Addiction

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Transcript:

Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that give you pleasure.

Am I addicted to stand-up comedy?

Sort of.

It has gotten out of control at times.  I’ve overinvested in stand-up.

I’d like to think I’ve found more of a balance at this point in my life, but that could just be a rationalization.  Could be making excuses for myself.

I don’t think I could quit.  I don’t think I could walk away.  I don’t want to either.

How does addiction work?

Well, it’s primarily regulated by dopamine.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter.  It’s a molecule in our nervous system that helps nerve cells communicate with each other.  It regulates how the nerves in our brain and the rest of our nervous system talk to each other.

Your motivation or excitement about any given pursuit in life is regulated by relative levels of dopamine.

Do you in this moment have a higher or lower level of dopamine release relative to the preceding moment?

If dopamine firing is increasing - you’re going to feel more motivated.

If dopamine firing is dropping, you’re going to feel less motivated.

It’s not about absolute levels of dopamine, it’s all about relative levels of dopamine across time - one moment to the next.

It’s all compared to recent experience.  What’s your baseline, resting level of dopamine?  Did you have a recent peak or spike of dopamine that shot you high above baseline?

Dopamine colors and distorts the subjective experience of something to make it more pleasurable - to make it something you want more of.

Often, if you’re experiencing increased dopamine levels you’re also experiencing an increase in epinephrine in your body.  Epinephrine is adrenaline.  This is a molecule that kicks your nervous system into high alert.

Epinephrine by itself is more about total energy and readiness increase.  Epinephrine is also associated with the experience of fear or anxiety.

But coupled to dopamine, when you have epinephrine and dopamine at the same time - you’re more likely feeling positive, pleasurable excitement about a given experience.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a room full of people erupt in spontaneous laughter after you said something funky into a microphone - but that’ll kick off some dopamine.  You’ll start chasin’ that dragon.

And when a joke falls flat and you bite it after just riding the high of having your previous joke or maybe a set a day or an hour before, if that material recently crushed and now you bit the big one - that’s gonna play games with your dopamine system.

Turns out we like that more than anything.

We like being surprised.

It’s really hard to maintain ever-escalating highs.  You run outta gas.  It’s not sustainable.

Dopamine is all about wanting more.  Craving more.  Anticipating something better just over the horizon, just around the corner.  You can never satisfy dopamine no matter what you feed it because dopamine is all about reaching for what you don’t have.  That’s all dopamine can tell you to do - go get more.

Now, it can tell you to hold off on getting more immediately so that you have the opportunity to get even more than that in the future.  Dopamine can tell you to wait patiently if there’s an even bigger payoff available later on.  But dopamine isn’t gonna behave unless it thinks it’s getting a better deal coming up.

Here’s why dopamine is such a tricksy, devilish, little imp:  Dopamine is all about craving.  Once you get what you want, once you have that thing you were seeking in hand, dopamine spikes up high, but then it drops back down.

And even worse: Dopamine doesn’t just drop down to baseline.  It dips to slightly below our previous baseline.  The extent it drops below baseline is proportional to how much above baseline it went.  So the higher the high, the deeper the crash.

And remember, how you feel is ALL about relative dopamine levels.  So after you get that big thing you wanted - you ran your marathon, your first child is born - immediately following you can get that lovely post-partum depression - this baby isn’t as cool as I thought it was gonna be - Olympic athletes get depressed after competing on the highest level - cuz your dopamine levels are relatively low compared to where they were when you were seeking that massive prize at the end of the rainbow.

So then what?  Climb a taller cliff?  Free solo a more dangerous mountain?  Get pregnant with twins or triplets?

Because if you only climb that same mountain a second time?  Guess what?  Dopamine doesn’t peak as high as it did the first time.

You run that marathon at the same speed - your dopamine release is lower.  You eat that 10th slice of pizza?  Doesn’t feel as good as the first slice.  You’re never gonna love that second child as much as the first.  Or the third as much as the second.  That’s terrible, I’m sorry.

For every bit of pleasure you gain, there is an opposing pain and craving for more that you will NEVER be able to satisfy by seeking out the same reward.

Evolutionarily, dopamine is the molecule of foraging and seeking.  It drives us out exploring in the world.  Which is critical to our survival.  We have to seek and explore.  Dopamine has to go back down after you get what you wanted so that you can be motivated to go get more of that or something else in the future.  It’s a matter of survival.

But our environment today is so much different from the environment in which we evolved.  We have access to excess.

If we get hooked on something and that something is too readily available in our environment, it can take over our life.  And it ends up not even being any fun in the end.  Chasing an addiction you just keep depleting your dopamine more and more - the spikes give less and less pleasure and the valleys get deeper and harder to climb out of.  This is what happens with drugs, can happen with video games, pornography, social media - stand-up comedy.

There are lots of religious and philosophical traditions that try to fight off this constant nagging from dopamine for more.  Buddhism talks a lot about extinguishing craving.  The Epicurean tradition in Greek thought is very similar.  We have the Minimalist movement in modern times attempting the same thing.  These are all methods for training your mind to not be a doormat to dopamine’s persistent demands.

But what if you kinda like dopamine?  What if you want to keep using?  What if you think you can handle it?  What if you’re an addict?

So one of the best ways to keep someone addicted, sustainably, is with what’s called an intermittent reward schedule.

This is what casinos use to hook people on slot machines.  This is why people buy scratch-off lottery tickets.

Dopamine yells at us to go exploring.  And dopamine gets real excited when it finds something new.  The best way to excite dopamine is to surprise it.

The big jumps in dopamine and the big crashes in dopamine have to do with this concept of reward prediction error.

So if you are out hunting, and you don’t think you’re going to catch anything, but then a giant buck walks in front of you, has a heart attack, and solves your food problems for the next several months - big dopamine spike.

But, if you are accustomed to easily catching fish at your favorite fishing spot and you go there, fish all day, and don’t catch a single one - big dopamine drop.

If you expect nothing and get everything - dopamine loves it.  If you expect everything and get nothing - dopamine’s not so psyched.

So the best way to mess with someone’s dopamine system and to keep them pursuing something for as long as possible is with an intermittent reward schedule.  You’re hacking this reward prediction error system.  It’s a balance of enough disappointment that when you do win, it still hits you as a wonderful surprise and your dopamine jumps up and says, Gimme more!

And nowadays, we have big data to analyze people’s behavior at places like casinos and in video games.  So people are watching us, tracking how long we use a slot machine, or a video game, or social media - and they’re figuring out, how often do we need to be rewarded in order to continue playing for the longest period of time.

So they might throw you a small reward every 25 or 50 times that you do a behavior.  And then about every 1000th time you do the behavior maybe you get a really big reward.  But it’s not on a set schedule.  Sometimes it might be the 700th time.  Sometimes it might be the 1200th time.  It’s unpredictable.

Alright, so we’ve got people trying to manipulate us and hack our dopamine systems to behave like their little pawns.  How do we hack our own dopamine system?  How do we make our dopamine work for us to get what we want?

Can you outsmart your own dopamine?  Can you trick the trickster?  Yes, we’re playing with fire, but is there a way to not get burned too badly?

How do you balance out your dopamine system so you can pursue the things you care about without letting them take over your life?  Without letting them narrow your pursuits in an unhealthy and consuming way?

First rule of dopamine: You DON’T want to stack tons of dopamine into one-time frame.  You don’t want a single experience spiking your dopamine into the stratosphere.  Too much dopamine at once can have very negative consequences for future motivation.

But you also don’t want to live a flat life.  It’s still good to climb mountains.  So how do you climb mountains without getting depressed and messing with your motivation to continue living life afterward?

Here’s what you do: If you hit a high point of performance.  You win that marathon.  A date with that new person goes great.  You have a killer stand-up set.  You have the ability to subjectively influence your dopamine system.  You can subjectively tell yourself “Ok, that was good.  That was fun.  I’m glad that happened.”  You can celebrate the win, BUT, don’t celebrate it too hard.  Don’t psych yourself up and get too amped.  Act like you’ve been there before.  Don’t expect high dopamine every time you do something right.

That keeps your dopamine in check - you’re not getting as much of a high, BUT you’re ALSO NOT getting as much of a crash.  It’s a smoother ride.  You’ll be able to stay pursuing whatever you’re after WITHOUT burning out by being unable to reach an ever-escalating dopamine high.

Remember: Big increases in dopamine both increase your desire to hit a new high AND increase the intensity of crashes.  You can get stuck reaching for goals that are out of reach.  And then you’re just stuck with the pain of the crashes.

You can take this further and reverse engineer an intermittent reward schedule.  What do I mean by that?

Let’s say you have several good dates in a row.  Or you have several stand-up sets that go great.  Or you’re killing it every month at your new job.  Don’t celebrate all of those wins every time.  Don’t treat yourself every time something goes well.  It’s ok to be “meh” about some of those wins in life.  And not because you’re disappointed.  It’s more a maturity thing.  You’re just doing what you were supposed to do.

Appreciate that things are going well - but don’t go nuts about it.  Let good or even great things feel a little bland sometimes.  And be ok with that.  And, every once in a while, say, ya know what - tonight feels like a night to celebrate.  Shit’s goin’ really well.  Let’s have a little party.  That’s how you can stay steadily motivated.  Random, intermittent reward for behaviors you want to continue.

Reward good behavior, but not excessively and not every time.

I mentioned Epicureanism, another Greek school of philosophy is helpful here - Stoicism.  Stoicism has become popular again because the world seems like it’s gone crazy these days.  There’s a lotta things to be anxious about being thrown at us through the internet.  Ryan Holiday, very popular author writing about Stoicism - how it can help you out in the tumult of modern life.

Stoicism is all about balance.  Not getting too riled up about anything.  Having very measured responses to what comes your way in life.  Not suppressing your emotions entirely, but having emotional responses that properly map to the challenges that face you.  If you can stay Stoic about your wins in life, you’re going to keep your dopamine system from overwhelming you.  Slow and steady wins the race - it’s about consistency over time.  You wanna ride life’s roller coaster - experience everything life has to offer - but take it in with some level of Stoic detachment, and then, occasionally, when it’s appropriate, fully engage.  Feel all the feelings.  Let that dopamine run a little cray-cray.  But not all the time. 

Here’s the other thing that is excellent for maintaining motivation for whatever you’re pursuing.  If you want to be a healthy addict, this is key:

You want to engage in hard work that is intrinsically rewarding.  What does that mean?  It means the act of doing the thing releases dopamine.  You enjoy the process itself.  You’re not running in order to win the marathon.  You’re running because you like running.

The worst thing you could do is tell yourself that you hate a given activity, BUT you like the reward you get afterward - that will decrease motivation for the activity and ultimately lead to failure.  You can’t change behavior this way.  That’s why dieting doesn’t work.  That’s why you won’t stick to an exercise routine you don’t enjoy.

Now, you might have to lie to yourself to make this happen.  Maybe you don’t like writing scripts for YouTube videos.  Maybe that’s not your favorite thing.  BUT - if you want to continue writing scripts for YouTube videos - if you realize that is an important thing for you to do - then the best way to motivate yourself to do it is to lie to yourself about all the positive things you gain when you’re writing scripts for YouTube videos.

Tell yourself you enjoy your fingers tapping on the keys of your laptop.  Tell yourself that this is helping you become a better writer overall.  It’s improving your self-discipline.  It helps you focus in the morning and kick off your day.  It wakes you up instead of you lounging around in bed, moping about how there’s nothing you can do to make your life better.  It’s a meditative practice that is helping you organize yourself psychologically.

Whatever weird little lies you need to tell yourself about why this thing you don’t want to do is actually a beautiful thing that you love doing - tell yourself those lies.  Whisper them in your ear.

You don’t want to be only pursuing innately pleasurable things - food, sex, warmth, entertainment - it’s too easy to overindulge in excess these days.  And that’s not ultimately helpful.  Your dopamine system gets hijacked and you’re hooked on stuff that isn’t good for you.  Sometimes stuff that sucks and isn’t fun ends up being really good for you.  So you have to lie to your dopamine and tell it that you want more of that.

When you’re struggling to put effort into something - subjectively tell yourself that you are doing this by choice and that you love it.  You love taking on difficult responsibilities and efforts and no one is forcing you to do that.  You intrinsically enjoy that.  That’s what gives you that steady drip of that sweet, sweet dopamine.  And every once in a while, all the effort leads to something sweet and surprising.  Novel and fun.  And your dopamine jumps.  But you don’t get too attached to that.  Sometimes you do.  But sometimes, it’s whatever.  What you’re interested in is the effort itself.  That’s what keeps you going.

You don’t want to spike dopamine too much before engaging in effort and you don’t want to spike dopamine too much after engaging in effort.  You want to subjectively tell yourself to spike dopamine during the effort itself.  And you want to do that on an intermittent reward schedule.  You don’t reward yourself constantly every time you sit down to write or go outside to run.  But every now and then you tell yourself, “Ya know what?  Good job.  This is good. This is where I should be.  I don’t wanna be anywhere else.”  And occasionally, you lose your head and go dance in the street like a maniac.  But that’s random too.

Because here’s the thing - you do NOT want to do hard work for the sake of any specific future reward.  Particularly a future external reward.  This is much less motivating.

You don’t want specific extrinsic reward.  You do want random intrinsic reward.

It’s way harder to push yourself during a run because of the pot of gold at the end of the marathon rainbow.  It’s too far away.  You need to put the reward in the activity itself.  Every step you take in this moment is a reward.  The act of the running or the writing is intrinsically rewarding.

That doesn’t mean that it is as rewarding as winning the race or having a video go viral - but you’re not doing it because you’re going to win or go viral.  You’re doing it because you want to do it because it’s good even if nothing else happens.  And if you just so happen to win or just so happen to go viral?  Cool.  Nice little surprise dopamine spike.

That’s how you maintain optimum motivation across time.  It doesn’t consume you.  You don’t burn out.  You engage in the pursuit of more at a healthy pace.  You leave room to be satisfied in the moment.  You can step off the treadmill and appreciate life because dopamine isn’t constantly barking louder and louder inside your head.  And then you can hop back on the treadmill when appropriate.

This is all very interesting to me because the thing I got hooked on was stand-up comedy.  I’m addicted to comedy.  I’m kind of boring for a comedian.  I don't drink.  I never have.  I don't use any drugs.  I never have.  I don't judge anyone who does - life is a nightmare - I understand why someone would choose to shut it all down by blissing out on heroin.  I fully get why people choose to do that.  Life is impossibly hard.

But I’ve gotten lucky getting addicted to the high of having a great stand-up set, because it's really hard for me to get my drug.  It's not easy to access.  I can't buy it from anyone.  I have to produce it.  I have to put in a tremendous amount of work to get that high.  And then it takes a long time before I can get it again.

It's like shelling pistachios rather than buying the pistachios with the shells already removed.  You can’t shove a handful into your mouth all at once.  Ya gotta pop those suckers out one at a time.  It’s a little tedious.

But it is kinda easy to get hooked on stand-up, cuz of the intermittent reward schedule.  When you get started, you go on stage, have no idea what you’re doing.  Most of the time you bomb horribly.  Sometimes people laugh when you bomb.  That’s confusing.  Then occasionally, something makes somebody laugh - and it might not even be the thing that you thought should get that reaction.  So you puzzle over that.  Try to get that little dopamine hit again.  And your adrenaline is kicked through the roof while you’re up there talking to people - all nervous and anxious, but then when it goes well all that nervous energy turns to excitement - Holy crap, it worked!  Dopamine and epinephrine mix together - we wanna ride that roller coaster again.

But it’s never consistent.  Some new jokes bomb.  Some new jokes go great.  Some jokes that used to work, don’t work anymore.  Some jokes that didn’t work before, you figure out how to fix them.  It’s all dynamic, always changing, and surprising.  Random, sporadic rewards with tripping and falling in between.

Stand-up comedy is a dream come true if you’re an addict.  Gives you just enough to keep you coming back, and you can’t die from it.  It’s like golf.  I don’t golf.  But I’ve seen Robin Williams stand up bit about golf.  And stand-up comedy is like golf.  Every once in a while you hit a great shot or have a great round, makes all the horrible shit worth it somehow.

Dopamine is all about going out and seeking.  But it’s not always about food, or sex, or entertainment, or shelter, or social bonding and friendship - sometimes it’s about information.  I’m a nerd.  I love reading books - finding new little nuggets of information.

Information is wildly valuable.  Dopamine loves new, surprising information.  If you can predict it, then technically, that’s not new information.  We’re wired by dopamine to pay close attention to any new information in our environment.  That updates how we interact with the world - teaches us, makes us wiser.

That’s what stand up is - that’s what jokes are - surprising, novel information.  That’s part of why audiences laugh - “I never thought of it that way.”  As the comedian, you go off exploring these weird little thoughts, and every once in a while you bring back a surprise golden treat for the audience.  They love that.

We consider things miraculous if they don’t behave how we expect them to behave based on our current conception of reality.  When something aberrant happens in reality - and it’s a positive thing - we tend to regard it as sort of miraculous.  Where did that come from?  Jokes are sort of mini-miracles sometimes.  They can even feel profound.  Not only do they contain some wonderful little surprise, but they shift our frame of reference so that the context is different - the surprise makes sense in some new frame - a new way of looking at an old problem.  You can have an absurd joke that actually gives you valuable information that applies to your reality.  It’s new information that’s valuable, somehow more accurate in the new breakthrough context.  

I’m rambling a little bit, but I love stand-up not just because it can surprise people with joy, but because it can open up your mind to new ways of thinking about things.  That’s so cool to me.

Comedy messes with your head.  I was talkin’ to one a’ my friends after a show, he was like “I wanna put a gun in my mouth.”  I was like “Whattaya talkin’ about?  You did really well.  The crowd wasn’t great, but you did better than the other comics by far, still got a bunch of solid laughs.”  And he goes, “Yea, I got a few applause breaks or whatever, but I wish this joke had…”  That was the next sentence.  It was “I wanna put a gun in my mouth” and then “Yea, I mean I got a few applause breaks…”  That’s how much comedy messes with your head.  That’s our threshold for satisfaction in life - if you’re too good at comedy - you end up needing more than a few applause breaks to hit your dopamine baseline.

Luckily, I’m not that good at comedy.

I’m not funny enough to overdose on stand-up.  That’s good.  Cuz if you’re really funny - if you’re too funny - if too many people are praising you too much - how do you balance out all that escalating dopamine?  Lotta celebrities struggle with addiction.  Makes total sense.  Hard to stay balanced out with that level of stimulation.

If you talk to addicts in recovery - they have some hard-won wisdom - they understand that it needs to be ok for life to be boring - that you can't always be seeking the next big thrill.

Life is going to be boring and stressful.

Boredom can be anxiety invoking.  Especially today, with all the distractions calling for our attention.  Fear of missing out and all that.

Boredom is important and necessary.  To be a healthy addict, ya gotta embrace boredom.

I love stand-up, but I can’t do stand-up 24/7.  That wouldn’t feel good.  That wouldn’t be fun anymore.

I feel like stand-up is one of my primary passions in life, but you can’t only focus on chasing your passion.  It’s a recipe for disaster.

There really is so much work that needs to be done that people don't want to do.  Myself included.

What addicts realize, how they get out of the constant chase:  They come to grips with this idea that “It’s not always entirely about me and my will and what I want - it’s about what needs to be done.  The work that presents itself in this present moment.  You don't need to search for the perfect thing to go out and chase.  Sometimes you just have to attend to what’s right there in front of you.”

If you can embrace this idea of a duty to the immediate needs of whatever environment you’re in.

If you can be awake and alert to your environment - connected to it, not trying to escape it.

That escapism is what dopamine pushes us toward - that experience of non-being - of being outside the limited self - our animal body - we try to do something that makes us feel immortal - we try to be the best that ever was because that would justify us somehow - we need this ultimate external recognition and reward.  This fantasy that dopamine is always seeking.

You have to stay vigilant against that kind of grandiosity.  You need an ego that is motivating you to chase something, but you don’t want your ego to get confused and think it’s a god.  You need an appropriate level of humility in the pursuit.  

That’s another reason I like stand-up.  Keeps me humble.  It’s really hard to think you’re all that when you bomb while trying to share your truth with others.  This is what makes me tick - what y’all think a’ that?  “Pretty lame ya dumb loser.”  Ok, I’ll go back to the drawing board.

In stand up, you have to be honest.  You can’t lie, that doesn’t work.  Nothing humbles you more than the truth.  It’s brutal.  I mean, you can make some stuff up - you can be silly up there, but the emotions have to be honest.  You can’t fake that.

If you wanna be good at stand-up, really good at it, not fake good at it.  If you wanna be really excellent at stand-up, you have to have an honest, transparent relationship with the audience.  Even if you’re posturing like you’re hot shit, there has to be a wink that deep down, you know you’re an idiot.  You have to properly reflect the human condition.  Your ego often doesn’t like that.

It’s very hard.  It’s incredibly rewarding when you get it right, very punishing when you get it wrong.

If you are addicted to something, it is possible to reset your dopamine system.

Abstaining from the thing you’re addicted to for about 30 days lets you get back to normal dopamine baseline, so you can feel pleasure in simpler things - simpler, necessary things - necessary things in your immediate reality that can lead and build toward bigger things.  The first two weeks of the detox from whatever you’re addicted to are gonna suck, but if you can make it 30 days, ya got a chance.

And ultimately, how do you overcome an addictive process?  How do you beat an addiction?  You have to replace it with something better.

And it may not be immediately obvious what that something better is.  That’s another one of the tricks.  You just have to start doing stuff.  Attending to things that need to be done.  And you have to tell yourself you’re doing that because you want to, that you love doing those simple things.  And then you sort of just stumble onto better along the way.  You have to practice enjoying the process.  Let the surprises happen.  Don’t chase some big surprise like you know what’s best for you.  Have a little humility about how stupid you are stumbling around in a complex, unpredictable world.

So, yea…my name is Mike Franke, and, I’m addicted to stand-up comedy.