Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and I want to teach you a little bit about desire dopamine versus controlled dopamine and how you can use an interesting little strategy to overcome your addictions, maybe to food, for example.
Desire dopamine, what is it? It's the dopamine that fires in the mesolimbic reward pathway. This is the pathway between the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area. This is the addiction center of the brain. This is the reward pathway. Some people used to call it the pleasure pathway, but it's not. It's about reward. It's about wanting. It's about craving. It's about anticipation. It's about the pursuit of more. And it's where our drive comes from to go get something. It really evolved to prioritize food and sex. Those are the main things that it wants to go get, but of course it can be hijacked by stimuli that activate it that have nothing to do with food or sex. By cigarettes, by iPhones, by screens, by games, by attagirls and attaboys, by any sort of reward that lights it up. The dopamine that fires there can be called desired dopamine. And this is nomenclature that comes out of the amazing book, The Molecule of More. That's all about dopamine. I highly recommend that book, The Molecule of More. They talk about desire dopamine versus control dopamine.
Let's talk about control dopamine. Control dopamine is dopamine that's in a different part of the brain altogether. It's in the mesocortical circuit. This is actually the connections that go from the ventral tegmental area up to the prefrontal cortex. What's interesting about this dopamine is it's not about addiction or desire. It's related to addiction though, and I'll get to that in a second. It's about planning, willpower, control, execution, making sure all the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed. Yeah, making a list, making sure all the things are done, considering all the variables, weighing consequences.
There's an extensive body of research showing that as addiction progresses, this latter circuit I just talked about, this control dopamine circuit from the ventral tegmental area up to the prefrontal cortex gets weaker, and the desire circuit gets stronger. It gets to the point where the addict can't rein themselves in anymore. They can't weigh consequences. They can't plan. They can't access their willpower. This is in the extreme case how addicts with an advanced case of addiction end up using when they know they're going to lose their family. They know they're going to lose their kids whom they love. And when a cue is there that predicts that a hit is available, essentially like they've got money in their hand and they're drug dealer's right around the corner, the spotlight, it's called incentive salience, the spotlight that shines on that potential hit that's available is so strong that everything else gets cast in shadow.
The controlled dopamine circuit can't be activated really at all. The desire dopamine circuit is so strong that the person goes to get that hit even when it's their day to pick up the kids from school and the judge has told them, "If you miss it again, you're going to lose custody of your kids permanently." It's such a strong asymmetry that can develop between the desire dopamine and the control dopamine that the addict just utterly loses what most of us would think of as rational thought or the ability to choose their behavior.
Let's imagine that maybe you or someone you know is stuck in a loop like that with food. They want to stay Bright. They want to not be eating sugar. They want to not be breaking their promises to themselves with food. And yet, a certain time of day comes around and there's stuff in the cupboard and they just end up eating food that they've promised themselves they won't eat. I want to teach you a little hack that can help rebuild the circuitry between the ventral tegmental area and the prefrontal cortex, this mesocortical circuit, this control dopamine circuit and help it to get stronger while at the same time healing the desired dopamine circuit that's run amok at this point. It's just way too strong and it's out of control.
What's happened over here in the desire circuit is that floods of dopamine from donuts, from sugar, from crack cocaine, from pornography, from whatever it is that you're hooked on, those floods of dopamine have overwhelmed the dopamine receptors. The dopamine receptors have responded by thinning out and becoming less numerous and less responsive, which means that you need to take more, this is withdrawal and tolerance, not withdrawal, sorry, tolerance. This is tolerance where you need to take more to get the same hit, to get the same effect and your using is now out of control. You keep using, you're using more. The dopamine receptors are burned out, they're down regulated and that circuit has become a monster. Meanwhile, the control circuit is nowhere near strong enough to rein it in.
So, how can you start to write this balance? Well, in Bright Line Eating®, we teach these habit stacks. We teach people to do things like have a nightly checklist sheet and keep a tracking calendar where you're crossing or giving yourself a star for a Bright day that's in the Bright Line Eating food journal or we give you little calendars to color in to make a pattern for your first 30 Bright days, little things like that. Why do we do that? Well, it turns out that tracking goals, having them and then tracking them marries the desire dopamine circuit and the control dopamine circuit in a really beautiful way and starts to heal the desire dopamine circuit while strengthening the controlled dopamine circuit.
Here's how it works. Let's imagine that you say, "I'm going to stay Bright for 30 days." And you print off one of our lovely Bright Line Eating calendars to do that and you're going to shade in or color in each day as you go and it's going to make a pretty pattern. Well, having that goal now activates your control dopamine that has a plan and it's involved now in making that plan. It's involved in helping you execute that plan. It's involved in the willpower, involved to remind you to color in your thing after dinner because you've had a Bright day. It's now got a job and you're getting dopamine flowing from the ventral tegmental area up to the prefrontal cortex and you're strengthening that circuit. Meanwhile, as you achieve the goal each day and you color it in, you get this boost in the reward system. You get just a little hit, just a little, that's lovely. Have you ever written something down on a to-do list that you just did just so you could write it down and then cross it off? You do that because crossing it off gives you a little hit. It gives you a little boost of desire dopamine, a little boost of a little rush, right? It's like, look at me go. I just did that. These are these two circuits working in tandem. You write it down and then you cross it off and you get that little boost. Now, that boost is not the kind of flood that you get from eating a pint of ice cream in a food coma, right? It's just a little something, something. It's just a little bit. And what it is, is it's a healthy dose. It's not a hit of crack cocaine. It's just a little, right? A little something.
That healthy amount of dopamine starts to heal and regulate your desire dopamine circuit. And so, in Bright Line Eating, when we give you a nightly checklist sheet to cross off, I made my bed today and I was Bright today and I meditated today, whatever the things are you have on there, doing that is healing your brain. As you give yourself a seven-day challenge or a 30-day challenge and you put X's on the calendar or stars on the calendar, you're healing your brain. You're bringing your dopamine circuits into balance and you're strengthening your control dopamine circuit that is the seat of really what you want for yourself. It's your planning. It's your control. It's your executive decision making. It's your effective weighing of consequences. This is what starts to go offline as you start to get more and more hooked on Franken foods that take over your desire circuitry.
So, getting your control circuitry back online is a really, really helpful thing. In Bright Line Eating, we survey our Bright Lifers™, and we know who's successful and we ask them, "What are you doing in your Bright Line Eating program?" And habit stacks, it's in the top three. The top three things that the most successful Bright Lifers are doing, the ones who are keeping off all their weight, the ones who are staying Bright, they are faithful to a set of habit stacks. They're tracking things, they're monitoring things. They've got a set of things they do in the morning, a set of things they do in the night. This is part of why they're successful is because they're dedicated to engaging in practices that are healing their brain. So, I wanted to tip you off a little bit to desire dopamine and control dopamine and how you can get your circuits back in balance. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
