When a risky $10,000 investment turns into $20,000, your brain floods with dopamine and endorphins. But it adapts fast, so you need bigger risks to feel the same rush. That's how people end up chasing larger and larger bets, trapped in what amounts to addiction.
So you talked about like the neurochemistry that happens with that a little while earlier in the interview. Can you dive deeper on that? What is actually happening on the chemical level for us to not break through to that next level and really understand like how to build our war chest and how to like be okay with that?
Yeah. So when we look at the neuroscience of risk, if I I take a risk, say I make a $10,000 investment, and then that comes back to me as $20K, right? My brain releases dopamine, serotonin, and other endorphins that create this sense of accomplishment and well-being. And that feeling is actually addictive. But the problem is, and this is known as hedonic adaptation, the next time we take a risk, it actually has to be a bigger risk and a bigger payoff in order to maintain that same level of satisfaction. So we end up doubling down and doubling down over and over in order just to get that same neurochemical result. And that is where this risk addiction comes in. There was places where I should have been writing a $25,000 check, but I was writing a $250,000 check because I— but because I wanted to get that next dopamine spike.
