That can be a good thing — dopamine is one powerful motivator — but it also has its downsides. Here to help us understand how the most important chemical in the brain works and how to deal with its pitfalls is Michael Long. Michael is a trained physicist turned writer whose latest book is Taming the Molecule of More. Mike and I discuss how dopamine, for better and worse, makes you want what you don’t have. He shares what causes low dopamine activity, how to know if you’re experiencing it, and what increases dopamine. We then talk about how to deal with the consequences of dopamine in some of the scenarios in which it plays a role — like losing the spark in a relationship and getting stuck in a smartphone scroll habit — and why so much of taming dopamine comes down to living in the here and now. We end our conversation with why The Great Gatsby is really a novel about dopamine and the fundamental answer to not letting the dopamine chase lead you around.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Mike’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast
• AoM Article: How to Do a Dopamine Reset
• AoM Podcast #745: Do You Need to Take a Dopamine Fast?
• AoM Article: Your Life Explained Through Dopamine

Connect With Michael Long

• • • Taming the Molecule website

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. All the neurochemicals in the brain have to do with life in the present, except for one. Dopamine. Dopamine is the one neurochemical that looks to the future. It anticipates what may be to come, and drives you towards it. That can be a good thing. Dopamine is one powerful motivator, but it also has its downsides. Here to help us understand how the most important chemical in the brain works, and how to deal with it’s pitfalls is, Michael Long. Michael is a trained physicist turned writer whose latest book is, “Taming the Molecule of More” Mike and I discuss how dopamine, for better and worse, makes you want what you don’t have. He shares what causes low dopamine activity, how to know if you’re experiencing it, and what increases dopamine. We then talk about how to deal with the consequences of dopamine and some of the scenarios in which it plays a role, like losing the spark in a relationship, getting stuck in a smartphone scroll habit, and why so much of taming dopamine comes down to living in the here and now. We end our conversation with why the Great Gatsby is really a novel about dopamine, the fundamental answer to not letting the dopamine chase, lead you around. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @aom.is/molecule.

All right, Michael Long, welcome back to the show.

Michael Long: Hey, it’s good to be here, Brett. How are you doing?

Brett McKay: Doing great. So we had you on the podcast several years ago, I think it was, back in 2018, to discuss a book you co-authored called the Molecule of More. It’s all about dopamine. You’ve written a sequel to that book called “Taming the Molecule of More.” What prompted the sequel? What did you flesh out in this book that you and your co-author didn’t flesh out in the first one?

Michael Long: Well, the first book is about the science of dopamine and it’s effects on modern life, or I should say it’s effects on us and struggling in modern life. And we explained as much as we could, as much as you can in 70,000 words, just how this plays out. And it turns out to affect everything from your political beliefs or your political behaviors, I should say, to why you get so wrapped up in your phone and even things like online pornography. And people read the book and they said, this is very interesting science. I love these stories. What can I do about it? And that’s the second book. How do you tame the stress of dopamine in modern life. Hence the title, Taming the Molecule of More. And I wrote this one alone, with a nice foreword by Dr. Dan.

Brett McKay: So let’s do a quick recap of the big ideas of the Molecule of More, since I think that’ll help guide the rest of our conversation. You call dopamine the most important chemical in the human brain. So what is dopamine?

Michael Long: Well, the best way to understand what dopamine is, is to first understand what it is not. And in general, when we talk about neurotransmitters, these are chemicals in your brain that guide your behavior and your feelings. Behavior and feelings. And there are dozens of these chemicals, if not a couple of hundred, actually. But for our purposes, we’re interested in a handful. And so, as I said, to understand what dopamine does, first understand what it is not. Every neurotransmitter, except one deals with the here and now. That is how things feel physically, how things taste and smell, how things sound. Those neurotransmitters let us live in the moment. But there’s one that doesn’t let us live in the moment at all. There’s one that does nothing but anticipate what is possible, one that looks forward, and that one is dopamine. Not only does it make you look forward to the future, anticipate the future, it also makes you want what you don’t have. And it does so in sort of a vicious and wonderful way. And what it does is, it makes you believe that if there’s something out there that you’ve just come across that might possibly improve your life, you have to break down walls to get it.

That’s what dopamine is. It’s the molecule that makes you want, anticipate. It’s the molecule that makes you desire more. And it does all this on the basis of the mere possibility, not even evidence that it’s so. And I’m sure in the course of our conversation, we can offer all sorts of examples where this begins to mess up our days. A quick example, though, is when you pull that lever on a slot machine. Now, there’s no guarantee at all that what comes up after you pull the lever is gonna be any money, a penny, a million dollars, whatever. But that feeling of anticipation, it might be. It might be something better than I have right now. It might give me more. That’s the dopamine feeling.

Brett McKay: The way you describe dopamine, I think it goes against the way often people think about what dopamine is, when they’ve heard of opening, they’ve probably heard of dopamine as the reward neurotransmitter. The way you described, it doesn’t sound like it’s a reward neurotransmitter.

Michael Long: It’s not a reward neurotransmitter at all. It is a go get the reward transmitter. It’s a motivating neurotransmitter. More often, I hear actually that people think of it as the happiness molecule. They talk about, oh, I just got the dopamine buzz. Well, no, you probably just got the oxytocin buzz or maybe even the serotonin buzz to some extent. The dopamine buzz is that feeling that, if I just keep pushing a little harder, I’ll get this thing. Another good example of the dopamine feeling, is if you celebrate Christmas, you know how kids are all leading up to Christmas and they’re wondering what’s in the presents. They’re all hopeful that what they wanted and they’ll even sometimes cheat a little bit and try to look inside the wrapping. I know that’s what I did when I was a little boy. I still do it today, once in a while. That feeling of anticipation, that is the real dopamine buzz. It motivates us into the future.

Brett McKay: Yeah. One of the big takeaways I got from your description of dopamine, I took away from that first book. And then again when I read this book. Uncertainty is an important factor of dopamine. If there’s no uncertainty, you’re probably not gonna have dopamine. So you don’t know if it’s gonna be good or bad. And that’s the thing that kickstarts that dopamine drive. Well, I got to find out. I wanna resolve this uncertainty?

Michael Long: That’s exactly right. My favorite example is this. And it’s a one that Dr. Lieberman and I have used for years. And everybody can recognize this. Let’s say for the sake of numbers, let’s say you get, at the end of every week, you get a check for $1,000 and that’s your pay. Congratulations. There you go. You get thousand dollars. At the end of the week, your boss comes to your desk, puts the thousand dollar check in your hand. You put it in your wallet and you don’t think anything about it. Now the next week, the boss comes to your desk and the boss gives you $1,000 check. And then the boss says, she says, “You’ve done so, well, I’m gonna give you an extra hundred bucks, here’s another hundred dollar check.” And you’re like, wow, an extra 100 bucks. This is fantastic. Notice that the thousand dollars you’ve just been slipping in your wallet, no big deal, she gives you one tenth of that and you’re ecstatic. That’s the thing we’re talking about. Dopamine is the, as long as something’s a little bit better, we’re gonna go chasing it. So now, the next week comes and all of a sudden you’re thinking, I wonder if I’ll get another hundred dollars this week.

Oh, that would be exciting. So she gives you $1,000 check, and you’re waiting and waiting and sure enough, she says, another great week, here’s another $100 bonus. Oh, boy, that great feeling you’ve had anticipating and it turned out to be wonderful. So fast forward, six or eight weeks down the road, you’ve been getting $1,000 check, which you yawn about, 1/10th of that $100 check and you are excited about it. But once a few weeks pass and you realize, oh, she’s always gonna give me $100 bonus, you stop being excited about it. You stop looking forward to that little extra thing on Friday because it’s no longer extra, it’s become normal. Nothing to be excited about. And that’s what dopamine drives us to, is to try to get that next thing. But once it becomes normal, part of the wallpaper, the dopamine buzz goes away. We don’t feel that anticipation anymore.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the scientific phrase for that, it’s called reward prediction error, right?

Michael Long: That’s exactly right.

Brett McKay: When you think there’s a possibility of something to exceed your expectations, that’s when you get that, oh, dopamine. Oh, man, let’s find out if it’s gonna happen or not. So you mentioned dopamine is the neurotransmitter of anticipation. It’s not about living in the here and now. The other neurotransmitters in our brain you call, here and now neurotransmitters. What are those here and now neurotransmitters, and how do they interact with dopamine?

Michael Long: Well, the here and now neurotransmitters, as I say, deal with sensory matters, consummatory matters, or consummatory matters. And there are lots of neurotransmitters we could talk about, but I’ll just go through a few of them that are in the realm. And when I say literally, all the others are here and now. Literally all the others, Brett, are here and now. There’s only one that truly deals with anticipation. One you’ve heard a lot about is serotonin. Serotonin deals with mood and sleep, and it’s a major player when we’re trying to get treatment for depression. There are others that simply act like an accelerator or a decelerator on all the activities in the brain. One of those neurotransmitters is called glutamate, and it causes things to get boosted a little bit. Things go a little faster. There’s another called GABA. GABA, if you’ve ever taken Xanax or Klonopin, that’s what it is. It’s a GABA acting chemical. It pushes GABA and that calms us down. It slows down some of the reactions. And what’s interesting about it, is it doesn’t flow through the brain like oil does. Oh, put some oil in so it’ll smooth it out a little bit.

It actually acts in a discrete way, in a separate way. So all these circuits in your brain, all these receptors that are scattered about in a particular system, mixed among those receptors may be GABA receptors. And so, those GABA receptors could be acted on at the same time the dopamine receptors are acted on. So instead of slowing it down like oil does, it’s like, oh, here’s another fellow who shows up to do a little work himself and he’s going, slow down. Now there are a couple of other H and N neurotransmitters that I like to mention, but they’re actually not technically neurotransmitters. Now, 99 people out of a hundred don’t give a damn. But technically we wanna be correct. These are actually neuropeptides. And it’s just chemically a little different. But for our purposes, they’re the same thing. They tend to act a little more slowly than neurotransmitters. One, you’ve heard of oxytocin. Oxytocin. And that acts in bonding, that acts in trust. And if you think about it, that makes sense that that would be a here and now thing. Because bonding is about the person that you are with in the moment. That’s where that happens.

The trust comes from what might happen to you in the moment you are with someone in the here and now. Another is endorphins. In endorphins, we can of think of as natural opioids. So pretty much any place you wanna point in that realm of neurotransmitters and neuropeptides, we’ll find something that primarily acts in the here and now.

Brett McKay: And so, it sounds like dopamine will drive you to get those good feelings. He’s like, oh, this can make me feel good somehow, possibly. And then once you achieve the thing, dopamine drops off, and then the here, now neurotransmitters, the oxytocin, the serotonin, they kick in to enhance the experience, help you enjoy the experience and strengthen your bond with the person you’re with?

Michael Long: Well, yeah, you just nailed it. The idea of dopamine driving you to get something that you can enjoy or consume, is just a parallel to what happens in the real world. In fact, the simplest way to think of it, is like exerting effort and then having a trophy. You don’t get the trophy, you don’t get the pleasure. You don’t get to hold the trophy in your hand until you’ve done the work to get there. Dopamine is the motivator to do that work. And the trophy is the feeling, the physical feeling, the sound, the touch, the taste, or pursuing someone that you wanna date. You go through a lot of anticipation, a lot of effort in order to get to the point where you actually touch them, where you’re actually sitting with them and interacting with them in the here and now. Everything up to that point is quite literally anticipation. What can I do? Or whether, what will it be like when I reach my goal? And that’s what all those other neurotransmitters do, is they indulge the goal. Dopamine pushes us toward the goal. And it’s worth noting that that dopamine feeling, although it has nothing to do with the here and now, is typically more intense and more, I’ll use the word motivating, even though that’s literally what it does.

More motivating than all the others. If it weren’t so, we wouldn’t have addiction. Addiction is driven by dopamine in large part, you’ll know. And people who are listening to this, who have dealt with addiction know that after a while, it takes more and more stimulation to get less and less feeling. And if you think about that, that ought to be the end of addiction. If you’re doing cocaine and you have to do more and more lines to get higher and now, to get the same amount of high until finally you don’t get high anymore, it makes sense that you go, well, forget this. I’m not gonna do cocaine anymore, but keep doing it. It’s because dopamine doesn’t give up. Dopamine doesn’t fade like the pleasure does. It’s so powerful and so intense, it continues pushing us towards something that may not even be good anymore. We’ve warped the system.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about how we can tame dopamine and get more out of it. Let’s talk about having low dopamine first, ’cause I imagine people are listening to you describe dopamine, that it causes you to have ambition, have drive, be motivated, and like, I need more of that in my life. So I’m sure a lot of people are like, well, how can I increase dopamine? Maybe that’s my problem life. I don’t have enough of it. First off, how do you know if you’re low on dopamine? Are there any symptoms of it?

Michael Long: Absolutely there are, with one caveat, Brett, and that is, I’m gonna tell you, a lot of symptoms that you can look for, a lot of phenomena you can look for. But I wanna offer the warning as I say that, that these are in broad terms, they can signal a lot of things. So just because you hear some of these, that I say that click with you, doesn’t necessarily mean the problem is dopamine. If it’s interfering with your life, by all means, call a psychiatrist, call a psychologist, go see your GP, get some help to find out if there’s something truly pathological that you need some help with. But having offered that warning, here are some things that are typical about low dopamine activity in the brain. One is a lack of interest in the things that used to intrigue you. You loved it before. Now, not so much. If you’re less interested than you used to be in new things, if you’re not as easily intrigued, that can suggest a decline in dopamine activity. If you are lacking interest in things that by all rights intrigue everybody else and ought to intrigue you too, all this can take the form of reduced motivation for instance, a lesser ability to concentrate.

Brain fog. Less interest in sex is a hallmark of this as well. Just an overall decline in the ability to feel pleasure. You’ll notice that a lot of these aren’t about suddenly you wake up one day and here’s a symptom. It’s a change in the way you felt before, to the way you feel now. And generally that decline involves less pleasure in life. Those are good signals that you’re… And I’m gonna take a little side note here. When we say low on dopamine, what we’re really talking about is in most cases, a reduction in dopamine activity, which again, won’t matter to most people. But we wanna be precise. It’s not as if you could take a dopamine pill and boost it. It’s about increasing the amount of activity with dopamine in your brain.

Brett McKay: Do we know what causes lower dopamine activity?

Michael Long: We know what causes some of it. We can describe it, which is different from saying we know what causes it. We can describe the sunrise, but we can’t exactly describe how the sun got there. When there’s less dopamine activity, a couple of things can be happening, technically. One is that, the dopamine that you have in your brain is getting diluted or washed away before it does all it’s job. Think of a bunch of locks on one side and a bunch of keys on the other. When dopamine acts, what happens is, or any neurotransmitter acts, that key slips into the lock, and that opens the door and causes the feeling. So you could have a lot of those locks blocked. That would be one thing you could do. You could have fewer keys. That’s something else. You could have keys not staying in the lock very long. All these things are declines. Now, what causes them? Well, some of them are just purely organic. It could be that your body was just designed with this flaw. It could be that your brain has changed, and these receptors and this receptor activity across the gap, or the synapses is now reduced by a simple change in time.

Could be that, and this is most common. It could be that you’ve used some kind of common compound that has stretched your ability to appreciate what happens when the lock goes in the key, and you’ve changed what we call homeostasis. You’ve changed your normal to something that requires a lot more stimulation. I always think of Miley Cyrus, who had some wonderful things to say about our first book for exactly this reason. She said, “I went through a period of time where I was not excited about performing in front of a half million people. It just didn’t thrill me anymore.” And it was because she had done it so much, so often, it was no longer unusual to her. It was just part of normal. Now, you and I might pass out if we had to stand in front of half a million people. But for her, she would yawn. It’s about stretching out that system really, like a sweater that you’ve worn, that you’ve pulled over your head too many times, and now it’s stretched out.

Brett McKay: Okay. So you could have low dopamine activity because of some organic biological reason, or it could be because you just hit a dopamine stimulating activity over and over again. So this could be with drugs, or it could be with something else, just like social media. It’s just whenever you flood the brain with high levels of dopamine, it reduces the number of dopamine receptors, and it’s kind of like closing windows during a windstorm.

And that makes it harder to feel pleasure from that stimulation in the future. Let’s go into different ways people think they can try to increase dopamine activity. We know drugs can reduce dopamine activity in the long term, but is it also possible to increase dopamine activity with drugs? And I’m not just talking illegal drugs, I’m talking stimulants and prescription drugs.

Michael Long: Yes, it is. But, again, a big warning. It’s all. Everything I have to say is, I give with one hand to take away with the other, Brett. First you need to know about that dopamine in your brain. When we talk about dopamine levels, you think about something like, insulin or A1C. What are my levels there? And you take a blood test and there you go. Well, you can’t do that with dopamine. This is weird. I think this is so interesting. All the dopamine that we’re talking about, that has to do with mood and behavior, this is already in your brain. All the dopamine that you’re gonna deal with, is already there. It’s made in the brain, it stays in the brain, and it gets washed out as something else. So you can’t drink yourself a big glass of dopamine and make it go up. It could never get into your brain, because your brain has a wall around it called the blood brain barrier. And it’s looking for chemicals like dopamine that are too big or too polarized to get in there. ‘Cause it’s like, I don’t want you messing with my brain system, man.

Leave me alone. I got a wall up here to keep you out. So you can’t just ingest this stuff. You can shoot it into your spinal column and it’ll go up there, but it acts so quickly, it won’t help, and that’s very dangerous anyway. So we don’t really do that too much. If we wanna elevate it with drugs, there are things that do it by causing the dopamine to hang around longer to make those keys I talked about, to make those keys stay in the lock a little longer or go in the lock a few more times. We see that with antidepressants like Wellbutrin, like Zoloft, like Effexor. Oh, yeah. Well, there’s an older antidepressant called an MAO inhibitor, and those do that as well. Now, we can get this with stimulants, Adderall, Ritalin, cocaine. You may be thinking of L-DOPA, which you’ve heard of, which is a precursor to dopamine. But that won’t help us in our conversation, Brett, because that is a precursor to dopamine, that largely acts on the circuits that have to do with motion. That’s why if you Google dopamine, you’re gonna get a bunch of hits about Parkinson’s disease.

There are other circuits in the dopamine system that do things we are not talking about. So, yes, there are compounds that you can use. Here’s where I take away with the other hand. Here’s that, if you have a deficiency of dopamine, we can often raise the dopamine activity to get you back to normal. That’s a good thing. I take an antidepressant. It helps me. It makes a big difference. Not just serotonin. It’s also in many cases, the dopamine level. But if you have normal dopamine, you can’t take Wellbutrin, Zoloft, Effexor, or Adderall. Listen up, students. You can’t take that and get a boost in behavior or a boost in performance from that. We can’t overclock the brain. It turns out we can try, but it just won’t work. Why is that? We don’t know exactly. There is something built into the brain that won’t let it overclock, that dopamine. And when it does overclock in more natural or pathological ways, then you’ve got problems. Then you have real problems.

Brett McKay: Okay. So if you have an actual dopamine deficiency or deficiency in activity, drugs can help. But if you’re just normal and you’re trying to boost yourself, with the Limitless pill, that’s not gonna work. It’s not gonna work out for you. Don’t even try.

Michael Long: I know what you’re talking about. You’re talking about the movie, the Limitless pill?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Michael Long: That is such a cool idea. And I know we caught a few people when I said Adderall won’t help, they’re like, the hell it won’t help. I went to college and got by on Adderall. But the studies that we have on this, show that with or without the Adderall, if you’re taking Adderall or if you’re taking a placebo and you think you’re taking Adderall, you’re trying to do better on a test, you will do better on a test. It’s a placebo effect. It’s the belief that you’ll do better. And to some extent, you may actually commit to studying harder because you think, now I have the Adderall benefit. This is bound to be easier. So even though it feels like it’s helping you and in practice, you may find that it’s better, it is still a placebo effect. It’s not really affecting your dopamine.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Something else you mentioned in the book about increasing dopamine activity. And it took me back to college, this is back in the 2000s. ‘Cause I got really into this back then. Binaural beats, how they can potentially modulate dopamine levels. So for people aren’t familiar, what are binaural beats and what role do they play with dopamine?

Michael Long: First, for people. So everybody knows what it is. If I put one frequency in one ear, let’s say I put 335 hertz in one ear and 345 in the other. Okay, you won’t hear 335 and 345. You’ll hear the difference of 10 hertz, 10 beats. Instead of those two beats, you’re gonna hear a wave. And this does something. But nobody knows exactly what’s going on. All we know is that it seems to change our behavior. Isn’t that crazy? It’s weird. Does it modulate dopamine levels? Does it affect them in terms of activity? It’s impossible for us to know from the research so far. But what we do know, is that it is causing easier concentration at certain frequencies. It’s causing more motivation at certain frequencies. This may have something to do with what we’ll call neural synchronization. Because the every living thing gives off waves. And that’s not a woo woo thing. Systems that have activity in them, tend to vibrate at particular frequencies. And those frequencies are associated with certain kinds of activities. The brain itself has several different levels of frequency ranges that are associated with things like deep sleep or concentration or excitement.

So the binaural beats phenomenon, is it modulating dopamine? Maybe. Is it retuning the entire brain? Maybe. We just don’t know. But this is another promising place that may help us overcome. I think what is so important to remember when you look at dopamine driven problems, is the answer may not always be, and in the future it certainly won’t be, well, let’s just fiddle with the dopamine dial. It could be that we can find other ways to overcome a dopamine deficiency or to modulate and reduce too much dopamine activity. And that would be wonderful, because dopamine is a really difficult system to manipulate. It’s so segregated, it’s so isolated in terms of how well we can touch it. And we can’t touch it very much.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So back in college, I would listen to binaural beats that were supposed to be designed to help you focus or stay motivated. I’ll do that occasionally today, if I’m doing taxes and to get stuff ready for my accountant or I’m writing an article that I’m just having a hard time. I’ll just find Spotify and look for binaural beats focus or binaural beats motivation. And it’s actually nice just as white noise. Just kind of keeps you focused. And maybe there’s something going on with binaural beats, who knows? But you can look for that on Spotify. There’s plenty of binaural beat play tracks out there. Let’s go back to the problem where you’re just not as sensitive to dopamine, because you’ve hammered your brain with dopamine stimulating activity so much. So it’s not responding to the stimuli anymore. Like the example you gave of the overstretched sweater. One solution you’ll hear about, is doing a dopamine fast. And this is where you temporarily abstain from pleasurable or stimulating activities like social media or porn to reset the brain’s reward system, reset your dopamine, so you re-sensitize yourself to normal, everyday levels of pleasures. We’ve actually talked about dopamine fast on the podcast and our website before. Is there anything to this idea of dopamine fast?

Michael Long: Absolutely there is. And if you wanna do it, you got to be sure you’re doing it right. Because if you don’t, you’re going to make it worse. There was an article in the New York Times a while back, about a couple of entrepreneurs who tried to do this on a weekly basis, and they did things like getting away from their phone or turning the lights off or never looking at a screen. All these things are sort of in the realm of dopamine to some level. In the same way, driving a car is sort of related to going to the gas station. There’s a lot more to it. But if you’re gonna do a dopamine fast, let me tell you, the best thing to remember about it, is that dopamine stuff you’re feeling is filling a hole. It’s filling a gap in your emotions, in your life. And if you get rid of dopamine by saying, I’m gonna cut myself off from these activities, that hole is still there, except now it’s empty. And you won’t be able to keep that up. If you’re going to pull back from dopamine, you have to fill that hole with something else.

And what you wanna do, is fill it with here and now activities, we spend so much time anticipating. That’s what your phone is all about. We’re scrolling down the phone looking for something that might be interesting, ’cause last time I saw something interesting, maybe I’ll see something fun again. You have to fill that with here and now, which means, sensory things. Perhaps you could talk to a friend, read a book, go outside and draw a picture, for Pete’s sake, pick up an instrument, do some exercise, anything that involves your engagement with reality in the moment. So if you’re gonna dopamine fast, by all means, knock that stuff out. But be sure, you fill the hole that remains, because it will not stay empty for long. And dopamine will win that battle every damn time.

Brett McKay: I imagine meditation is another one that you could do. Replace it with.

Michael Long: Absolutely. Because meditation puts you in the moment. It requires you to not anticipate, but to feel. Feeling is the word here. The feel, the physical feel with all five senses. You look into breath work. It’s a really neat idea. Has to do with carbon dioxide levels in your brain and your body. This can make a big difference. It’s something that I’ve been looking at in the past few months and I found a lot of peace. And it’s the kind of thing that you can do when you’re standing in line at McDonald’s. It’s going to help you live in the moment.

Brett McKay: So after tackling what we can do to have healthy dopamine levels, re-sensitize ourselves to it. You spend the rest of the book talking about different issues where dopamine plays a role and offers suggestions on how to tame dopamine for those situations. Let’s talk about this one. A couple that’s been together for a long time, we’re talking about a romantic couple, and they feel like the spark is gone. What’s going on there with dopamine?

Michael Long: Well, the first thing we can know, is that a couple that’s been together a long time has now reached the end of significant reward prediction error, which is a fancy way of saying, they don’t surprise each other anymore. And a part of love, especially in the early, as Helen Fisher has done in her research showed. In her research, early love is about surprise, anticipation, is about what is it that I’m going to learn. When love starts to fade as we think of romantic love, it’s because there’s nothing new left to discover. So what we want to do is find ways to restore reward prediction error. And I’ll tell you a few things that you can do to do that right away to create a little more spark, do things where you’re going to be in a situation that you can’t predict the outcome. For Pete’s sake, go to karaoke night with your partner. Do that. Take two $10 bills. Each of you have a $10 bill. Go to a thrift store or go to the mall and say, okay, you got to go pick me out something. Go buy me a $10 present. Go, pick a destination you haven’t been before, and go there and explore it.

Don’t have an agenda. Just say, we’re gonna find out what’s there. You’re putting yourself in situations where you don’t know exactly what the other person’s gonna do. You might have an idea, but we can surprise each other. So these are things to create new opportunities for reward prediction error. As for sex, there are things that we can do in that realm as well. One of the things you can do, is create a place where people can say, the couple can say what it is that they might not wanna say out loud because they’re afraid they’ll surprise you in a bad way. So create a private communication channel between the two of you. Some little secret account. Don’t use your regular account, because you don’t wanna press enter at the wrong time. And there are things you can do in terms of intimacy. I don’t know how much detail you wanna go into here, but certainly you can say, we’re gonna make out, but we’re not gonna go all the way. How about that? That’s for tomorrow.

And then you’ve got this wonderful, delicious day of anticipation that you build like that. Anything that creates an opportunity to anticipate, that creates an opportunity to encounter a surprise from your partner. And that begins by creating situations where that mystery is possible.

Brett McKay: All right, so do new things together. I think it’s an easy one. I think another thing you can do, I think when you’re with someone for a long time, you have the illusion that you know this person really well, like the back of your hand. And you do. You do know them a lot, but there’s still another, they’re a mind. You actually don’t know everything about them. There’s parts of them that you don’t know. And so, you suggest maybe you go deeper, like ask questions you haven’t explored yet. Like, tell me about some memory from your childhood. You’re just trying to recreate the dynamic of those early days of dating, where you had that excitement of learning new things about each other that you didn’t know. And you can do that by just asking a deeper question or just asking about something you’ve never talked about before.

Michael Long: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: So you can increase the spark by doing new things together, going deeper in your conversations. But also another tactic of maintaining that connection long term, is shifting over to the here now neurotransmitters as well. Don’t just rely on dopamine. There comes a point in your relationship where the here now need to start taking over more.

Michael Long: That’s exactly right. When I was in college, I had a friend who had a sign on his wall. He wasn’t a very romantic fellow, let’s say. And the sign on his wall said, kiss and don’t last. Cook and do. And it was such a great thought about how romance has to ultimately become. Well, there’s really not a lot that I have to discover about you, but the fact that you and I can savor the sensory world around us, is gonna be enough. And that’s what romantic love almost always evolves into. And if you’re not ready for it, you’re not gonna be very happy. The more you spend on anticipation, the less you’re in the moment. And I want people to realize what. Frankly, what I’ve realized is that, the moment is all you got, Brett. The moment is all you got. When my best friend died, he was 39 years old. At the funeral, the man who gave the talk at his funeral, man named Chris White, he said, “You may not remember all the time you spent with our friend Kent, but it’s okay, because it happened.” And my response was, what the hell does that even mean?

What could that possibly mean? And over the years, in learning more about neuroscience, I began to see what he got. He was right on the mark. You and I won’t remember much about today or yesterday. As time goes on, this will just fade away. We’ll remember broad things about it, if we remember it at all. But while we’re doing this right now, while you and I are talking, Brett, I’m having a good time. I’m very much in the moment, enjoying what we are doing right now, even though I won’t remember it. So that tells me we’re not doing these things because of how we can sit back in our dotage and think back on the old days. We’re doing it because right now happened. And let’s live in the moment. What a joyful thing to realize is that, we can replace this constant dopamine chase for what might be, what might be, what might be. Replace it with what is right now. A good, vigorous conversation with a smart guy who knows a lot of people, knows a lot of stuff. I’m getting to talk to you, Brett. That’s pretty cool. You’re getting to talk to me, and I know a few things, maybe, that you haven’t heard before.

This is fun, and the moment is wonderful. If you wanna beat dopamine, start living in the moment. Enjoy what you have. When Warren Zevon was dying, David Letterman asked him, what is your lesson? And he said, “Enjoy every sandwich.” My goodness, truer words never spoken.

Brett McKay: How can we use our knowledge of how dopamine works to tame our problematic smartphone use?

Michael Long: Oh, my. Let me give you a single example of what I did in my life, and that is my compulsion with the smartphone. And it has a direct parallel to things like social media. Is I was following the news. I came to Washington, D.C many years ago, to write in politics, and it didn’t take very many years for me to get tired of the abject hostility involved in that world, to back away. But I decided in 2017, that I was not going to read the news for a year. Now, as Nick Offerman said on Parks and Rec, what you just heard me say was, Mike didn’t read as much news. No, Mike stopped reading the news. I used technology to cut off technology. I blocked the news sites, I blocked certain keywords in social media and I spent a year without reading the news. I just cut myself off from it. And after a year I said, you know what, I’d like to continue to do this. So I did it for another four to six months and it was, you ask how do you do it? Well, in that case I did technology to break it off.

And I also planned for other things to do when I felt the urge to read the the news. I would have something else, I’d have a novel to read, I’d have musical instrument to play, I’d find something physical to do, go bake a batch of cookies, do something. And what I found at the end, and this is the takeaway, is that what I thought I was getting from reading the news, and this is true of social media or any kind of doom scrolling dealing with your phone. I found that what I was getting from it, wasn’t nearly what I thought. Was it making me an informed participant in the public debate? No, it wasn’t. In fact, I turned out that mostly I was posting things so I could get hits, so I could get likes. And those likes made me feel good. Was I changing anybody’s mind? No, I was just reinforcing people who already agreed with me. And if I did disagree with someone, it was usually some random person that I didn’t give a care about in the first place. Why am I arguing with strangers? I discovered that the time I spent on social media and my smartphone, were not contributing to my life in the long run.

They were barely contributing to it in the short run. And in fact, they were robbing me of the time I could have spent either working on something productive or simply enjoying the act of being a human being. So if you want to get out of the smartphone game, if you want to get out of social media, cut yourself off completely for a period of time. And you do that by cutting off the apps, turning the apps off, getting rid of them on your phone, putting in a block that limits the amount of time, some of the that you can access it and when you can access it, some of these are accessible through the so called children’s settings. Get yourself an accountability partner. Whenever you feel that you’re gonna do this, tell your friend, hey, I’m gonna call you and I need you to talk me out of this. Okay? Please let me do this for you. When you say, I’m not just going to taper off, but I’m going to quit, the initial hill is high, but the trip after that is much easier. And the powerful experience afterward can change your life for the better.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve used apps to block apps on my phone, using technology to fight technology. But another powerful thing that I’ve used to break the smartphone scroll habit is some metacognition. So I think, okay, I checked my smartphone ’cause I’m hoping that I’m gonna find something that’ll change my life. I’ll find something interesting, funny, maybe some useful information. Let me think back all the times I’ve checked my phone. How often does that happen? Hardly ever. And so, I just started thinking, you know what? I think I’m gonna find something cool and new when I check my phone. I usually don’t. So why am I checking my phone? That’s kind of the metacognition I do to trick myself. And they go, there’s really no reason to check your phone ’cause there’s nothing there.

Michael Long: And the problem is, dopamine says, yeah, you might not find it every time, but what if you do?

Brett McKay: Yeah, there’s still that dopaminergic pole. But I have found, I think it’s useful to talk back to it. Just reminding myself that there’s nothing there. It’s helped me out a lot. And it can help people walk away from social media just like, yeah, there’s nothing on social media. And then with you, it seems like it helped you with quitting the news. You realize you weren’t missing anything. You had that realization. You also have a section devoted to problematic porn use. How does dopamine make porn so alluring? What’s going on there?

Michael Long: Well, it’s doing the same thing that we’ve talked about in all these other realms with a couple of nasty little attachments to it. Not only do we have the attraction of dopamine to the possibility of something new, we have it combined with at least the effects of three other neurotransmitters, and the general attraction of sexual activity, of reproduction, which is the strongest of human desires. So here we are, stuck on our cell phone or looking at the laptop or whatever, and we have the possibility that we’ll see something new and exciting. Plus, we have serotonin, but can make us more compulsively behave this way. We have glutamate, which is pushing us harder toward compulsive behavior. And we have reduced GABA, which means it’s not relaxing us, but it’s goosing this event. It’s goosing this desire. So you’re getting hit from all sides. And it flows from the fact that the sexual response, the sexual drive is the most basic and powerful. It’s, I guess to use a cliche, it’s dopamine on steroids.

Brett McKay: And so to tame that, probably the same tactics you use to tame your smartphone addiction or news addiction?

Michael Long: That’s the great thing about dealing with dopamine. If you find a system that works for you in social media, if you find a system that works for you in online gaming or shopping, if you find something that works with serial dating, something we haven’t talked much about, if it works for those things, it’ll work for everything else. We’re talking about the same mechanism over and over again. And this way, we’re no longer saying, I just have to be more self disciplined. Self discipline has a shelf life, doesn’t last very long. But if we plan for it, if we use technology, if we understand the system, if we engage with the observing self, meaning that we know we’re going to feel a stimulation and instead of reacting, we’re gonna take a moment to decide how to react. If we plan for that, we can beat this thing.

Brett McKay: And then the other thing to not only take away, you not only want to subtract that trigger, that dopamine trigger, but you wanna replace it with a here now activity, meditation, going for a walk outside, talking with your friends, that’s gonna be more useful to you instead of just trying to rely on pure grit alone.

Michael Long: Absolutely. And hey, quit trying to be normal folks, oh, I’m going to read a book, I’m going to do push ups. No. Say, I’ve always wanted to learn to draw. I’m gonna go buy myself some art supplies. I’m gonna try to draw. I’ve wanted to learn to play guitar, but I don’t wanna buy a guitar. I wanna buy a $40 ukulele ’cause I don’t wanna spend 200 bucks on a guitar. Buy a friggin ukulele. Do something. It doesn’t have to be normal or ordinary. If it amuses you, that’s enough. And the more unusual it is, ta da. The more dopamine is gonna go, what the hell is this ukulele doing back here? Let’s explore that. All of a sudden, you’ve replaced a pure dopaminergic waste of time with a dopamine driven here and now experience that leverages the best of dopamine.

Brett McKay: You end the book talking about one of my favorite novels of all time. It’s The Great Gatsby. And you argue that it’s a novel that captures the tug of war with dopamine perfectly. Tell us about that. Why do you think The Great Gatsby is the great novel of dopamine?

Michael Long: Well, it is the great novel of dopamine. And it is also, and I hear you and I are gonna part company pretty strongly. I think it’s one of the most damaging novels ever written.

Brett McKay: Okay. I don’t, yeah. There’s some damaging, but I think it’s well written. I enjoy reading.

Michael Long: Oh, it is. Oh, some of the prose is beautiful. I was reading it, as I wrote this book, reading it again, and it’s devastatingly beautiful. The phrases will be a part of the English part of us forever. But the problem is, is here’s this guy, here’s this guy Fitzgerald, who had the most wonderful life you could imagine. He had money, he had fame, he had love, he had admiration. And his book is about how everything is pointless. The whole thing gets to the point of saying, and you know what? Here’s that green light, and we’ll never reach it. We’ll never get there. We’ll never reach the orgastic, as he calls it, delight that we seek. And so, here we are, boats against the current, beat back ceaselessly into the past. And what a horrible, sad, hopeless thing to tell your readers, especially a guy who knows better. So when I look at Gatsby, I see that. I see here’s somebody who did not finish the equation. Is it a beautiful book? It’s absolutely a beautiful book. But it tells us something that’s not true, which is life is pointless.

And that’s really at the heart of taming the molecule of more of the book. If you’re going to face up to dopamine and try to live in the here and now, even the here and now isn’t going to fix it, unless what you’re doing over the course of your life leads to meaning. Leads to meaning. And that’s what’s missing from Gatsby. Aristotle talked about this, and so did Viktor Frankl, the great psychiatrist. And it’s very simple. If you want to solve the dopamine problem, yes, solve those discrete dopamine issues, but realize that you also need to fill the hole with something of meaning. And the way Aristotle said, we can do that, it’s very simple. It’s crazily simple. Find the things you love to do, find the things you’re good at, and see where they intersect. What is it that you’re good at and you love to do? Now from that, think about what matters to you. What virtues matters to you. And by virtue, I don’t mean holiness. I mean things like knowledge or justice or grace or kindness. What is it that you do that you enjoy and are good at, that also advances your best virtues?

This way, what you do moment to moment, will lead to nothing less than a fulfilling life. A good, solid, contributing life that means something to you and others. If you’re gonna be the lunch lady, you like to cook. You love seeing the little kids, and the kids are happier for seeing you. What a wonderful life that would be. What a wonderful life that would be. And that would be a fulfilling, meaningful life because it mattered beyond you. That’s where the hope comes from. Look beyond yourself.

Brett McKay: And so, it sounds like instead of looking to Jay Gatsby, should look to George Bailey.

Michael Long: I think that’s a pretty good example.

Brett McKay: That’s a good one. Well, Michael, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Michael Long: Tamingthemolecule.com, you can buy the book there. You can interact with me if you want. If you have a book club and you’d like me to swoop in and have a conversation with your book club, I’d love to do it, tamingthemolecule.com.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michael Long, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Michael Long: Brett, is always a pleasure. Thanks, buddy.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Michael Long. He’s the author of the book Taming the Molecule of More. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, tamingthemolecule.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/molecule, where you find links to our resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And make sure to sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.