How to Get Motivated: #1 Dopamine Expert’s Protocol to Build Willpower & Get Things Done

29:58And it's like a simple, quick hit that immediately resolves the anxiety you're feeling. And now my daughter is working on this with me, that anytime she feels this flood, and it's painful when you feel that. And obviously every expert out there says when you're anxious, the worst thing you can do is avoid the painful thing. But seeking reassurance, I just realized, is pleasurable. And that's why the anxiety gets worse. That's why you start to become addicted in those moments. Oh, got to reach out to mom. Got to check in with mom. Got to make sure my spot. That is part of this mechanism of pain, pleasure, dopamine, and not forcing yourself to do the small, uncomfortable things.

30:44Can you explain a little bit? Because I see you're nodding and smiling. Oh, yeah. I absolutely love this. And this is why I think we're sisters from another mother, because that's essentially my drug of choice is attachment. Let me start by saying it is wonderful to have emotional intimacy and people in your life you can reach to and interdependency and that we need each other and love each other and want to reach out to each other. So that's obviously the wonderful starting point. But what you're getting at is really, really important. And it's that moment that we cross from sort of mutual love and respect to, I'm actually using you to, as a drug, essentially, I'm using you to kind of help me modulate, you know, my emotions, which again, in and of itself is not necessarily bad because - Well, everyone's well, of course.

31:42Yeah. But when it becomes the baseline - Yes. And for me, what I started asking myself is, wait, am I reaching out because I want to connect with this person? Right. Or am I reaching out? As a drug. Yeah. Like I'd grab a glass of wine. Yes. And here's where the technology has become so destructive and insidious. you know even just 20 years ago if you wanted to reach out to your daughter living across town i mean essentially you had to go over there right and it took a little bit of time and it took some effort now with the devices this reaching out really has become drugified you know whether it's and i do this too you know um we're newly empty nesters and it's been very difficult for me to be at home without any kids there now.

32:39And, you know, I kind of got to a point where I was like literally stalking my kids on Find My iPhone. And I'd be like, my daughter was like doing an internship in D.C. and I'm like, are you at a goodwill in D.C.? She goes, mom, that's weird. Like, you know, I don't want you to use Find My iPhone with me if you're going to like be stalking me. And it's been, this is a real area I'm working on because my kids occupy a lot of my mental real estate, right? And their well-being, I do use it as a drug to make myself feel better. And when they're doing well, and I get little information from them that they're doing well, I feel good.

33:16And when they're not doing well, I ruminate and I worry and I feel bad. But here's how this is so, you know, counterproductive and potentially harmful for me and my kids, is that my kids then get trapped in this thing where we can't actually tell mom that things are not going well because we have to be doing well for her to be okay. And it's very subtle. But this creeps up on you. I'm so glad you're talking about this. We're the same age. Yeah, we are exactly the same. We've gone through the empty nester thing, but I think regardless of your age, if you're in your teens or your 20s or your 30s, you can probably think of moments where you have been going through something uncomfortable and you are now trying to make yourself feel okay by using another person.

34:08I invite you, if there's a person whose location you check all the time, or there is a person who you notice, you only reach out to them when you're feeling a little distressed or bored or whatever. Just take everything that Dr. Lemke has shared and try to, for the next couple of weeks, not text or reach out to that person when you're feeling a moment of distress and try to reassure yourself through it and just notice what starts to open up. And I think it's a little dopamine reset. Yes. Yes. I think you're right. Homeostasis sets back in. That's right. That's right. It's so cool. Dr. Lemke, I knew you were going to be awesome, but holy God, I cannot believe how much we are learning right now.

34:52I knew dopamine was powerful, but this is turning everything that I thought about motivation and the way the brain works like on its head. And, you know, as you've been talking, Dr. Lemke, I'm already thinking about so many people that I cannot wait to share this conversation with. And I'm sure as you're listening or watching right now on YouTube, you're thinking, oh my gosh, my partner, my kids, my friend, my colleague at work that's been feeling really stuck, They need to know this stuff too. So take a moment and share this with the people that you have in mind and don't go anywhere. We're going to take a quick break.

35:28We're going to hear a word from our amazing sponsors. We're going to also give you a chance to share this episode with people who need all of this amazing research. And stay with me because Dr. Lemke is just getting started. We're going to go even deeper into this plain pleasure center in the brain and her protocols for how to reset your dopamine when we return. Stay with me.

35:56Welcome back. It's your buddy Mel Robbins. And today you and I are getting to learn from the number one dopamine expert in the world, Dr. Anna Lemke. We're hearing all about her protocol for building willpower, getting things done, being happier. And I hope you're just as fired up as I am because holy cow, Dr. Lemke, this is really game-changing information that you're sharing. And so here's the next topic I wanted to talk about with you. One of the things I really love about your work and your research and the way you explain this stuff, Dr. Lemke, is that you are very open with your own story.

36:30And I love that here you are researching all this stuff. You are teaching it. You're simplifying it for your patients. And all of a sudden you have this epiphany. Oh, my gosh. I myself have become addicted to something. Would you share that story? Yes, absolutely. So, okay, where to go into this? So, in my early 40s, you know, life was basically running along pretty well. And it's not like I was trying to escape into anything. I mean, I had some, you know, marital conflict around whether or not we were going to, you know, try to have more children or stop there. But, and I've always been a reader.

37:21So I always enjoyed reading as, you know, a pleasure and escape as well. And I was hanging out with some moms at the elementary school and they were talking about this book that they had read and, you know, how great it was. So I was like, oh, well, what are you reading? And they said, oh, it's the Twilight Saga. And I thought, huh, okay, that sounds, you know, I've never read a book like that. I'll go check it out. So I go to the bookstore and I'm looking for it in the adult section. They're like, no, no, you got to go find it. And the kids, I'm like, okay, the adolescent section. So it's for those who don't know, it's a vampire romance series written for teenagers.

37:56So anyway, I can't really explain it other than just saying I found it completely transporting. and I read the whole series and then I went back and read it again and again and again and I just it just put me in this place that was just I don't know I just didn't have to think about myself I didn't think about my life it was like a trance-like state a very very pleasurable more so than you know books I had been reading at the time so then I thought to myself well maybe there are other vampire romance novels yeah so I go to my local library and lo and behold, there's like a whole shelf of them.

38:32I mean, I know it's kind of weird that I didn't really like discover the romance genre until late in life, but I really hadn't. So then I'm like, oh, I'm reading, you know, I'm reading Anne Rice. I'm reading all the romance novels that have to do with vampires. And then I'm like, okay, what now? And then it was werewolves and, you know, necromancers and soothsayers and fairies. And as time went on, you know, I just was spending more and more time reading romance novels, especially romanticcy, combining fantasy and romance. Then my friend Susan, you know, lover, but she's like, Ana, you should get a Kindle.

39:09And I'm like, oh, you know, and this was sort of early, like the e-readers were early. So I'm like, okay. And I get a Kindle. And then all of a sudden I can be reading like bodice rippers with these really embarrassing covers, but nobody knows. I'm like, oh yeah, I'm reading War and Peace. Isn't that amazing, you know? and you know it's the crazy part is even as an addiction psychiatrist i did not see the progression as it was happening and there were a couple things with the progression number one i started developing developing tolerance where i i noticed i didn't notice it only in retrospect but i needed more and more graphic forms to get the same effect so more sexualized more eroticized um i was spending more and more time reading so staying up later and later at night uh being tired the next day i was becoming mentally preoccupied where that's all i wanted to do i just wanted to get through my day deal with the kids deal with my husband and then get to my place where i could read my romance novels right so this kind of narrowing of focus which we see with addiction and then there were also real consequences and the main consequences were I was less present for my children and my family and my patients.

40:21I started bringing romance novels to work and actually reading them in the 10 minutes between patients instead of reflecting on patients or documenting my patients. We went on a family vacation at the beach. I didn't go to the beach. I spent the whole time in the room reading romance novels. We even went to like a neighborhood party. And this is so bizarre. I actually found a room in their house while other people were in the backyard. And I read romance novels during the party. So it was, again, this kind of narrowing of focus, the inability to take joy and other modest rewards, this resetting of my joy set point.

40:55The only thing that gave me pleasure was the romance novels. And eventually I got to a point where I didn't care about the writing or the plot structure or the characters. I was on Amazon trying to get free, because free drugs like that, that sounds good to me. I didn't want to pay more money, so I got free romance novels. I didn't even finish them after a while. I just got to three-quarters of the way through, which any romance novel is designed. If you open it to three-quarters of the way through, you'll get right to the climax. Yeah. You know what I mean? That in multiple ways. Yep. And I didn't even finish it.

41:32And it was really only in retrospect that I could see in myself what my patients had been describing, where it was like, oh, I'll never use heroin. And then all all of a sudden, you know, they're in the tenderloin, you know, selling their jacket and their laptop for a tiny amount of black tar heroin. You know, this kind of like sort of this kind of lowest common denominator, anything to get my fix. Now, I don't want to trivialize. Where was the moment where you were like, holy cow, I, the pleasure pain. Like it's, it's, I am, I'm like, was there a moment where you're like, holy cow? Because what you're describing, honestly, sounds like everybody's basic use of their phone.

42:16Yeah. The conflict, the grip, the this, the that. It's not as satisfying. Why am I doing it? I'm searching for more. Maybe follow different things. And so I love this story. I also love this story. I'm going to tell you a reason because I found the whole genre of adult fairy fantasy. Court of Thorn and Rosens, graphic audio. I would be in my kitchen listening to this. Chris would be standing there. The volume would be down. I'm in the night court listening to my characters in a completely different world. I can hear him talking and I'm kind of nodding as if I'm there. And I'm like, Mel, you have to.

42:57And the other thing that happened is after I finished the entire series, which I got my whole family and half this company to listen to, I had been looking for something that holds my attention. and haven't found it. And so when you have, can you use that to explain just the cycle of pleasure, pain, and how dopamine is involved? Just like in the beginning. So the first one you're like, oh my God. So it's novel. Dopamine gets released because of why? Again, dopamine is our reward neurotransmitter. It is what signals to us that something in the environment is important for our survival. We should approach it, explore it, and potentially exploit it.

43:45Dopamine evolved to bring us to the natural rewards that we need to live, food, clothing, shelter, finding a mate. What happens in addiction is that that dopamine signal and the reward pathway gets hijacked by this drug that resembles a natural reward and works through that similar mechanism, but is not in fact a natural reward and is actually adverse or contrary to our well-being. But we no longer recognize it as such, in part because over time our brain adapts to that increased dopamine firing. Eventually we end up in this chronic dopamine deficit state And now we're needing to use not to get pleasure, but actually just to bring ourselves back up to baseline and stop feeling pain.

44:36But we don't see that. Right. We don't see that. Okay, so let me see if I can give this back to you. So the fact that you keep looking for another novel, the fact that you keep going back to the novel, that's a sign that you're in a dopamine deficit state because you're chasing something like that? Even more importantly. Yeah. When you, that you lose some agency around your use. And that even when you or others recognize it's problematic, you have trouble stopping. Okay. And when you're not using, you experience a lot of craving to use and a compulsion driven by that craving to want to do it again, even when you committed to not doing it.

45:23Got it. Okay. You've said that in today's world, every single one of us is vulnerable to addiction, even if we don't realize it. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah. So we talked about these technological affordances that make digital media more addictive. And kind of the big idea in Doak Me Nation is that we've essentially drugified everything, whether it's substances or behaviors or work or relationships. relationships, we've made it more accessible, more potent, you know, more novel, such that now we're vulnerable to get addicted to just about anything, including things that we typically think of as healthy.

46:08Like what? Like reading, right? Now we're like, oh great, my kid's reading a book, that's awesome. But I can tell you, I and many of my patients have gotten addicted to various forms of reading. But also things like human connection, as we talked about, right? Like the super healthy, we need each other, we need human connection. But now we have these devices that are so reinforcing because of their dynamic design features that they create the illusion of connection even when there's no real connection happening. And more importantly, they hijack our reward system so that we don't want to disengage even when we've exhausted their utility.

46:46Right. So these these digital media are great when we use them as a tool, not great when we use them as a drug to change the way we feel. All right. I'm just going to come out and say it. This conversation is intense. I mean, in the best way, Dr. Lemke, it's like someone just opened a window in your brain and flip the lights on. And if you're like me, you are already thinking, holy cow, my partner needs to hear this. My kid needs to hear this. I need to play this back tomorrow morning. So while you text this episode to somebody who needs a motivation reset, we're going to take a quick break and let our sponsors shine.

47:26But don't go anywhere. Dr. Lemke is about to walk us through exactly how to reset your dopamine when we come back. Stay with me.

47:45welcome back at your buddy mel robbins today you and i are getting to learn from the number one dopamine expert in the world dr anna lemke and we're learning her protocols for resetting your dopamine building willpower getting things done being happier so dr lemke the next thing i wanted to ask you about was this why is it so damn hard to do the simplest things like going to the gym eating healthy, or just getting started on that project or on studying. You know you need to do it, but you can't seem to get the get up and go to do it. We evolved to reflexively approach pleasure and avoid pain. Gotcha.

48:24In a world of scarcity. Okay. Where we would have to do a lot of upfront work for a tiny little bit of reward. Got it. So we are designed to move toward what's easy now, towards what's pleasurable now, and we are designed to move away from the gym or away from the project that we don't want to do. Yes. And again, that is a great built-in mechanism to keep us alive in a world of scarcity. But in this world of overwhelming overabundance, it's a very bad mechanism because now we're exposing our brains to this firehose of dopamine. We're getting into this dopamine deficit state. Now we've narrowed our focus.

49:03All we want to do is keep pursuing pleasure to bring ourselves back up to baseline. And the prospect of getting up off the couch and actually going out the door, much less going to the gym, has become kind of a Mount Everest for us, right? Because we've reset our hedonic or joy set point. Plus, we are embedded in a culture that tells us that pain is dangerous, that if we're uncomfortable, then we're potentially creating a psychic scar that's going to set us up for future pain in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder, that what we need is to pursue comfort, to be happy, to be relaxed, that any kind of distress is actually going to harm our brains.

49:52And in fact, the opposite is true. That when an organism is exposed to right-sized pain, that actually triggers our body's own re-regulating healing mechanisms. And we start to upregulate our feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine, like serotonin, like our endogenous opioids, like our endogenous cannabinoids. So we get our dopamine indirectly by paying for it up front, which is the way that we evolved to get it. Again, we evolved to have to do work to get a little bit of reward. So the message here is to be happier, to experience more joy, we need to do the counterintuitive thing of moderating and greatly reducing our use of instantaneous easy pleasures and intentionally leaning into right-sized pain in order to reset our pleasure-pain balance.

50:54That makes so much sense. The way that a human being is designed is we need moments of pain all day long. And what you're talking about is shoving yourself out of bed. You're talking about getting out the door for a walk. You're talking about how painful it can be to just get yourself out of that lull, turn off the TV, stand up, and go fold the laundry. You're talking about picking up the phone and having the hard conversation. You're talking about working on your resume. We're taking that AI skills class instead of scrolling on your phone. And the problem, and that we need that. We need to be able to push ourselves through moments of pain all day long, because that's how we were designed to work.

51:39And modern life and the way it is so easy and so convenient. And we've optimized for, you can order your food. You don't even have to cook anything or think about it. Oh, you can sit on the couch and somebody will bring it. You don't even have to. You can listen to 15 different radio stations on the way to work if you get bored. So you don't even tolerate boredom, which I would imagine would be just one of these small moments of pain. It's not any fun to be bored, but we reach for our phone. And so we've so completely whacked ourselves from the inside out because we're constantly now reaching for pleasure.

52:18We are so used now to constantly being stimulated, right? That simply sitting in the quiet is terrifying for us. It's absolutely terrifying because we're always reacting to external stimuli. We're not comfortable with our own thoughts. You know, when we disconnect for a period of time, we have this flooding of these thoughts and emotions that we've been putting at bay, you know, by distracting ourselves with all these pleasurable stimuli. And it can be really scary. Like, that is painful. But the longer we can sit and just kind of like, okay, be curious about what comes up for us, and this is where mindfulness practices are so important, and even welcome.

53:05that discomfort, but also name it and recognize it. So, you know, not even just so much pushing through discomfort, but just going, okay, I'm uncomfortable now and that's okay. You know, and I can sit with this and just be curious about it. And it too will pass and I will get to a place where I've actually then built up mental calluses to tolerate more discomfort. And this is, of course, you know, the sort of underpinning of exposure therapy that I think so many people are finding helpful. One thing I want to ask before we talk about what the hell do we do, Dr. Lumpkin, is how does overwarding yourself with these small, little, cheap dopamine pleasure, easy, easy, easy, do the easy thing, how does that mess up our motivation in the long term?

53:56It messes up our motivation because we become narrowly focused on short-term rewards, And we lose the ability to see the longer-term rewards that require the upfront work that are actually better for our well-being over months to years. So does the pain also feel bigger? So if you have constant pleasure, easy distraction around you, I'll just do the easy thing. I'll just order the Uber Eats. I'll just do this. I'll just do that. Does it feel harder over the long run to get off the couch or to go for that walk? Absolutely. And again, by changing our hedonic or joy set point, what it means is that we need bigger pleasures to feel any pleasure at all.

54:40And even the merest pain is incredibly painful. And we see this now in clinical care where, you know, people talk about really quite ordinary things that they struggle to do. you know, simply paying a bill or getting off the couch and going and meeting with people or doing the dishes. Now, these are, you know, kind of everyday things that, you know, nobody really likes or generally we don't like, but they're even more painful than in prior generations. Well, you know, one example that I can point to, to kind of broaden this out to a normal person who's just really struggling with motivation, you know, doesn't, I'm like, well, I'm not really addicted to anything, but has really leaned in to say, but I've really screwed up the pain, pleasure balance in my body.

55:30I am finding it harder and harder to concentrate or to do the little hard things or to be motivated to do the things that I needed to do. If you've ever had an experience or you have an experience as a parent where your kids go to like a school sleep away camp or they go on a field trip and they take their phones away and they are forced to tolerate that. They are so much happier. And so it's an example of how your body naturally resets to a homeostasis once the cheap dopamine thing is removed from your environment and from you. and that's why I think we all need a dopamine detox. Yeah. And to really understand that if you're struggling with motivation in any area of your life, if you're struggling with doing anything difficult, Yes.

56:29if you're struggling with enjoying aspects of your life, that this is a really serious place to take a look because this makes a lot of sense. Just add something in there. Yeah. So, and key to this absence trial or this dopamine detox, and we're not actually abstaining from dopamine because we're not ingesting dopamine. It's something that gets triggered in our brains, but it's kind of a metaphor or a meme at this point. The key to it, though, is to abstain for long enough to allow those gremlins to hop off the pain side of the balance and for homeostasis to be restored. Because if we don't abstain for long enough, what happens is we take our pleasure, our reward off of the pleasure side, the gremlins accumulating on the pain side crash us down, And we are in withdrawal, right?

57:15And in that state of withdrawal, we experience anxiety, irritability, insomnia, dysphoria, and also intense craving that feels like it will never get better. But what is so amazing is that once we get over the hump of sort of that acute withdrawal for most people, which is about 14 days, we come out the other side. Well, that's for a hard drug. Or is that for everything? Could that be for like not checking a person's location? Yes. In fact, studies looking at teenagers who get off of social media find that they feel less depressed, less anxious, and less lonely, but only if they go for long enough, which is on average about three to four weeks of abstaining from social media.

57:57In my clinical experience, kind of no matter the drug and no matter the sort of severity of the attachment, if people can go for about three to four weeks, they generally, not always, but about 80 % of folks feel better and experience less craving. But if they only go for two weeks or less, they do not typically get out of that vortex of craving. And then they don't also kind of believe in the experiment, right? Because they feel like, oh, it didn't work for me. It's like, well, how long did you abstain? Because it really needs to be long enough, again, for those metaphorical gremlins to hop off and for sort of baseline reward to be reset.

58:42Well, it's also helpful to know that the craving is simply your body working through this pain, pleasure, seesaw being out of whack. And it's time limited. It's time limited. that it will pass, but it is a sign that everything's functioning as it should be because you're trying to get back to homeostasis. And if you're feeling the craving, you're actually doing it correctly. That's right. Exactly. And you're moving toward a good place. So it's reframing the dopamine fast or the abstinence trial as not denying ourselves a reward, but actually doing something healthy, moving toward a better life.

59:25So you could create a dopamine detox over a three to four week period over anything. Whether it's, I'm not going to sleep next to my phone for four weeks and I'm going to wake up in the morning and I'm going to feel the craving to reach for it. I'm not going to do it. You could take on the standing in line challenge. Every time I'm standing in line for the next four weeks, I am not going to reach for my phone. I'm going to practice all the tolerance and the painful experience of feeling anxious, depressed, just agitated, pissed off in that line. And if I feel those things, I'm doing this correctly because I'm getting myself back into homeostasis.

1:00:07Oh, I love this. This makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, good. And let's talk about discomfort. How can intentional discomfort help us become happier and more motivated? And could you explain to the person listening, what does that look like? Great. So getting back to dopamine fasting and the pleasure-pain balance, we're encouraging people to abstain for a period of time, minimum four weeks, from their drug of choice to allow those gremlins to slowly hop off. It takes time so that homeostasis can be restored. But hypothetically, we can speed up that process by intentionally pressing on the pain side of the balance.

1:00:53So, for example, there are studies showing that people in withdrawal from alcohol and drug addiction, if they engage in vigorous exercise, they can decrease the symptoms of withdrawal. They can get to a place where they're feeling more of a strong recovery, and they can actually prevent or decrease their risk of relapse just by engaging in exercise. Why? Well, again, using this metaphor to sort of visualize what might be happening in the brain is that if we intentionally now press on the pain side of the balance, those gremlins, those metaphorical gremlins will go to the pleasure side, and we can get our dopamine indirectly by paying for it up front.

1:01:34And the classic example of this is the runner's high, right? So we know that exercise is actually injurious to cells. So at the cellular level, exercise is toxic. But we also know exercise is really good for us. So how does it work? What's probably happening is that the body senses minor injury in response to exercise, and then starts to upregulate, again, our own feel-good neurotransmitters, including dopamine. since we now understand that intentional pain throughout your day, doing hard things, pushing that lever inside yourself, forcing yourself to do these things, that it is so important for your happiness.

1:02:17It's so important for your body to function correctly and your brain to function correctly. And so I want you to take this on as Dr. Lemke describes this. What would it look like from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed to start to insert intentional discomfort for your own happiness and well-being? Let's just take somebody who is really concerned about their overuse of the phone and technology, but they still have to go to work. And let's just walk through the moment you wake up and what you could do with intentional discomfort to start to help yourself reset this? Okay. The moment that you wake up actually begins with the night before.

1:03:03Oh, okay. Where you make a plan because if we find ourselves choosing between pleasure and pain, we will always choose pleasure unless we have anticipated that moment and put in self-binding strategies that put a barrier between ourselves and our drug of choice so that we can press the pause button between desire and consumption. Got it. So you're basically saying, do not rely on willpower. Do not rely on willpower alone. Because you are wired to move toward the cheap dopamine. Yes. And so if you truly want to do this, you're going to make a plan the night before. Yes. And that plan will include having no digital devices in the bedroom or within easy reach.

1:03:46it will include making a plan for starting your day with pain now that that i know some examples really first of all just getting out of bed okay okay when you wake up get i mean it can be hard to just get out of bed right and then you know if your schedule and your lifestyle allows doing some exercise or some mind body work some meditation something that maybe you know you don't necessarily look forward to before you do it, but you know that after you do it, you feel better. Okay. So you, and you plan all that out. You put your, your exercise bag there, or you arrange to meet with a friend to exercise, or you put your, you know, whatever your meditation practice is, you get it all ready and you plan it out.

1:04:32And then when you wake up, you don't linger, you know, in the bed when you know, especially you're not going to be able to go back to sleep. don't grab for any digital devices. Don't look at any screen. Your brain is going to tell you, oh, I need to check this, or I'm just going to look at that, or this is really important. Really try to plan it out so you don't need to look at your device for any reason. Not for a text, not for mapping, like know where you're going to go. Plan it out in advance. Get up, leave the device behind, go outside if you can, move your body, you know, be in nature if you can, be in a space where you are not counting yourself or digitally monitoring yourself.

1:05:15You're just with yourself or other people, but you're not, it's not through this digital medium. When you've done that, that alone is awesome if you do that. That'll change your life. That right there and doing it with consistency, but also coming back and then delaying the point at which you get on your device. So whatever your, you know, one patient I had called it his morning jamboree, you know, whatever it is, like making your bed, eating good breakfast, brushing teeth, cleaning up, all of the things, right, before you actually get on the device. And then before you get on the device, make a list of what you're going to do on the device.

1:05:53Why? Because the instant our brains are exposed to those screens, all of a sudden we forget what we were going to do. We forget how we were going to use it as a tool, and instead we use it as a drug. So make a list, get on there. Hopefully the night before you've also deleted the apps that you want to abstain from for that period of time. whether it's a social media app or a game-playing app or an online shopping app. Unsubscribe. Get rid of them because you're really committing to not using your drug of choice, behavior or drug, whatever it is. And then also just really be aware that you're going to feel uncomfortable and you're going to experience craving.

1:06:41And part of craving will manifest as an elaborate narrative for why it's a stupid experiment. I don't need to do that. That's dumb. Or yesterday that seemed like a good idea, but today that's just stupid. And I need for this and this and this reason, you know, for other people's safety, you know, or for work. Now, I want to emphasize that it really is true that a lot of us need to be digitally connected for our work, but we also use that as an excuse to be overconnected. So this is all the part of the planning in advance. How are people going to reach me when I'm on my digital dopamine fast? How am I going to negotiate work even though I'm not going to be using that app or even though I've turned off notifications so I'm not constantly triggering my reward pathway with the little alerts that pull me back in?

1:07:28So it's really anticipating it, knowing you're going to feel uncomfortable, but trusting that with the passage of time, your brain will readapt and you will find yourself in a place which is so much better, right? Where you're not in that constant state of craving, where you have more presence. Because really what we're losing so much of is our presence, right? When we're in the line checking, we're not really looking around at where we are or what other people are doing or what's happening on the road or in the sky or in our own minds. So we really recapture that presence and that is our life, right?

1:08:07We're getting back our life. I think this is so important because I did this a couple of years ago, got very serious about this and it all started with not looking at the phone in a line. Yeah. And I don't have the phone within reach. Right. and I don't look at it first thing in the morning. I have a ritual, even a hotel room that I do before I even check. And I am probably 85 % compliant with it. I have a place in the kitchen where I plug in the phone. It's almost never on my person. In fact, people that work with me will be like, I always walk around like, does anyone see my phone? Right, right, right.

1:08:49And I cannot even tell you the level of peace that you have if you take this on. And what I appreciate that you said, Dr. Lemke, is that when your brain goes nutso and starts negotiating with you, that sounds like an addict telling you why they need a drink today. Right, right. And you should expect it. And it's a sign of the pain pleasure mechanism in your brain being out of whack. Yes. and that's why you need to do this type of dopamine detox for yourself. Because it will get better with time. Yes. The longer you can go, the less you'll miss it. And then you'll even get to a place where you don't want to have anything to do with it.

1:09:34Absolutely not. How will doing this help motivate you to achieve your goals? Great question. part of recapturing our motivation is not having these frictionless, cheap pleasures that we can distract ourselves with. So, for example, a young patient of mine who got very addicted to video games went off to college, continued to play video games constantly, and also found that other things lost their salience or their appeal for him, including his computer science classes. And he continually procrastinated with video games. When he gave up video games and really committed to that and then went back to school, he said, it's amazing.

1:10:18My classes are interesting again. So when we remove all of these ways of distracting ourselves and procrastinating, we're suddenly left with this big empty space, which feels very terrifying. mine. And yet it is in that empty space where we go, oh, okay, I can't do this thing that I usually do. So I guess I'll just do my work. Right? I mean, it is really like that. It's like you kind of sit there and you go, I'd really like to do that over there, but I committed to not doing it. So geez, I guess I'll get started filling out this form or, you know, writing this paragraph or, you know, dealing with paying this bill or cleaning out my closet or whatever it is.

1:11:04It is amazing how just creating that kind of empty space and tolerating that discomfort and not giving ourselves other options, just like, well, okay, I'll do this. Well, one of the things that I love about this conversation is the connection between making yourself intentionally do things that are hard and painful, knowing that it has a huge impact on how happy you are. Yeah. In the long run. In the long run. In the long run. And how much more motivated you are. Yes. Can you share more examples of simple things that I can do, that the person listening can do in their daily lives to help get this dopamine detox and the pain pleasure center back into homeostasis?

1:11:58Like what are some other things we can be taking on every day? I mean, again, with digital media, you said a lot of them, but deleting apps, turning off notifications is really key. Every time we get that kind of buzz or ping, that pulls us back in. Going grayscale can be really important. If there's a digital medium we need to be on, putting it on our laptop and not on our phone so it's kind of less portable, we have less access. Those are all really important self-binding strategies. When it comes to food, so our food supply has become drugified, right? You've done a lot of podcasts on this with the addition of fat, salt, sugar, and flavorants.

1:12:36So having non-drugified foods in our home, right, wholesome foods, the way that Mother Nature made them, so that when we eat them, we are getting the calories we need and we're not getting this incredible spike of dopamine that we get from ultra-processed food, which is what has us continuing to consume it even after, you know, we should be satiated or should feel full from it. So that's a big one. And I really think also, you know, when we think about work and, you know, work we typically think of as effortful and hard, but not all work gives us that sense of natural reward or satisfaction at the end of the day, either because there's too much of it.

1:13:18We pressed too hard on the pain side of the balance or it's the kind of work that's really been divorced from the meaning of work. And so we don't really feel the satisfaction of having an impact. And a lot of people have jobs like that. So there's a real risk of getting into this work hard, play hard, which remember, any deviation from homeostasis is biological stress. We're releasing our adrenaline every time we have to do the work to get back to a level balance. So when we're pressing hard on the pain side by doing too much work, it is a natural inclination at the end of the day to want to then use our intoxicants to bring it back to the level position.

1:13:59So I think being really thoughtful about limiting the amount of work that we're doing, if we're able to, trying to limit the stress related to work, and then being really mindful that at the end of a really hard day, it's probably not the time to indulge in intoxicants. Because of course, people are going to indulge. Moderation is okay. It's the spice of life in many instances. I'm not here saying never take a drink or never eat a cupcake. That's not the message at all. But if we've had a really rough day where we've overextended ourselves at work, that would be the day to intentionally avoid these kind of cheap intoxicants because we will not have the ability in that context to moderate our consumption.

1:14:48And I'll just use myself as an example. You know, I love my work, but on the end of my busy clinical days, I cannot watch videos. And I say cannot, of course I can, and I do often. But when I do - I love how normal you are. Oh my God. But when I do, it's like I plan to just watch for 15 minutes or I was just going to watch this one video, you know, and there I am two, three hours later. Yeah. And we use it to kind of relax and self-soothe, but I don't think it's actually relaxing for our brains. So again, intentionally planning, getting together with friends or meditating or going on a walk, something where we're finding a way to calm our brains down without using our drug of choice.

1:15:34What is so powerful, Dr. Lemke, about boring movements? Taking a walk, stretching, Yes. Rolling. Yeah. Why is that a powerful thing to do? Well, essentially, you know, boredom is a really fascinating emotion because, number one, it's painful because it's boring, right? Yes. And we're really used to being overstimulated. But also, boredom is kind of terrifying because when we are bored, we are then confronted with kind of fundamental questions about life. Like, why am I doing this? Or what is my purpose anyway? And when we wade into those existential areas, it can really, you know, cause us to feel some degree of terror, especially since we don't tend to think about those things because we're always distracting ourselves with our drugs.

1:16:24But boredom is really, really necessary because it's only when we allow ourselves to be bored and to sort of quiet our minds that, number one, we become acquainted with our own thoughts and feelings and sort of acquire the mindfulness that we need in order to move at the pace of mindfulness, which is this peaceful and grounding place. But also boredom really is kind of the midwife of invention, right? It's only when we're bored enough to allow ourselves to explore a new idea and not interrupt ourselves in the middle of that thought that we get to a place where we have a new idea, right? or an inspiration or something that we want to move toward or even know what we want to move toward.

1:17:13You know, what is it that I really do like to do? Like what actually gives me deep joy? And we can't know those things if we're constantly distracting ourselves and never allowing ourselves to be bored. It feels almost like boredom is when you're probably in homeostasis. And you just gave me a little bit of an insight because I have no problem taking a walk because I find it visually stunning in nature and the dogs are running around and I'm good about, you know, not looking at my phone at all, but I cannot stretch to save my life. I literally roll out a mat and I get down and I'm like, okay, we're done.

1:17:48Like my, my, my brain is like ping pong, ping pong. And so I'm realizing that's an area where I could step on the pain intentionally and start to build a bit of tolerance there. That would probably bring more happiness into my life. Dr. Lemke, if you could speak directly to the person listening, if they take just one action out of everything that you have taught us today, what do you think the most important thing to do is? I think the most important thing is just to recognize how resilient we actually are and how we really are wired for pain and lean into it. Not in a way, again, that's harmful.

1:18:36Like we're not talking about over-exercising, right? Like people can get addicted to exercise. But just recognizing that we can do these hard things and in the process, reset our reward pathways and that slowly over time, things will get better. Oh my gosh. I learned so much for you today. I'm so excited. The connection between intentional moments of discomfort and pain and the hard things that you need to do and your happiness and resetting your dopamine and getting more motivated. How cool is this? It's so cool. And it makes me feel this sense of urgency around boundaries with behavior and devices or substances that you feel the grip around.

1:19:25And I also feel so encouraged, and I know you do too as you're listening, about the fact that you're wired to do this. Yes. And your brain and your happiness and your heart and your body, they are dying for you to wake up and start doing this. And moving toward these moments of intentional discomfort, that's the secret. Yeah. That's the detox. Yes, yes. That's the dopamine reset. That's it. I love that. Dr. Lemke, what are your parting words? I mean, we're all in this together. You know, I think everybody is struggling with this in some shape or form. It's the world that we live in now. But I have a lot of optimism that through talking about it, kind of owning it, and collectively problem solving, we can get to a better place.

1:20:11Well, I already feel like I'm in a better place. Thanks on everything. Thanks to everything you taught us today. So, you know, Dr. Lemke, thank you. thank you, thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for the genius that you have in explaining this in a way so that we can grasp it and understand the power in what you just taught us. I am so grateful that you hopped on a plane. I'm grateful that you're doing the work that you do. So don't stop. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Mel. You're welcome. And I also want to thank you. Thank you for being interested in learning more about how your brain and your body works and learning about dopamine.

1:20:47This was so cool. I know you probably loved it as much as I did. Thank you for sharing it with people that you care about. I cannot wait to send this to my kids, to everybody that I care about. I know you feel the same. And one more thing, in case no one else tells you, as your friend, I want to be sure to tell you, I love you. I love that you're interested in learning, that you're interested in science, that you're interested in doing better. And I believe in your ability to create a better life because you're listening to things like this and learning. All righty. I will see you in the very next episode.

1:21:17I'll be there to welcome you in the moment you hit play.

1:21:23And she's chief of Stanford's dual diagnosis. How do you say that? Diagnosis. Okay. She's testified in courtrooms, advised national policy. She's testified in courtrooms, advised national policy, and she's published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers. So without further ado, let's get motivated and jump in. Oh my God. Thank you for being here. Yeah. I'm really happy to be here. That's right. That's right. It's so cool. Okay. We're good. We're good. Great job. Thank you.

1:22:11Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist. And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.