Dhru Purohit Show
Why You Need a Dopamine Detox: The Science Based Way to Master Self Control & Break Addiction Patterns with Dr. Alok Kanojia
Mon, 25 Nov 2024
This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Lifeforce, and One Skin. In today’s world, addiction takes many forms—whether it’s alcohol, drugs, social media, or snacking on ultra-processed foods. Certain key factors drive these behaviors and make breaking the cycle of addiction challenging. Today’s guest offers powerful insights into brain health and psychology, explaining why these behaviors occur and how we can break free. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Alok Kanojia to explore addictions, how they start, and their impact on brain health. Dr. Kanojia explains the roles of dopamine and serotonin in addictive behaviors and reveals the lifestyle habits that deplete serotonin. He also shares his top tips for successful morning routines and the secret to mastering self-control. If you’re looking for insights into why we engage in addictive behaviors and advice on how to break free from the cycle, this episode is a must-listen! Dr. Alok Kanojia, known online as "Dr. K," is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist specializing in the intersection of technology and mental health. As the co-founder of Healthy Gamer, a mental health platform designed for the digital generation, Dr. Kanojia has inspired millions with his content while overseeing the mental health coaching of thousands of young people. Widely regarded as the leading expert on video game addiction, he is also recognized as one of the most prominent mental health authorities for the younger generation. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. K dive into: How addictions start (00:00:11) How social media impacts brain health (2:41) How dopamine and serotonin are impacted during these addictive behaviors (11:56) Top lifestyle behaviors that rob us of serotonin (17:42) Morning habits that influence our need for dopamine hits (23:15) Dharma and self-control (28:50) How to find your purpose (38:35) Choosing discomfort (44:35) Improving self-control and sitting with the discomfort of being uncomfortable (49:25) Dr. K’s journey (01:00:45) Meditation practice and how Dr. K started his meditation practice (1:06:45) Ultra-processed foods, gut health, and depression (1:14:35) Dr. K’s PSA on mental health advice on social media and comfort crisis (1:20:05) Also mentioned in this episode: Dr. K’s Book: How to Raise a Healthy Gamer Healthy GamerGG Spotify Podcast Healthy GamerGG Apple Podcast For more on Dr. K, follow him on X/Twitter, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and his website. This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Lifeforce, and One Skin. Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the Momentous Three: Protein, Omega-3s, and Creatine made by and used by the best. Go to livemomentous.com and enter promo code DHRU to get 20% off any order. Right now, you can save $250 on your first diagnostic and get personalized suggestions. Optimize your longevity and track your progress; go to mylifeforce.com/dhru! Right now, One Skin is offering my community 15% off; just go to oneskin.co and use coupon code DHRU to save 15% and give your skin the scientifically proven, gentle care it deserves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the signs of addiction?
You know, when does something become an addiction? So we engage with all these things, whether you're talking about shopping or alcohol or whatever, because they do something for us. Right. So some part of our brain is experiencing a reward of some kind. The problem is that when we start to get addicted to things, these become solutions that create more problems than they solve.
So if you look at someone who's struggling with like alcohol addiction, they may be using the alcohol to cope. with negative feelings, depression, things like that. We use alcohol as liquid courage that helps us socialize better, be more comfortable at places. We can have a couple of drinks when we go to an office party so that we feel more relaxed and we feel more sociable.
All addictions start out as like solutions to things. And then over time, what happens is we start to become dependent on the behavior and the behavior starts to create problems. And then despite it creating more problems, we find that we can't stop. And that's really when we've achieved an addiction.
And in terms of what's going on in the brain, well, it turns out that depending on what your choice is, whether it's alcohol or shopping or social media, what's happening in the brain is actually like quite different. So that's kind of the common pathway. But then there's a lot of detail about what circuits are affected and things like that.
Chapter 2: How does social media affect our brain?
Well, let's take, for instance, for my audience, something that I regularly hear is people feeling like they're abusing social media and it's impacting their life. It's robbing them of pleasure or it's impacting them from really pursuing the things that they want to pursue in life because they're feeling like they're losing motivation or comparison is seeping in.
So can you talk a little bit more about what might be happening in the brain for somebody who feels like they're addicted to social media?
So social media addiction is like really interesting because the first thing to understand is that see substance use addictions. So these are things like alcohol, opioids, marijuana. These act in a very discreet way. Right. So I have a molecule of alcohol that crosses the blood brain barrier and then activate something called the GABA receptor. So it's like very targeted.
The issue with a lot of these technologies is that they're not nearly as targeted. So we see a lot more of a whole brain effect. And the different problems that you described each have like unique parts of the brain that they affect. So let's like run through those. So social media does a couple of fundamental things. The first is that it messes with our sense of identity.
So if we think about like on social media, I have a representation of myself. And then when that representation of myself gets activated, there are really primitive circuits of the brain of things like social status and social relationships and connectedness with other human beings. Social media activates all of those circuits.
And the challenge that we really run into, just to give you like one really example, so a simple example is social media oftentimes leads to problems with body image, right? So we're seeing a rise in body dysmorphia in both men and women. And there are really simple ways that it does this.
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Chapter 3: What role do dopamine and serotonin play in addiction?
So anytime you use social media, there are a lot of apps now that will automatically filter and adjust your appearance. So if you take like a picture on an app like TikTok, it will apply a filter without you doing anything.
And so over time, what happens is we start to build up an identity of ourselves that is a virtual identity that gets a certain number of likes, dislikes, call it whatever you want. And then what happens is like literally when I look at like my pictures online, I'm a prettier version of what I see in the mirror. So I put forth this face to the outside world.
And then I spend a lot of time and energy because now it's become a part of our jobs. It's become a part of our social circles, right? We have to be active on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, LinkedIn. So now I invest in this person. But then when I wake up in the morning and I look at myself in the mirror, I'm not that person.
What you see when you look in the mirror looks different from the pictures that you take of yourself, especially when we start applying filters. So there's already a little bit of a disconnect between the person that I really am and the person that I put forward. Then what happens is I start to feel inferior to my virtual self, right? Because I'm just not as pretty when I look in the mirror.
And so then like we can start to feel dissatisfied with ourselves. And then what happens is, OK, so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start like using more filters. And then we almost get like addicted to filters in the same way that we can get like addicted to Botox, where we want to look a particular way. And why do people use Botox? It's because they want to look a particular way.
And now you can do that virtually. And so at the same time, what we're doing is like creating kind of a false version of ourselves. And then we kind of have this like part of us that we don't like. And then we like the false version more than the real version. So we invest more and more time into our online presence and we start to like lose ourselves in the real world. That's just one aspect.
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Chapter 4: What lifestyle habits deplete serotonin?
A second aspect is comparison, right? Because social media is very, very, very good at making comparisons and making all kinds of comparisons. So the social media algorithms have figured out that the way to keep you addicted is by making you feel bad and making you feel good in an alternating way.
So it'll show you things that make you feel good about yourself or maybe feel superior to other people. And then it'll show you things that make you feel bad about yourself. And so it's kind of like messing with your sense of identity.
And it really kind of gets messed up because if we look at the way that our brains have evolved, we haven't evolved to compare ourselves to millions of people, right? We evolved in tribes of like 300 people. So your social status was like somewhere between one and 300.
But now on the internet, no matter how successful you are, how you look, you will always find someone who is doing better than you, who is more attractive than you, who is more successful than you. who is doing a better job of being a parent and having a career. So like no matter where you go, you're going to end up feeling inferior. That's kind of the second aspect of social media.
Third aspect, you talked about motivation. So this is another thing that a lot of people like don't understand. So when you wake up in the morning, you have a limited stock of dopamine. So we tend to think about dopamine as like being regenerated throughout the day.
But there are studies that show that if you take mice and you give them cocaine and then you have them do other behaviors, their ability to experience pleasure from the subsequent behaviors, as well as be motivated to act afterward, actually goes down. So we have this limited stock of dopamine. And anytime we activate dopamine, we create cravings and we reinforce behavior.
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Chapter 5: How can morning routines influence self-control?
So one of the biggest challenges that we see is dopamine is our primary motivating neurotransmitter. And if we kind of waste it all on social media, we've got no dopamine left to experience pleasure with normal things.
And what's even more dangerous than that is like normally if you like work hard, right, if I wake up and I like work productively for four hours, I will feel some sense of accomplishment afterward. And that's because I have a lot of dopamine. So when I finish, I get some rush of pleasure. I'm like, oh, man, I'm done. Like, awesome. I did a great job.
And then it's actually easier to work tomorrow, right? Because you've got some momentum. You feel pretty good about it. But when social media enters the picture, it empties our dopamine stores.
Therefore, our capacity to experience pleasure and behavioral reinforcement actually goes down for the rest of the day, which is what creates this experience that people have where like after you spend some time using a device, you don't feel like doing anything else. And when you do it, it requires like it's like a slog, right? You have to force yourself to do it.
And then you don't get any sense of satisfaction, even though like in a different circumstance, doing like a solid chunk of work will like make you feel good, right? You're like, yeah, I did it. But that our brain is just empty. So we don't have those feelings.
You know, there's so much more awareness. You brought up dopamine. There's so much more awareness about dopamine than ever because of largely a lot of these incredible podcasts that are out there. And you take it a step further.
You say often it's important for people to understand dopamine, but sometimes dopamine unfairly gets all the attention when it comes to things like addiction and behavior in the body. Can you expand on that a little bit more? You know, in a perfect world, we would all get enough of the nutrients that we need for high level performance from our diets alone. That's in a perfect world.
But we live in the real world and that's a world of nutritional deficiencies and not always optimized diets. And the truth is that every single one of us could use a little bit of support when it comes to the path of becoming our personal best every day. For me personally, as I always talk about on this podcast, the first step is nailing the basics.
That's why I love and start with the Momentous 3. It's protein, creatine, and omega-3 supplements. These are the three nutrients that expert research shows as the foundation of long-term health. And taken daily, this protocol supports every cellular function in the body and the brain.
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Chapter 6: What is the connection between discomfort and purpose?
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We have these different circuits, like we have the sense of identity. We have a sense of community. So these are different parts of the brain that are getting activated. But I think a big challenge that we have is that, you know, a lot of what technology does and a lot of what we struggle with has nothing to do with dopamine.
So a really good example of this is if we look at the amygdala and the limbic system. So the amygdala is our survival center of the brain where we experience fear and anxiety. And then our limbic system is more broadly like our emotional circuitry in the brain. And technology is addictive for a couple of reasons.
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Chapter 7: How can we improve self-control?
One is that it activates dopamine, which gives us pleasure and reinforces the behavior. But then the other thing that happens is anytime we use technology, it usually suppresses our negative emotional circuitry. If we look at addictions, all addictions do two things. They give us pleasure and they take away pain.
And usually what happens over time is we will actually acclimatize or build tolerance to the pleasure. So if you look at someone who's struggling with alcohol, the first couple of drinks they have, they're having a blast or maybe they're enjoying it. And then later on, like when you're on drink number eight or drink number nine or drink number 10, it's no longer fun. Right.
So when I have patients that are like carrying fifths of vodka around and like like tucking them away in purses or in drawers at work or things like that, and they're drinking throughout the day, they're not drinking to have a blast. They're drinking to numb certain parts of their brain. And that's what we also see with technology. Right.
So like when you're kind of like when you're stressed out and you go and you like, you know, sit down for a couple of minutes and you pull out your phone and 30 minutes go by. It's not like you're having a blast and laughing and full of pleasure. It kind of numbs out all the stress and all the that you have to deal with.
And you got to pick this up on the way home and you have to do this for your kids. And then you got to do this and you got to pay your mortgage. You got to answer these emails. So it helps us kind of like mentally numb out. So I think that's one example of like circuits besides dopamine.
But then there's also a lot that we don't understand about like motivation and behavior and how that can come from other parts of our brain in a more sustained way, which is why I like if we get stuck with dopamine, it doesn't really work very well. Just
Just to take it one step further on this, can you also talk about the role that serotonin plays as sort of a protective element against a lot of the brain hijacking behaviors that can be there when it relates to dopamine?
Serotonin and dopamine, I almost think about them as like inversely correlated. So the more dopaminergic your brain is, generally speaking, the less serotonergic it is and the vice versa. So let's just run through a couple of examples and what that means. So dopamine, first of all, is the neurotransmitter that governs pleasure, right? So it governs like having fun or pleasure.
Serotonin is a lot more associated with contentment or peace, right? So if we think about like, you know, someone who is suffering from like a mood disorder, like major depressive disorder, and we prescribe them a serotonergic agent, an agent that boosts their serotonin transmission. These are not happy pills. They don't make us happy. They make us less discontent. Right.
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Chapter 8: What is the relationship between addiction and purpose?
So we have to understand that serotonin and dopamine are kind of like inversely related, where the more that you do things that are serotonergic and make you feel good about yourself, like make you feel accomplished, make you feel content, are actually not dopaminergic. They're the opposite. So when you work really hard and you feel good about that, that's actually not a dopaminergic release.
It can be some dopamine, but it's serotonin. So I think a lot of times what happens is people are so focused on optimizing their dopamine that they ignore the real source of peace and contentment and even a sense of accomplishment in life.
On that topic, what do you think are some of the top lifestyle behaviors that we have in our modern day and age that are robbing us of that serotonin response, that healthy response that's there? Like, is it the presence of something or is it the absence of something or is it both?
And if it's both, what are some of the most common examples? How do we think about enhancing or optimizing our serotonin? So let's just think about this, okay? So the first thing is that the more dopamine we engage, okay? So when I do a lot of dopaminergic activities, what that literally does is strengthen the dopaminergic circuit in our brain.
So remember that the brain has a lot of like competing impulses, right? So like I want to eat a piece of fried chicken, but I should eat a salad. So some part of my brain is telling me I should do something. And another part of our brain is saying, I want to do something. So when we give into the dopaminergic part, it strengthens that part and allows it to become stronger than other parts.
So we kind of know this a lot from like kind of Eastern wisdom, right? That when you give into a desire, whatever you give into in your mind only grows. So if you let yourself eat unhealthy today, it becomes easier to eat unhealthy tomorrow and easier to eat unhealthy the next day. And that's once again, because remember, dopamine creates behavioral reinforcement, right?
So whatever we do, we're going to create cravings for and we're going to reinforce. So the first thing that a lot of people have sort of figured out is that when they use a lot of technology, that dopaminergic part of their brain is literally getting stronger and it starts beating out other parts of the brain that are telling you to do other things. So it becomes harder to motivate yourself.
It becomes harder to like, you know, you become more irritable, you become more cranky. It's like if someone tells you to not use your phone, you'll get like cranky around that. So you like literally become more receptive to like dopaminergic activity. So instead, what we really want to do is focus on boosting our serotonin system.
So this is why we're seeing an unprecedented level of addiction in the world today. But we're also seeing an unprecedented level of hunger for meditation and mindfulness. And why is that? What do these do in our brain? So we know that, for example, meditation is an evidence based intervention that improves things like depression and anxiety.
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