Andrew Huberman· PhD
So for every bit of pleasure there is a mirror image experience of pain and they overlap in time very closely.
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
So for every bit of pleasure there is a mirror image experience of pain and they overlap in time very closely.
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As described in the episode that I hosted with my phenomenal colleague from Stanford School of Medicine, Dr. Anna Lembke, she's an expert on addiction and dopamine pathways, the dopamine circuits of the brain have what we call a pleasure pain balance. And there I'm paraphrasing what Dr. Anna Lembke has said, and has written about in her beautiful book, "Dopamine Nation." If you haven't read that book, I highly recommend it. Whether or not you have issues with addiction or you know people that do, or you don't, it's an incredibly important read, especially if you're interested in understanding motivated behaviors and ways to channel your behaviors in life toward healthy, motivated behaviors, and make sure that you avoid some of the common pitfalls that people fall into, not just addiction, but things like overuse of social media or wasting time in general, it's a phenomenal book. In that book, and of course, within research articles, you will find evidence of this so-called pleasure pain balance that exists within our dopamine circuits. Nobody has dopamine circuits that allow them to escape this pleasure pain balance. And the way this works is that anytime that we engage in a behavior or we ingest something that increases our levels of dopamine, there is a subsequent increase in the neural circuits that control our sense of frustration, pain, and lack.
if you recall a peak in dopamine is followed by a trough in dopamine that trough in dopamine is experienced as pain or wanting or craving that pain that I'm referring to is actually a craving or a wanting and it's a craving you're wanting for a specific state that you would like to achieve that is different than the one that you're in you want to get out of that trough and as you recall from earlier in the episode that trough is the stimulus for the ongoing release of dopamine that provides the propeller the motivation to go forward and seek some goal
that brings us to the important feature of motivation which is that motivation is a two-part process which is about balancing Pleasure and Pain