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Episode 209: Susceptibility to addiction, Dealing w family bullies, Attraction CB
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dear doctors are there some people more susceptible to addiction than others if so why are some people more susceptible to addiction than others hmm the I would say that there's probably two reasons that feed into this the the first reason is genetic variation so just simply we we know that the way that genes are built the way the genes build psychologies of organisms that that certain certain people are going to be far more susceptible to for example alcohol addiction than our others the so we know that gene variation is involved but the question would be sort of how is gene variation involved so there could be convoluted pathways by which this could take place now I'm quite certain that there's a pretty sharp difference in reactivity to for example alcohol and in terms of dopamine response between one set of people and another set of people so some people's responsiveness is far greater and they're far more likely to wind up being alcoholics it's also true that alcohol and drug addiction or other addictions can could follow their way through a different pathway for example it could be that they're more open more open and maybe less stable and maybe if you if you were to try to configure up a perfect personality for addiction it could look like this a really good configuration let's think three now for an entertainment let's think through the big five plus one probably the best example would be low intelligence high openness low conscientiousness high extraversion high agreeable and high unstable that individual that that is regardless of the underlying propensity to be addicted to a substance that individual should be very very likely to be addicted the reason would be that they would come in contact act with certain drugs that would be far far more likely to develop an addiction in any nervous system in other words it would just build tolerance quickly it would be very disruptive something like morphine for example and so so that wouldn't be that you had a particular genetic susceptibility to morphine or the opiates and therefore you were more likely to be an addict it would be instead that you had a personality that was more likely to have you playing around with that kind of dynamite and so that's that's so your personality could impact you in that direction or it could be that like I have many examples I've worked with I don't know how many people with addictions in my career certainly more than a thousand and I can tell you that their stories are not carbon copies of each other there's wide variance in the stories so for example one person may have been introduced to alcohol you know liked it then drank more then in their 20s they put you know drank pretty hard and everybody would go after work to happy hour and then and by their 30s they're clearly they're an alcoholic they're in trouble another individual and actually it was my very first case in my career a very first client I ever had when I was a student so we're going back you know oh my god we're going back more than 35 years the that individual told me that she knew she was an alcoholic from her first beer at about age 15 or 16 okay the the impact on her nervous system was so striking that it was immediate okay so the so this is that that would be an example of an extraordinarily genetically loaded nervous system that in no way could tolerate that kind of tickling to the circuits whereas someone else might take years before they wind up in the trap so the drugs selves are our traps by virtue of the fact that they are hyper activating pleasure pathways for example and they will we will develop tolerances to them and therefore there's a disincentive to get away from them because you have to go through withdrawal process so drugs will set a trap but there is the individual differences responsible but the chief issues going to be genetic and the that issue is going to work through two possibly different pathways number one how intense the pleasure response is to the individuals nervous system and secondly how how open and experimented and and inherently sort of wild and undisciplined is the nervous system itself that also is going to be a factor so indirect and direct pathways both genetic I don't believe that there's any any support anywhere for any environmental impact other than the fact that obviously if you live in the land where there's no opiates you're not going to be an opiate addict but essentially the access to all these drugs are more or less ubiquitous in the United States and so we would expect that you know people that are susceptible to these things will find their way there and if they find their way there you know if you if you take a line of cocaine you decide to do that because you're sufficiently open or you're too agreeable in the party and the cool people are doing this and you're there and you get encouraged you better hope against hope that you don't you're not a genetically you know genetically loaded coke addict because that could be a very very devastating mistake okay for many people it won't be in fact for most people it won't be but most is not all and some people I have had people that from their first line of cocaine they were in deep trouble behind that just well that's all it took so so anyway that's the the answer to that question is that the the fundamental reason is genetic but the way that the genes may play into this have different pathways mm-hmm one of the things that I found most striking when I would read the pleasure trap for the first time was how you compared the dopamine rush from say cocaine and that of an orgasm and it was like what ten times greater or something like that and I was just it was just astounding like yeah I remember you saying it Elektra like can you imagine just how rewarding that would be yes compared to you know ten times more yes actually that's uh it's actually endorphin not not dopamine so the orgasm there's a phenomenal endorphin storm so that so you can imagine that exactly orgasm would be the most intense endorphin storm that would naturally occur to the organism and yet you can you can go far past that with with some drug for example with an opiate and so you can understand whoa super super super dangerous and you you could expect a lot of people get to get into a lot of messes behind having that kind of experience it's just something this is where openness is so dangerous around this I've had many friends who are very open and and tried various and sundry drugs and you know wound up with intermediate level problems or no problems at all around monkeying around with sort of garden-variety drugs but they all they all knew you know what I'm drawing the line at at cocaine and heroin and I'm not going to do that I'll smoke marijuana and I you know I've had some people who do some mushrooms and may maybe even with the dynamite that is LSD and think but not you know but drawn the line at things that that they were intimidated about and they were worried about their addictive propensity yeah that's just some IQ and some conscientiousness saving somebody from a disaster but it won't always do it okay so this is a this is IQ conscientiousness emotional stability openness agreeableness extraversion introversion all in a swirling cauldron of vector that you know in a given location and time in a given culture that that's what's at play here so we're not gonna find necessarily a super linear simple answer but the most linear answer is genetics genetic variation either through through the general personality of the the openness or the or the specific individual individual responses of neural chemistry to a given drug yeah I remember you know I've been in a few party situations where I've been offered some hard drugs and I remember telling somebody you know I'm curious it sounds interesting but I know myself I'm gonna be under this the Golden Gate Bridge you know not knowing how I wound up there in a matter of months if I ever do this drug yeah and it was the fear of doing that yes just yeah yeah well good for you I want you one better I wasn't cool enough to be invited at the party so therefore I escaped all sorts of rats I wasn't invited back though all right all right our next next question dear doctors in my husband's family several members are bullies even my husband will join the bully pack if there is any indication that they might turn on him I'm highly agreeable in conscientious and find that I'm they often the target of their bullying what would you say is the best tactic to use with adult bullies in families well the best tactic is to not get in any conversations with them about anything that is controversial where they disagree with you okay so that's clearly what's taking place here so whatever the deal is she's got some positions on things this is known there's a disagreement in the pack and now we're gonna we're getting some gaming up behavior on her so the first move is don't be controversial around a bunch of disagreeable humans the second thing is if you can do it at all avoid them all together as we talked about last time you know you're you've only got more or less a hundred thousand hours of spent on her you know Nathan you may have 200,000 but I'm probably down to my last hundred thousand waking hours where you know this is this is what I had to do and so the quality of my existence in this life how at the end of it you know what was the score on a one to ten scale for my average life experience well that's going to depend upon you know what choices I made to be located where who was I interacting with and what was I doing during these hundred thousand hours and and believe me you know now now that I as I was talking to it Alan Goldhamer the other day we both turned you know 60 in the last year and I said you know we feel great and we can still play some darn good basketball we can pretend like we're 45 but we're not and the truth of the matter is it's three quarters of the way over in all probability and so we talked about that we were kind of joking about it but taken as seriously that that for us we're in the word that late in the third quarter and the fourth quarter you know might be great it very very well could be might be the best part of the game we don't know we're certainly investing in our health so we're not going to hopefully have you know a lot of discomfort or negative surprises so we hope that we are able to as Alan puts it live till we die but but the the thing is is that when you live as long as we have lived you do realize something that is not we're not really cognizant of when we're under 40 which is that your time is limited it really is limited and you know it's one thing to hear old people with gray hair or talk about this and you sort of nod your eyes and roll your eyes but it's like guess what this is really true your your life span is remarkably limited and it's not some grand you know big scheme that you're trying to figure out no it's the hours right in front of you okay it's this day this day is just as valuable as any other day of your existence and so the hours that are in this day you've got 10 12 14 hours to do some things are you enjoying the process do you like it are you interacting with the people that you like and you love are you do some doing something that you enjoy doing you know is this an enjoyable process and if it's not an enjoyable process it's important to look really hard about why and usually the first place that we can look is what is our social ecology who are we interacting with okay I like to interact with people that are friendly funny happy you know that that liked me a lot and we have a good time that's it okay if you're not one of those people or that you are sincerely interested in my opinion and I'm trying my very best to help you and you know and that that's how that works so this is how it this is how I build it and if that isn't what it is I'm out okay obviously sometimes I'm gonna wind up in professional situations where hmm you know I'm not really enjoying this thing this much I'm at some conference and I'm supposed to be there and now some people are coming up to me and they're drawing about how they disagree with me about something yeah not an enjoyable process and I'm gonna have to just manage it or whatever it is there's going to be you don't have total control over every minute of your life when it comes to this regard but you've got a lot of control and so if there's people in your life quote these bullies or god forbid I don't know what this husband is and why he's joining the pack so we'll leave that question for some other day or consideration but the point is is that what are we doing in a discussion with people arguing with us that we know they're going to argue with us because they've done it before we know what their behavior is they're very disagreeable loud bombastic pushy whatever we're not going to convince them of anything they're not going to convince us of anything the whole damn thing is unpleasant so why are we there okay so think very carefully why on earth are we showing up to that Thanksgiving why are we there why are we going to the brothers de Y really drill down through this and try to figure out why am i spending three of my very precious hundred thousand hours driving over there hanging out with these people for an hour but I don't like and then leaving why well goose it's my husband's brothers so why doesn't he go if he enjoys hanging out with them and going to their birthdays then let him go and you stay home oh well that's gonna be a big strife in the family who cares go out and enjoy your existence they'll have a better time without you there so this is how it is that I look at things that you know when it comes to your free time I mean you got to work for a living most of us most of us have to do things and a lot of times in that doing things for a living there's things that are unpleasant you know uncomfortable you know that we might dislike doing you know we've all done a lot of those things so you know I can't say that you know if you like to do plumbing every hour of your existence plumbing is going to be a joy sometimes it's going to be a real you know really uncomfortable and unpleasant so it is same thing with doing anything if your surgeon so we don't expect our work life to be you know necessarily filled with joy it may be and hopefully it is but we may not be able to control or change that that well but our social life outside of that are you kidding me you're in a hundred percent control over that so that should be spent with people that you like and people that you love and people that you respect people that you enjoy their presence that's who it should be and if it's anybody else take a really hard look at that because as far as I'm concerned those are weeds in your personal garden okay pull them get out of there you know there's just no need to be spending your life so how do we deal with bullies we just walk out of the room and never even show up in the room in the first place that's probably a better answer wonderful doctor laughs thank you so much I really love it when you get passionate about this it really shows how much how much you care about this your honor yeah you make makes me it gets me all fired up like a soldier joining battle that's right there you go all good all right what else we got all right our next question dear doctors what attracts people to others from different ethnic backgrounds to themselves for example some people I assume are obsessed with people from Scandinavian countries other people may prefer people from Asian countries alternatively why are some people so against being someone being with someone from their own ethnic background while others may only want to date people from from their own ethnic background I say this from my own experience which is I am a southern European ancestry I have dark features I'm physically repulsed by women with those features and helplessly drawn to women from northern Europe with fair physical features like blond hair blue eyes etc pale skin it's so frustrating as this makes it very hard for me to meet women as women with tha'rt features are in the minority where I am I wish I was drawn to women with dark features as there are so many more of these women in the world it's a fine question I would say if you are repulsed by the people around you then and you're drawn just people in some with some other characteristics then by all means you should be doing everything you can do to plot to get where to get where you need to be ie this is what I call fish where the fish are for goodness sakes so on a you know so whatever it can be done to facilitate that situation is what should be done the now the terms of the broader question about why this is true nobody knows right now we know that the answers are going to be in the genetic code but we don't know specifically why we certainly know that we know a great deal about attractiveness and what draws people to you know what makes people attractive what would make people attractive to one genre of attractiveness as opposed to another genre of attractiveness is not none so for example there are women who who like guys that are tall and slender and that they maybe they'll play in the NBA you know and they're six foot six and they're 220 pounds or 210 pounds so they're they're athletic but they're slender okay on the other hand there's gonna be women that are gonna be very attracted to some guy who's who's six foot tall and 200 pounds you know more like a sort of a classic boxer out of Ireland or something in other words just tough as anything and strong as an ox so what accounts for that difference answer who knows okay so these are the same thing with you know you know from time immemorial the different configurations of female you know the different patterns of female anatomy that some guys are attracted to one thing being larger another thing being smaller etc these are individual differences that are are very likely to be genetic and probably not likely to be to be subject to to be local input from media or anything else on the Sun it's probably not learned now it's interesting that when it comes to women's preferences that appears to be less true women can be essentially discovered that some guy that they really liked has certain features and now it turns out that they didn't use to be attractive those features before but now they're more attracted those features that's something that apparently takes place in women and I don't think that it has been discovered in men so that was sort of an interesting finding when when women's preferences were analyzed that doesn't mean that they're infinitely flexible and it doesn't mean that they don't have typical what-do-you-call-it preferences that that happen before any experiences that may be sort of bedrock or baseline preferences that don't change so anyway so that point is is that yeah these are these are very likely to be genetic some of the issues about being drawn to people outside your your gene pool versus inside a lot of possible reasons come to mind but one of them would be openness it's also true that there's in this species women have a have a draw to actually leave probably leave the village and get away you probably want to get away from your gene pool it's because you don't want to be mating with first cousins or even second cousins if you can help it it's probably you're probably better off getting you know away from the sort of a family group and so that that may be a characteristic that characteristic has been found in many animals and it may be true of people I don't know that that's been established in people I don't think it has but it's suspected by many evolutionary thinkers that that could be the case a derivative of that characteristic would be to be attracted to people who are different okay so that don't look like us facial configuration a little bit different bone structure a little bit different in other words let's just try to get you know let's try to find people from the other side of the hill that have that have a little bit different breeding stock than us and have been you know that they used to be relatives of ours you know one hundred and thirty years ago they used to be pretty close relatives now they're not they've got their own settlement over there there's been half a dozen generations have come and gone now of course we we even as we share a lot of language so we can talk to each other but we've got slightly different ways that we pronounce who we pray to it's a little different slightly different ideas about that and we look slightly different okay so you can see that finding people slightly different could be genetically useful as a characteristic and so you could see that if that is true if there's a chip in our head that says slightly different is better than more the same at some level there's a contrast increases the attractiveness then you can see how that chip could be in some people far greater and more dramatic than it is and other people like this this gentleman that wrote to us so he could you know he could be essentially an outlier on that particular dimension and he wants to be looking at people who are very different than he is you can see Wow how that could be you know a very obvious genetic variation that could take place so you know otherwise why I can't point any further than that logic I could I will that a great deal that the reasons are ultimately in the genetic code and so that's you know that's not going to change so therefore since it's not going to change and it is you my attitude is you know tunnel your way to Stockholm do whatever you have to do to get there if you're if you're not there find a way find a way to get there or - I don't know Los Angeles they're not they're not they may not be genetically blonde there but they're blonde so what the heck now I heard a long time ago in terms of pop psychology that that you know men and women may go through phases where like you know in certain part of their life they're attracted to this particular race or ethnicity and then then they get over that and now they go to more the more convinced you know it's a silent conventional whatever it is so whereas you know it sounds like what you're saying is you know the the symmetrical face is really what's going to do it and then the ethnicity or the the other things are just more genetic as far as interest what do you say to that and what's your thoughts on it oh yeah that's all just bogus pop psychology there's no no truth in that the know it yeah it's not it goes obviously beyond the symmetry of the face and the body it also goes to that you've got fitness indicators that are on the body that we are looking for so beyond symmetry there are other characteristics in addition to symmetry that can really significantly increase or decrease someone's attractiveness to another so so you can imagine let me give you an example you can imagine the very effeminate breathy voice of Marilyn Monroe which you may not Nathan because you're too young but that that that was that was an extraordinarily striking very sexual characteristic and so the the height and and method of speech and the height of the pitch all these kinds of things and probably even some of the some of the even the tone and the of the delivery of the voice probably was similar to how people might talk you know across a pillow way in low voices so Marilyn Monroe you know like like some other extraordinary specimens you know really had it all I mean so did soda Elvis I mean Elvis was unbelievable in terms of how the guy could move and sing and how handsome he was so some people are come loaded not just with symmetry they come loaded with you know 99th percentile fitness indicators in an in a given dimension whatever that was whatever those dimensions are so Marilyn had that Elvis had that that's why these guys are X Y they're still being talked about you know 50 years later 75 years later I mean that's why is because they're so striking and so I forget what on earth your question was I've totally lost what was it was just about about the the first one was about the pop psychology which I am that out yeah and that you were saying there's something it's not just the it's not just the asymmetry of the face right it's a whole it's a whole constellation and yes but but the issue of attracted to others and how different they are and how different they need to be and it's not just different obviously so this guy is is drawn to the light the light skinned blonde hair so were a lot of people you know some people aren't some people are very drawn to dark skin dark hair I mean that's how that works ironically I had a long conversation unfortunately for this guy it was me having the conversation so to him I had a long conversation with a a very very intelligent very beautiful young blond Northern European who is very attracted to dark-skinned dark-haired man so quite quite an interesting interesting conversation and so it's like there there it is I was getting literally the mirror image of the same story and it was kind of a curious curious wandering around about kind of why and when it happened and you know when it was noticed in her development etc it just is the way it is this is human nature and in her case it wasn't the only style of men that she was attracted to she's also attracted to you know young young tall thin blond you know good-looking men from from Europe as well so but the point is is that she also had in there a bit of a preference and tendency towards exactly exactly what our writer is so it's a big old scramble and you you don't know who on earth that you would appeal to given who it is that you are but you do know that if you're if you have some group that you're strongly drawn to and you're nowhere near that group then do what you can to get there there's no you know whatever the hassle that is it's probably worth a try well made the gods bring those two people together someday [Laughter] all right next question dear doctors people get feza physically less attractive as they age they also become less fertile to the point of being completely infertile what happens when looks and the prospect of sex are no longer appealing due to age-related decline and how does evolutionary psychology explain attraction at this point in life and beyond yeah sort of a bunch of sort of loaded interrelated things so let's let's try to try to talk about this from maybe a few different perspectives so it's certainly the case that as we age we're going to be less attractive that's true and it's also the case that to some degree as we as we are as we age we're going to be less interested in sex that's also true the interestingly enough it's going to be more true of women than it is submit the and ostensibly we don't know why and we can't necessarily pin this exactly on biology that probably we I mean and I believe I don't know it may already be known I haven't kept up with I don't keep up with every new discovery or or you know every new study that is under under the umbrella here but yet I do believe that that we know that there's a pretty significant sex difference that that men's sexual interest is going to decline less precipitously than women's and that women's declines pretty significantly post menopause now I can already hear that we've got women saying well that isn't true for me blah blah blah of course it isn't it's I didn't say that it all closes off and goes to zero but it's a it's a main effect of being a female is that there's going to be less interest the the it would it would make sense that that would be true by the way as we as we take a broader perspective on the evolutionary problem if you can't reproduce why would we go to the trouble of going through reproductively relevant behaviors so one answer might be that I had my last child at 46 at the very last edge of my fertility and that child is now you know ten years old and I'm continuing to try to get resources out of my paraben partner as I'm now 56 and so one of the ways to do that is to be bluffing him that there is still a possibility of future children with me and he's attracted to me or he wouldn't have been interested in the first place and so I happen to have the features that aren't is that aren't as alluring now as they were when I was 46 or when I was 36 or when I was 26 but I still have some of those features and I'm tickling his nervous system enough that I can keep him around and therefore I need to be sexually interested in up in sex in order to keep him around so that he will continue to invest in our ten-year-old child okay so essentially you could look at postmenopausal sexuality and women being a bluffing mechanism to try to continue to get resources out of males that would be the deep evolutionary hypothesis that would be involved here that wouldn't mean of course that there was any conscious process going on there at all I wouldn't expect there to be that's not what we're talking about we're talking about deep unconscious programs that could have driven continued sexual interest in the female even past the point where there would be any possibility of her reproducing so that it could be that that's just all bogus and that in fact all you have is once you build a machine to to be sexually interested then you can't shut it off like it's more troubled for evolution to shut it off than it is to just let it idle along even though it wastes time and energy I tend to think that the first explanation is probably a lot more likely so I think that I think that there is a reduced interest but there's some degree of residual interest probably there to try to keep males in a pair bond and keep provisioning the last children for a while so so that's what that's how I think that probably works the now for the males I would expect that that the decline of interest would be less and I think that's probably true I think we could probably establish that with Survey Research pretty easily so you know what was the rest of the question I forgot the rest of the question was about as how does it explain attraction at this point in life and beyond ah and well what happens when looks in the prospect of sex are no longer up healing dude yeah well I'll tell you what you know when when you lose when you it's it's impossible you can lose enough attractiveness potentially from your age that you're really not appealing to anybody at which point sexuality is out of the game for you and that's you know that's you know an unfortunate state of affairs but most most of the people that better in that state are probably you know by the time you have some guy old enough and crotchety enough that he is but you know he's at that age and has no appeal he probably doesn't have a lot of testosterone and a lot of steam in the engine anyway mercifully and the same thing is true with women if they get old enough that they no longer have any they no longer have any possible appeal and they also are and they out they have very low sex drive associated with it also we wind up with a situation that isn't really too unpleasant I don't it's also the case that something else that you will sometimes see is that you'll see couples that particularly that have been if they've been happily together for a long period of time as they age they they often can maintain sexual interest in each other even as their their their attractiveness from the general public is declined quite a lot that's because they seem to be able to see right past the aging cues in other words they because they have known the person when they were younger and a lot more attractive they those characteristics of that attractiveness are still being registered by it by the admirer on the other side so this is a again a beautiful and merciful possibility humans that they could be both you know 78 years old and still attracted to each other and that can happen but if you're trying to hear from me this story or or anybody wants to hear the story that at all you know has some beautiful I don't know some beautiful magical spiritual appropriate design that at all wine cept just as happy and we can know everything can be just as great at 70 as it was at 30 the answer is no okay statistically that is not going to happen more people yeah of the people that would still have some sexual engine and would have some sexual interest those people are are going to be typically a lot less attractive than they ever were and it's going to be harder to find people that would be interested in them and it's going to be some increased frustration as far as that goes and that's okay a lot of us are are frustrated with this problem our whole lives so what's the difference it sounds like even more of a reason to take your advice as far as not squandering the hours that you have at your prime your peak or close to that well said okay so yeah the you know whatever and try to do a good job at enjoying your existence and don't let other people and institutions and expectations of anybody else wish your life okay we've got a limited number of hours on earth to enjoy this this gift that we have let's let's really do a good job at making the best of it
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