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Episode 204: Do emotions trigger relapses, How to prevent or minimize addictive relapse
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and so the the name of the article is called harvard researchers help explain the link between emotion and addictive substance use oh good for them now based on what i've learned from from you both here on the podcast uh is is that uh that this is uh you know i wanted to read more just to see exactly what they were saying um and so i won't read a long whole thing about the studies there were four integrated studies but they essentially we're trying to figure out what drives a person to smoke cigarettes and what keeps them uh what what gets them to relapse when they have quit for a while and so the uh the study was basically data from a national survey of more than 10 000 people over 20 years and the laboratory tests examining the responses of current smokers to negative emotions and one study tested the volume the frequency of the actual puffs on cigarettes by smokers who for volunteered to be monitored um the the um a couple of other studies uh oh no i lost my place here um and then the uh i guess okay um so what they found was uh they essentially the conclusion was uh that that when people are sad you know when when when they are feeling sadness uh then they get more triggered to relapse or to use the addictive substance so you know they had some public policy implications for example they thought maybe current anti-smoking ad campaigns could be redesigned to avoid images that trigger sadness and thus unintentionally increasing cigarette cravings among smokers my first thought is thinking well if the cigarette companies found out about this study and if it were in fact true maybe they would start making ads that trigger sadness good thinking nathan so that's definitely what the alcohol advertisers do yeah yeah so you're looking at home get a six pack of beer and everything's happier yeah yeah because i remember when coca-cola was like you know open happiness that was their big campaign is mcdonald's also you know has a lot of happiness related slogans right yeah and so so it reminded me uh when i read the pleasure trap uh dr lyle the book that you wrote uh the i the the most fascinating part for me the first part that i remember just getting really excited about besides learning about how a gray strike pokes bugs and put them on thorns uh the really cool part was uh distinguishing between pleasure and happiness and how it seemed that many people will mistake those two emotions or those two feelings and and how if you know if they're deficient one they might if they're not happy they might try to compensate for that seeking for the pleasure so um dr lau doctor how can we get your take on this well i i looked at this this i didn't read the whole article but i just read some of the the comments by the researchers and i i did i saw that thing about them being worried about their ads that they might trigger sadness or they might trigger if they look too negative about smoking that might trigger sadness and that would impact people to smoke more this is like delusions of grandeur i mean these people they got to harvard and then they think that every thought that they have is golden i don't know what they're thinking the common problem [Laughter] this is absurd to believe that that you could push human behavior around so easily is of course ludicrous the uh also the the research uh that they've done is just even the sound of it is just silly uh and i'm sure has almost no merit whatsoever the um the if we're going to try to understand why people relapse uh people would love to blame the fact that they were sad on whether or not they relapsed however the truth of the matter is is that the the most common reasons for uh relapse are channel factors uh and also the the actual stimuli itself uh and also uh straight pavlovian spontaneous recoveries so the uh so i i note that i they don't to appear to have controlled [Laughter] for anything for anything okay they actually went out after this study with an idea in mind okay and then use their survey data to retrospectively ask people you know gee when you relapsed were you kind of sad before you relapsed i mean this is this is absurd yeah so yeah go ahead jen well it's very similar to people who blame uh sort of disease processes on emotional like we talked about last week so there's some emotional cause of some kind of pathology and and those are all retrospective as well and it's the same kind of question like oh so i see that you you know you have you have cancer you know were you experiencing some anger some unexpressed anger in the last year and people say well by golly i sure was i i was really i had a lot of rage at my father that i never expressed and and the new age people will come right in and say oh well you've held that in your lungs and that's why you have lung cancer you have a great deal of unexpressed sadness so this is just about as valid to to do it with this kind of result in mind as well yeah the truth is we can we can see for example we had a beautiful experiment here in the last 30 or 40 years to see what would actually help people stop smoking and it's not going to be the ads orchestrated by these geniuses from harvard the or or the american government who i'm sure that the because they went to a fancy school that they'll get they'll get nice solid jobs there working for you know the united states council on health or whatever it is and you're enjoying the harvard smack talk a little too much last episode i got to say you pushed it a little too far dr hawk tell us where you went to school again to the university of washington yeah university of washington honors yeah the uh yeah but the the point here is that uh we already know and we know that the channel factors would by channel factors what we mean is that the ease of access and this is because there isn't anything really mysterious going on in addiction or relapse all that's happening is cost benefit analysis that's what's happening with all behavior and so the um uh i i can see why actually i just occurred to me that i could see why some people when you've heard this for the 80th time if you don't understand deeply that all all a brain is is a cost-benefit analyzing computer uh for gene survival chips so that's where gene survival probabilities that's what that's what a brain is that's what it what it evolved to do if you didn't know this and you just heard cost-benefit analysis a few times you would start to think that this is a sort of tautology that it's that that it it's a it's just just so story that everything you can always go back and say well why did the person do it well it's because the the benefit outweighed the cost that's why they did what they did but it's true that's true and so there there would be no other reason for one neural circuit to be activated and another circuit to be deactivated uh and to have one chosen over the other in terms of an option and so so when we're going to start to look at something like relapse we're just we we begin the question with cost benefit analysis now these people are assuming all kinds of things in their in their dreamlike study and that is that negative emotion drives the use of substances you've got to be kidding me has anybody visited a bar you know on super bowl sunday yeah let's just go in there we're all depressed because our team's in the super bowl and that's why we're ordering up the beer because we're really depressed or let's control for who drinks more the the people rooting for the winning team or the losing team do we really think there's going to be a statistically significant difference there i that's actually a great study if someone wanted to test their own hypotheses so the if it's such a quote depressant why is it that that everybody's using it in celebrations for god's sakes right okay so no the the whole notion that this is a the wise you know sort of the wise nodding therapist oh well the reason why you relapsed was because you know you had some you've had some sadness you've got to be kidding me no so the re relapses take place under all kinds of differing conditions and sadness driving a relapse and therefore a desire to you know shift your emotional state out of the sadness maybe okay uh but probably no more likely than being in a celebratory mood and wanting to extend it with whatever it is uh most important would be uh just uh channel factors so some your new year's party and some you know attractive women if you're a guy offers you a cigarette yeah you've been you've been sober on the cigarettes for a year but maybe it's time to break it because you wouldn't want to you know you wouldn't want to turn her down so all kinds of reasons including very important pavlovian reasons being spontaneous recovery but notice uh spontaneous recovery is just uh just no reason at all the nervous system uh the deep reasoning of the nervous system is if there's been a resource that's been important i.e anything that stoked the dopamine pathway in an accentuated fashion which cigarettes would then even if you get away from it and you get into extinction and therefore you are off the sauce there that that doesn't mean that every now and then there won't be a a lighting up of the scoreboard inside your head to basically cause you to go back and see if that resource still exists these are these are behavioral programs they're instincts inside of animal brains that are designed by nature for animals to go back to the scene of where they were very well fed and see if they can recover that resource well your brain doesn't really know the difference too well between the dopamine flood of cigarette and the the flood of getting fed in other words they're both rewarding uh they're both telling the organism that there's been an evolutionary win and so even if you get away from drugs or alcohol or some something that has addicted you the brain will spontaneously cause a motivational rush from time to time that will cause you to go back and seek that stimuli that's super important to understand yeah particularly if it's if there's an associated queue in the environment yes there's a particular smell or you're in the same kind of place or you're in you know you see somebody or you're reminded of somebody so all of those things can contribute so those might be associated with sadness because you were sad when you were an addict so there may be there may be feelings of sadness that co-arise with those cues that are generating the recovery but the um that's not what's actually driving the process yeah this is uh this is just this is a paper mache explanation of relapse and it doesn't tell us anything about what would be effective with anything we already know and that is when they banned smoking from buildings the the smoking dropped dramatically in the united states so it went from 40th something percent down to below 20 uh in you know a generation and the reasons for this are just pure hassle and so this is uh so the cb is clearly impacting you know this more than anything else is just the energy conservation processes so uh so thinking that one's add you know some some trivial little effect of some transient emotional state that is driving real is just ludicrous so ah oh well thank you um yeah so the the third study uh they were trying to figure out you know they measured impatience for for their puffs and they said that the result was built upon previous research findings that sadness increases financial impatience and so that reminded me of one of your dvds called the willpower paradox where you cite the work of roy baumeister saying essentially that that if you have low blood sugar if you're hungry you're you're vastly more likely to make impulsive more impulsive decisions and so i couldn't help but wonder if sadness may have a similar effect uh in terms of making more impulsive decisions or being you know unable to to uh uh control this type of you know to control it i just want to back up for a second to talk about sadness so these people act like it's some kind of unfortunate disease process that's that's creating mischief it's not this is a incredibly delicately or orchestrated mechanism shaped by evolution in order to tell the organism what to do that's what it is okay it's not destructive sadness isn't the slightest bit destructive neither is the excruciating pain that you get in your ankle when you've sprained it it's not destructive okay so the uh we don't want to rush in there and block the pain with the medication the that would be a disaster the the pain is a signaling device the pain isn't damaging this is also the absurdity of the new age crap about oh you will you have all these pent up emotions and they're causing you physiological damage under what evolutionary cockamamie transmogrification of causality could you ever come up with such an idea why would an organism ever orchestrate its own self-destruction chakras are the mechanism it all gets stuck in there it starts turning the wrong direction it's ludicrous okay so the sadness uh is not going to orchestrate self-destructive behavior at all it's designed by nature to shape effective behavior that's why when you get sad after you just lost you know your last 200 bucks in a in a uh in a slot machine in vegas you know that sadness is to tell you yeah hey chief you know this wasn't that really isn't your town yeah okay it the sadness is to tell you when the girl told you the fourth time no we're not going out anymore yeah you're sad but it's it's a signaling device to tell you that the game is lost and therefore you need to back up and re re-engineer your thinking about how you're going to expand your resources because this one's a lost cause that that's what sadness is so the the notion that sadness uh would would engineer drug relapse maybe i don't i mean i'm sure there are times when that's true that that for some reason someone takes that option uh but most of the time no that wouldn't be the case the relapse is going to be vastly more to do with channel factors than it's going to be with anything else and uh and so yeah and sadness per se is no disease process that we want to inherently avoid it's a it's an experience that's trying to you know that you can't avoid because you're going to have some failures and you're going to have some losses in life and sadness is a is a mechanism to signal to you that something of value is lost that's what it is so instead of feeling like it's a plague that visits some people that have tried to quit smoking and then it causes them to relapse it why don't we understand that sadness per se these people are attempting to live their lives as intelligently as possible and and as effectively as possible and then sometimes they lose as we all do and so when they lose the sadness that they feel is a is an inherent mechanism that's designed by nature to signal them to teach them about that they lost and get them to examine why the the notion that oh god that's a terrible thing that sadness thing we can't better not have an ad with sad music on it when we're talking about cigarettes because somehow that's going to visit them like you know invasion of the body snatchers and now it's going to cause this relapse i mean that is just insane out of control process right yeah yeah the notion that these feelings that you have uh are are somehow as if they are visiting from somewhere else or that there's some independent process independent of your life process independent of your hunger inter independent of your sleepiness independent of being uh warm or cold independent of being you know thirsty independent of feeling you know in physical pain or not no they're all part of the same process which are signaling mechanisms to to help you adjust your behavior in ways that optimize your survival reproductive success they're not some inherently destructive process even when they're negative okay so this is the this is actually a fundamental misunderstanding of many people uh blatantly in the new age world but new age and the buddhist world that you have the monkey mind that's just spontaneously generating thoughts that don't have anything to do with anything they're just like floating across your mind like clouds so you have to detach from them and then you can freely rewrite them so if they're making you sad or they're making you unhappy or you feel shame because of those thoughts they're just random thoughts that the monkey mind is generating so you can just you can just think different thoughts you just don't have to attach to the bad thoughts you attach to the good thoughts and this is how it this is how it works in this world and a lot of contemporary therapy just adopts these ideas as if they're true yeah that's what that that's what's uh 30 years ago got me you know parting ways with many of the much of the thinking cognitive therapy i.e when therapists will say well which which thought is working for you which thought would be more beneficial yeah they they'd love to ask that question this it's amazing it's a the the monkey mind isn't some self-destructive haywire bizarre feature of of you that you can somehow control these are these are uh deep logical algorithms that exist inside your brain that are giving rise to concerns that you're having right and if you look at what those concerns are they're not random you're you're not concerned that the next door neighbor's cat is about to drop out of the tree and land on its head no that isn't what comes to mind well now i am what now that you brought it up right so your your mind is scanning the the evidence that your senses give you and it's relating that evidence that it's giving you to data that's already in the databanks and you're analyzing probabilities and you are coming up with a swot analysis a strength weaknesses opportunity and threat analysis about where you stand relative to your environmental opportunities and threats and the thoughts that you have are running down attempting to estimate parameters around those threats so the notion that somehow the solution to stopping people from relapsing smoking is to block them from i can just see the next move oh what we need is to give them antidepressants yeah of course of course you know because they this random terrible process has has befallen them and we need to medicate it right the natural solution there you go that that's like i can almost smell a a tobacco company grant that was associated with this thing so the i mean i don't know if that's true of course but the but the um uh but i mean not tobacco pharmaceutical company which turns out they're the same people the uh but yeah it's all uh this is all very weak thinking but wow what the heck on on we go yeah one thing that uh that i it seemed to me like a little limitation of the study is if people are more sad uh and they therefore supposedly this supposedly triggered their addictive substance use um where does emotional instability come into play so if the people who feel this more often they're going to be the ones more often to medicate and celebrate this is one of the many things they didn't control for that's beautiful nathan that's really good thinking but of course there's no personality anywhere in any of these these four studies they talk about because they didn't even it didn't even occur to them to control personality because nobody's even thinking about personality much less controlling for it no they it sounds like they did control for other negative emotions and so they specifically you know teased out sadness so how are they defining sadness how are they distinguishing sadness from shame like why why are people being triggered by sadness but not shame that's the first question that came to me when i read the abstract like how the heck are you distinguishing between those two things in the process like and the uh it's experimentally induced sadness so they're showing people pictures of i don't know lonely kittens in the rain or whatever it is to make them feel sadness it's not sadness that's actually associated with any of their competitive processes so what's the thinking that if you see a sad picture then you're tapping into your internal sad processes like i there's none of it makes any sense to me yeah but it's all premised on the idea that your behavior and your circumstances are a result are a result of your of your um your emotions and your thoughts and it absolutely has a causality reverse the your your emotions are symptoms your emotions and your thoughts are symptoms of your circumstances and your behavior they're not driving those things excellent so rather than rather than trying to avoid sadness uh we want to get back to the fundamentals which is what you've both talked about is just set up your environment so that you're less likely to experience uh difficulty in life situations in general and therefore less difficulty in sticking to the plan or let me let me talk about this first of all you can't do that because you're doing that anyway as best you can the but when it comes to addiction the most important thing you do is you look out for the channel factors that can get you what is a channel factor channel factors are going to be uh you better not hang out with friends that smoke okay you you avoid the places where you used to go where you know that there's cigarettes handy these are and you you do that from a long ways away and so you uh this is the types of things that you can do so you you avoid you know the parties and the people that were associated with a lot of smoking and was all cool and everybody was patting each other on the back and it was part of the part of the subculture so these are the best things that you can do and uh and you can also sometimes do some things that that you know highlight and and uh underscore for yourself the wins associated with with being uh with being smoke free which would be like for example i don't know getting up in the morning and running for 20 minutes so just knowing what it feels like to have your lungs clear and enjoying that process and making that a regular practice so these are these are the types of things that that you that you want to do uh but you know one of my i mean i could i could tell a thousand stories of relapse that i've worked with with addicts over the years and in all different kinds of substances but one of my one of my quote favorite stories it's not a favorite it's an instructive one was a was a superbly intelligent and superbly disciplined client very unusually so so extremely intelligent extremely self-disciplined and that person had an alcohol problem and uh and was clean for a long time and had engineered his life around every uh everything that he could to see to it that he wouldn't come anywhere near where the alcohol problems had arisen and then and that included uh where he got off on the freeway on his way home and then uh one day they were working on that freeway off-ramp and it caused him to not be able to use that off-ramp he had to go to the next off-ramp and then extra took him past the liquor store that he had been to many times to buy a specific uh drink and he got it he relapsed okay so that's that's a channel factor and so that's uh recognizing and understanding that you are you're an animal that's running cbs and if you if you do your level best to try to keep the seabees loaded in favor of your success then you have a much better chance uh it d trust me i've had many people say well i heard you say that dr lyle but i can get in the car and drive 17 miles to you know get myself a chocolate parfait at my favorite place likely to do it it's more difficult to do it and that might be just difficult enough yeah you don't know what how difficult it has to be to make it out of reach for your cb so it may not be as dramatic as you're thinking it has to be it might just be slightly uncomfortable you're just not willing to take that extra step the day i got sober i tried to quit alcohol several times before i successfully was able to and the day that i actually turned out to be day one of of permanent sobriety it was just because i happened to have gotten through all of my alcohol the night before and i didn't have any left over for the next day so that had not been the pattern the pattern was i always had enough to sort of get started the next afternoon and and then you go get more and that's it's just the cycle repeats itself so that day i just happened to not have any and it would have been a i was hungover and it would have been a pain to go out and get more and the store wasn't that far away but it was like snowy outside and it was like ah no i'll just go one day and i won't do it and that was all it took so that that that started that that turned that whole ship around so you never know how big a channel factor you're dealing with with any particular nervous system and people can really overestimate um how how pure they need to make the environment or how strict they need to be with themselves sometimes this is fantastic let me tell people i don't know that i've i've told this this story or this concept before but it just your story just gave rise to this gen and so it's a it's a it's a time for time to talk about this this is um if we go back in time to the 1920s and 1930s there was a a a european uh social psychologist named kurt lewin or levine uh in his primary tongue and uh he he was a a major theorist in fact he is the father of modern social psychology so he he is the man that began the concept of running experiments and so you all know alan funt from candid camera well the allen fund uh got his master's degree uh under kurt levine um in new york and so so that candid camera is a set of social psychological experiments that's what it is entertaining ones yes entertaining ones and so uh lewin's idea was that instead of just doing naturalistic observation of people if you thought about what variables you're interested in you could enhance them and and essentially put them uh put force behind them and then see what the reactionary force it was inside people so that is the that is what social psychology is the the grandest you know his his quote intellectual children were people like stanley milgram uh of the famous milgram studies and the and other people uh solomon ash and and people of that nature that that did these experiments where they put people in in uh in tough situations that called for them to make decisions and they they didn't you know they weren't sure what the right thing was to do so uh darlene latinae did famous experiments with with bystander interventions or with emergencies so if you have somebody sitting in a waiting room and and you have somebody walk by or you have another person sitting in a waiting room with them and you have a guy walk by you know through into another room into a back room and then he's got a ladder with them and then you hear the ladder fall and crash and you hear the guy yelling you know if your person in their in their waiting room with you doesn't make a move the odds that that i will make a move are about 10 but if there isn't another person in the waiting room with me the odds that i'm going to go back and check it out are like 90 so these are these are fascinating little studies that are that are uncovering what lewin called the field and what the field was in lewin's mind was a set of forces that was pushing against each other in in what we would now recognize as a cost-benefit analysis it was perfectly perfectly well conceived by lewin because it's exactly the way i think of it i now think of lewin's field as a set of a set of qualities and inequalities with mathematical coefficients about gene survival and so essentially lewin's field is all of these different forces are pushing now one of lewin's beautiful contributions was the notion that a very tiny factor in this field think of this field as a an interwoven set of causality that you know goes back to i don't know we've got a literary person with us who who told the jen who told the the famous story of you know my kingdom for a horse or for the wand of a nail the kingdom was lost oh god i don't know i failed that pop quiz it's a good thing we're not a pub trivia because i'm not shakespeare's richard iii sounds like she's good for you just just just just pull something out that sounds smart i just googled it no i googled it oh yeah okay what do you know this expression comes from the play richard iii by the english playwright william shakespeare that's that's nathan's disagreeable swagger that's willing just to just google it stealthily and then just come out with the answer that's so good all right so yeah this is this notion that a small tiny factor could have cataclysmic impact and so the um the the social psychologist uh richard nisbett and lee ross lee ross at stanford and this bit of michigan actually analyzed you know went back and thought about many things uh in in history that were that you could think about history in terms of these luanian force fields and one of the things that they thought about for example was the was the downfall of the soviet union and that where the notion was is that that something something that appears very very static like there's there's no way it could change uh may in fact be not moving because there are tremendous forces pushing against each other and in fact if there's a tiny little change of the force then the entire system can become tremendously disrupted and so the think of your two hands pushing against each other they could be pushing ensure very lightly or they could be pushing each other with tremendous force and if you couldn't see the muscle switching if you were just looking at the hands you wouldn't know whether or not there was tremendous force against that or whether the forces were light and the same thing is true when you're talking maybe you've got some new romantic relationship and it seems a little uncomfortable about something you can't tell whether there are tremendous forces pushing that person or whether it's just a little bit of a light thing you're not sure okay now in the case of of the story jen tells about herself there it turns out that what we discovered was that there was a tremendous force pushing against the drinking oh definitely i mean that was that was like the fourth or fifth serious attempt yes okay so there's huge forces against it there was huge forces for it in other words the the addiction process itself and the difference between winning and losing was a tiny channel factor okay so this is this is richard iii and so this is uh so these folks here in this whole study are are kind of looking in the wrong place they're they're trying mysteriously they're ignoring the fact that obviously as nathan pointed out that the more more unstable people are having more negative emotional responses but they're look they're they're running around trying to say oh my god negative emotional responses well that that that's probably you know going to cause some relapse right don't bad feelings cause relapse it's like well i don't know maybe a little bit but it's not the main factor the main factor is going to be these important channel factor issues and those things are going to be more obviously were massively more successfully done by legislation that stopped people from smoking in buildings now i don't know that you have anything similar today that you could do they've taxed the daylights out of cigarettes you can make them more expensive at some point people start smuggling them the um but uh maybe i wonder i know that i've played poker in a casino before and i see signs where you can actually if someone's a problem gambler they can go to the casino and ask to be put on a list where they are now no longer allowed to step foot inside the casino and otherwise they'll be arrested for trespassing yes i wonder if future legislation may include where you're actually you opt out of you know the 7-eleven or whatever store selling cigarettes and things literally i've told clients to do that when they live like really close to a store where they go and they get they're in a cram circuit or they're they're getting junky food so this of course could work for any addictive substance where you just go to the manager and say hey here's a photo of me put a photo of me in your back office and don't don't let me in here if you see me please please ask me to leave so you're just raising the social cost and trying to create a little bit of a channel factor and um and whether they act on it or not the fact that you know that you've done that is is gonna help keep you out of that yeah i guess if the manager doesn't comply then you can always just make a seeming scene and so that you actually are banned from there it doesn't affect your life that much if it's that bad nathan's creative twist but this is this is why people will place bets you know where they have to there's there's some sort of big punishment associated with losing the bet where you have to make a donation to the opposing political party or there's something like or a public declaration of your support for someone that you hate or things like this this is this is trying to manufacture some kind of public shaming process that creates a channel factor that because people are aware if they if they raise the costs of the of this behavior then they're less likely to engage in it yeah i just had that happen with a friend of mine uh where i was trying to trying to break a cycle of potato chips for myself right and it's a guy that that uh that i compete against uh but we're friendly competition but like we're we're really hard competitors and so i told him i said well okay so i'm gonna go without you know potato chips for a week and if i do then if i don't if i relapse then i have to give you you know a few hundred bucks and of course i relapsed i gave him the money and i told him said yeah i just don't hate you enough [Laughter] so he took me out to lunch a few times with my own money oh my goodness whatever works yeah yeah all right all right all right one more question yeah our first question yeah there you go now we've actually gotten out of the chit chat yeah oh it's great it was great i think uh yeah it explained a lot in my mind because i think you know the researchers don't i mean of course we're going to go back a little bit but the researchers in this particular case they were quoted as saying that our work suggests that the reality is much more nuanced than the idea of feel bad smoke more but uh you know that there's uh what you guys are saying makes a lot more sense in the context of the practical uh practical application yeah a nuanced uh explanation of feel bad smoke more doesn't realize that feel bad smoke more is the wrong premise to begin with so nuancing it doesn't get you it doesn't get you anywhere although it gets you published i suppose no i appreciate that that's uh correcting a distortion of mine okay all right so our question is uh dear dr lyle dear dr hawk most of the people i know use chemicals to manage their lives as at least in some aspects coffee to wake up alcohol for social lubrication ssris when they're feeling down xanax and beta blockers for anxiety adderall or cocaine sometimes for productivity and charisma and so on and so forth and even knowing what i know it's hard to resist the feeling that i'm leaving some competitive advantage on the table by not partaking in all those things i assume that you both would discourage the use of most if not all of these substances but is it because you think they are all net negative in the long run or do you find that the whole concept puts the cart before the horse by trying to mold in motions to fit the environment instead of working on the environment and if are there any exceptions yeah well this is kind of this is really a continuation of the whole conversation so this is um we can we can hashtag ask the alcohol up here so this is this is like actually getting the the essence of the question right though where instead of talking about oh well what what sort of emotional processes is pushing me to indulge in some substance it's like oh indulging in the substance it gets me there's a cost benefit associated with some payoff related to using this thing so i actually just posted on facebook the other day um this article that got a lot of conversation going that was uh written by an evolutionary psychologist at oxford named robin dunbar about alcohol and how alcohol is sort of the secret of civilization and that it's there's there's this real competitive advantage to drinking and just social drinking because uh you're you're uh you have this sort of collective endorphin effect where everybody's your best friend and it smooths over conflicts of interest and um obviously it's a mating aid and it's uh it's helpful in a lot of human social processes um you know lowers inhibitions all of these things so so these are all very good reasons to indulge in alcohol and they can even be a comp like this like this asker this this um this person is asking is it is a competitive advantage in a lot of ways to use a particular substance it's obviously a competitive advantage to use caffeine i continue to be an unrepentant caffeine addict and i run that cb all the time or i drink my coffee and i know that there's a cost to it but there's also a benefit to it so so this is obviously there's huge costs associated with alcohol use regardless of what sort of social benefit there may be or how that may be linked to our ancestral history or whatever professor dunbar is observing you have to be aware of those consequences and and run that cb accordingly because there's no you're not going to get an effect from anything without a side effect that's that's the whole point of any drug use there's always a side effect if you're getting any kind of effect at all uh and you may not be entirely aware of what that side effect is or how how long term it's going to be or how how much damage it's going to do to you um you know the caffeine the the sort of consequences of caffeine are much more there's there's sort of a um delayed response to some of those some of those consequences because essentially what it's doing is it's robbing my sleep quality over time and so i'm not getting as much quality sleep as i might otherwise be getting and i there's some evidence to suggest that that might be putting me at risk for uh you know certain types of mental degeneration later in life so when i run that cb it's like well a cup of coffee sounds really good this morning it's going to make me a little more awake it's going to make me it's going to give me a little more attention for some some writing i want to do or whatever it is i want to focus on and oh you know any kind of consequence for that is really far out in the distance and i'm not going to worry about it too much whereas obviously with something like alcohol you've got a different trade and different individual nervous systems have entirely different uh cbs on particular substance use so i think in general yes you're you are with all of this this is um this is trying to engineer the self to fit the environment the questioner has that right um and so in general we're going to advise against all of this kind of stuff but that doesn't mean that there is potentially specific benefits associated with particular substance use um but you just have to be very clear-eyed and and uh open to what those consequences look like and whether it's worth it for you and coffee probably is a lot less addictive than say cocaine so coffee right for a particular project that needs to be done maybe more more in line with you know potential benefits and that's a really good point that obviously some you know these things are are working on the pleasure pathways a little differently so you don't want to play with too much fire with some of this this brain hacking that people are doing where if they're going to hack your productivity with cocaine yeah that's probably not going to be advisable under any circumstances or micro dosing lsd which is like all in vogue right now like this is not something that people should be doing this is that you're really playing with fire not because you're going to develop an addictive response to lsdb because you you know so little about what what those consequences are going to be uh what the long term process look like looks like what kind of damage you're potentially doing like there are different degrees of uh worthwhile experimentation with these substances here so caffeine social drinking is one thing um cocaine lsd heroin that's another thing so uh but you know people people are sovereign unto their own cost benefit analysis so go go forth and run your cd i remember when i read uh malcolm gladwell one of his books and i believe it's in the acknowledgement section where he acknowledges you know the people that helped him and he also thanks uh is grateful for providing which is the you know wakefulness drug um right that's also very in vogue yeah yeah yeah yeah but that's basically what i don't know if doug has others other things to add to that no i i'm i guess i would i would just summarize just the following in general and that is that it's it's very uh difficult to beat the experience of of uh nature impacting your dna the way it's supposed to and so you're you're you are exquisitely designed through 3 500 million years of evolution and you weren't designed to be uh having any substance that distorts the nervous system and so the when we uh obviously as as we're all talking we're all like reasonable we're not crazy we're not prudes any of us the um but messing with that equipment um what we're gonna find is is that open personalities are are now now have access to things that no ancestor got anything close to and so this is a problem and so it uh you know on the so this in order to not sound you know sanctimonious and like my methodist you know minister grandfather the truth is is that you should be exquisitely careful with your brain it's the only one you've got and and this is you know this is i see equal and greater uh potential damage with pharmaceuticals that that that the whole world is basically asleep at the switch and thinking that gee we're going to go in here and monkey with your neural chemistry uh just like target one neurotransmitter no problem yeah no as if we understand it yeah we have no understanding and and i have people you know my very open friends uh will often tell me that they went and used i don't know psilocybin or whatever it's called out in the desert and it helped their ptsd and again as jen's warning like yeah you think that's true but how do you know what impact that's going to have the that didn't fix something in your information processing system that damaged something in your brain okay and so that's these are uh in general my attitude uh that you can you can feel through the pros of the present pleasure trap and it's not you know even though it's i've got you know alan goldhamer you know nudging me along in a sanctimonious path there but the truth is is that he and i see things similarly which is that you know the best bet is to live as you know as healthy and naturally as is reasonable and and we we get into any of these things you know knowing as jen says if it's a little bit of a little bit of influence it's probably got a little bit of pushback i'll uh caffeine pretty pretty minor league and if you can handle social drinking that's going to be probably no big deal but along the way here keep your eyes peeled and be be wary because um you know the this is your mind wasn't meant to have any of these things it's meant to to uh you know breathe clean air work hard try to win esteem from the people in the village that matter and never be have access to anything psychoactive that's actually how you were designed it's actually a really important point because it's similar to super normal food there's there's another piece of this which is that people you know you play around with these things and you you reset the expectations of the pleasure pathways to a different level and so you're kind of depriving yourself of optimal joy of natural pleasures when you when you over stimulate these these pathways whether it's because you spent a life eating you know pizza and snickers bars and so now kale and sweet potatoes are just not that exciting to you where you would never have known the difference you you could have gone through life like completely enjoying your your kale and your sweet potatoes if you hadn't kind of set the bar at this higher level where you you always feel this this slight pain of this loss to your to the the potential pleasure in the system when you've when you've hacked around with this kind of stuff um and that was part of the discussion that we were having about alcohol as well where where people who you know had that benefit had that collective endorphin experience the lowering of inhibitions the ease of the social connections all of these things you you know how easy that can be with the drug and then when you take the drug away it's always kind of this feeling of your you're outside looking in you're you're missing out on something you're you're not able to to reach that level of connection and to have that those kinds of relationships that that are completely natural to the species otherwise but you've you've permanently distorted yourself and your estimation of of what kind of what life should look like um by using drugs that were never intended for human use so there's there's a little bit of um there's poignancy associated with that so especially if you're open especially if you have quote unquote an addictive personality you know people will use that phrase not really knowing what it means but it's if that's if that's the sort of situation you find yourself in you're you're diminishing your life experience overall strangely yeah it's a paradoxical diminishment it is and now with drugs with drugs this uh this can sometimes permanently alter the pleasure pathways uh with food though uh luckily we don't it doesn't always work that way yeah it's not going to work that way but it it it still can be create a remarkably slippery slope that that's hard to get out of so that's you know that's what the pleasure drops about it's that story well just another reason to go uh spend time with nathan at the fasting escape if you absolutely reset your pleasure pathways it's very very absolutely very true and this is this is allah the dalai lama who you talked about every now and then go suffer go go make yourself suffer a little bit and recalibrate as best as you can to scarcity yes absolutely yeah oh yeah well we talked about that a few weeks ago with the dopamine fasters you know like if you go go take a fast from dopamine so you're not so over stimulated all the time so there's some there's some truth in that
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