The Dopamine Expert: Doing This Once A Day Fixes Your Dopamine! What Alcohol Is Really Doing To Your Brain! Your Childhood Shapes Future Addictions!

**Anna Lembke** (0:00)
There's a very famous experiment in which rats were engineered to have no dopamine, and the scientists discovered that if they put food in the rat's mouth, the rat will eat. But if you put the food even a body length away, the rat will starve to death, which tells us that dopamine is fundamental to get the things that we need for our basic survival. Now, every time we're doing something that's pleasurable, from sugar to video games, work, pornography, social media, that will affect dopamine. The more dopamine that's released, the more likely that drug or behavior is to be addictive. But also, the genetic risk of addiction is about 50-60 percent. So if you have a biological parent or grandparent with addiction, you are more likely to develop that addiction. We have to keep it in balance in order to stay healthy.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:42)
Dr. Anna Lemke is Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford, Chief of the Stanford Addiction Clinic, and a world leading expert on the subject of dopamine.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:49)
She will tell you how this one powerful chemical is controlling your life and what to do about it.

**Anna Lembke** (0:53)
One of the most important findings in neuroscience in the past 75 years is that the same parts of the brain that process pleasure also process pain, and the balance wants to remain level. The problem is that we automatically seek out pleasure and avoid pain, and we're exposed to all kinds of pleasures that we have in the modern world. And our brains are reeling in response to try to compensate. Now I need more of my drug and more potent forms to get the same effect, which then leads to addiction. And that's what happened to me when I got addicted to romance novels.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:20)
Take me into that phase of your life.

**Anna Lembke** (1:22)
I was out of control, and I needed to restore a level balance. And take the advice I give my patients.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:27)
And what is that advice?
I've sat here for the last 20 minutes trying to figure out how to say this to you. So I'm just going to say how it comes up my mouth, and I apologize if this is messy. But if there was ever an episode this year that you should listen to, it is this one. Since this episode was recorded about a month ago, all I've been thinking about is how on earth I get you to watch this. And I don't say this often. The last time I said this was the first time Mogul came on this podcast. This is the second time I've said this in almost four years of recording this podcast on YouTube. And the reason for that is so many of the things that I know you're struggling with in your life, that stand in the way of the person you want to become, that relationship you have with your phone, the procrastination, the cycles of behavior that make you feel embarrassed and full of shame, that you've just never been able to crack. All of them, all of them, I genuinely believe for many of you are going to be understood today. If you listen to this episode, it has changed my life and it has changed much of the lives of my team. If I'm wrong here, you have the right to message me and tell me that I was wrong. Please listen to this episode. Really, really, I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Dr. Anna Lemke, you wrote one of the most iconic, well-known books about dopamine, which propelled the subject matter of dopamine into the public consciousness. But I guess the most important question I should ask you is, why does dopamine matter?

**Anna Lembke** (3:05)
Ah, good question. Good place to start. I mean, dopamine matters because it's fundamental to our survival, right? So, it's the chemical that we make in our brain that tells us this is something we should approach, explore, investigate. So, it's really almost the survival chemical.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:26)
So, what is dopamine? If you had to explain it to a 10-year-old, how would you go about explaining it?

**Anna Lembke** (3:30)
So, dopamine is a chemical that we make in our brain. It has many different functions, but one of its most important functions is that it helps us experience pleasure, reward, and motivation. It may be even more important for the motivation to do things than it is for the pleasure itself. So, for example, there's a very famous experiment in which rats were engineered to have no dopamine in the brain's reward pathway, and the scientists discovered that if they put food in the rat's mouth, the rat would eat the food, would seem to get some pleasure from the food, if you can determine that from watching a rat eat, which I think they felt like they could. But if you put the food even a body length away, the rat will starve to death. The idea being that without dopamine, we're not motivated to seek out the things that we need for our basic survival.