Dr. Brian Pennie

Dr. Anna Lemke talks about this, the dopamine, pain, pleasure balance.

If you're really looking forward to something that's going to be this amazing thing, you're so happy and you're anticipating it's going to be great and it doesn't happen.

the high becomes the low.

So what you don't, what you're looking forward to or what you have, the absence of that can become a real low.

Like you get the big spike from the dopamine pleasure, that can turn into pain.

So I'm not one for massively celebrating me wins.

And I've had people that are close to me saying, you need to celebrate your wins more.

And I was like, oh no, I'm going to stay in the middle way.

Now, life is to celebrate as well.

So I try to celebrate as much as I can.

But I was taking it in me stride.

But I remember doing me Viva.

defending the PhD, and I asked a woman called Katie Wichacek, she's a profound addiction researcher over in the United States, and I asked her to be the external examiner.

And it turns out that she was like a wizard in structural equation modeling, which was the core basis of my research.

But I sort of, I didn't know it as well as I should have.

It's really hard, there's so much time involved in it, I nearly had spent two years to really have it down.

And I only found out at that at the last moment.

So the last two weeks before I'm Evive, I had to go on this crash course of structural and equation modeling so I could defend that.

And luckily I did because I needed it.

But I remember being on the call with Katie and it was during COVID time.