Intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful dopamine reward schedule for maintaining behavior.

“You reward yourself, not on a predictable schedule so not every other time or every third time or every 10th time, but sometimes it's three in a row then not at all for 10 days. So reward is important. Self reward is critically important but make sure that you're not doing it on such a predictable schedule that you burn out these dopamine circuits or that you undercut your own ability to strive and achieve.”

“One of the key things that we can all do to adjust our ability to experience pleasure is to engage in that intermittent reward schedule. You can either adjust down the peak in dopamine, meaning not let yourself ever get too happy, but that's no fun, right? Life is about occasionally achieving or experiencing ecstasy, but every once in a while, remove the reward. And of course, I don't mean ecstasy the drug that's a separate matter. The MDMA trials are a separate matter. Very interesting, I want to be clear. I meant psychological and physical ecstasy of the natural sort. I've immense interest in what's going on in the MDMA trials, but just for clarity purposes, that's a separate topic that we will cover in an episode very soon. So how do you adjust this dopamine system? Well, every once in a while at random, not in a predictable way, you remove the reward and that will keep you and your dopamine system tune up in the proper ways.”

“Random intermittent reward is truly the best schedule of reward, hence slot machines and so on. And you should engage random intermittent reward.”

“the intermittent reinforcement schedule was discovered Long Ago by scientific researchers so this is the slot machine that every once in a while gives you a win to keep you playing”