Andrew Huberman· PhD
Indeed cold water exposure leads to huge increases in dopamine as we talked about before, and very sustained ones at that.
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Indeed cold water exposure leads to huge increases in dopamine as we talked about before, and very sustained ones at that.
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There's a study published in the "European Journal of Physiology" showing that cold exposure can increase our baseline levels of dopamine robustly, 2.5x, and it's a long-lasting increase in dopamine and appears to be a healthy one, meaning it doesn't seem to be addictive.
And the reason I say that is that if you were to go back to the episode that I did on dopamine, or you were to go back to the episode that I did with Dr. Anna Lembke on addiction and dopamine, what you would find is that increases in dopamine of the sort evoked by deliberate cold exposure are actually very similar to the kinds of increases in dopamine that are elicited by things like nicotine or from other behaviors that are known to be addictive and bad for us because they lead to other effects on the brain and body that we simply don't want.
The plasma, yeah. Yes, plasma. - Very hard to measure dopamine directly from the brain unless you're doing microdialysis. No unfortunately unfortunately, their skulls were intact. Fortunately, for them, unfortunately, for the research community, their skulls were intact, so they couldn't measure directly in the brain. But obviously, there's a correlate there. It's a very real effect.
She has an amazing book called "Dopamine Nation", all about dopamine and both its uses, healthy, and its perils in things like addiction. And she describes a patient of hers that used deliberate cold exposure to try and maintain dopamine levels while coming off of drugs that were increasing dopamine so potently that they were putting him down the path of addiction.
And without question, the most potent behavioral tool for doing that is going to be deliberate, cold exposure.
deliberate coal exposure we know is a very reliable way to increase the catacol amines which includes dopamine
although some evidence suggests cerebral dopamine might increase after prolonged cold exposure in rats (https://t.co/YAttkHtQit).
What's particularly interesting is this boost in dopamine occurs without an apparent subsequent drop in dopamine below baseline levels which is in stark contrast to drugs of abuse like cocaine.
Deliberate cold exposure leads to a prolonged rise in dopamine and norepinephrine above baseline levels.
the catacol amines are released in a bolus in parallel from the locus cerus nor epinephrine from the adrenals adrenaline from the various sources in the brain that can release dopamine that they are just released in parallel and we know they have different time courses
I can see those images in the paper now of the you know the big dopamine in increase and the norepinephrine increase and I think it's three graphs set above one another um vertically in that paper where I mean this is long arcs of dopamine release way above Baseline distinctly different from what one sees with like cocaine or amphetamine