NEUROSCIENTIST: Make Your Life Exciting Again - DO THIS

In a previous conversation you said something that really came to mind and that is that many people who become addicted to certain things have the feeling that normal

life

is not interesting enough. I think

life

for humans has always been hard, but I think it's harder now in an unprecedented way and I think the way life is really hard now is that it's actually very boring and the reason why What's boring is because all our survival needs are covered. I mean, we don't even have to. leave our homes to satisfy every physical need you know, as long as you have a certain level of financial well-being if we look at free time, for example, people without a high school education have 42 percent more free time than people with a college degree my point here is that life is hard now in

this

really weird way where we don't really have anything to do, so we're all forced to invent things, you know, whether it's being a scientist or be an Olympic athlete or, you know, climb Mount Everest and people really vary in their need for friction and some people need a lot more than others and if they don't have it they feel really unhappy and I think a lot of the people that I see with addiction and other forms of mental illness are people who need more friction, as if they are unhappy, not necessarily because there is something wrong with their brain, but because their brain is not suitable for

this

world.

What's so widespread in our narrative now is like finding

your

passion, you know, and in some ways that's good because it has people in the world looking for it, but in some ways it can also be misleading in the sense that I think people He is not fully aware that the world is difficult. place and that life is hard and it's like we're all making it up to each other. One of the most significant findings in neuroscience in the last 75 years is that pleasure and pain are located together, meaning the same parts of the brain. that process pleasure also process pain and function as a balance, so when we feel pleasure, our balance leans in one direction, when we feel pain, it leans in the opposite direction and one of the primary rules that govern this balance is you want to stay level so you don't want to stay too long tilted towards pleasure or pain and with any deviation from neutrality the brain will work very hard to restore a level of balance or what scientists call homeostasis and the way in which the brain does it is with any stimulus towards one. side there will be a tip in equal and opposite amount to the other side it's like you have the main laws of physics, yeah right, so I like to watch YouTube videos when I watch YouTube videos of American Idol, you know, it leans towards the pleasure side and then when I stop watching I have a right dip which is a tip to the equal and opposite amount on the other side and that's that moment of wanting to watch one more YouTube video and here's really the key if I keep tipping the taste

again

. and over and over

again

, ultimately, I have so much on the pain side that I have essentially reset my brain to what we call an anhedonic or joyless state, which is a dopamine deficit state that the way the pain can become The main factor is that I have indulged so much in these high reward behaviors or substances that my brain has had to compensate by regulating my own dopamine, so that even when I am not using that drug, I have a dopamine deficit.

State that is similar to clinical depression. I have anxiety, irritability, insomnia, dysphoria, and a lot of mental worry about using or getting the drug again, and that's the piece there, the one-time use that passes easily, but it's the chronic use that can then re-establish itself. really our dopamine thresholds and then nothing is pleasurable so I think that's really what I want people to tune into and become aware of because once you tune in you can see a lot of it and then when you start to see it. I think it gives people a kind of way to imagine what they're experiencing on a neurobiological level and understand it and, in that understanding, gain some mastery over it, which is really what it's all about.