Andrew Huberman: Fix Your Addiction in 1 HOUR | NEUROSCIENTIST on Nofap

when you're engaging in a behavior over and over and over again and you're thinking to yourself this isn't even that interesting you're officially addictive there's an additional issue with pornography which is not often discussed which is that remember what is pornography doing to the brain first of all it's triggering the release of dopamine and in the short-term testosterone by the observation of sex not actually engaging in human contact well we'll just be we're adults here I mean there's this idea that speak for yourself if you look in the journals of sexual health yeah and I'm

really interested in in sexual health and Urological Health there's a ton of interesting stuff on pelvic floor this stuff just isn't often discussed what you find is that a masturbation for women turns out to their self-reported Notions of well-being of mood of immune system function of quote unquote knowing their bodies and what gives them pleasure Etc all increase if you look at the data in Men in terms of masturbation and here we're talking about masturbation to the point of ejaculation in men they report lower mood less willingness to pursue relationships shocker you know they're home

watching porn right so we have to be very careful with statements like masturbation is bad or or something like that because that's not true it's going to be genders well we should say stay out of that discussion biological sex dependent because yeah it's a clearer ground we'll just leave it at that and then there is this whole notion that a whole generation of young males are becoming porn addicted to masturbation addicted I can't look someone in the I asked them out on a date or learn how to navigate healthy consensual sex yeah right and they're

not doing Network so they can't look anyone in the eye they've got flaccid feet and they don't do nothing yeah I mean and here I'm not trying to create Notions of like hyper mails we're really just talking about a radical shift in the way that Sexual Health has evolved over the last 10 years because of the accessibility of hardcore pornography its relation to the dopamine system yeah you know so here I'm not trying to be Evangelical or anything like that I'm just saying these are serious neurotransmitter slash hormone systems and a whole generation of males

is making themselves sated enough to not actually pursue a number of what used to be considered Milestones toward the transition between young adulthood and true adulthood and you know his birth rates are low dating is low oh yeah sex you know a few people are having a lot more sex so this is great for the people out there who are comfortable in social interactions right anyway we we don't want to go down that path too far but these are deeply wired systems yeah yeah do they who have much much will be given yeah so for

those of you willing to date and find relationship for Doja thank you for Dozier dopamine is what's called a neuromodulator and I mentioned that only because neuromodulators modulate the brain they make it more likely that certain things are going to happen and less likely that others are going to happen so think of them kind of like a playlist and I like to think about the kind of four playlists as neuromodulators just to really simplify things but make them clear serotonin does a lot of things but in general serotonin makes us feel pretty relaxed Blissful and

good with what we have what we all the relationships we already have the food our state of mind and body that we're already in okay if you ramp up serotonin really high people tend to lose their appetite lose their libido and feel really blissed out but kind of flat it's it kind of kills desire because why would you go after everything anything if you already have everything you need it's satiation exactly certainly many people out there would like to break habits that they feel don't serve them well one of the challenges in braking habits is

that many habits occur very very quickly and so there isn't an opportunity to intervene until the Habit has already been initiated and in some cases completed well there are a couple of tools that neuroscience and psychology tell us can be very beneficial some of those things are somewhat intuitive and relate to what I call foundational practices meaning things that set the overall tone in your body and brain such that you would be less likely to engage in a particular habit or that would raise your level of awareness both of your situation and to how you

feel inside so things like stress reduction things like getting good sleep things like quality nutrition things like having positive routines arranged throughout your day all of those of course will support you in trying to break particular habits and while that can be very useful it's admittedly very generic advice it doesn't point to any one specific protocol in order to identify a specific protocol that one could apply in order to break habits we have to look at the mirror image of the sort of neuroplasticity that we talked about at the beginning of the episode at the

beginning of the episode we talked about a form of neuroplasticity called long-term potentiation involving the nmda receptor just to refresh your memory a little bit it basically says that if a set of neurons is very electrically active it's likely that over time those neurons will communicate with themselves more easily because of changes in things like nmda receptor activity the recruitment of additional receptors Etc it's essentially a cellular and molecular explanation for how something goes from unlearned to learn to reflexive now in order to break synapses or to break apart neural connections that are serving a

habit that you don't want to engage in we need to engage the process called long-term depression and long-term depression has nothing to do with a state of mental depression or a reduction in mood so I really want to be clear that when I say depression in this context it has nothing to do with psychological depression has nothing to do with mood it's simply called long-term depression because just as long-term potentiation says if Neuron a triggers the firing of neuron B and it does so very robustly over and over and over again the neuron a will

not have to fire as intensely or as frequently in order to activate neuron B in the future because they become potentiated right the threshold for co-activation has been reduced there's a much higher probability that they will be activated together at low levels of intensity that's essentially what long-term potentiation is long-term depression says that if Neuron a is active and neuron B is not active within a particular time window then the connection between neuron A and B will weaken over time even if they started off very strongly connected okay so I'm going to repeat that because

this is a pretty detailed neurobiological mechanism whereby if Neuron a is active and neuron B is active but at a different time or outside of particular what we call temporal window meaning outside a particular time window then through long-term depression the connection between Neuron a and neuron B will weaken and just as a point of Interest the nmda receptor is also involved in long-term depression although there are other molecular components involved as well so how do you take two neurons that underlie a habit out of synchrony how do you get them to fire asynchronously this

is pretty interesting with respect to the cellar molecular technology but at the behavioral level it's especially interesting the way that one would do this is let's say for instance you have a habit of picking up your phone mid work session okay that's a reflexive habit I think that most people have experienced and we often hear the idea that oh you know the phone is so filled with access to dopamine and incredible things that were just drawn to it but if you notice what's happened with phone use over time most people including myself sometimes I admit

find ourselves just looking at our phone or find ourselves in a particular app without actually having engaged in the conscious set of steps of oh I'm really curious what's going on in this particular app I'm really curious what's going on in this particular website and you just kind of find yourself in air quotes for those of you listening I'm making air quotes you just sort of find yourself doing it because of the behavior of picking up your phone is sort of reflexive or has become fully reflexive you see this a lot at meals where multiple

people are there and no one's looking at their phone and then all of a sudden someone takes out their phone and you'll notice that other people just naturally take out their phone it's this kind of observed observation induced reflex and I would wager that most people aren't consciously aware of the in immediate steps involved so the literature says there are a number of ways to break these sorts of Habitual behaviors or reflexive behaviors most of those approaches involve establishing some sort of reward for not performing the activity or some sort of punishment for forming the

activity I've heard of some basic things that people do like they'll even put like a rubber band on their wrist and every time they complain or um every time they do some Behavior like pick up their phone they'll give themselves a snap on the wrist the the rationale there is that you're trying to create a somatic a very physical representation of something that makes it very real and harder to overlook other people just do a tick mark on a piece of paper the sort of um what gets measured is what gets managed kind of mindset

where if every time you do something you take away the Judgment this is very new AG I realize but this is what you find out there if you search the literature and even on PubMed peer-reviewed articles that every time you engage in a behavior you just measure the fact that you that you uh did that behavior you just mark it down at the end of the day people are supposed to look at that and say oh my goodness I can't believe that I spent uh you know three hours doing something or I did it 46

times and in fact a lot of apps social media apps will start to give you warnings now if you opt in that you've been on the app for an hour would you like to leave most people just click right past it and go back in I think very few people uh say oh my goodness it's been an hour and therefore you're right I absolutely shouldn't engage in this anymore it's just far too easy to just blow past those reminders ready to conquer nofap grab our digital nofap guide now end your porn addiction Skyrocket your self-esteem

and achieve your goals packed with proven Techniques expert advice and relapse prevention tricks click the link below and break free today it should become obvious why things like pornography not just the accessibility of pornography but the intensity of pornography can negatively shape real world romantic and sexual interactions this is a serious concern the discussion is happening now the underlying neurobiological mechanisms You Now understand this isn't to pass judgment on whether or not people like or don't like pornography that's an ethical discussion it's a moral discussion that has to be decided for each individual but again

any activity that evokes a lot of dopamine release will make it harder to achieve the same level certainly the greater level of dopamine through a subsequent interaction yes indeed many people are addicted to pornography and yes indeed many people who regularly indulge in pornography experience challenges in real world romantic interactions You Now understand the mechanisms behind what I'm telling you now I'd like to talk about the positive aspects of rewards for our Behavior and the negative aspects of rewards for our behavior and from that I will suggest a protocol by which you can achieve a

better relationship to your activities and to your dopamine system in fact it will help tune up your dopamine system for discipline hard work and motivation hard work is hard generally most people don't like working hard some people do but most people work hard in order to achieve some end goal end goals are terrific and rewards are terrific whether or not they are monetary social or any kind because of the way that dopamine relates to our perception of time working hard at something for sake of a reward that comes afterward can make the hard work much

more challenging and make us much less likely to lean into hard work in the future let me give you a couple examples by way of data and experiments there's a classic experiment done actually at Stanford many years ago in which children in Nursery School and kindergarten Drew pictures they drew pictures because they like to draw the researchers took kids that liked to draw and they started giving them a reward for drawing the reward generally was a gold star or something that a young child would find rewarding then they stopped giving them the gold star and

what they found is the children had a much lower tendency to draw on their own no reward now remember this was an activity that prior to receiving a reward the children intrinsically enjoyed and selected to do no one was telling them to draw what this relates to is so-called intrinsic versus extrinsic reinforcement when we receive rewards even if we give ourselves rewards for something we tend to associate less pleasure with the actual activity itself that evoked the reward now that might seem counterintuitive but that's just way the way that these dopaminergic circuits work and now

understanding these Peaks and bass lines in dopamine which I won't review again this should make sense if you get a peak in dopamine from a reward it's going to lower your Baseline and the cognitive interpretation is that you didn't really do the activity because you enjoyed the activity you did it for the reward now this doesn't mean all rewards of all kinds are bad but it's also important to understand that dopamine controls our perception of time when and how much dopamine we experience is the way that we carve up what we call our experience of

time when we engage in an activity let's say school or hard work of any kind or exercise because of the reward we are going to give ourselves or receive at the end the trophy the Sunday the meal whatever it happens to be we actually are extending the time bin over which we are analyzing or perceiving that experience and because the reward comes at the end we start to dissociate the neural circuits for dopamine and reward that would have normally been active during the activity and because it all arrives at the end over time we have

the experience of less and less pleasure from that particular activity while we're doing it now this is the antithesis of growth mindset my colleague at Stanford Carol dweck as many of you know has come up with this incredible Theory and principle and actually goes beyond theory in principle called growth mindset which is this striving to be better to be in this mindset of I'm not there yet but striving itself is the end goal and that of course delivers you to tremendous performance has been observed over and over and over again that people that have growth

mindset kids that have growth mindset end up performing very well because they're focused on the effort itself and all of us can cultivate growth mindset the neural mechanism of cultivating growth mindset involves learning to access the rewards from effort and doing and that's hard to do because you have to engage this prefrontal component of the mesolimbic circuit you have to tell yourself okay this effort is great this effort is pleasureful even though you might actually be in a state of physical pain from the exercise or I can recall this from college just feeling like I

wanted to get up from my desk but forcing myself to study forcing myself enforcing myself what you find over time is that you can start to associate a dopamine release you can evoke dopamine release from the friction and the challenge that you happen to be in you completely eliminate the ability to generate those circuits and the rewarding process of being able to reward friction while in effort if you are focused only on the goal that comes at the end because of the way that dopamine marks time so if you say oh I'm going to do

this very hard thing and I'm going to push and push and push and push for that end goal that comes later not only do you enjoy the process of what you're doing less you actually make it more painful while you're engaging in it you make yourself less efficient at it because if you were able to access dopamine while in effort dopamine has all these incredible properties of increasing the amount of energy in our body and in our mind our ability to focus by way of dopamine's conversion into epinephrine but also you are undermining your ability

to lean back into that activity the next time the next time you need twice as much coffee and three times as much loud music and four times as much energy drink and the social connection just to get out the door in order to do the run or to study so what's more beneficial in fact can serve as a tremendous amplifier on all Endeavors that you engage in especially hard Endeavors is to a not start layering in other sources of dopamine in order to get to the starting line not layering in other sources of dopamine in

order to be able to continue but rather to subjectively start to attach the feeling of friction and effort to an internally generated reward system and this is not meant to be vague this is a system that exists in your mind that exists in the minds of humans for hundreds of thousands of years by which you're not just pursuing the things that are innately pleasureful food sex warmth water when you're thirsty but the beauty of this misolympic reward pathway that I talked about earlier is that it includes the forebrain so you can tell yourself the effort

part is the good part I know it's painful I know this doesn't feel good but I'm focused on this I'm going to start to access the reward you will find the rewards meaning the dopamine release inside of effort if you repeat this over and over again and what's beautiful about it is that it starts to become reflexive for all types of effort when we focus only on the trophy only on the grade only on the win as the reward you undermine that entire process so how do you do this you do this in those moments

of the most intense friction you tell yourself this is very painful and because it's painful it will evoke an increase in dopamine release later meaning it will increase my Baseline in dopamine but you also have to tell yourself that in that moment you are doing it by choice and you're doing it because you love it and I know that sounds like lying to yourself and in some ways it is lying to yourself but it's lying to yourself in the context of a truth which is that you want it to feel better you want it to

feel even pleasureful now this is very far and away different from thinking about the reward that comes at the end the hot fudge Sunday for after you cross the finish line and you can replace hot fudge Sunday with whatever reward happens to to be appealing to you we Revere people who are capable of doing what I'm describing David Goggins comes to mind as a really good example many of you are probably familiar with David Goggins former Navy SEAL who essentially has made a post-military career career out of explaining and sharing his process of turning the

effort into the reward there are many other examples of this too of course throughout evolutionary history there's no question that we revered people who were willing to go out and forage and hunt and gather and caretake in ways that other members of our species probably found exhausting and probably would have preferred to just put their feet up or soak them in a cool stream rather than continue to forage the ability to access this pleasure from effort aspect of our dopaminergic circuitry is without question the most powerful aspect of dopamine in our biology of dopamine and

the beautiful thing is it's accessible to all of us but just to highlight the things that can interfere with and prevent you from getting dopamine release from effort itself don't Spike dopamine prior to engaging in effort and don't Spike dopamine after engaging an effort learn to spike your dopamine from effort itself ready to conquer nofap grab our digital nofap guide now end your porn addiction Skyrocket your self-esteem and achieve your goals packed with proven Techniques expert advice and relapse prevention tricks click the link below and break free today I personally think that porn in the

availability of porn is is a real is a real detriment to the developing brain along those lines I've heard you say that in order to reset the dopamine system essentially in order to break an addictive pattern to become unaddicted 30 days of zero interaction with that substance that person Etc right is that correct yeah and and 30 days is in my clinical experience the average amount of time it takes for the brain to reset reward Pathways for dopamine transmission to regenerate itself there's also a little bit of science that suggests that that's true some Imaging

studies showing that our brains are still in a dopamine deficit state two weeks after we've been using our drug and then a study by shuck it and brown which took a group of depressed men who also were addicted to alcohol put them in a hospital where the they had received no treatment for depression but they had no no access to alcohol in that time and after four weeks eighty percent of them no longer met criteria for major depression so again this idea that by depriving ourselves of this High dopamine High reward substance or behavior we

allow our brains to regenerate its own dopamine to for the balance to really equivalate and then we're in a place where we can sort of enjoy other things so that Progressive narrowing of what brings one pleasure eventually expands so I'd like to dissect out that 30 days a little more finally um and I also want to address how does one stop doing something for 30 days if the thing is a thought so put that on the shelf for a moment so days one through ten I would imagine will be very uncomfortable yes they're gonna suck

right basically to be quite honest because wait if the way you describe this pleasure pain balance to my mind says that if you remove what little pleasure one is getting or a lot of pleasure from engaging in some Behavior that's gone the pain system is really ramped up and nothing is making me feel good I'll just use myself as an example I'm not in recovery but you know that 10 days is gonna be miserable right anxiety trouble sleeping um physical agitation and to the point where you know um maybe impulsive angry should should one expect

all of that should the family members of people expect all of that yeah so what I say to patients and it's a really important piece of this intervention is that you will feel worse before you feel better for how long yeah this is probably the first question yes right and I say usually in my clinical experience you'll feel worse for two weeks but if you can make it through those first two weeks the sun will start to come out in week three and by week four most people are feeling a whole lot better than they

were before they stopped using their substance so um yeah you have to it's it's a hard thing like you have to sign up for it and I will say Obviously there are people with addictions that are so severe that as long as they have access to their drug or behavior they're not able to stop themselves and that's why we have you know higher levels of care or residential treatment so this is not going to be for everybody this intervention but it's amazing how many people with really severe addictions to things like heroin cocaine you know

very severe pornography addictions I posit this and I do it as an experiment I said you know what let's try this experiment I'm always amazed number one how many of them are willing and number two how many of them are actually able to do it they are able to do it and and so that little nudge is sort of just what they need and the carrot is you know there's a better life out there for you and you'll be able to taste it in a month you really will be able to begin to see that

you can feel better and that there's another way so the way you describe it um seems like it's hard but it's doable for most people not everybody right and we'll return to the that category of people who can't do that on their own um well then days 21 through 30 uh people are feeling better the sun is starting to come out as you mentioned they it which translates in the narrative we've created here and support by biology that dopamine is starting to be released in response to the taste of a really good cup of coffee

yes exactly whereas before it was only to insert you know addictive behavior right that's what it whichever it is a puppy can be addictive too but but we'll leave that inside yeah I feel like coffee has a kind of um consumption limiting mechanism built in where at some point you just can't ingest anymore yeah um but maybe that's wrong sorry to give lift to the caffeine addicts out there I was like as I watch my my mug um so days 21 through 30. um I've seen a lot of people go through addiction and addiction treatment

I've spent a lot of time in those places actually looking at it researching I've Got Friends in that Community I'm close with that community and so what I'd like to talk about in this context is what sorts of things help other people that we know that are addicted what really helps right not uh not what could help but what really helps and are there certain people for whom it's hopeless I mean I don't like to hold the conversation that way but I wouldn't be close to the real life data if if I didn't ask is

it is it hopeless are there people who just will not be able to quit their substance use or their addictive behavior despite I have to assume really wanting to yeah yeah so there there are people who will die of their disease of addiction you know and I think conceptualizing it as a disease is a helpful frame there are other frames that we could use but I do think given the brain physiologic changes that occur with sustained heavy drug use and what we know happens to the brain it it is really reasonable to think of it

as a brain disease and and for me the real window of let's say being able to access my compassion around people who are repeat relapsers even when their life is so much better when they're in recovery yeah it's like it's a no-brainer right um is is to conceptualize this balance and the dopamine deficit State and a balance tilt tilted to the side of pain and to imagine that for some people after a month or six months or maybe even six years their balance is still tipped to the side of pain that on some level that

balance has lost its resilience and its ability to restore homeostasis it's almost like the hinge on that balance is messed up exactly and so I mean for for someone who's never experienced addiction like yourself maybe one one way to conceptualize It is Well I didn't say that okay to be clear I was not referring to myself but I I in this example I was given I if I were I would I would um come clean I I would reveal that um but I I think that especially after hearing some of your lectures and descriptions of

the range of things that are addictive I think um I've been fortunate I don't have a propensity for drugs or alcohol right okay I'm lucky in that way that frankly if they remove all the alcohol from the planet I'll just be relieved because no one will offer it to me right right so don't send me any alcohol it won't go to me right imagine that you had an itch somewhere on your body okay and it was I mean we've all had that like you know whatever the source it was super super itchy you can go

for uh you know if you really focus you could go for a pretty good amount of time not scratching it but the moment you stopped focusing on not scratching it you would scratch it and maybe you do it while you were asleep right that and that is what happens to people with severe addiction that balance essentially broken homeostasis does not get restored despite sustained abstinence they're living with that constant Specter of that pull it never goes away so let me see there are lots of people with addiction for whom that does go away and it

goes away at four weeks for many of them but in severe cases that's always there and it's lingering and it's the moment when they're not not focusing on not using it's like a reflex they fall back into it it's not purposeful it's not because they want to get high it's not because they value using drugs more than they do their family none of that it's that really they they they cannot not do it when given the opportunity and that moment when they're not thinking about it does that make sense that's a great description and actually

in that description I can feel a bit of empathy because the way you describe scratching An Itch in your sleep yeah you know I've I've done that with mosquito bites inside when you're scratching you're like oh you wake up scratching that right that mosquito bite and I also have to admit that I've experienced not feeling like I want to pick up my phone because it's so rewarding but just finding myself doing it yes of course like I'm not going to use this thing I'm not going to use this thing and then just finding myself yeah

like what am I doing here right sort of the how did I get back here again right and I I know enough about brain function to understand that we have circuits that generate deliberate behavior and we have circuits that generate reflexive behavior and one of the goals of the nervous system is to make the deliberate stuff reflexive so you don't have to make the decision because decision making is a very costly thing to do exactly decision making of any kind right right so that does really help um the I I want to just try and

weave together this um this dopamine puzzle however because if by week so first phase of this uh 30 or 40 day um detox it's like a dopamine fast right right okay first 10 days are miserable middle 10 days the clouds are out there may be some shards of sunlight coming through and then all of a sudden Sun starts to come out it gets brighter and brighter why is it then that people will relapse not just after getting fired from a job or their spouse leaving them but when things are going really well is it this

unconscious mechanism because I've seen this before is uh they have a great win I have a friend who's a really impressive creative um I don't want to reel any more than that but uh and relapsed upon getting another really terrific opportunity to create for the entire world and I was like how can that happen but now I'm beginning to wonder was it the dopamine associated with that win that opened the spigot on this dopamine system because um it happened in a phase of of a really great stretch of Life yeah right yeah so you you

raise that great point about triggers right and triggers are things that that make us want to go back to using our drug and the key thing about triggers whatever they are is they also release a little bit of dopamine right so just thinking about um whatever the trigger is that we associate with drug use or just thinking about drug use can already release this anticipatory dopamine this little mini Spike but here's the part that I think is really fascinating that mini spike is followed by a mini deficit state so it goes up and then it

doesn't go back down to Baseline it goes below Baseline tonic levels and that's craving right so that anticipation is immediately followed by wanting the drug and it's that dopamine deficit state that drives the motivation to go and get the drug so many people talk about dopamine it's not really about pleasure but about wanting and about motivation and so it is that deficit state that then drives The Locomotion to get it and earlier your description of dopamine being involved in the desire for more giving the sense of reward but also movement right I have to assume

that those things are braided together in our nervous system for the specific intention of when you feel something yes good then you feel the pain yeah maybe you don't notice it and then the next thing you know you're pursuing more of the whole thing there and I love the way you use the word braided together that's beautiful and let me also just say something that I find also fascinating in my work with patients and I see this all the time there are people for whom bad life experiences loss you know in any form stress in

many different forms that's a trigger but there are absolutely people for whom the trigger is things going well and the things going well can be like the reward of the things going well but very often what it is is the removal of the hyper Vigilant State that's required to keep their use in check so it's this sense of I want to celebrate you know or I want to this reward happened I want to put more reward on there and it's really really fascinating because when people come to that realization about themselves that they're most vulnerable

when things are going well um that's really a valuable Insight because then they can put some you know things in place or barriers in place or go to more meetings or whatever it is that they do you know to protect themselves what is pornography doing to the brain well first of all it's triggering the release of dopamine and in the short term testosterone by the observation of sex not actually engaging in human contact think about the young brain being significantly more plastic and willing to rewire than the adult brain absolutely there's no question about it

it's hyperplastic and of course it can wire rewire again but you think about somebody who engages in a lot of porn watching right watching porn and that person is getting dopamine and testosterone increases by observing sex and not actually by engaging in human contact okay so that's concerning right and there and obviously that um people vary but that should come as no surprise that a lot of these people have trouble with um romantic interactions when they do happen right because they their brain isn't conditioned to respond to those right and there's variation there I'm sure

and and these are private matters so there aren't good data because there aren't laboratory experiments that you could do on this sort of thing that someone will probably do those experiments eventually but but also dopamine seeking is what triggers the increase in testosterone but as we just talked about it with repeated dopamine seeking or triggering of dopamine release it starts getting diminished diminished diminished so pretty soon that behavior is not causing the release of testosterone now people are just doing it compulsively to try and get some little droplet of dopamine out of their out of

their brain I personally think that porn in the availability of porn is is a real is a real detriment to the developing brain especially to the developing brain yeah now it sounds like you rescued the behavior and it takes some discipline right I imagine and it it's one of those things that um it's also anxiety-less compared to dating in relationships where people are vulnerable on both sides and have to negotiate things like you know consent and timing and you know and communication and all the things that are really hard to do but are essential to

do that's that's key so I think uh pornography is a serious issue and because of the way that Taps into these very primitive systems it's as serious in my mind as some of the other drugs of abuse like the the opioid crisis and talked about cell phones you ever notice that when you get on a phone and you're scrolling Instagram it's like a lot of fun like this stuff is cool you're seeing people and then sometimes you're on there and like this doesn't feel good but I'm doing it anyway yeah I'm just doing it that's

exactly how people talk about their drug use that's exactly how people talk about alcohol use that's exactly how people talk about gambling you imagine this high but the high doesn't show up and that's your dopamine depleted you need to take some time away from it and then come back and then you can enjoy it again now with pornography it's a slippery slope right there's also a whole aspect of pornography which is that if people are pursuing pornography and they're not pursuing relationships there is the potential they reach their 20s and 30s and they are truly

dysfunctional in terms of look every species has two major goals protect the young and make more of itself you know whether or not you decide to have children or not is a personal issue I personally don't have children I may someday but every species protects its young the met the maternal aggression is amazing right a mother protecting its young there's nothing like it in the animal kingdom actually that's not triggered by testosterone that's triggered by estrogen which is interesting but the parents of every species try and protect the Young and they try and make more

young this is this is why every species is driven to do that and you think about what porn and masturbation these things really are I'm not calling them sinful what I'm saying is they are potentially addictive especially with the availability of pornography so um you know beware you know just everyone's different and and people have to have to be careful about these circuitries you really need to protect them they are they're super valuable and so I would say in keeping with our theme of you know what are the other things to do to support testosterone

would be uh don't engage I would avoid pornography frankly I really would I would you know maybe everyone's got their threshold for what's too much for some people that might be the number might be zero for other people it might be something different then it's gonna vary yeah it would be different maybe using your imagination versus uh seeing images or like you know is there a difference which if you know any of this is a difference between video versus you know old school way of like having magazines and things like that well it's because it's

like more fantasy and maybe I don't know maybe you thinking it through about this thing is different than you just watching or even remembering past experiences yeah so we can speculate there a bit um you know a picture is worth a thousand words and a movie is worth a billion pictures um when it comes to the the impact that it has on your nervous system that's a bar you know exactly and so um you know I'm I think it's fair to say that whatever problems exist in society today almost certainly existed 100 years ago but

in a different form okay we always think oh you know stress was only there for the saber-toothed tiger now there are no tigers and we got this thing that's really unfortunate called stress look let's imagine this was a hundred years ago spouse is still cheated people still died you had you know physical challenges there was a question of how you know all that stuff is is baked into us at a deep level right none of those circuits have changed it's just the circumstances that trigger them change so I think that 100 years ago it wasn't

cell phones it might but you can bet that there was there were forms of pornography they were probably more cloistered away they weren't you know as out there in certain parts of the world it's still very very uh cloistered away despite the internet so I think that what's healthy in this domain has never really been defined this is one of the challenges we know what an eating disorder is but what's he healthy eating right where do you draw the line I think given this uh General theme that relationships are healthy friendships are healthy romantic relationships

are healthy and anything that inhibits the pursuit and functioning of healthy relationships is where you have to start saying wait a second is this Behavior getting in the way so look it's it's unlikely to be an all or none um I think uh and I don't know what the line is but we just have to be careful anytime we are overwhelmed with powerful images of increasing intensity that's where you start getting into the dopamine depletion that's where you start getting into the hormone depletion that we're that we're talking about here so this is also true

of violence a lot of people they're like excited about watching zombie apocalypse violence plus all of that violent sex and everything getting poured into the same film well they made horror movies you know 50 years ago they were a little bit different the question is how strong were we driving the system and if anyone out there is feeling underwhelmed and kind of like life is no good Etc chances are your dopamine system has been pushed too hard I'll give one quick anecdote of a friend he's got a kid he's 21 he graduate high school he

went to Community College for a little bit decide not to do that anymore then he stopped working he stopped exercise he's really fit he's got like his genetics are like the same as he's kind of like he's just got this incredible physique and all that doesn't do anything it doesn't work does doing he's a failure to launch as we call it and they were analyzing does he have ADHD does he this and he heard Anna talk about dopamine depletion and he called me and he said and he said I'm going to do one month no

video games no phone no nothing he's 25 days in and he's running again he's lifting again he's heading back to work again and this was somebody who thought he had ADHD now there are people with ADHD out there but what happened was he was dopamine depleted so he couldn't concentrate he didn't care about anything and so the phone and just living in this constant stream of movies that are really stimulating on YouTube and everything else I mean you have to be I mean we're on YouTube right now and I use YouTube for my podcast and

everything but you have to know when to shut that valve and here's what I tell myself shut that valve so that I can continue to enjoy it right it's like gorging yourself with Tomahawk steaks they're delicious but unless you've been fasting all day you're not gonna eat nine of them right what's your record mark I think I've done two two but yeah nine would be that would be a feat yeah two but they were the size of you know the table but no um so you have if you want to continue to enjoy things and

pursue things you have to know when to slam the gate shut and I think that no one told us that we needed to do that that's the challenge so if I interpret that in the context of this discussion about libido sex porn of masturbation if somebody has a very intense sexual experience and not not here we're not necessarily talking about an intense um orgasm we're talking about just in you know a lot of intense visual so very um a lot of intense imagery or auditory input or both that is going to lead to a situation

where dopamine is going to be depleted afterwards or a guest on this podcast before my colleague at Stanford Dr Anna lemke's expert addiction talked a bit about this as sort of a seesawing I hear we're talking about a wave and a crashing out of the water from the wave pool there was a seesawing from Pleasure and Pain it's going to be a longer and deeper period of lack of pleasure following that and I think a lot of people think oh well that's great you know they want the intense experience but if that intense experience is

coming from pornography and masturbation or I suppose coming from you know High adrenaline activities like you know life life risking parkour hanging off the side of a building it inevitably is going to lead to depressive episodes low libido episodes that follow is that right correct in a similar physiologic way to withdrawal from stimulants like amphetamines now is sex with a partner different because there are many people who are chasing more and more intense experiences with a partner as opposed to through pornography and masturbation again here we're talking about all ages and I should always say

anytime we're talking about sex with a partner we're talking I you know the four conditions that I was lay out on the humor and Lab podcast are that we're talking about consensual age-appropriate context appropriate species appropriate interactions and this is also a case where the dose makes the poison so if there's you know obviously meeting all those criteria if they have one preference that for both of them is a positive experience then that is likely okay you're not going to be able to maintain dopamine over a certain threshold for a long period of time so

there very well may be a crash from the experience as well and the Crash may be different in one partner than the other oh I'll draw an analogy to food it'll be like you know you don't have to serve the banquet meal seven seven nights of the week maybe just two is that right and there are other delicious foods out there yes we use that analogy that is very reasonable okay not trying to be PG-13 just trying to uh um parsimony Occam's razor the ability to describe a lot of things in in a few words

I'd like to return to the key things that people should do or I should say the key things that men should do to optimize their hormones we talked about getting some movement getting some sunlight getting Quality Social connection one way or the other avoid excessively frequent masturbation and viewing pornography and for some people zero might be the optimal number and I keep coming back to this for most people interesting I feel so fortunate to have grown up prior to the availability of Internet pornography I've never been a big consumer of pornography I've just not been

my thing but I hear so often from males of all ages about their addiction to it their Affliction by it it's really a serious issue and that's one of the reasons why I'm grateful that you're willing to talk about this and your clinical experience with these patients are you ready to conquer norfette grabo digital nofap guide now in your porn addiction Skyrocket your self-esteem and achieve your goals path with proven Techniques expert advice and relapse prevention chartex click the link below and break free to death you mentioned porn and masturbation um this topic has come

up a bunch of times on this podcast and on other podcasts I've gone on because of the relationship between dopamine sexual motivation and sexual behavior and I've been of the pretty strong stance that well I'm not judging porn or masturbation it can create a brain wiring situation where males in particular essentially teach their brain to be aroused by watching other people have sex as opposed to being the first person actor in sexual interactions in that sense um you know that's more about the brain wiring and neuroplasticity and dopamine but what are your thoughts on porn

and masturbation as they relate to hormones I mean this is a big debate on the internet in fact one of the most common debates is whether or not masturbation increases or decreases testosterone in males certainly it will decrease motivation to go find sexual partners we know this and there are more and more data on this all the time in terms of the effects of pornography and masturbation and here I suppose we need to be um somewhat specific and operationally Define what we're talking about we're talking about porn and masturbation to the point of ejaculation right

my understanding is that the ejaculation and orgasm associated with it causes an increase in prolactin which blunts libido for some period of time the duration of that will vary from person to person and Circumstance to circumstance but basically all of this points to the fact that porn and masturbation can really limit libido in the real world and to me uh pornography and the screen is not the real world the screens exist in the real world the real world doesn't exist in the screen that's an accurate statement and prolactin does have a significant acute increase after

ejaculation it does to some degree after orgasm as well but prolactin acts on the pituitary to inhibit the release of the hormones LH and FSH of which LH can increase testosterone so this may be one of the cases where the dose makes the poison and if it is a very frequent habit certainly daily or more than once a day would be very detrimental from a hormonal component not even taking into account the the neural wiring listen I think it's terrific that you've actually defined frequency because this is the problem on the Internet or even in

the doctor's office you'll see um descriptions about pornography being dangerous for certain things or detrimental to hormones people say frequent but what's frequent so you're saying daily or multiple times per day would be potentially detrimental to the hormone profile of a male of essentially any age and that's just for masturbation with porn use as well it would likely be worse why is that just this the sort of dopaminergic Drive of the stimulus just a really intense visual stimulus dopamine Sensitivity I think that using the analogy of a dopamine wave pool it would deepen the pool

but not increase your supply of dopamine um in terms of the other things that all male should do meaning all males of all ages um puberty and Beyond should do what what are some of those things so on a daily basis uh maybe you could just take us through the Arc of a day and um and push out some of the protocols that you use or the things that you like to see your male patients use in order to try and optimize their hormone status I'll briefly touch on some of the lifestyle pillars to start

diet and exercise are the first two in puberty sleep is particularly important of course um but with diet and exercise throughout a lifespan you want to not exclude things that are helping you for example during puberty if you're consuming Dairy and then all of a sudden you cut out all dairy dairy can help increase igf-1 and free igf-1 and just wait for our audience maybe you just mentioned what IG what having enough igf-1 can do for us that's beneficial is it helps you grow it helps with genital development secondary sexual characteristics and long bone growth

skin Growth Hair growth a host of things so getting an array of nutrients that include Dairy what other sorts of nutrients are important during development you want to have adequate vitamin D vitamin D helps with testosterone production it helps again with bone mineralization and stature after an age of about 25 and there's not a strict cut off but up to about an age of 25 optimizing your growth hormone and igf-1 helps with bone density and bone growth from the dietary standpoint you want to have enough free estrogen not too much when you're growing but you

want to help basically stockpile bone to prevent a risk of osteoporosis or thin bones fractures when you're older or someone who broke his left foot five times while in high school I can say that whatever young people can do to optimize their bone density would be great that problem seems to have resolved itself over time but I don't know back then I was I did a short run as a vegetarian but I've always been an omnivore I realize that some of this relates to ethics and food allergies and things of that sort but would you

say that on balance that most people would benefit from eating a combination of you know quality proteins from animal sources and non-animal sources fruits vegetables and starches I mean what do you think for instance about people following a pure carnivore or a very uh pure vegan diet in their 20s and 30s in their late 20s it might be a reasonable option in early 20s and certainly teens it is a horrible idea because it is likely to significantly decrease your free androgens so you will have less testosterone acting on receptors through the body are there any

other micronutrients or macronutrients that people in their 20s and 30s should emphasize we haven't really touched on fatty acids or Fiber too much fiber is going to be Paramount and kind of like setting your set point of your gut microbiome the rest of your life there is Prebiotic fiber which you could think of as fish food for your good gut microbiome your gut microbiome is kind of like an aquarium or a fish tank no I'm just thinking about goldfish swimming around in that the Goldfish eating people don't eat goldfish people but any fiber or food

that you're putting in your gut it's either going to it's going to skew your gut microbiome towards something that is more beneficial or more detrimental and would you say that the pre Prebiotic fiber and getting essential fatty acids that would be important to do throughout the lifespan or just for people in their 20s and 30s throughout the lifespan I'm particularly important in the teenage 20s 30s because that helps with brain development you're certainly more of an expert than me when it comes to brain development but it does continue to develop through really throughout the lifespan

but certainly through the 20s and 30s as well about um taking a multivitamin while you're growing up so many people do that is it necessary is it useful and if it's not necessary is it safe to do anyway it's generally safe to do anyway I do not think everybody needs a multivitamin the more exclusionary your diet is for example if you have celiac disease or if you're planning on fertility soon then perhaps it's more reasonable to take a multivitamin in a previous discussion of ours I asked you about caloric restriction and testosterone and if I

recall correctly the idea was that if some somebody is overweight they have excess fat adipose tissue then getting rid of some of that adipose tissue but through caloric restriction and exercise provided it's done not too fast in a healthy way is going to be beneficial for testosterone in the long run but that for individuals who are not carrying in excess of body fat caloric restriction is actually going to lower testosterone that's correct if you look at an individual in a caloric deficit several changes will happen one is that they'll have less building blocks for hormones

another is that they will be in a catabolic State more often so that balance of anabolism and catabolism will be different they'll likely have less signaling from growth hormone and igf-1 and they'll also have the high shbg that we defined earlier as The Binding protein so they're free androgens and free estrogens will go down [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] remember foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you