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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Avoiding “Disliking” Neurochemicals
Won’t Get You Anywhere

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Range: the extent or scope of something.

Imagine a pendulum swinging between two states: feeling good and feeling bad. When we experience liking (or “here and now”) neurochemicals, the pendulum swings in one direction. When we experience disliking neurochemicals, the pendulum swings in the other direction. The range of motion between the two states represents the extent of our emotional range.

Everything everywhere is in motion all the time, so the pendulum is never completely still. But the closer to equilibrium it is, the milder the emotional response.

Liking neurochemicals, if you recall, include serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins and other endogenous opioids, and endocannabinoids. These are the sources of pleasure (but not desire). The brain experiences them as rewarding, so anything—whether a substance, an activity, a situation, or a person—that elicits these neurochemicals will cause the brain to approach.

Disliking neurochemicals, also known as stress neurochemicals, include adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol. These are sources of displeasure, pain, or stress that drive us to avoid or move away from whatever appears to be causing their release.

The brain is always trying to determine whether something is a potential threat, which we want to avoid or move away from, or a potential reward, which we want to approach or move toward.

The purpose of liking neurochemicals is to encourage us to want to do or consume or participate in activities that will enhance our chances of survival—at least in terms of how the brain has been trained to perceive them. Likewise, the purpose of disliking neurochemicals is to keep us away from situations or substances or actions that might decrease our chances of survival. Neurochemicals—and the emotional responses they evoke—are an important part of this process. It’s highly desirable, to put it mildly, for us to get agitated enough to get ourselves out of harm’s way. Being sedate about potential threats is not a good survival strategy.

But most of us tend not to face life-threatening situations on a regular basis. Keeping that in mind, there are two aspects, equally important, about the way we respond to liking and disliking neurochemicals that affect our ability to create transformational change and even our enjoyment of being alive.

Assess the Brain’s Interpretations

The emotions we experience are a result of our brain’s interpretation of things (“things” in this case being situations, events, etc.). We react emotionally to our interpretations, not to the events or situations. We can’t react to an event or situation before the brain has interpreted it because it is the brain that supplies the meaning. In order to do that, it uses the mental model of the world it has constructed over the course of our life. Our mental models are not always accurate, so the interpretations we’re responding to are also not always accurate.

As a result, we may need to assess some of our interpretations rather than taking them at face value. This requires practice because by the time we’re consciously aware of how our brain has interpreted something the interpretation is experienced as fact and an action is either already in progress or has been taken.

Our experience is not an accurate reflection of reality. Being able to distinguish interpretations from events and situations—and recognizing that our emotional responses are based on interpretations not on facts—is an essential part of the process of creating change. We can’t affect the choices our brain makes moment-to-moment. We can affect future choices, but only if we do more than just go along for the ride our liking and disliking neurochemicals take us on.

Expand the Range of the Emotional Pendulum

The narrower the range of our emotional pendulum, the quicker our brain will be to respond to disliking, and the quicker it will be to come up with an action to move us away from those feelings right now. I’m referring to the impulses that lead to short-term pleasure but long-term dissatisfaction. Have a glass of wine, says the brain. You’ll feel better. Or buy something. Better yet buy several somethings. Binge watch that show you like on HBO. Have some ice cream. In fact, have all the ice cream!

The more sensitive one is to disliking neurochemicals, the harder it will be to resist the reflexive urge to squash them. Eating all the ice cream may seem like just the thing, at least in the moment. Never mind the many contraindications for eating all the ice cream, including the fact that doing so will probably lead to feeling even worse afterward. And feeling worse will lead to wondering why we engage in these counterproductive behaviors when we know better.

You do it, I do it, we all do it because that’s what the brain learned to do in the Pleistocene when we didn’t have refined sugar and HBO and shopping malls or the internet, so we wouldn’t have had access to the many different sources of immediate gratification that are available to us now. That’s one issue.

Another issue is that we tend to find it much easier to eat all the ice cream than to allow ourselves to experience the discontent or dissatisfaction. That keeps us from assessing whether or not there’s a response, a behavior, or a situation we might want to change. Eating all the ice cream maintains the vicious, unreflective cycle and keeps us stuck, at the effect of those liking and disliking neurochemicals.

If we can’t muster the energy to identify and pursue what we want, and if we haven’t built the muscle that allows us to tolerate disliking long enough to figure out what we want to change, all that’s left is swinging back and forth, back and forth, never really going anywhere.

It’s important to recognize that moving away from disliking is purely reactive and not the same as actively or intentionally moving toward liking. Many people not only don’t know what they want, they also don’t know what they like. When that’s the case, the disliking or stress neurochemicals become the dominant set of neurochemicals. The brain focuses on detecting and avoiding threats rather than on identifying and seeking rewards. This doesn’t lead to the minimization of threats or discomfort, however, but to the amplification of them.

Furthermore, stress in and of itself isn’t necessarily negative or bad. Some stress is good for us. If we want to create a satisfying and meaningful life, we must be willing and able to tolerate both ferocious dissatisfaction on one end of the pendulum and intense joy on the other end. That’s what allows us to play full out in enthusiastic pursuit of our aspirations and our desired outcomes.

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Good Stress vs. Bad Stress

Pleasure Is Transient
but Wanting Persists

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Liking is the pleasure you experience from something. The source of that pleasure is the liking—or Here and Now—neurochemicals released in your brain: serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins and other endogenous opioids, and endocannabinoids. The same pleasure-generating areas in the brain are activated for all pleasures, from gustatory and sensual to musical, artistic, and altruistic.

Life’s intense pleasures are less frequent and less sustained than intense desires. —Dr. Kent Berridge, University of Michigan

Because the pleasure circuit is considerably smaller and far more fragile than the “wanting system,” it can be elusive; more importantly, it is always transient. Liking something doesn’t always motivate you to go after it. Dopamine is what generates motivation, so you also need to want what you like.

We often think of desire and the objects of our desire as inseparable. We think it is the indulgence itself—the luscious ice cream, the rush of nicotine, or the flood of coins from a slot machine—that motivates us. To a greater extent, however, it is the expectation of these rewards, the luxurious anticipation of them, that fires up our brains and compels us to dig in, take a drag, or place another bet. —Chris Berdik, Mind over Mind

While liking (pleasure) and wanting (desire) are separate systems, wanting actually enhances and, in a sense, prolongs liking. It’s said that the brain likes to want because it releases liking neurochemicals along with dopamine. On the other hand, instant gratification quickly dissipates pleasure. That’s how you end up on the hedonic treadmill where you are continually in pursuit of more and more of the things or experiences that initially brought you pleasure in an attempt to maintain a steady state of pleasant feelings.

When you work toward a reward and earn it, rather than simply treating yourself to it because you can, you actually enhance your enjoyment of it. But you have to be intentional about it. You have to make a connection between your actions and the reward so your brain gets the message.

Dopamine is a powerful motivator. It carries signals for both rewards and for the muscle movements needed to go out and get them. So when dopamine levels are diminished, you will still like what you like, but you will be less inclined to take action to get it. And when dopamine levels are elevated, you will be more inclined to take action to get something, whether or not you actually like it.

Liking and wanting usually do work together in your brain, but when they become uncoupled, you can want something without liking it. And according to Stanford University researchers, if you don’t get something you want, you desire it more while liking it less.

If you don’t clearly identify what you want—and determine how you’re going to get it—you’re liable to end up going along for the ride of getting what your brain wants. What you want needs to be compelling enough to you to activate the amygdala, thus creating a sense of urgency. Amygdala activation is critical in getting you to act on your desires. It settles down when you receive or achieve them.

In the case of long-term goals, once you’ve identified a reward and begin taking steps toward it, your brain gradually and steadily releases increasing bursts of dopamine the closer you get to the reward. And the bigger the reward (the more your brain craves it), the more dopamine will be released.

Reward systems integrate liking, wanting, and learning. Our pleasures help us learn and change our behavior, and what we learn alters the pleasure we experience. Our reward system has a built-in flexibility in which cognitive and pleasure systems interact and modulate each other. Anything can be a source of pleasure as long as it taps into reward systems embedded in our brains. –Anjan Chaterjee, author of The Aesthetic Brain

Wanting has a purpose. It is critical to any focused effort. It motivates you to pursue both long-term and short-term goals. But, as Chris Berdick says, once that goal’s been achieved, wanting moves along.

Unsurprisingly, liking neurochemicals have a close relationship with stress neurochemicals—adrenaline, norepinephrine, cortisol, etc.—which I also call disliking neurochemicals. I’ll talk about how that relationship can hamper our ability to create change next time.

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Procrastination Is NOT a Thing

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I just read another article about self-sabotage—which is also not a thing. Your brain does not have ill intentions toward you; believing that it does is irrational. This particular article used procrastination as evidence of the brain’s self-sabotaging tendencies.

The word procrastinate is meant to describe delaying or postponing taking a particular action: the emphasis is on not doing something. But when we’re awake we’re always doing something. Procrastinating doesn’t mean you’re sitting vacantly in a chair staring off into space or out a window not doing instead of cleaning the house or finishing a report or making that one phone call. No, it means you’re doing something else instead of the thing you think you should be doing. That seems obvious, right?

So why isn’t there a word for eating a cheeseburger for lunch when you planned to eat a salad? Why isn’t there a word for staying up late at night when you meant to get to bed before midnight? Why isn’t there a word for binge-watching a TV show when you intended to go to the gym? There’s only a word for doing one thing when you strongly believe you should be doing something else if it’s based on a real or self-imposed deadline.

There is no substantive difference between doing something other than the thing you think you should be doing, whether that involves what you eat, when you got to bed, how much exercise you do or don’t get, and say, when you complete a report or project.

All these incidences of doing something other than what you think you should be doing have a couple of things in common. One is the false belief that understanding the benefit of a particular behavior ought to automatically cause us to “do the right thing.” But understanding has no direct impact on behavior. So it’s completely unsurprising that we’re likely to do whatever we’ve been doing rather than do something different based on information or vague desires to shape up or be better.

Rewards ARE a Thing

Another is the fact that the brain moves toward what it believes will provide a reward and away from things it considers a threat. That means we’re inclined to do things that give us pleasure and avoid things that provide less pleasure or may even amp up stress neurochemicals.

If you like cleaning the house or writing reports or eating cheeseburgers or watching You Tube videos, you’re likely to do more of those things and less of other things. This is why we use rewards to motivate us to do things we don’t otherwise get pleasure from when we’re doing them but nevertheless want to have done. This is called using your brain. If you decide your problem is procrastination, however, you have diagnosed yourself with an imaginary condition that you have to explain (why do I sabotage myself?) and treat. Or you may simply use this imaginary condition to explain yourself to yourself and others. Neither approach will generate any change in behavior. There’s no solution to the problem of procrastination because procrastination is not a thing.

There is one difference between the behaviors that fall under the category of procrastination and other behaviors like the ones I used as examples. That difference is time. You can convince yourself you’ll choose the salad tomorrow or the next day; you can get to bed on time…eventually; you can start going to the gym next month. But if something has a deadline, you don’t have more time than that.

Nevertheless, moment-to-moment, the brain still moves toward what it thinks it will like and away from what it thinks it will dislike. A deadline in the future, with potential negative or positive consequences, is not compelling to the brain until the task becomes an emergency. Failure to eat a healthy diet or get enough sleep or enough exercise are not, moment-to-moment, perceived as emergencies by the brain because we believe that we have more time to get them right.

If you look at all these behaviors through the same lens, though, you can see that they all involve doing something in the present that we understand would be a good idea (good for us in one way or another) but that we don’t particularly want to do right now. We may believe that we should want to do them right now, but the fact is that we don’t.

The belief that we should want to do things that we don’t want to do because we know they’re good for us is one of the most counterproductive beliefs we can have. It’s an enormous obstacle on the path of creating any level of behavior change, let alone transformational change.

What would it look like if you gave this belief up? What might then be possible?

Although I haven’t mentioned specific neurotransmitters in this post, it is part of the series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Which Path Are You On?*

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As we know, dopamine is involved in many different aspects of our lives, including sleep, memory, mood, learning, and movement. Dopamine is also a significant component of the brain’s reward system and, as such, it’s the source of motivation. That’s why it’s so important in regard to behavior and behavior change.

There are four major dopamine pathways in the brain. The two that matter most to us here are the mesolimbic pathway and the mesocortical pathway. While both pathways motivate us, they motivate us in different ways and in different directions, indicated by the nicknames given to them: desire dopamine and control dopamine.

While dopamine is distributed throughout everyone’s brain, the amount and pattern of distribution is not the same for everyone. As a result, some of us have more dopamine in the control pathway and some of us have more dopamine in the desire pathway. And of course not everyone who has more dopamine in the control pathway has the same amount, which is also the case for dopamine in the desire pathway. Still others may have similar amounts of dopamine in both pathways.

Here’s a comparison of what a predominance of dopamine in one pathway compared to the other pathway looks like:

Desire dopamine generates craving for things, substances, people, situations—whatever is salient (important) to you. You desire (want) what you like and what matters to you.

Control dopamine generates a craving for achievement or accomplishment, which can range from completing multiple years of education in order to attain a degree or checking off boxes on a to-do list.

Having more desire dopamine doesn’t automatically cause you to have unrestrained appetites or develop addictions. And having more control dopamine doesn’t automatically cause you to make better judgements or be a better critical thinker.

Our genetics play a role in our neurochemistry, including dopamine distribution, as does our experience. We all have dopamine in both pathways. One of the things about neurochemicals is that while they affect us, we can also affect them. So if we have lots of dopamine in the desire pathway but not enough in the control pathway to actually get what we want, we can use contrivances to take actions that alter our neurochemistry. Likewise, if we have lots of dopamine in the control pathway but not enough in the desire pathway to identify what we really want, we can use contrivances to help us increase desire dopamine.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
—Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

As with the Meta Mindsets, in which Production mindset is most effective in the service of Experiment mindset, control dopamine is most effective in the service of desire dopamine. Otherwise the functions and processes of the mesocortical pathway have to operate without salience, meaning without your direction. You have nothing to process but the exteroceptive or interoceptive situations or stimuli you happen to encounter and no context within which to process it.

One of my favorite quotes from neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett is: You tweak the world, and the world tweaks you back. With too much control dopamine and not enough desire dopamine, it’s more like: The world tweaks you, and you attempt to manage the effects.

We happen to live in a world where control dopamine is held up as the gold standard, whether it’s labeled as such or not. People are very busy pursuing completion for its own sake without having determined whether or not there is anything meaningful to them in the pursuit. This has negative implications for individuals, societies, and the world. In The Molecule of More, Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD and Michael E. Long write:

Some people have so much control dopamine that they become addicted to achievement but are unable to experience H&N [Here and Now] fulfillment. They achieve something, then move on to the next thing.

Next time, we’ll take a closer look at the relationship between dopamine, the wanting neurochemical, and the liking (aka Here and Now) neurochemicals.

*Hat tip to Pete Seeger

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Everything Everywhere
Is in Motion All the Time

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What would we do without dopamine? The answer is: nothing. We can’t do anything without dopamine, which is the literal source of all motivation—all movement—whether physical or psychological. Why then are so many people going on and on about how we all need a dopamine detox? Why are we advised to be wary of substances or activities that provide us with “hits” of dopamine, as if dopamine were a drug?

Considering popular, and even some scientific, perspectives on dopamine tends to put me in mind of the lyrics of a song by the Animals straight out of the wayback machine:

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good.
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

While dopamine’s functions* are wide and varied, its role in regard to the brain’s reward system has been clarified. Dopamine is not the source of pleasure in the brain. That role is played by the liking neurochemicals, such as serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, endocannabinoids, and endogenous opioids. Dopamine is called the “wanting” neurochemical because it is the source of…wanting, which is really just another word for motivation.

Dopamine is released when the brain expects to experience a reward, meaning it expects to experience something it likes. It causes us to take action by moving toward the reward.

Let’s say you notice you’re thirsty and you consider getting up from your desk to get a glass or bottle of water. Do you want the water enough to stop what you’re doing and take an action to get it? In other words, how motivated are you? How enticing is the water? How rewarding do you think it will be? How much pleasure do you think you’ll get from it? (Of course, it’s your brain that makes the choice, but you get to experience both the wanting and the liking.)

Although dopamine is not one of the liking neurochemicals, the brain “likes” to want. It likes to be motivated, to get us to move. So liking neurochemicals are released along with dopamine, to a greater or lesser extent depending on how rewarding the brain expects the experience or substance to be. The so-called wanting system in the brain is considered to be robust, while the liking system is fragile. That’s because the liking neurochemicals don’t stick around for long, so the brain moves on to wanting something else. Liking comes and goes but wanting persists.

Those who believe we should not want simply don’t understand how the brain works. Wanting is essential for being awake and for living an awake life, as was illustrated in the 1990 movie Awakenings. Robin Williams played neurologist Oliver Sacks, who in the early stage of his career dosed catatonic patients with levodopa, the precursor to dopamine in an attempt to literally wake them from their unresponsive states.

Going on a dopamine detox (conceptually, anyway, since the idea is nonsensical), would be like deciding to stop eating altogether in order to avoid sugar. It would be like advising someone not to pursue something they’re passionate about because that would generate “too much” dopamine.

Although dopamine plays a role in compulsive or addictive behavior, it is neither a drug, nor does it function like a drug. Instead of trying to manage dopamine—which is not a game for amateurs—we ought to focus on identifying better targets. We could learn how to use the wanting system to pursue the things we think would provide us with a more satisfying and meaningful life.

Next time I’ll talk about two important dopamine pathways in the brain and how they affect our ability to create change.

*Dopamine plays a role in your brain’s reward system, which includes feeling pleasure, achieving heightened arousal, and learning. Dopamine also helps with focus, concentration, attention, memory, sleep, mood, and motivation. And it is involved with decision-making, movement, working memory, and learning. It is one of the most extensively studied neurochemicals, mainly because it plays such diverse roles in human behavior and cognition. Dopamine is also a factor in Parkinson’s disease, addiction, schizophrenia, and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

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