Episode 399: How Genes, Biomarkers, and Epigenetics Shape Addiction with Dr. Evelyn Higgins (Rebroadcast)

0:00Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Hey everyone, Dwayne here. Before we get into today's episode, I want to take a minute and welcome our new sponsor, Wired for Addiction. I am so excited about this partnership. Dr. Evelyn Higgins and her team are doing some of the most important work I've seen in the recovery space, and I genuinely believe in what they're building. Now, the conversation you're about to hear with Dr. Higgins was one of the most powerful we've ever done on this show. So many of you reached out after it first aired, and honestly, it's one that has stayed with me as well. That's why we're replaying it today, because the science she walks us through genuinely changes the way you understand addiction, recovery, and why some people stay stuck no matter how hard they try.

0:44Dr. Evelyn Higgins: If this conversation speaks to you or someone you love, Dr. Higgins and her team put together a free guide for you. It's called The Biology of Addiction 10 Core Biomarkers, and you can download it at theaddictedmind.com forward slash wired. That's theaddictedmind.com forward slash wired. All right, here's my conversation with Dr. Evelyn Higgins.

1:11Hello, everyone.

1:13Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Welcome to another episode of the Addicted Mind podcast. I'm so glad you're here today. My name is Dwayne Osterlin, and I'm your host. And today we have a awesome guest, Dr. Evelyn Higgins. She is the chief executive officer and inventor of the patent pending panel utilized by Wired for Addiction. She is a recognized international expert in the epidemiology of addiction. She is a dual diplomat of the American College of Addictionology and Compulsive Disorders and diplomat of the American Board of Disability Analysis specializing in pain management. With 34 years in clinical practice, Dr. Higgins has designated over 16 years to research and development in the science of addiction recovery.

2:03Dr. Evelyn Higgins: And in 2021, she was the nominee for Modern Healthcare's Top 25 Innovators in Healthcare. Dr. Kiggins finds herself at the nexus of epigenetics, neuroscience, and addiction. So in this episode, we're going to talk about genes, biomarkers, how they influence our behavior, how they play out in addiction, and why knowing about this part of ourselves is so important in getting recovery and avoiding addiction in the first place. So in this episode, Dr. Higgins shares some of her own personal story and what motivated her to do this work and do this research and understand addiction in the first place.

2:48Dr. Evelyn Higgins: I think you're really going to enjoy it and get a lot out of it. But before we start, If you are getting a lot out of The Addicted Mind, please rate and review us wherever you get your podcast. That really does help the podcast get a lot of exposure and helps people find the podcast. I'd really appreciate it. It means a lot to me. And if you want to continue the conversation online, join our Facebook group. Just go to Facebook and type in The Addicted Mind Podcast. Click join. All right. Stay tuned for this episode.

3:18Dr. Evelyn Higgins: All right, everyone. Welcome to The Addicted Mind Podcast. My guest today is Evelyn Higgins, and we're going to talk about biomarkers in addiction, genetics, and the roles that plays in how addiction manifests itself. But first, Evelyn, you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you and maybe a little bit about your story of getting into this work and wanting to understand this. Sure.

3:46The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: So I was practicing in pain management, started 34 years ago in a rural area. And I was seeing a lot of people with the try this, try that method of getting better. Right. There was no clear, delineated way that was happening. And then 20 years after that, I'm practicing in an urban area and we're still using the same model. Right. So that didn't make sense to me. I'm seeing we're behind on using technology in this area of health care. And it was kind of a why. Personally, the story gets even deeper than that. I married an alcoholic and we had a child together. about a year after my daughter our daughter is born we find out that he's adopted this was never

4:37Dr. Evelyn Higgins: told to me and or him well i'm seeing this behavior and in in reality he was addicted to

4:45The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: more than just alcohol but that was his main source of trying to get that fix those dopamine

4:51Dr. Evelyn Higgins: receptors we now know about right right right maybe back at the time we didn't quite understand that all the way.

4:57The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Exactly. I needed answers to why this is happening. I'm walking on eggshells every day, not know who's showing up that minute, that hour. And I'm in the healthcare field. You know, like, what are we doing here? That made me then go because I had a child. And I was the parent, I was responsible. You know, I'm like, I need a lot of pressure. Sure, sure. I'm seeing this behavior manifest, and I know what's happening, but I'm like, well, do we have a genetic link here? What are my concerns? There is modeling behavior after what you see, and then there's nature and nurture. So I studied and became dual diplomat, addiction compulsive disorders.

5:43The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: My husband has since passed. He died in early 40s. And I just kind of did the rest of my work to figure out what was the biological relationship to this addiction. Obviously, we have lifestyle choices, but was there something within the physiology that needed to be looked at? And that kind of became...

6:07Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Something in our bodies that really drive this behavior beyond just, like you said, I mean, we know trauma and we know things like that definitely impact whether addiction is going to play out in your life or not. But you're looking at these biomarkers. And then I'm just going back a little bit. You also said you're in the pain management field or you were in the pain management field, which I kind of feel like those things are really related.

6:31The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: They are. Totally. You know, you look at someone who becomes addicted to whatever the substance is. It's either trying to self-medicate a diagnosed condition, an undiagnosed condition, or a trauma, one, two, or all three. Right? Right. So when someone is constantly in pain and reaching out and we're just doing a try this, try that, that doesn't make sense. We're in 2023. We should be using all we have to advance this area of health care as well. And it's almost like we stopped in like 1980. And we just keep on doing the same things, expecting different results. As we both know, that's the definition of insanity.

7:14The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: and kind of there's an inequity in this area.

7:20Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Well, you see that in addiction treatment in general, like you're saying. I mean, you're doing the same model over and over for the last 50 years and kind of not getting much better results. And when we start to really look at the outcomes, we're like, wow, this maybe isn't working as great as we thought.

7:38The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Correct. And if we see somebody go to treatment once, twice, three times, I mean, I've had people in double digits and more. It's because, you know, you learn the tools. We consider addiction a biopsychosocial model, but we don't really look at the bio part of it. You know, it's retraining the brain as far as behavior goes. But when you see someone white knuckling their sobriety, that's because we never looked at the physiology. And that's a tough way to go through life.

8:12Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Yeah, absolutely. And I would imagine your experience, you witnessed that.

8:17The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: On a daily basis. I witnessed it on a daily basis. And then, like I said, having a child, that's kind of like, okay, what part of this do I need to be concerned about?

8:28Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Yeah. So let's jump in and start to talk about some of these things that you started to see when we look at the biology part of it.

8:37The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Sure. So I started with looking at neurotransmitters and hormones and seeing what the relationships were there. You know, when we see somebody that's been on an SSRI drug for 10, 15, 20 plus years, first off, SSRI drugs were not meant to be long term. They were for an acute situation. We've now gotten to a lifestyle, you know, and I am not anti-pharmaceutical whatsoever. There's a time when it should be used. It saves lives. But we tend to abuse them in this country. We really do. Right.

9:11Dr. Evelyn Higgins: So people are on these SSRIs just for years.

9:15The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Absolutely. And then I would do labs on these people and say, you've been on an SSRI drug for 15 years. Your serotonin is in the tank. Obviously, that wasn't the problem. But we were diagnosing someone based on vocabulary. And what if my vocabulary is not your vocabulary? Right.

9:36Dr. Evelyn Higgins: You don't have a clear picture of that.

9:38The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Exactly. Where do we end up with that? So we use objective biomarkers, and that was the first level. And then in end of 2014, beginning of 2015, the technology became available to look at what are called SNPs, or single nucleotide polymorphisms. Don't want to get too sciencey here because people will stop listening. What that basically means is an error in genetic coding. So we can now look at those things. Right.

10:07Dr. Evelyn Higgins: So we can start to see these things in the code itself.

10:11The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Exactly. That's 2015. That's recent history for a multitude of reasons. One, to have the science get disseminated to clinicians takes time. Right. And then for people to learn to think a new way, as we both know, takes time. Right? And then we were involved with COVID. So that became everything that we talked about. And this kind of was on the back burner. So in the patent-pended panel that we created, we included the SNPs in there. Because if there's an error in genetic coding, we have to say, okay, what are we going to do with this? Probably the most exciting part of science today, epigenetics.

10:53All right?

10:54Dr. Evelyn Higgins: So let's talk about what that is, what that means for people out there who don't know.

10:59The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: So with epigenetics, we now know that here's your DNA. You're born with it. Boom. That's your cards. Play them out. But when we have stressors from the environment within our life, they can turn on or turn off those particular SNPs, right? Those genes.

11:18Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Right, those pieces of genes that we have. Right, exactly.

11:23The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: So what does that do? That creates what we call aberrant behavior. What's aberrant behavior? Things like impulse control, risk-taking, addiction, anxiety, depression. That's the model of an addict.

11:41Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Right, yeah, absolutely. So what I hear you saying is that we may have these things in our genetic code, these snippets that may not be functioning or in a way that's optimal and our maybe our lifestyle our environment can turn on or turn off these snippets of code then that impacts our behavior that impacts how we show up in the world whether you know all of a sudden this thing gets turned on and maybe we're producing a different hormone that promotes more anxiety tell me if i'm wrong I'm just trying to make sure I understand.

12:18The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: No, you're spot on.

12:19Dr. Evelyn Higgins: And then now we have anxiety. Now we've got to do something about the anxiety, but it's turned on from this gene or that's a piece of it. And now that's influencing our behavior and maybe influencing our addictive behavior.

12:33The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Correct. And people would even say, you know, I've never seen my friend, loved one, family member act this way. How come for 30 years they never acted this way and all of a sudden they did? Well, let's look at what's happened in that history prior to where the addiction started. There were stressors from the outside that changed those steps. Right. Turn them on, turn them off to where we then saw that behavior. Right.

13:03Dr. Evelyn Higgins: So having this piece of information is a big chunk of the puzzle. And I hear what you're saying is that if we're only just treating it from this behavioral perspective and we're not taking into this biological component, we're kind of fighting against our own biology.

13:22The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Exactly. White knuckling it through life, right? We've all seen people who are sober, yet they are angry as can be every single day of their life because their physiology still hasn't been optimized. And that's a hard way to go through life.

13:36Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Right. So you started to find all these markers. Let's talk about a few of them that might be common for individuals out there who are struggling. What are some of the things that you see? Sure.

13:49The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: So we look at some of the neuropsych genes. We look at some of the detoxification or something called autophagy. Autophagy was only discovered in 2017. a Japanese physician won the Nobel Prize for discovering this particular gene. We look at that too. That's kind of the garbage man of your cells. But if you have these neuropsych genes, and you've got positive findings within those, and we've got all these other issues creating havoc within your body, you bring in the stressors from the outside, we're going to turn those genes on and we're going to see aberrant behavior. Example, one of the genes, COMT gene, catecholamine methyltransferase.

14:33The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: That's somebody that sees the world as the glass is half empty, right?

14:37Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Right. From a gene. That's pretty amazing.

14:40The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: From a gene. Dwayne, the really cool part of this is you go over someone's labs with them and they are blown away because they could tell me a completely different story about who they are and play Let's Stumper. And I'm going to say, okay, objective findings, boom, ba-da-boom, ba-da-boom, ba-da-boom, this is what's going on, you experience this, you experience that, they're like, oh my goodness, can't believe, like to a T, I'm like, right, because this is subjective information, this isn't us, these are those vocabulary words, and, you know, to go back to saying with addictions, you know, we were looking at the behavior modification aspects, that's still equally as important, right?

15:22Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Yeah, absolutely, Yeah.

15:23The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: That's what makes this such a complex disease. Because there's so much to it.

15:28Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Yeah, it adds to that complexity. But what you're making me really think about is this intersection of how our biology and behavior come together. And I would also say our tendency, and maybe this is our history of making addiction a moral failing. You know, this intersection here, like really being able to understand that we are more than just our choices. There's stuff going on here that is out of our free will, if you want to say that.

16:00The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Exactly. And thank you for bringing up that point, because I did a TEDx talk and I say that in there. Addiction is not a moral flaw. No one wakes up that day wanting to lose their family, their friends, their job, their home. Nobody.

16:15Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Right. That's where you find yourself.

16:17The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: It has nothing to do with morality at all. It's a disease.

16:22Dr. Evelyn Higgins: yeah and you know working in this field and seeing that really that piece of it i i can believe that so deeply because no one chooses this openly i mean it you know you why you wouldn't want to it's so painful and there's so much hurt and suffering that comes from it that that is that's so clear to me right but you know a lot of people that aren't doing this work or don't understand addiction or don't see it from this perspective, it's easy to jump to, well, they're just making bad choices.

16:58The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Right. You can throw stones easily. You could say, well, somebody has diabetes. We don't say to them, why are you so weak? But if someone struggles with addiction, we're like, why can't you just get over it? Why are you so weak? Why do you make those decisions? That's where all this comes from. Decision making comes from this.

17:16Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Right. And that's kind of a paradigm shift in thinking about how we operate in the world and how we exist in the world. And in some ways, I think that can be really uncomfortable, too, to think in that way, because it says there are some things I don't necessarily have total control over. Right. And that can be disconcerting.

17:40The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Absolutely. You know, it's even how we see the world, how we perceive the world. You know, if you see everybody as a bad guy, that's what's going on. That's the messages that we're getting. So absolutely, you nailed it, Duane. You put all this together.

17:57Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Well, thank you. Well, I want to jump into another part because so we get this information. We see it. We start to go, oh, wow. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, this makes sense to me. What do I do with it? Do I have any power to make any change here? Sure.

18:16The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: So the first step is just getting the objective information. Where do we have the problems? What's working less than optimally within you? Because 7.5 billion people on Earth, 7.5 billion different sets of DNA, yet we treat everybody as if they're all the same. I mean, I could go on about that forever, too. But it's OK. We've got this information. This is what your makeup is. What do we need to do? We look at the biochemical pathways and we say, where are we less than optimal? What do we need to do to get to the next step? Example, serotonin. The last step of the serotonin pathway is melatonin.

18:55The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Someone's not sleeping at night. They're also a depressed person. Right. It's because we don't have any of those steps going along the way. So that's what we do. We get the biomarkers. We say, okay, let's look at these pathways. Here's where we're less than optimal. Here's what we have to support. We use a combination of nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, whatever we need for that individual because everybody is different. We look at those SNPs, those polymorphisms, and say, how do we have to support those? That's your DNA. That's going to remain the same. However, we can support them so we don't have the aberrant behavior as a result of it.

19:35Dr. Evelyn Higgins: And is this where epigenetics comes in, where you can influence the gene expression by changing some of the things in your environment or what you consume or what you do, like exercise or meditation or eating something different even?

19:54The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Absolutely. Yep, that's all part of it. All part of it. what you put into your body and your mind, whether it be thoughts, emotions, or actual food, exercise, it's all what we're bringing in to us, what we're allowing to come into us.

20:14Dr. Evelyn Higgins: And that's really, I think, going back to like, giving some hope here, is that we have the power to change that. We have the power to change how we respond to this new knowledge that we can get.

20:28The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Absolutely. I can't tell you the amount of people that when I go over lab results actually cry and say, I'm not crazy and use that word. I cannot. We just have to, there's some things that we have to tweak. And that, talk about being a game changer of someone's life, that's going to make everything better because as you use the word hope for the first time, you have hope that this can actually end differently. That's a beautiful thing.

20:59Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Yeah, that you have some power here. So what are some of the common genetic markers that you see with addiction? And then what I also want to talk about too, and I think you had mentioned this in your TED talk is younger people getting this information before the expression happens. So I want to talk about two of those things as well.

21:24The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Okay, that's the sweet spot. I'll go to the first part first. So, you know, looking at specific biomarkers, like I said, the COMT gene, like dopamine, like serotonin, like epinephrine, like norepinephrine, you know, with depression, it's not just serotonin. It's serotonin. It's dopamine. It's epinephrine. It's norepinephrine. It could be one of those, two of those, three of those, four of those. Unless we measure, we don't know. We're throwing a dart and hoping it ends somewhere close nearby. Right. So that's the first part of it. We look at 85 biomarkers.

21:58Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Wow.

21:59The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: So it's a complete panel of everything that's creating this, even down to inflammation markers, IL-5, IL-6, because what's going to happen if we have an inflammatory condition on something that's already withstanding and turned on? It's going to exacerbate that condition. So it's all of it. 85 biomarkers is what we looked at. The second part to your question, the sweet spot, the perfect world for me would be talk having a young person who we have say they already know a family history or they don't you know we used to have conversations in the past like well you know grandpa at the holidays this is going to happen you know those that was the extent of the conversation now we know that there's science behind that so we have these open conversations with people first we remove the stigma by doing that.

22:58Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Yes, absolutely.

23:00The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: We all have genes. Let's take a look at them. Yours might be cardiac. Yours might be cancer. Yours happened to be this. So we do a panel on a young person. We get those findings. And now you have an opportunity to say, how do I want to play out my life? I'm telling you, you know, you don't have wiggle room here, right? So find something else we call fun, you know, cause you don't do this. Exactly. You're, you're at an age where your buddies are going to say, Hey, after school, let's go do this, you know, and, and you're of the four of you, three of your buddies the next day say, man, that's a one and done.

23:38The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: I don't want to do that again. And you're like, no, I think it'd be fun to do it again today. Right.

23:43Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Right. Like they're there in your code is, and, and so many people, uh, you know, that, that I've, I've worked with through the history of working through working with addiction, uh, you know, They go, oh, when I had that first drink, something shifted in me. It was just right. It was just right. It was just what I needed. And then the other person over there, like you said, goes, ah, whatever. I'm not going back to that. But their brains are different.

24:15The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Correct. And you said it perfectly. People describe it as it was the first time I experienced peace after that drink. or I felt like everything was white and I was floating on a cloud or I just, it was the first time I didn't worry about anything. That doesn't happen for everybody. But you probably think it does because that's all you know within your body. Right.

24:42Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Yeah. Yeah. And if you, and if we're not talking about this, then, you know, first off the person who maybe doesn't have, you know, is struggling with depression or struggling with anxiety. And they don't maybe even realize they're struggling with that, if that makes sense. Like, I'm so normalized to it that I don't realize I'm actually depressed. I'm actually anxious. This is my normal operation. And so that's not talked about, right? So they don't recognize their own pain in a way. And then they have this experience of this drug or behavior that all of a sudden takes that all away, which is tied into their biology, which makes them predisposed to this possibility.

25:27Dr. Evelyn Higgins: And then it's kind of then there it goes. It takes off.

25:31The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Exactly. Exactly. In a TED talk, in that part, I say consider the connotations of being armed with the facts in your youth of your physiology. would you make different decisions knowing you had a genetic propensity towards addiction? That's, you know, that's, that's all the cards right there. That's all the marbles. Here it is. How do you want to play it out? We still have that free will play it out. But if we know into the game, that says, you know what, let's sit back and think of other things that we want to do with our life, because that's not a place you can dabble.

26:06Dr. Evelyn Higgins: yeah and if you're having discomfort in your life getting help for that discomfort in a way that's going to uplift your life and and create meaning and help you through that without going to this this other direction because if you go this direction it's going to be maybe too good

26:24The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: if that makes sense it's going to be too easy and and it works until it doesn't work right right Like, yeah, just that example of the first time. It's like, wow, this is great. This works. I found you couldn't even define anxiety. And all of a sudden, you were not anxious. And you said, this is the best thing there is. I figured it out.

26:47Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Right.

26:48The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: And it works until it doesn't work.

26:51Dr. Evelyn Higgins: right so then i'm really thinking about how this is personalized medicine i mean this is really down to the individual and realizing how unique we all are and that in a way if we really want to work on this and really treat this we have to personalize it we have to get down to who we are and work on it on that individual basis. Right.

27:19The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: It's genetic guided precision. Yeah. We're using these things in so many other areas of health, but we're not using it here because we're still stigmatizing and we're still putting people in timeout and we're still saying it's your fault. It's not.

27:39Dr. Evelyn Higgins: It's like, get that support. Yeah, like stepping out of that. And it takes time, like you said, for, I guess, the healthcare professionals, the people kind of in the trenches to catch up to the science of it.

27:57The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Yep, yep. And then disseminate that information. So we're at this crossroads of a time of this is available. People need to know about it. So thank you for having me on your show because this is a way for people to know that this exists.

28:15Dr. Evelyn Higgins: yeah yeah absolutely and and i and imagine just going back to your own journey through this process of why this is so important because you know when we lose people to addiction and we watch the pain and suffering it's it's just so hard to see and you know you want to help them you want to find a way for them to get better to find peace to move out of that because it's just painful.

28:42The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Right. And we all know the domino theory associated with that, right? For the individual, it's painful. But for the family, for the loved ones, they just want to shake them and say, stop.

28:52Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Yeah.

28:53The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: It doesn't, you know, we can't.

28:56Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And how does this, that's a good question, good topic that you brought up. How does that help the family see the person who's struggling with the addiction when they see this from this biological perspective?

29:11The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: It's huge. Yep. Because all of a sudden they can see their loved one from a health look. You know, if you needed open heart surgery, would we say tough it out? You know, all of a sudden we're putting science in this and we're saying, wow, you just don't want to have our family every holiday be turned upside down. This is a disease. This is what's happening with you. They get on board with I understand now. Let's get this done. Let's let's get you the help that you need. And it's a sigh of relief in a lot of ways. Also, it makes everyone else in the family say, what's my behavior? And was it just not quite as bad to put me over the edge?

29:59The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: But I live that life too.

30:03Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Right. I can see myself in that as well. And I can see like I have my own stuff. It's almost like in a perfect world, we'd have everybody do this. It would just be standardized care.

30:13The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: You're talking my language, Duane. It would be because, you know, even if it's just nations worried about the bottom line in dollars, wouldn't your bottom line be so much better if we nailed this in life?

30:27Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Yeah, but that's forward thinking. I don't know.

30:30The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Yeah, exactly. That's way too forward. But you think about, you know, cancers, you think about cardiac disease, all those other diseases that are as a result of behaviors.

30:43Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Yeah, well, this is really exciting to talk about. And we could keep going in and we could dig into even more detail, but I'm glad that you've given us like this, this picture and this other idea of how to look at addiction from this other perspective, from the biological perspective, the genetic perspective. So before we wrap up, I always ask every guest one question, and that's if someone out there is struggling and you could tell them one thing, what would you want them to know? What would you want to say to them? I would say, get these labs done.

31:21The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: I really would. Because if you're struggling, I know that this area has not been touched with objective information. At best, it's been, as we said earlier, vocabulary. And we may nail it, we may not nail it. The pain and the suffering doesn't need to continue.

31:44Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Right. Understand the biology of it. Evelyn, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your wisdom and your experience. How can people find you if they want more information about this? How can they get a hold of you?

31:54The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: Sure. So our website is wiredforaddiction.com, all spelled out. You can go there. You can go through the website, get in touch with us. As I said, I just did a TED Talk, and you can find that on YouTube, The Biology of Diction, Dr. Evelyn Higgins. Take a look at that, you know, and share it with your friends. And if you need help, please, please, please reach out to us. Dwayne, you are a part of being a game changer in this for having this conversation. So I thank you for the work that you're doing.

32:30Dr. Evelyn Higgins: Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much for saying that. I appreciate it. And I'll put all those links on the addictedmind.com. So people can find them there. If they don't remember them, they can just go there and get them.

32:42The Addicted Mind Podcast Host: And Evelyn, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. Appreciate it.

32:51Dr. Evelyn Higgins: All right, everyone. Thank you for listening to the Addicted Mind podcast. As usual, all the show notes be at the addictedmind.com. So go check that out. And if you enjoyed this episode, share with a friend. All right. Have a wonderful day. And I will talk to you on the next episode.