Dr. Lieberman Explains How to Treat the Root Cause of Addiction!

Overcoming addiction is not about being strong, it's about being smart.

What role does dopamine have in motivation?

The more value we anticipate getting, the stronger the dopamine hit.

Can you ever fully recover from that addiction?

With addictions, you can't just say no. You've gotta have things that you say yes to.

Genetics, does that play a role, or how does that fit in this model?

It does. It plays a big role. Is there a healthy amount of dopamine we should be having Dopamine is perhaps one of the most powerful forces in the human brain, but there's one that's more powerful, and that is—

Have you ever wondered why addiction seems to be perfectly logical to an addict? The answer lies in dopamine. It is the chemical of desire that always asks for more, more stuff, more stimulation, more surprises. It is the source of every urge. Practically, it is why we seek and why we succeed, why we discover, why we prosper. Yet it's also why we gamble and maybe make reckless decisions. So how do we better understand and leverage this tool? That is the focus of this episode. Welcome back, Kwik Brains. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. Our guest today is Dr. Daniel Lieberman, MD. He is a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington He is the co-author of the international bestseller, The Molecule of More, which I'm holding if you're watching this on YouTube, How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, Creativity, and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race. Wow. In this episode, I want to chat about how dopamine shapes our desires and what role does it play in addiction.

Yeah.

Dr. Lieberman, thanks for being on our show.

Thanks for having me, Jim.

Dopamine, as a lot of our listeners know, is a neurotransmitter, one of what, dozens? And people think about dopamine, usually they think about pleasure, right? But according to your research, it's more than that. And so maybe we could start, you could explain what dopamine is and how it affects our body and obviously our brain as part of our body.

You're right. Most people think of dopamine as the pleasure molecule. The molecule of sex and drugs and rock and roll. And dopamine can feel very, very good when we experience it. But it's a certain kind of pleasure. It's a pleasure that is focused on the future. Dopamine really has nothing to do with the present moment. It's always about what's possible, what's new, what's more, what we don't have now. And so we get hits of dopamine when we anticipate something. It's that feeling of excitement, of interest, of feeling alive. There is a wonderful quotation in the book Winnie the Pooh, of all places, that I think characterizes dopamine so well. Christopher Robin asked Winnie the Pooh, what's your favorite thing in the world? Pooh is about to say eating honey, but before he does, he thinks that there's a moment just before you start eating honey that's even better. But he doesn't know what it's called. And that's dopamine. It's the expectation of some kind of a reward.

So this expectation, this anticipation is almost a bigger, quote unquote, high than actually the actual experience of that activity, that task, that reward.

I think that's true for most of us. The satisfaction we get when we accomplish something, or we get something that we desired, is a very different kind of feeling than the dopaminergic anticipation of it. And I think that in the culture we live in, we're really trained to focus on the dopamine, the anticipation. What do I need that I don't have now? What do I want? And we focus a lot less on that feeling of satisfaction that we experience when we get that thing that we worked for. And that's a problem because what it does is it leaves us chronically dissatisfied chronically striving and unable to enjoy the things that we work so hard for.

Interesting. And so, and I want to relate this to addiction in this conversation, but what role does dopamine have in motivation?

Really, dopamine is the basis of motivation. We do things because we want something. We do things based on desire. And dopamine really is the neurotransmitter of desire.

There are a lot of Debates. You look online and people listen to our podcast and read our work just because they'd like some clarity and some, you know, better understanding. The debates about addiction either being a choice or versus an illness. How do you navigate this complex discussion and what role does dopamine play here?

Well, as the saying goes, embrace the power of and. It's both a choice and an illness. You know, the essence of addiction is craving, and we all know what that feels like. It's really kind of a terrible feeling because we feel a little bit like we are out of control. And craving in a very real way reduces free will. It doesn't eliminate it, but it makes it harder for us to make free choices. You know, we all know you wake up early on a cold winter's morning, you crave more sleep. And most of the time you're going to get out of bed. But if you have the opportunity, maybe you won't. You're on a diet and somebody brings in cupcakes to work for somebody's birthday. In some sense, you have free will to say no. And yet we often say, yes, I'm going to eat that cupcake in spite of The desire we have to lose weight. And so addiction is a medical illness insofar as drugs have rewired the brain so that people are constantly experiencing craving for things that are unhealthy, whether it's a drug or whether it's a behavior. But it's also a choice because people, people, addicts may not be able to choose not to use their substance when the rubber hits the road and they're experiencing craving. But they can make a smart choice to get into treatment. We often say overcoming addiction is not about being strong, it's about being smart.

And that's actually one of the questions we had. We have a program called Kwik Success. A lot of our listeners are part of that community. People can find out at kwiksuccess.com. It's our monthly where we have a book club and we talk about new content, practical strategies to improve your brain performance, your productivity, your learning abilities. And so When we're thinking about addiction, like an addictive behavior, maybe it's you're addicted to your digital devices or it happens to be gambling, you mentioned, or sugar. Looking through the lens, the dopamine lens, why is it so hard to quit an addictive behavior? And can you ever fully recover from that addiction?

Yeah. You know, in some ways dopamine signals value. The more value we anticipate getting, the stronger the dopamine hit. So if you've done a good job and you're expecting your boss to pat you on the back, you're going to get some dopamine. On the other hand, if you're about to get a major award, you're going to get a lot more dopamine. Now, let's start with chemicals, addictive drugs. What addictive drugs do is they artificially stimulate The area of the brain where dopamine is released. And this artificial stimulus hits it like a guided missile. And the amount of dopamine released is far more than one would get from regular behaviors. And so when we see addicts, you know, maybe they're homeless, they've given up their family, their friends, their job, their home, their savings, everything to use their drug. From the outside, we say, Oh my God, that seems so irrational. Why on earth would somebody choose to do that? But from the inside, from the point of view of the strength of the dopamine release, that's as rational as perhaps me giving up seeing a movie to do an overseas trip for my business. Dopamine is telling me that one is far more important than the other. And when you get with addictive behaviors, that whole system gets scrambled. And people make very bad decisions thinking that they are good decisions.

So let's talk about decision-making. So the anticipation of a reward, it seems to play an important role in decision-making. So how does the anticipation influence our ability to maybe resist that temptation or make choices that are more aligned with our long-term happiness, well-being, particularly in the context of addiction recovery, but we could cover you know, a wider, you know, ecosystem?

There are more than one dopamine circuits in the brain. We've really been talking about the most primitive one, which I call the desire circuit. And that's one that makes us want things. It gives us motivation. It's also the one that gives us pleasure when we anticipate getting something that we want or we need. That's an ancient, as I said, primitive circuit. But there's a more sophisticated one that is stronger in humans than in any other animals. And instead of being deep in the brain, like the desire circuit is, it goes to the frontal cortex, the most advanced part of the human brain. And I call that the control circuit. Now, all dopamine is focused on maximizing future resources. Whereas the desire circuit gives you the motivation, the energy, and the desire to push towards it, the control circuit in the frontal lobes enables you to plan. The desire circuit looks just a few seconds or a few minutes or a few hours into the future. It's, I want it now. It can lead to impulsivity. The control circuit, on the other hand, looks much farther. It says, well, yeah, I want to eat that second donut. But is that really going to be good for me in the long term? It can also help us achieve our long-term goals in other ways. It's, it's the circuit that gives human beings the ability to reason, To abstract and to control our behavior to keep it within social norms. So it's a much more sophisticated circuit. And in many instances, it's in conflict with the desire circuit. The example I just gave, I want the donut, says the desire circuit. No, you better not do it, says the control circuit. And it's the same with drug addiction. Now, the control circuit may say, hey, Step away from that social media. It's not good for you. But the desire circuit might be much stronger and the control circuit fails. What the control circuit can do is it can do an end run around the desire circuit and make plans. So you might install some kind of a filter on your phone that only allows you to be on social media for 30 minutes a day. You might work with a friend To support one another, not to use it so much. That's being smart. And that's really the most effective way to overcome a maladaptive desire circuit.

So with the control circuit, it's like if somebody is, they're addicted to eating certain treats, could be your executive functioning thinking like, don't have it in your home. Yeah. Yeah. So in terms of your planning.

That's right. Have some grapes in the refrigerator. You know, you can just grab them. They're sweet. They're a lot healthier. It's coming up with strategies to make resisting easier.

So one of the questions we had in Kwik Success was, is there a healthy amount of dopamine we should be having daily when we're harnessing the motivational power of, you know, people talk about cold plunging and, you know, it's like the dopamine spike lasting, you know, for X amount of hours. We hear a lot online on social media, people going on a dopamine detox. What are your thoughts? None of that.

I don't think dopamine detoxes are very useful. And the reason is that they tend to be short, but the brain adapts very, very slowly. Right? There's that legendary 10,000 hours to master a new skill. And that's because the brain changes very, very slowly. So if you detox from dopamine over the weekend, I don't know, you might feel good about yourself, it might have some benefits, but you're not going to be resetting the dopamine system. You really need to do that for months at a time in order to make a difference.

Wow.

And then if you, you go back to your dopamine activities, the switch back to where you were happens very, very quickly. Dopamine induces what we call tolerance. You know, if you have a heroin addict, a small amount might get that addict very, very high in the beginning, and then 10 times the amount a year later does almost nothing. And that's because the dopamine circuit is only interested in things that are new. And so if you keep feeding it the same thing, it stops responding.

Because it's no longer— doesn't have that novelty and it needs either greater intensity or frequency, duration to be able to get the same level of that experience.

Yeah, yeah. So really, if you find yourself overwhelmed with dopamine, what you want to do is make longer-term changes.

What's an example of that?

Yeah, so I kind of think of it as, you know, hitting social media, consuming pornography, eating junk foods. This is like doing shots of tequila. Whereas enjoying things like doing a good job at work, helping out a friend, reading a good book, that's like slowly sipping a glass of fine wine. And I think that if we want to maximize our enjoyment and satisfaction, We've got to step away from slamming our dopamine system with junk food and junk stimuli for the brain and really think about shooting for that moderation to maintain the sensitivity of our dopamine system and also not get caught up in doing nothing but trying to stimulate the dopamine.

Especially for like low, where you don't have to put the effort into it, right? For certain things that you could just put it on your device or reach for it. You don't have to really work for it. And so you get that dopamine, that, that spike, if you will, but there was no effort that was required.

Yeah, that's right. And, you know, we started off by talking about how dopamine is sometimes confused with a pleasure molecule. And I think that this is a good place to mention that we can do a behavior compulsively because we think it's going to give us pleasure. But it really does not. And I think a great example of that is doom scrolling, when, you know, you've got this endless scroll, which is a diabolical invention, by the way, right? It used to be you'd come to the end, and at the very least, you'd have to tap a button to go to the next page, give you an opportunity to say, hey, maybe this is enough. But you got your endless scroll, right? And maybe you found something very, very interesting on there. And you're thinking, there's probably something else interesting, something that will help me, maybe a like I've gotten, maybe something that's going to affect me personally. And after a while, you notice that you're miserable, that your mood is going lower and lower, your energy level is just in the basement, but you don't stop. You keep doing it. And that's because when you get into an addictive behavior, the pleasure and the compulsion separate. And you get enslaved into this behavior without getting any reward from it.

You get trapped. So if we're looking through the lens again of dopamine, when we're going back to addiction, does one of the questions that was in our community was around genetics? Does that play a role or how does that fit in this model? Are you a high achiever constantly seeking that next level of success? Welcome to the Kwik Success Program. It's a deep dive and support system to master your life and scale to new heights in personal and professional achievement. Included is our exclusive monthly book club where we process transformative ideas from amazing books to level up your learning and your life. We also bring the author to the club to answer your burning questions. You could also participate in monthly live coaching calls with me where your questions meet my decades of expertise. Simply go to kwiksuccess.com. That's kwiksuccess.com and choose the plan that works best for you.

It does. It plays a big role. We don't know everything about the genetics of it, but I don't know how technical we want to get here. But there are, there are other neurotransmitters in the brain, which put the brakes on dopamine. And some people don't have very much of that neurotransmitter, or the circuits that use that neurotransmitter are a little bit weak. And we've studied this most extensively in alcohol. And so if somebody has a father or an uncle who's an alcoholic, they need to be very, very careful. I've had patients of my own who have fathers who are alcoholics who they've never touched alcohol in their life. They say, I've seen what it can do. I know I'm at risk. I'm not going to even roll those dice. It's too risky.

So maybe we could give people who are listeners an example. If they label something, one of their behaviors as an addiction, we could, you could give the example. What are some things that they could do keeping dopamine in mind to be able to mitigate that impulse?

Yeah.

Or that desire?

So let's start with the easy ones first. The first thing they can do is try to put together strategies to minimize craving. Once craving starts, the battle is almost lost because you get into this horrible debate within yourself. Think about setting your alarm clock 30 minutes early so you can wake up and exercise. If the alarm clock goes off and you jump out of bed, you've won. But if you start debating, if you say, geez, do I— which is better, the exercise or more sleep? It's game over. You've lost. So what you need to do is you need to put strategies in place that will avoid experiencing the craving, experiencing the debate. With alcohol or junk food, it's get it all out of the house. And make sure you have other things to reach for when you feel the urge to drink alcohol or eat junk food. With addictions, you can't just say no. You've got to have things that you say yes to. All right, I'm not going to use social media. Instead, I'm going to call my friend. I'm not going to use social media. Instead, I'm going to go out for a walk, or I'm going to Work on that woodworking project. You've got to have alternatives. Otherwise, you're just sitting there with nothing to do. The craving is going to come roaring back.

So having a replacement or some kind of building intelligent alternatives that are healthier for you can lead to greater levels of long-term, would you say happiness or fulfillment?

Yeah, fulfillment, but really success in overcoming this addiction. Now, I do want to say that for most people, this is not going to be enough.

Okay.

And so I want to take it to the next level. It's a level that most people don't want to go to. But eventually, you realize that you have to go there. And that is reaching out for help with other people. Dopamine is perhaps one of the most powerful forces in the human brain. But there's one that's more powerful. And that is our social instinct. That's why when people go to addiction programs, it's usually a group therapy format. And people resist that. They say, no, no, no, no, no, I want privacy. I want anonymity. I don't want to share with other people. The problem is that dopamine addiction is so strong that you really have to bring in these social circuits in order to overcome it. And so despite the shame, Despite the desire for privacy, for not wanting to burden other people or share your problems or the embarrassment of saying, hey, I can't control my behavior, that's really your quickest route to success. You say to your friend, hey, I'm having problems with this. Can we be a buddy team? Can you look out for me and make me accountable to you? Or if you've tried a lot of other things and nothing has worked, reaching out to a professional and enrolling in some kind of a therapy program.

Yeah, I have this side. I wrote a book called Limitless, and people ask, how do you become limitless in a limited world? Well, it's— we do it together. And that's a big part in terms of having support. So anybody who's struggling in these areas, you know, I would encourage those individuals. What would your message be? It would be like asking for help is not a weakness, but it's a show of strength.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And, you know, in this age of social media, we tend to see people in an unrealistic, perfect way, right? People don't post their failures on, on social media. They always post their successes. So it's like everybody's life is perfect. Everybody's got it all under control. But if you open up and you say, hey, I've got this problem I can't solve, I need your help. Odds are they're going to understand. They're going to go, oh my God, I totally know. I've got 10 times more problems than you do. I just didn't put it on my social media feed. So in some ways, it's harder to reach out because we have this fictitious view of other people being perfect. On the other hand, I think that the rewards of reaching out, being authentic, Showing some of your weaknesses in addition to your strengths is so valuable and so appreciated in this age of lack of authenticity.

I love this discussion because part of having a more limitless life is a reminder that we have a level of agency and more control. And there's a quote in my book that says, life is the letter C between B and D, where B stands for birth and D stands for death, but life C stands for choice. That these difficult times, they could distract you, right, with every like, share, comment, whatever. They could diminish you or they could develop you. But ultimately, we decide with those choices. And I love this conversation about how dopamine could affect our decision-making and our executive functioning because it just reminds people that we have more influence, that we don't always— that we don't have to be perceived as as reacting or at the effect of things. Uh, Dr. Lieberman, we're talking about The Molecule More. Recommend that any of this conversation appealed to you and resonates with you to get a copy. Where can people get a copy of the book?

Amazon, Barnes& Noble, and all the major booksellers.

Fantastic. And if people want— and we'll put the links always, as we always do, in the show notes at jimkwik.com/notes— how can people stay My website is danielzlieberman.com. Perfect. We'll put that in the show notes also as well. I'd love for our listeners right now to— if you feel like this episode was useful to you, then share it with your friends, your family members, your followers. I think we learn things for 2 reasons. You learn it for how you could personally benefit, but you also learn it so how you could help others. Because, you know, as we're having this conversation, when we're talking about everyone's highlight trailer on social media, It's a reminder also that everyone is fighting battles that other people don't know about, right? And it's so important. And I think knowing yourself and how we work is fascinating, especially when it comes to the brain. Your brain doesn't come with an owner's manual. So part of our show is showing people simple ideas to better understand, to have the self-awareness introspection, but then also be able to apply those things. And you gave us so many different things and ideas and tips. And to be able to make their lives better. So I want to thank you, Dr. Lieberman, so much, and I want to have you back on the show to talk about your other book also as well.

That would be fantastic. Thank you for having me.

Thank you, everybody who tuned in. I want to remind everybody that on YouTube is where we put the extended version of our show. You could join our 1.3 million subscribers there. If you've got value out of this, you can take a screenshot of wherever you're consuming this episode right now. You could tag us On social media so we get to see it. I'll repost some of our favorites. I actually have a couple of copies of this, so I'll gift out a couple of copies as a thank you for just— I think knowledge alone is not power. It has the potential to be power. It becomes power when we utilize it. So if you take some action on it, we want to really reward you for applying what you know. So, Dr. Lieberman, thank you again. And everyone who's listening, Thank you. Uh, until our next episode, be limitless.