Gary Brecka explains how the brain's dopamine system drives addiction to sugar and screens. Tech companies engineer smartphone light wavelengths to trigger dopamine receptors, while sugar hijacks the same system. The brain, he says, acts like a dictator, stealing resources for its own reward cycle.
Addicts, as I say, very often don't wake up one day and say, I want to get really banged up. They wake up one day and say, I want to feel normal. And it's usually the search for normalcy that develops an addiction. The first inception, the first foray that addicts have into the journey of addiction is not a propensity to want to get banged up. It's a propensity to want to feel normal. What's fascinating is the pharmaceutical industry, the chemical industry has spent decades studying this neurotransmitter. The actual wavelengths of light in your iPhone are specifically designed to excite the dopamine receptors, to actually give you a reward for taking in that information. The same thing happens with sugar. The brain is crack addicted to sugar because the brain is addicted to the dopamine cycle. The brain is nasty. The brain is like the little Kim Jong Un of dictators. This kind of sits up there and takes everything for itself. If it wants amino acids, it will strip it from lean muscle. If it wants calcium, it will steal it from the bones. And if it wants sugar, it will activate a receptor on the back of your tongue, and it will give you a dopamine reward for giving it sugar.
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