Hey, welcome, everybody. This is Vincent for The Meaningful Sh!t Show, and today we're going to talk about harnessing the power of dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin. So the four feel-good molecules. Like to start with a couple of opening quotes. First, that's what's falling in love really amounted to, your brain on drugs, adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin, chemical insanity, celebrated by poets. It's by Tess Gerritsen. When the eyes of a woman that a man finds attractive look directly at him, his brain secretes the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine, but not when she looks elsewhere.

Daniel Goleman. All right. Let's get this started. I want to talk to you about strategies for regulating the four feel-good molecules, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin, and what it means from a big picture perspective, what we can learn from it. And I'll touch on adrenaline as well here and there. So I would like to talk about all of the four chemicals, more from just a scientific perspective, what they are, but want to go through that relatively quickly, just to get you started, get the juices flowing.

Dopamine, often referred to as the feel-good neurotransmitter, plays a crucial role in the brain's reward system and reinforcement of certain behaviors. Serotonin, it's also a neurotransmitter, known to regulate mood, emotions, and social behaviors. It's created in the gut, contrary to dopamine, which is created and stored in the brain. So serotonin contributes to feelings of well-being, happiness, and is involved in maintaining stable mood. We have endorphins. They are neuropeptides or something else.

They're produced by the body, I believe produced in the brain as well, but we'll get to that later, to help manage pain and stress. They act as natural painkillers, mood lifters and induce feelings of euphoria and reduce anxiety and stress. Then we have oxytocin. I've read the most contradicting research about that. I've actually gone through a bunch of scientific papers on this. So classically, oxytocin is referred to as the love hormone, the bonding hormone, and it plays a significant role in social bonding.

There are all kinds of experiments with mice and rat and voles, where they manipulate the levels of oxytocin and see how they react to that. And it plays a role in emotional connections and trust as well. It's released during activities like hugging, touching, and intimate interactions. Hence, they also call it the hugging hormone. So they all work in very complex ways. So whatever I'm going to tell you is an oversimplification.

It has to be because whatever these chemicals do is not like limited to exactly our moods and the topics that we're talking about. So it's not on emotions, it's over a mood. It regulates organs as well, your digestion, et cetera, et cetera. But they are essential. Those are the ones that are essential for maintaining emotional well-being in a balanced mental state. So it behooves us to know about them and adjust tactics based on that, so that we make sure that we fill up on that, that we take care of these different levels of, because it informs us what makes us happy, which is also the reason that we're talking about it.

I've been talking about on topics that help you make decisions to make you happy. And in a way, these are old decisions or decisions you can make to make yourself more happier without doing that much specific stuff. This is more abstract stuff. This is more taking care of your body, as science currently understands how these molecules work. It's not at all about that. It's not that we're just like driven by these feel-good hormones, and we just have to top them off, because then we can just like shoot up with drugs, and that would be it.

And those obviously have downsides, but we can be informed by them. Also, begs the question, what happiness exactly is. Is it contentment, ecstasy, avoidance of non-happiness or negative emotion, or is it just being balanced? And how I look at it in context with these well-being molecules is like the meta thing that we want to do is be on life's path, and it has something to do as well.

I'll touch upon that when we talk about dopamine. But that path comes with ups and downs. So we're not trying to eliminate sadness, eliminate negative feelings or something like that. In fact, doing your life's path can actually come at least initially with more downs, because that might refer to every episode I talk about what could be the backlash from your environment. So the moment that you start prioritizing your life purpose, doing things that your peers, the people around you don't necessarily expect, that does mean that you can get pushback and that your life becomes harder.

That's why all these motivational speakers are always talking about, like listen to yourself, don't listen to other people. They are going to keep you stuck in how you are and how you want to be. So if you recall a moment in life that was challenging, you had a challenging emotion. And if you imagine that instead of dealing with these stuff in motion, you just take a pill that makes you feel happy.

And that would cause you to not deal with it. So that's also not what I'm suggesting. Sounds like a harrowing addiction to me. In the short term, escapism works, right? In the short term, if you're just sad or someone broke up with you, you can like go drink, snort, gamble, fuck, go on the Eagles, wild rollercoaster ride, sure that works. But what we're trying to go for is not the short term.

We want to be cognizant of the medium in the long term. And a lot of things that happen when you're walking your life's path, they give you more of a low-grade glow. First is like that bright flash of like going to a party or something like that. Not to hate on going to parties, you know, that's part of life too. But you're not going to get much forward momentum out of that by and large, right?

I mean, it could be good for networking. I also want to underline that different people that might be listening or watching this might be in different stages of their life. There's different optimal decisions for an individual person, and that is partially informed by the chapter of life that they're in. It can be advantageous to chase shiny things when you're in your 20s, maybe even 30s, because it tells you something about what is for you.

If you chase that shiny thing and don't even think about why it's shiny, and if it's your society that tells it's shiny or whatever, it informs you, it can teach you more about what you like in the end, even if you get it, how does it affect your life happiness? If you get that car or driver's license or a girlfriend or a boyfriend, or how does that move a needle?

Or piece of technology, new phone, new TV. I want to talk a little bit about something that happened to me personally in life. During a fairly recent, a number of years ago, chapter of life, I got out of a very long relationship that I've been in since I was like 19, basically, 11 years. So throughout all my 20s, I was in a relationship and I didn't get to experience like the adventurousness and sex-review adventurousness and promiscuity that a lot of people experience in their 20s.

Not all the people experience in their 20s. I'm not necessarily saying that that's a good thing. I actually would argue the opposite right now. Wish I would have a little bit more maturity in that phase of life. But I went through that phase because I thought that that was what I was truly desired because it's like one of these shiny things. It's like something that at least I was susceptible to drinking that Kool-Aid of what like masculinity looks like, that you can go out and you can just have sex with a bunch of girls.

Like that makes you a better man in some way. And it turned out to be more destructive in the medium and long term to me because it engages like sort of almost in an addictive cycle because it's, you know, chasing shinies in a way. And you're not moving yourself along that that much. Again, there's something to be said because there is the fact that men are interested in women and that they want to chase them has something to do with their reward mechanism.

We're going to talk about dopamine there. It's very dopamine inspired. Nature has arranged it in such a way that for a lot of us, like we don't just keep chasing women over and over and over again because we have one point to get that it doesn't really make us happy. And that like sort of the low grade, slow turn happiness is more in having a longer relationship.

So these two systems do play together. Basically dopamine and serotonin. More about that later. So that is what I wanted to underline that. In that chapter, that was very dopamine driven. It was about going to parties, meeting people. And at the same time, I was working on my life's path. I was working on spirituality, but it was very segregated. And that was a phase of immaturity in me.

And very much like sort of a dopamine bender in a way. Your story might be completely different. You might have gone through that chapter in your 20s. You might be in your 20s. It might be more about complacency for you. Some people are in a situation that they have a good safety net around them, you know, so that they are not really challenged that much to do anything.

They're just doing what everyone else is doing. And sort of like feeling like their life is slowly wasting away, they're gaining weight. They're not really doing anything that challenges them. That's not really my temperament for better or for worse. But it can influence your happiness in the same way, and it involves the same brain chemicals. I mean, what keeps you sort of on the couch? What keeps you unmotivated?

And that has something to do with dopamine as well, which is how you motivate yourself. So we're really going to take a look at what these four feel-good molecules tells us about optimizing happiness, to just have like this feeling that you're good in your body and your brain, that you're steaming head into a direction that you want to, and how that affects these different molecules. And of course, this is just a model to look at that.

These molecules are hugely complicated. Like I said, it's going to be an oversimplification. But we can still see what chemically drives happiness and we can try to look beyond the chemicals at the same time. We know the solution does not lie in a pill. The solution lies in putting in the work and putting in effort. But you want to put the work and the effort in the right way to chop the wood with the grains, the woo way moving in line with how nature wants things to go.

So in a way, recruiting these feel-good molecules, so it helps you along, right? That it becomes a tool instead of something that prevents you from moving forward. We can then be informed by these theories. We can be informed by how the machinery works. And then turn that, use that into doing what we want. All right. Now I want to try to do this rapid fire. So I want to really talk a little bit more in detail about these different molecules.

I'm going to start with dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain, stored in the brain, discovered by Arvid Carlsson only 50 years ago. It's mind-blowing. There's more insights that were provided by Paul Greengard. So that's another known name in the industry. And that actually got them the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2000. But it's really interesting, at least to me, that we've only really known about what this molecule does for 50 years.

It's fascinating. So it's known as the Feel Good Hormone. It gives you a sense of pleasure, strong sense of pleasure, which wanes pretty quickly. It gives you the motivation to do something. So it is anticipatory, as in you know that you're going to get something that's pleasant, that is going to give you some motivation to keep going. Generally, you do have to start or you have to visualize starting, then the dopamine starts going.

And then when you complete whatever the thing is, you get the shiny, you also get rewarded with a huge surge of dopamine, which you've already guessed is gone 10 seconds later, or maybe a little bit, but it's fleeting. So it's part of your reward system, and that system is designed to reward you when you're doing things you need to survive. Eat, drink, compete to survive, compete to reproduce.

If you think about it, it makes sense, because all of these things, really, if you think about it, are a huge pain in the neck. It's much easier to just lie on your ass and don't do anything. So it's kind of interesting to realize that nature needed a strong reward system to motivate you to get off from your ass and actually do something. And the fact that that system exists, that means that you can harness it.

So our brains are hardwired as humans to seek out behaviors that release dopamine in our reward system. When you're doing something pleasurable, as I said, it releases a large amount of dopamine, and you feel good, you seek out more of that feeling. So it is evolved in movement, in memory, right? Because you have to remember a good thing in order to do that good thing again. So you have a special way of storing those memories.

So you can have like euphoric recall, like basically only remembering the good things of an event or eventuality, so that you seek it out again, which can lead you down an addictive path, and you can break that entire system once you come really addicted to hard drugs, for example. Pleasurable reward and motivation. There's the Coolidge Effect as well, where males get more dopamine if they're mating with new females.

So it tells us a lot about our sexual attraction as well. I spoke the quote that I started the episode with about if you're locking eyes with an attractive, it was from the male to the female, but it works the other way around, that dopamine is flowing. And in the Coolidge Effect, we see that males get more dopamine if the new female is introduced. And that's an interesting factoid about our sexuality as well, which is something to be aware of and harness as well.

It's also interesting that the other way around, it doesn't really work that much. It leads into these age-old discussions about that men are motivated to go out there in the world and spread their seed where women try to find a strong male that will take care of their offspring. And these things are a little bit at odds at each other. So I'm also partially telling you this because the fact that something is present in us doesn't mean that we always just want to let that system do exactly what we want.

We're not... we have a society that does not promote, like, just going around and spreading your seed as it were. That's adultery. But there is something that... the reason that adultery happens is because we're seeking dopamine and that we're lacking in different areas. So it's an imbalance in a way. So it's also a part of behavior and cognition. Like, it allows you if you want to figure something out.

Like, dopamine is released. So you actually put in the mental effort to figure something out. It can be like even like your homework at school. That can... when you finally figure it out, when you get the right answer, you get rewarded with dopamine for work as well. If you finish that report, it drives attention and actually you get dopamine if people pay attention to you, regulates sleep and arousal, mood, learning and lactation as well.

For women, it decreases lactation. It also plays a small role in your fight or flight system that we talked about last episode. It's not something that you can clearly measure. So it's not that you can get some kind of over-the-counter test where you spit in a tube and it tells you your dopamine level. It's hard to measure. You can't even get a blood test that clearly states that.

So we have to look more for its effects and that we can directly see what the levels of your dopamine is. So let's talk a little bit about the different things that allows us to get more dopamine. The most important part is accomplishment, right? Accomplishment of something pleasurable. And it doesn't even have to be something pleasurable per se. Like I said, it's like finishing your homework. That's not necessarily pleasurable by itself, but by making it a goal and focusing your achievement on that, you do get a release of dopamine.

So it just doesn't have to be shiny. And in fact, there is something problematic, just chasing down things that are pleasurable, that will get you stuck in a hedonistic loop. Also reframing challenges, right? So usually how we relate to a challenge is we're annoyed by it. Like something comes up and I don't know, we have to do our tax returns or we get a parking ticket or whatever, anything happens in life, we don't get the promotion.

There is great value in reframing challenges, in like sort of a positive way. Not just like, it's not just like an airy-fairy thing. It is something when we do that, we harness the power of our motivation or of our reward seeking. Because we set a goal, we imagine it to be in a certain way, and instead of being annoyed that it isn't this way right now, we focus more on how it will feel good if we complete that task.

And then suddenly, our dopamine is going to help to stay on target and actually finish that. There's also all the kind of low-grade activities that make you feel happy or relaxed that also releases dopamine. It's thought to increase dopamine levels such as exercise, meditation, yoga, massage, playing with the pet, walking in nature, or reading a book. And just pleasurable, relaxing activity. There's also the nutrition part of it, which I don't think for a ton of people makes that much of a difference, but it is still important to realize that in order to feel in a certain way, your body has to be able to create dopamine.

So in that case, if you want to eat, if you eat a diet that's high in magnesium and tyrosine rich foods, those are the building blocks for dopamine, right? I don't think in a ton of situations, if you just pay good attention to your nutrition, that like your gap is going to be like you don't have the building blocks, but it's still good to know where it's in.

Foods that are known to increase dopamine include chicken, almonds, apples, avocados, bananas, beets, chocolate. Chocolate also increase serotonin, more about that later. Leafy green vegetables, green tea, lima beans, oatmeal, oranges, peas, sesame, and pumpkin seeds, tomatoes, turmeric, watermelon, and wheat germ. I eat oatmeal on the daily, so that's probably good. So how does it feel if you have the right amount of dopamine? You're happy, you're motivated, you're alert, you're focused.

How does it feel if you have low dopamine, tired, unmotivated, unhappy? Memory loss, mood swings, sleep problems, concentration problems, and a low interest in sex. How does it feel if you have a high dopamine level, euphoric, energized, a high sex drive, which there is a risk of adultery then, like in that state. That's more associated with a high dopamine level. Jealousy, erratic behavior, poor impulse control basically, trouble sleeping and being aggressive.

So more insight about dopamine later, but I want to keep going. It's not as rapid fire as I hoped. Next up, endorphins. More straight forward. So they are created in your pituitary gland and hypothalamus, both in the brain, and they're released when your body feels pain or stress. Your body releases endorphins to help you survive, to override the pain. So it actually releases endorphins to block the nerve cells that receive the pain signal, so that then turns it down, essentially turns off your pain.

It helps you to continue focusing even in painful or stressful situation. And because you naturally seek to avoid pain, you're more likely to do something if it makes you feel good, like exercise. So they have many benefits. So they ease the symptoms of depression, help with stress and anxiety, improve self-image, contribute to weight loss, and alleviate childbirth pain. This is again from a number of scientific studies that I will cite in the show notes.

One of the easiest ways of releasing endorphins, and you might know that, is by exercising. And I've talked about The Real Happy Pill by Anders Hansen before, which outlines what kind of exercise and what you have to do. And it's actually nothing crazy. You do have to focus that you engage your heart rate. Your heart rate does have to go up above a certain BPM, appropriate for your age.

So it's not just taking a walk. Like it is the exercise that actually does make you break a sweat that releases the endorphins, because you can imagine that just a low grade walk doesn't really stress your body. The moment that you're like sprinting or something like that, that is a stressor for your body, which is why that drives the release of all these endorphins. For example, like a runner's high that people feel after or during a good run.

But you don't have to feel the runner's high. There's other forms of exercise that make you release endorphins because lots of people don't like running. Power walking is included. Get your heart rate up high enough, but it is included. Swimming, dancing, hiking, all of these help. You can increase your body endorphins by engaging in various activities. I mean, exercise I already mentioned. So it's a moderately intense space, right?

It seems to be best for releasing endorphins. Supposedly as well, good scientific study to which I don't know that much about acupuncture, but acupuncture, like just, you know, putting fine needles into the skin at specific points, probably related to the fact that that actually hurts. And then you get some endorphins for that. But supposedly that's one of those. Meditation, breathing deeply, focusing on calming your brain and mind.

That eases pain as well. So just mindfulness by itself. Sex, so the endorphins give us the blissful feeling of many of us get after sex. It's just like a painkiller. And there's many more hormones that are released when you're having sex. And I don't know if that's familiar to some of you, but what I've noticed is sometimes when I'm sick, I am more interested in having sex because of those painkilling effects.

That's not the best reason to want to have sex. There are painkillers for that, but it's good to remember. Let's see, there is some study as well. Like, this is the interesting thing about studies. This is a more recent one that do state that the release of endorphins aren't as strong as, like, after having sex for men as for women. But that's just the one study. But, you know, playing music.

So, I alluded to the dancing as well. But if you sing, dance, bang on a drum, you do more than just entertain others or annoy others. You also release a rush of endorphins, and that might increase your tolerance to pain. Eating chocolate or spicy food. So that's, we've seen chocolate for dopamine. We've seen chocolate for endorphins now. And we're going to see that it also promotes serotonin.

So there's something really good about chocolate. The more like high percentage cocoa as possible, right? Like 80 percent like dark chocolate or 90 or something like that. And spicy foods supposedly as well, probably there's something painful, stressful about that. Laughter. So that apparently does wonders for releasing endorphins and generally for your state of mind. Laughter also alters levels of serotonin and dopamine. I didn't really talk about it in context of dopamine as much, but that is definitely one as well.

Ultraviolet light. So just being in the sun, it stimulates a release of beta endorphins in the skin. So that's wonderful. Onwards to serotonin. So serotonin is largely created in the gut, 95 percent, and not just the brain stem. Or not, yeah, not just the brain stem, but some of it is created there as well. Which is different from the chemicals that we've been talking about so far.

What does it do in your body? It regulates your mood. It's often called your natural feel-good chemical, just like dopamine, so that's confusing. When it's at normal levels, you feel focused, emotionally stable, happier, calmer, and low levels of serotonin are associated with depression. And many medicines or medications that treat anxiety, depression, or other mood disorders, target ways to increase the serotonin in your brain, like SSRI, so it's a serotonin uptake something, something.

I forget what it actually stands for, but I believe that SSRIs prevent the re-uptake of serotonin, so that it just stays in your system more. Digestion, so digestion, sorry. Most of your body's serotonin is in your GI tract, where it helps control your bowel movements and plays a role in protecting your gut. So your gut can increase serotonin release, to speed digestion, to rid your body of irritating food or toxic products when you eat spicy food.

Serotonin also plays a part in reducing your appetite while eating. Nausea, so actually your brain perceives nausea if serotonin is released into your gut faster than it can be digested. So many drugs that are used to reduce the feeling of nausea, target the serotonin receptors in your brain so that you don't experience nausea. Sleep together with dopamine plays a role in the quality of your sleep, how well and how long you sleep.

Your brain also needs serotonin to make melatonin, and that's the hormone that regulates your sleep-wake cycle. You can take that as a supplement, by the way. Wound healing, so it has a place in helping your body heal wounds. And just like dopamine, it regulates your desire for sex as well. So different than just chasing the reward of sex, it does play a role as well. It has a role as well as feeling fatigue.

So you might know about tryptophan. Tryptophan is one of the amino acids that's required to create serotonin in your brain. And it's one of the eight or nine, depending on how you count, essential amino acids. So I know that from the supplement world, in your pre-workout and post-workout, oftentimes you see that it doesn't have tryptophan, but it does have valine, which is closely related. And the reason that that's the case is, if you get a lot of tryptophan, that can get metabolized or in your brain, changed into serotonin.

If you have a higher concentration of serotonin in your muscles, you can't do as many reps. You feel tired earlier. So I found that interesting as well. That's the reason that there's generally no tryptophan in working out supplements. So to increase the levels, you guessed it, you can eat more tryptophan containing foods. There's a list, but I'll just highlight chocolate again, dark chocolate. Getting more sunlight. So again, sunlight, very, very important.

Just don't feel good. Like eat a piece of chocolate, go outside. That's just going to be good for you, especially if you then do some moderate exercise, even if you go for a power wall. Meditation and mindfulness, there it is again. So we see that popping up for all these different chemicals. Again, this is not just woo-woo. Nowadays, there's good studies on mindfulness. There's whole MBSR, mindful-based stress reduction.

I actually did that class on Masterclass by Jon Kabat-Zinn, I believe his name, like he's the OG MBSR guy. So there's good solid evidence for that, that it's not just woo-woo, as we thought it was like 20 years ago, just something that blew over from the East. But now there's good evidence for it. Finally, getting more exercise and lowering your stress level. Oxytocin, we're at number four now.

So oxytocin, I actually, by reading all these different papers, I've found out a bunch of information. So my takeaway is that it's just primarily used in labor and childbirth to stimulate contractions and aid lactation. So it feels like that chemical, again, it's synthesized in your brain, released by your brain. That's the clearest physical observable thing that happens. And then there's, when a woman goes into childbirth, there is actually a positive feedback loop of oxytocin that helps you to get through the entire thing, which is, of course, very stressful and painful.

And supposedly, it helps your bonding as well, like child-infant, parent-infant bonding. But there's newer evidence that, like, sort of counter indicates that as well. They did exercise where they bred, I believe, voles that do not have the receptors for oxytocin. They had a hard time lactating, but they bonded with their young just fine. They, like, licked them, which there's, like, all kinds of very interesting evidence that for red pups, young, young reds, if their mother, like, licks them, that means that they will grow up to be, like, much more stable individuals.

So it's just the equivalent of cuddling for rats and it creates more social rats. And of course, there is a human equivalent of that as well. So, but there's other studies that say that, well, actually, oxytocin doesn't really do that much. So there's different things that work. That's always the wonderful thing of trying to do studies on that. You know, it's hard to measure these things, and there's so many other things that are happening as well.

So, but still, a common wisdom is still that it plays an important role in human behavior, social interactions, sexual arousal, again, recognition, trust, romantic attachment, and parent-infant bonding. So, something like MDMA, the drug, boosts these oxytocin levels, I believe, which is the reason that you feel, suddenly feel so connected to everyone in the room, even if they're strangers, right? So that is, that is a measurable effect.

Like I said, for women, childbirth and lactation, is affected by oxytocin quite a bit. And for men, apparently, ejaculation, which was also interesting. So the feeling of being close and connected actually apparently promotes orgasm in men. Just like we saw in the last episode, that being in the fight or flight system promotes ejaculation in men. I find it interesting whenever I read about these things, how many of these things are, have stuff to do with a reproductive system.

It makes me respect it, how like well wired it is through everything. It makes me sort of realize that all the machinery that's, that's behind it, to make us interested in doing that in the first place because it's such a pain in the neck to actually deal with. So I got to chuckle out of that. It's rare to have too little or too much oxytocin.

So it's apparently pretty much self-stabilizes pretty well. Increasing oxytocin through, say, physical touch, to think massage, cuddling, also making love and having sex, hugging, and playing with animals and having eye contact with animals, supposedly also makes us feel connected. So oxytocin surges. So let's go into the insights. I've tried to give an overview of the four molecules, what they do, how they work. And now, what does it mean for the work that we're doing?

What are the insights that I got out of that for me personally? Just sort of in an abstract sense as well. I feel like a number of these feel-good chemicals are straightforward, and what you can take away from this talk is just, hey, take care of your exercise. It's so important for just like your chemical happiness. It's not optional. Plan for it. Do it in the right way.

It's just not an option. Get out in the sun. Sure, like wear sunscreen is important, but be aware of, it's not just the vitamin D that you're getting. It's really important for your chemical happiness. Eating in the right way is also quite important. And laughter is what I wanted to mention as well. It's like plan that in your life, even if it's watching comedy show or something like that, or working on your own humor.

Meditation, so it's basically so much connected to all these chemicals, brain chemicals for happiness. Read up, if you have some kind of skepticism around that, read up on the signs yourself. But it's just so important. And in this world of everybody doing that much, it's one of the things that I find the hardest to convince myself or others of. And the last one is also take care of your sexual well-being.

So and that doesn't mean just having sex. It might actually mean having less sex, right? So I'll go into that as I talk about these different, these different, these different insights. First of all, I do want to like sort of compare a little bit dopamine and serotonin because they're both neurotransmitters. They're both chemical message carriers between nerve cells in the brain as to and from other areas in your body.

They're both considered to be happy hormones, and they both play a role in positive mood and emotion. But what's the difference? Serotonin is associated with happiness, focus, and calmness, while dopamine is associated with rewards and motivation. I've talked about that as well. They are in some balance. It doesn't mean that if you're just chasing Chinese and have high dopamine, that your serotonin is going to be low.

It's not as simple as that. It's really complicated. But they do interact, right? So they have partially all other functions. Dopamine doesn't really regulate a digestive function or serotonin does. But it is true that sometimes an imbalance leads to an overproduction of the other neurotransmitter. So in my head, I translate that if you don't take care of your serotonin, if you don't like relax, go for that calmness, that might present itself as an overproduction of dopamine.

And that involves chasing, chasing shinies. So for me, that just means that in my like sort of daily plan, my daily time, I have to really think about what are my dopamine activities? What are my serotonin activities that, you know, how do I take care of like an environment that allows both of them to regulate me? Let's see, one of the other things, I mean, just to reiterate, like the things to take away from this episode is like exercise well, not just exercise, like do it in a way that you sort of maximize filling up on these hormones.

Be present, mindfulness, eat well, have a balanced sexual life, save physical touch, spend time in the sun and laugh. So there are seven things there. You can take note. I do want to create like sort of talk about like a warning and partially from personal life. And that is to be aware of compulsions. So I think that most of these chemicals that we've talked about, there's no way that they can really like hurt us that much.

You could argue that if you're like high on serotonin and you're just like feeling good, you don't really motivate yourself to do anything. That's something you could argue that. But I believe it to be much more rare. And it's not the case for me. So that it doesn't speak to me as much. I can sympathize. I can empathize. But for dopamine, there is a danger there because it's so much.

You get to decide what the rewards are that you chase after. And what you consider pleasurable is driven by so many things in life. Right? So once something becomes ingrained in your brain circuitry, if you've engaged in to it over and over and over, and you might have heard of these experiments where mice can like self-medicate dopamine or cocaine or like some addictive like, and when we're talking about addiction, the way that you get addicted to cocaine or heroin is very much like through rewards and through dopamine.

Read an interesting paper on that. On that topic, that same paper also states for men that want to like kick their cocaine addiction, making sure that you have enough oxytocin even with like a nasal spray. Well, it had like a very positive effect, right? Like the control, the group that had the spray versus the placebo group or the group that didn't do anything, did significantly better, which is interesting.

It's also interesting that it doesn't work like that for women, but I don't have like a particular insight. I just thought that was an interesting factoid. But so if you ingrain it in your brain circuitry, it becomes exceedingly difficult to like change that at one point. This is where adrenaline comes in as well. Like if you have this cocktail of adrenaline, something that's like really exciting, kind of scary, and dopamine, that creates very euphoric memories.

It's going to feel very vibrant, very great. And that's dangerous, right? Because there are some things that can actually be very damaging. So, for example, that's the way that pornography takes root in a lot of, like the brain of especially young men. Younger in life, and I can speak to that from personal experience. You have the rush of adrenaline because you're doing something bad that's not allowed, right?

And dopamine, because your body is rewarding, like looking at naked women or porn or whatever. And the orgasm that usually follows. But that creates a dopamine cycle that, because you're getting that from that one source, it's not just going to be dopamine, it's just also there's a bunch of endorphins and oxytocin that's released. But you don't really have someone that you're really bonding to in that moment.

You have the model that you're looking at, but they're not real. So it creates all kinds of problems. And if you do that through a repeated exposure, that creates an inability to function in different areas of life. And if we're talking about cocaine, heroin addiction, that's very clear, right? It's obvious. That's the reason that people caution you that much to be really, really careful with drugs like that.

It makes sense. But that can be for natural things, as having sex as well if you do it in a compulsive way, in a chasing shiny ways, chasing more women. And pornography is especially problematic from that perspective because it's really about that Coolidge effect, right? Because you're exposing yourself to different women every day. And that sets up that cycle of reward seeking, seeking the next thing, the next thing, the next thing before you know it.

You can't really engage that well with actual people in your life, right? Like all your fancy sexual energy goes to like these, you know, hypothetical women that never say never say no to you. So you can see what the problem there is. This is also true what I would say from like playing video games in a way, because it gives you a reward that in real life would be would be harder to get.

Now, generally, good video games give you like these dopamine hits early on to like get you hooked and then the games become harder, right? But it's still like engages your reward system in the same way. See, I also wanted to mention that euphoric recall again. So that is the concept of a memory being much more vibrant and positive than it actually was because there was so much dopamine involved.

So it changes, it changes like sort of the color of our memory, even if something really bad happened afterwards. So it creates a really or it takes a really conscious and concerted effort to swim against the current of reinforcement, right? Because every step towards like getting your full search of dopamine, you're going to get like dopamine drips. It's reinforcing you. It's like sort of cheering you along here.

Like, feel a little better, feel a little better, feel a little better. So that's where you get in a rush. Like people that read about like people that have been in recovery for years, that can still really experience these strong cravings when they find themselves in places where they used to engage in their addictive behaviors, right? Because you just, your body wants you to get there. And this is an interesting thing.

Because if you haven't formed those memories, if you've only done like a thing once, you've experimented with the drug once, and you're just like, okay, well, that's what's like, this is not the healthiest for me. It can fade away to the background. If you have like a very strong, you've reinforced that circuit a lot, it's going to take a lot of deprogramming. Luckily, it is possible, and this is where mindfulness comes into play again, because being mindful promotes brain plasticity, so that promotes certain neural pathways from, you know, getting less priority and less priority.

So the great news is that years of concentrated effort to like undo these euphoric memories does have an effect, but it does take like, you know, it can take a decade. Like if you've had a strong addictive behavior cycle, especially if substances are involved, but it can be sex addiction just as much, which usually comes with substance addiction as well, but it changes you. It like physically changes like the connections in your brain.

So that means that you have a lot of brain plasticity work to do to unwire that. And that's like sort of my caution about dopamine. So you can fill your dopamine cup in millions of unproductive ways. I've already talked about playing video games, making money, just focusing on making money. That's like lots of like if you drive like car for Uber or Lyft, I hear from drivers that there's like a gamified way of doing that.

Like you have to get this many rides, and then you get that much money, and like you hear like sound effects and stuff like that, and then you get a dopamine rush when you hear that beep of achieving that reward. I'm not saying that making money is bad. I'm just saying that that can be one way of engaging your reward system, and that gets you some things, but not other things.

Gambling is a great example as well. Again, I can sympathize, not empathize. I don't really have a gambler's heart or soul or whatever, so I don't really get it. But supposedly as well. And anything that is addictive, right? Smoking, drinking, doing stimulants, doing heroin, dopamine drives early addiction to heroin very strongly. So all of these engage dopamine very well, optimize that. I've already mentioned watching porn or fantasizing.

And fantasizing, sort of, not just fantasizing, can be absolutely great because it's a way of visualizing what we want. And that's absolutely great. That's actually a big part of manifestation, being able to visualize what you want. I've talked about visualization in multiple episodes. So it's very, very important. But it is important to fantasize about things that you want to come to pass, and not just like these bizarre scenarios that you see in porn, because, you know, that's not even truly what you want, if you're honest.

So it's wasting brain cycles in a way. Masturbate and doing any like, sort of like reproductive behavior, it is important to be aware how strongly that engages the reward system, depending on your temperament. But the fact that how much you hear me talking about that is, you know, a strong thing for me. Like oftentimes, sex feels like the shiniest shiny to me, and there's dangers to that, because not only does that lead to disappointment, because it's actually like not your solution to everything, it hurts the connection with your partner as well, right?

Because it becomes compulsive. And who wants that? Who wants to be exposed to someone that wants something from you compulsively instead of connecting with you? I mentioned already euphoric recall. So that's dopamine plays an important part in that. So you're just thinking about a memory of something that good that happened gets the dopamine flowing. It's meant to get the dopamine flowing so that you seek out that situation again, right?

But in some situation, you don't want to engage with that situation again, right? So this is again where mindfulness comes into play. So I would say that euphoric recall can be very important. I can say that everything that I've talked about in a way can be very important. If it's a goal, if it's something that you're trying to achieve or to get, right? If I want to do public speaking, and I am just doing a euphoric recall to how I felt after I did that, when I got my applause or something like that, that's positive because that means I get reinforced in seeking out that next experience to fulfill my life purpose if that's public speaking, something like scary like that, instead of focusing on how nervous I was before that or something like that.

So I'm not saying that euphoric recall is bad. I'm saying to use it productively. Instead of obsessing about or euphorically recalling things that happened in the past that you don't want to reproduce, that you actually don't want to do. If you, you know, experimented with a drug and it was really good. And to obsess about that, that leads you in the wrong direction or some sexual encounter or gambling where you want some money, or that time that you got that bonus from work when the company sold or some, that time that you found like a thousand dollars on the street.

You know, so the more of the story is kind of like, just don't be dopamine's bitch. Think about the marshmallow test as well. Delayed gratification is a good thing. You don't have to follow that dopamine drip that's being created. I haven't really talked at all about cell phones and social media, right? When I'm talking about playing video games, it's kind of the same thing. In a way, social media, you can see it as a video game.

I don't really engage that much with social media at all, partially because I feel like I'm very... It's easy for me to get sucked into likes and whatever. But that is a very important one to mention as well. So that can lead to a lot of scrolling. It can lead to a lot of obsessive thinking. It will lead to checking your phone whenever you hear the beep of something that you're getting.

That is actually the reason that I have notifications on my phone off the vast majority of the time. I have two or three contacts that can get through that. So if I get a text from my girlfriend, that will interrupt my workflow. But for the rest, like not Twitter, not email, not Slack, not like any of these things that work into like, oh, this is a good or a bad thing.

No Instagram alerts or something like that. And that has to do with the dopamine. That just means that my phone, it's still a dopamine hit for me to check it. But then at least there's not just like that dopamine that diverts your attention, that reinforces you to engage with your phone. At least I don't have that just all the time, that you hear your phone vibrating or something like that.

It has downsides because I sometimes miss important things. But you can imagine how important, like for example, like when recording an episode like that, it's obvious that I don't want to have my phone buzzing or a notification on my laptop, right? Because then I'm just going to be okay. What's that, right? It's going to take you out of your flow. The moral story is here as I'm talking most about dopamine, but to get your dopamine from setting goals that are in line with your values.

Playing video games can be in line with your values. Having sex can be in line with your values in like a healthy amount. Even gambling can be in line with your values. You might want to get really good at poker. That's fine. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. You can make your living doing that. Why not? Why is that better than programming? I mean, I can, you know, people become like these that do like, compete in the tournaments and stuff like that.

So nothing of this is like really, really wrong, right? You can, video games, you can be wanting to make a living in the game industry, and then it's just really important for you to know your games, and maybe you're designing games, so you play that from that perspective. But that depends on what you want to achieve in life. So the key here is to look at what you're doing on a daily basis, where you're getting your dopamine from, because the way that I relate to it is you are going to get your dopamine from something.

Like the reward system is something that doesn't really fully go dormant. I do think that over the years, like you can imagine that like a guru or something like that, if you think of like Sadhguru, for example, and partially that's a projection and I don't know how he actually is, but you can imagine that a person like that with a high development isn't as easily swayed by rewards anymore.

That's how they can refrain from eating sweet and salty food, and it's a part of being mature, right? And some of it get it like, that's the marshmallow mellow test again. Some of us get that early in life and it just like comes with it, and some of it has actually have to do a lot of work for it. So it's all about like making sure that you plan ahead.

And it can be really hard. As per usual, there's like backlash from your surroundings, usually because there's a sort of like a gravity well. And if everyone around you in your family or friends group or something like that, all engages with like, I don't know, social media or does drugs or drinks or like, whatever the thing is, it's going to be really hard for you to not do that.

And you might actually have to cut people out. You might also not know your values yet, right? So you might not know what thing you want to engage with on a daily basis so you can get somewhere. It can be especially true in your 20s and 30s. And that's where my episode about values is about. It's important to uncover these things, to discover them, to build your values in a way.

So I want to reiterate, like, it's how do you use that dopamine? And how do you get dopamine? How you use that? Again, I want to underline the accomplishment, achieving goals, but you set the goals. So that is where visualization comes into play as well. And that is where smart ways of planning come into play as well. So, and actually, while recording this or while, like, preparing this, I came to an insight myself.

It's like, I manage tasks in two different ways. I either have, like, a reminders list, like, getting things done, style, contextual things, right? Or I put things in a calendar. And over time, I've started using, like, the task list less, because the calendar, you look at it all the time. So it always reminds me, if I have to do something, I can put that in my calendar and do it.

What David Allen, I believe, his name is of getting things done, what he recommends is actually not doing that in that way. Because if you plan it from 10 to 11, and then you do it from 2 to 3, like, why was it on your calendar? And you just keep moving the thing, and then you move it to next day, and that doesn't really engage, it doesn't really give you confidence that well.

I still like doing that that way, because I just look at my calendar more than I, look at my reminders list. But what I realize is that one of the things where it does make a lot of sense to do more things with my task list again is that creates that reward system. I definitely feel the reward of checking off an item to the level that I sometimes add something to my to-do list so that I can check it out, right?

And it's really silly, but that's just about getting a dopamine hit, but it's a dopamine hit for doing something that you want to get done in life. So set up ways that you do not only know your goals very well, even if they're abstract, but that you also have the micro steps in there, right? So you have small things that you do every day that you can then check off.

And that's, I'm going to think about that from myself, actually, in relation to my life goal. So I might change some things around, because, like I said, I'm very calendar driven, but it's beside the point. Reframing challenges is also very important. This was really like an eye opener for me, because reframing challenges into goals where you get like dopamine things from that, it just harnesses your reward system, and that becomes very, very positive and powerful.

So those are the two that I wanted to re-highlight, right? Let's see. A couple of things about oxytocin as well, but that's partially because there's so much new research on oxytocin. And so what do I want to mention about that? It's partially that oxytocin is released. Partially as well, like this is from a study called How Relevant is the Systematic Oxytocin Concentration for Human Sexual Behavior? Systematic overview, systematic review.

One of the things that I found really interesting is they showcase as well the downsides of like what oxytocin is supposed to do when it comes to sexual behavior is to create bonding. They highlight what the downsides are of like self-stimulation, how that then works, and where that bonding goes towards. So that wasn't an interesting thing. But how you can also modulate it in the right way.

So generally, you can, in sexual behavior, you can do two things. You can engage in fantasy or you can engage with actually what's happening right in front of you. And in a lot of situations, especially if you're self-stimulating, masturbating, you're in fantasy land. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be the case, but that's oftentimes. And that is actually where you can do that in a productive way.

You can, if you keep your fantasy on the real world, on your partner, for example, or someone that you want to be your partner, there can actually be advantages to that. So it's another example of where visualization, fantasy in a way is visualization. Combining it with a strong bonding system, like human sexuality, actually can get you something positive that you want to go for. And from my perspective, the best is still to engage sexually with a partner that you want to bond to.

And instead of while you're having sex with them, fantasizing about someone or something else, to really make sure that you can be present in that situation. And that creates very, very important bonding, which again, has a positive effect because the moment that you're bonded to someone, they become a source of oxytocin for you by just looking into their eyes, right? And that creates more stability in general.

I think I mentioned already that the oxytocin is not unlike the drug ecstasy, which triggers the release of serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin in the brain, and heightens users' feeling of trust and intimacy, even among complete strangers. So that's from the history of oxytocin. And so that's, I found that like interesting. I hadn't thought about trust and intimacy that much as a feeling. So that for me would change as well as how I, how I engage with some of these things.

I'm wanting to try to like more have more safe physical touch, for example, because that does release oxytocin. And especially if you focus on bonding to that, to that person. So that doesn't just have to be like a sexual thing. And one of the last things is that I've mentioned as well as like for men, if you're caught in an addictive cycle, and like the study is about cocaine addiction, that you can actually use oxytocin to make your life a lot easier.

So that shows a little bit for us men, how important it is to like fuel bond. I mean, you can artificially like sort of have like a nasal spray with oxytocin, but that also kind of means that if you optimize that in a natural way, and I translate that in my head as like feeling connected to people around you, that you don't really get sucked into addictive behavior, that much.

So I found that very interesting as well. Right. So I think that that's what I wanted to chat about. I do want to wrap up. Like I usually go through, expect some backlash from your environment. Be aware of if you're changing behavior, if you're changing like your, the way that you're getting your dopamine. And be aware of that. That's going to make people around you are going to have an opinion about that.

Not always positive. And I just want to re-highlight as well as been talking mainly about dopamine, because dopamine I feel is partially dangerous. Like it can take you down. I haven't talked in my insights as much about the other feel-good chemicals, because my takeaway again is like these, just where are my seven things. Exercise well, be present, mindful, meditate, eat well, have a balanced sexual life, save physical touch, spend time in the sun, and laugh.

Wait, like the sexual life and physical touch were the same, but so seven things. That's the main takeaway that I get from like the endorphins, the serotonin, oxytocin. I talked about it a little bit more. But from an insights perspective, I feel like that's just the most important takeaway. So this stuff about to feel good molecules should re-motivate you to just cover those bases, really, really well.

So if you make sure that in your routine, those are taken care of, that's going to do a lot for you in life. All right, so I think I want to leave it at that. Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been Vincent for The Meaningful Sh!t Show, and I will see you next time.