I ask myself in such contexts what influence meditation, mindfulness, and positive psychology might have on the neurochemistry of the brain and, in this case, especially on the essential little helpers that make our emotional spectrum so manifold, wonderful, irresponsible, and prone to lunacy. This is a book I certainly recommend, though it could have been crisper in the early and middle portions.

So let's talk about dopamine. Most people have heard of dopamine, and we hear all the time now about dopamine hits, but actually there's no such thing as a dopamine hit. And actually, the way that your body uses dopamine is to have a baseline level of dopamine, meaning an amount of dopamine that's circulating in your brain and body all the time. And that turns out to be important for how you feel generally, whether or not you're in a good mood, motivated, et cetera. And you also can experience peaks in dopamine above baseline. Now, this has a very specific name in the neurobiology literature, so-called "tonic" and "phasic" release of dopamine. And I'll explain what that means in a couple of minutes. But if you remember nothing else from this episode, please remember this. That when you experience something or you crave something really desirable, really exciting to you, very pleasurable, what happens afterwards is your baseline level of dopamine drops. So these peaks in dopamine, they influence how much dopamine will generally be circulating afterward. Well, it is great, except that by layering together all these things to try and achieve that dopamine release and by getting a big peak in dopamine, you're actually increasing the number of conditions required to achieve pleasure from that activity again. And so there is a form of this where sometimes you do all the things that you love to get the optimal workout. You listen to your favorite music. You go at your favorite time of day. You have your preworkout drink, if that's your thing. You do all the things that give you that best experience of the workout for you. But there's also a version of this where sometimes you don't do the dopamine-enhancing activities. You don't ingest anything to increase your dopamine. You just do the exercise. It's no surprise that if you choose something you genuinely enjoy, you'll be more likely to follow through with it. Plus, fully immersing yourself in one captivating book will give you so much more than speeding through a dozen books while your mind wanders elsewhere. Only when we're fully absorbed can we reach that priceless state of flow: the "optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best." One that you might be wondering about is caffeine. I'm certainly drinking my caffeine today, and I do enjoy caffeine in limited quantities. I drink yerba maté and I drink coffee, and I love it. Does it increase dopamine? Well, a little bit. Caffeine will increase dopamine to some extent, but it is pretty modest compared to the other things that I described. Chocolate, sex, nicotine, cocaine, amphetamine, and so on. However, there's a really interesting paper published in 2015. This is Volkow et al. You can look it up. It's very easy to find. That showed that regular ingestion of caffeine, whether or not it's from coffee or otherwise, increases upregulation of certain dopamine receptors. So caffeine actually makes you able to experience more of dopamine's effects, because as I mentioned before, dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or its release volumetrically, but then it has to bind someplace and trigger those G-protein-coupled receptors, and caffeine increases the number, the density of those G-protein-coupled receptors.

Customer reviews

This is a very interesting book on how just one chemical – Dopamine influences so much of our behaviour. The undue influence Dopamine exerts is amazing considering the fraction the Dopamine circuit occupies in our brains. This is a well written book and very informative as well. If we get clarity on how our brain chemistry works, we can use that understanding to create a life full of healthy, sustainable and truly rewarding relationships and accomplishments, and more effectively avoid the traps of modern existence that are just about to kill us all.

So for anyone that's experienced a real drop in baseline, who has addictive tendencies, whether or not they're behaviors or substances, that is always going to be the path forward is going to be either cold turkey or through some sort of tapering to limit interactions with what would otherwise be the dopamine-evoking behavior or substance. So let's talk about the optimal way to engage in activities, or to consume things, that evoke dopamine. And by no means am I encouraging people to take drugs of abuse. I would not do that, I am not doing that, but some of the things on these lists of dopamine-evoking activities are things like chocolate, coffee — even if it's indirect; sex and reproduction, provided it's healthy, consensual, context-appropriate, age-appropriate, species-appropriate, of course, is central to our evolution and progression as a species.

The Hands that Pull – Reward prediction errors and variable reward schedules

Again, how much dopamine you experience from something depends on your baseline level of dopamine when you arrive there and your previous dopamine peaks. That's super important to understand, and it's completely neglected by the general language of dopamine hits. This is why when you repeatedly engage in something that you enjoy, your threshold for enjoyment goes up and up and up. So I want to talk about that process, and I want to explain how that process works because if you understand that process and you understand some of these schedules and kinetics, as we call them, around dopamine, you'll be in a terrific position to use any dopamine-enhancing tools that you decide to use. You'll be in an excellent position to modulate and control your own dopamine release for optimal motivation and drive. And this is very important. How satisfying or exciting or pleasureful a given experience is doesn't just depend on the height of that peak. It depends on the height of that peak relative to the baseline. So if you increase the baseline and you increase the peak, you're not going to achieve more and more pleasure from things. I'll talk about how to leverage this information in a little bit, but just increasing your dopamine, yes, it will make you excited for all things. It will make you feel very motivated, but it will also make that motivation very short-lived. So there's a better way to increase your dopamine. There's a better way to optimize this peak-to-baseline ratio.