speaker 3: Thank you for listening.

00:24:43
Speaker 1: Be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself, and we will talk very very soon.