Anna Lembke

And then when the exercise is stopped, those neurotransmitter levels remain elevated for hours afterwards.

And of course, this is our runner's high.

And then eventually those elevated levels of dopamine will go back down to baseline levels homeostasis, but without ever going into that dopamine deficit state.

In other words, by paying for our dopamine up front, we get those feel good experiences, which we need, right?

We're humans.

We can't just like hang out in homeostasis, but we can get those good feelings without ever having to go into our cash dopamine reserves, so to speak.

Exactly.

And you can see the ways in which actually the way we pay for things makes us all more vulnerable to addiction because now they have these credit cards where you don't even have to pay for them in real time.

You can pay for them later, which is just terrible.

I'm recommending a new form of asceticism for the modern age.

And what I mean by that is we are living in an unprecedented time of overwhelming access to highly reinforcing drugs and behaviors such that I think that our existence is going to be reliant upon figuring out how to navigate this world of overabundance

And so in fact, in order to be healthy, we actually have to intentionally veer slightly to the side of pain and insulate ourselves from pleasure in order to preserve balance.

Have you done this yourself?

Oh yeah, I do this on a regular basis.

Well, I like to start my day with pain, namely doing some kind of exercise, mainly walking or swimming because I'm in my 50s now.

But every morning when I wake up, trust me, I do not want to get out of bed, but I absolutely force myself to do it most of the time because I know I'll feel so much better afterwards.

And it's just a great anxiolytic and mood stabilizer for me.

And then we've raised our family with a lot of...

forced marches and outdoor wilderness experiences, which were challenging and difficult.

We've insulated ourselves from digital media in the sense that we didn't have any devices or Wi-Fi, even Wi-Fi to the home until our eldest went to high school.