Neuroscientist: 'Rewire Your Brain on Nofap in 30 Days' — Science-Based Techniques

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 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 quote right 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 um 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 we're gonna 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 going to be miserable right anxiety trouble sleeping um physical agitation into 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 I asked 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 whichever it is Poppy can be addictive too but but we'll leave it outside 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 and 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 so 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 yeah it's like it's like a no-brainer right um is is to conceptualize this balance and the dopamine deficit State and a balance 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 which 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'd 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 um