How Dopamine Helps You Keep Going When Things Get Tough

There is a kind of a third kind of secret, there is a secret sauce in this whole mix. And this is kind of what brought me to some, my lab, you know, we do work with typical people but we also do some work with people from David's former community and domestic and foreign special operations who are interested in this process for obvious reasons. How can you leverage the nervous system to build better, longer lasting warriors? It's a really interesting question. And you could do that with brain machine interface, you could do that with, you can imagine doing that with drugs or with, you know, supplementation or nutrition, all of that. But since the nervous system sits at the foundation of any of those, we started to think about this problem and there's actually another element to it which is the reward pathways involving dopamine. So you asked about kids, like why they can learn all day long. So their brain is very different but it still needs some degree of focus and they still need to get their sleep. They still have to obey those two rules of this process. But they engage in something else which is really powerful, which is play. A lot of their learning is through playful exchange, especially with the little kids like in kindergarten and nursery school. And then as they get older, the social dynamics can be kind of harsh but they can also be really pleasurable and fun. So the molecule dopamine is a really misunderstood molecule. We all make it from a location in the back of our brain. And people think of it as like reward, like, oh, I got a bunch of money or I, you know, did a great performance. Dopamine is responsible for that feeling of feeling great. But in addition, dopamine is what's released anytime an animal or human thinks it's on the right path. And that's very subjective. So this is not, and I want to be really clear that this is not positive thinking or, you know, the secret or telling yourself that you're performing well even when you're not. Right. Like if you are a rioter and you break into a courthouse but you feel like you're on the right path, you're going to get a release of dopamine. Heavy release of dopamine. Yeah, even if you're committing a crime and you really probably shouldn't be doing that. Yeah. Mother Nature built these systems, adrenaline, acetylcholine, dopamine, to be very generic in terms of what can activate on purpose. You know, cocaine will cause a tremendous release of dopamine. So will methamphetamine. The problem is it sets a focus on just getting more of that thing. So dopamine is evoked through play. It's evoked through humor. Right. If you've ever just been working like mad or you see this in, you know, team guys know this really well that, you know, because they tell me that you can be in the worst situation and somebody will crack a joke. And all of a sudden it's like you have energy. Now that couldn't have been glycogen. That wasn't because you're ketogenic. It wasn't because you're whatever. That's neural energy. And that neural energy is dopamine. Is that what happens when you hear a great song and you get pumped up? Is that the same thing? Absolutely. And the reason dopamine is so powerful in this process of neural plasticity is that dopamine has the ability to buffer noradrenaline. So that stress that you feel when you're in effort, it's very hard for most people to keep that going. But when you get a, when I say a shot, I mean, internal release of dopamine through humor or through the sense that you're on the right path. Let's take the fight example where it's stressful and you're getting beaten down. All of a sudden you land one or you do something properly and the other guy starts to timber a little bit or shuffle a little bit. You gain a chemical advantage and it comes in two forms. One is it triggers marking of the synapses that likely will change later. We rarely forget the events associated with dopamine for that reason because they signal, oh, whatever's happening now, that was good. And in addition to that, they start pushing back on the level of acetylcholine, excuse me, noradrenaline in the brainstem. And this is crucial because there was a study that came out two years ago, not from my group, that asked, why do we quit? You know, if you set, you know, 800 or even 500 pounds on the bar out there, I can't lift it. So I'm not talking about that kind of quitting. I'm talking about a long run. Why do I quit? If I'm not injured, like what actually causes quitting? When do we decide that something is futile? And it turns out that for every bit of effort, any bit of effort, lifting a glass of water or running up a hill or in a fight, there are little bits of noradrenaline, adrenaline that are released in the brain and body. And there's a counter. There's a cell type which are called glia, which literally means glue in Latin. These cells are paying attention to how much norepinephrine is coming. And if it hits a certain threshold, the brain stops voluntary control over the muscular just says, that's it, I quit. And there are these beautiful experiments where they manipulate the visual environment so that this isn't, they're certain that this isn't lack of muscle fuel, or liver fuel. This is lack of neural fuel. Dopamine pushes back that level of noradrenaline and it gives you more gas. It lets you go further. And you see this through teamwork when you feel like you're supported, when you're in cohesion, humor, play. You know, if you're in serious effort and it's just things are going terribly, maybe I've never done comedy, but you're trying to write a joke and it's just frustrating. And then suddenly you just kind of laugh at how ridiculous the process is. There's a kind of loosening or a lightening and you have more energy. That energy is reductions in epinephrine.