Dopamine and Video Games: The Neuroscience of Addiction

Dopamine influences one's mood, motivation, and craving, with video games having a potential for high dopamine increase.

### The Neuroscience of Dopamine and Video Game Addiction by Andrew Huberman
* 🧠 Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that influences our **current feelings, future mood, motivation, and willingness to exert effort**.
* 🎮 Video games have the potential to **increase dopamine levels significantly**, with **high novelty and engagement** leading to **greater dopamine release**.
* ❌ Video game addiction can result in a **progressive narrowing of activities that bring pleasure**, leading to **neglect of other areas of life**.
* 🔄 A video game detox can help **reset dopamine levels** and allow individuals to **enjoy other activities**.
* 🎯 Setting **realistic but challenging goals** and making **gradual progress** is crucial in overcoming video game addiction.
* 🤝 Having accountability, whether through friends, family, or a community of individuals facing similar challenges, can provide **support in addressing gaming habits**.

so let's talk about dopamine. Dopamine has everything to do with how you feel right now as you're listening to this. It has everything to do with how you will feel an hour from now. It has everything to do with your level of motivation and your level of desire and your willingness to push through effort. It modulates a bunch of things all at once. That's why it's so powerful at shifting not just our levels of energy but also our mindset, also our feelings of whether or not we can or cannot accomplish something. I have a million dollar question for you: in which activity does dopamine increase above Baseline the most: nicotine, sex, chocolate, or video games? Most of you probably picked sex or nicotine, but in reality, video games have a higher potential for above normal dopamine increase. According to neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who is best known for his work on Behavioral Sciences including human behavior, addiction, neuropsychology, and brain development, while nicotine and sex increased dopamine 100 above Baseline and chocolate 55, video games can range

between 75 and 300 percent to understand how much dopamine that actually is. Well, cocaine is 225 percent. Imagine that. At the highest level of engagement, gaming can produce more dopamine than even having sex or doing cocaine. Now, I know what you're thinking. That sounds a bit crazy. And personally, I prefer to avoid comparing things like video games to drugs and alcohol, which I'll share why later in the video. But for now, if you want to understand the neuroscience of video games and addiction, including ways to fix it, then according to Andrew Huberman, you're in luck. Imagine it's your first time playing a video game. You turn on your PC and jump into the game. The first few games are not that fun as you were trying to figure out how to control your character and also follow what's happening on the screen. At first, it's too overwhelming. However, when you actually do something like perform that combo or do something without looking at your controller, you feel awesome. You keep playing to get more of that awesomeness feeling.

then you play more and more. Why? Why don't you just enjoy that feeling one time and then move on? Well, it's because our brains are not designed to enjoy stuff as a one-time experience. Now, I can blabber on about what dopamine is, but I think I'll let the master do the talking. So, let's talk about dopamine. The way that your body uses dopamine is to have a baseline level of dopamine, meaning an amount of dopamine that's circulating in your brain and body all the time. And that turns out to be important for how you feel generally, whether or not you're in a good mood, motivated, etc. You also can experience peaks in dopamine above baseline when you experience something or you crave something really desirable, really exciting to you, very pleasurable. What happens afterwards is your baseline level of dopamine drops. Okay, so these peaks in dopamine, they influence how much dopamine will generally be circulating afterward. And you might think, Oh, a big peak in dopamine. After that, I'm going to feel even better because I just had this.

great event. Not the case. What actually happens is that your baseline level of dopamine drops. Dopamine has everything to do with how you feel right now as you're listening to this. It has everything to do with how you will feel an hour from now. Has everything to do with your level of motivation and your level of desire and your willingness to push through effort. If ever you've interacted with somebody who just doesn't seem to have any drive, they've given up. Or if you've interacted with somebody who seems to have endless drive and energy. What you are looking at there in those two circumstances is without question a difference in the level of dopamine circulating in their system. Dopamine is what we call a neuromodulator. Neuromodulators are different than neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are involved in the dialogue between neurons, nerve cells, and neurotransmitters tend to mediate local communication. Just imagine two people talking to one another at a concert. Communication between them is analogous.

to the communication carried out by neurotransmitters. Whereas neuromodulators influence the communication of many neurons. Imagine a bunch of people dancing where it's a coordinated dance involving 10 or 20 or hundreds of people. Neuromodulators are coordinating that dance in the nervous system. What this means is that dopamine release changes the probability that certain neural circuits will be active. Other neural circuits will be inactive. Okay so it modulates a bunch of things all at once and that's why it's so powerful at shifting not just our levels of energy but also our mindset also our feelings of whether or not we can or cannot accomplish something. It is not just responsible for pleasure. It is responsible for motivation and drive live primarily at the psychological level also for craving those three things are sort of the same motivation driving craving. It also controls time perception. Okay that's cool and all but let's get into what role video games play in dopamine Neuroscience. People will play a video game they love it. It's

super exciting to them. And then they'll keep playing, and playing, and playing. And either one of two things happens. Typically both. First of all, I always say addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. So oftentimes what will happen is the person only has excitement and can achieve dopamine release to the same extent doing that behavior and not other behaviors. And so they start losing interest in school. They start losing interest in relationships. They start losing interest in fitness and well-being. And depletes their life. And eventually what typically happens is they will stop getting dopamine released from that activity as well. And then they drop into a pretty serious depression. And this can get very severe. And people have committed suicide from these sorts of patterns of activity. That's the bare basics of how a gaming addiction can come about. And if you want to learn more about the neuroscience of a brain on video games, then check out my video on gaming and the brain. But Andrew Human adds a few points that go deeper. Remember how, according to Andrew

huberman playing video games could be more of a motivation than having sex smoking or even doing hard drugs like cocaine. The percentages were 75 to 300 and that essentially means that the more intense and stimulating a video game is, the higher dopamine release there is. This is what Andrew Huberman calls novelty as an element in video game engagement. Video games, especially video games that have a very high update speed where there's novel territory all the time, novelty is a big stimulus of dopamine. Those can release dopamine somewhere between nicotine and cocaine, so very high levels of dopamine release. So playing a video game like Abzu, where the game pretty much plays itself and is more like watching a movie, could be considered as low novelty engagement. On the other hand, playing late levels of the game Risk of Rain 2 could be more of that high novelty that Andrew Huberman talked about. Another aspect of the danger of video games that Andrew Huberman points out is the neglect of other hobbies. Gaming is super exciting and everything else is boring so you lose

interest in school work sports relationships fitness hygiene other hobbies and even your own well-being pretty much when you become addicted to gaming your quality life decreases significantly and it's because your brain only finds gaming to be exciting just think about it why would your brain choose less stimulating and more difficult activities like working your job doing your homework going out with friends doing chores or shooting a YouTube video like this our Basic Instincts always choose the most gratifying short-term option if you want to overcome a lot of problems in your life you have to turn on your Consciousness in order to use the higher functioning ability of the human brain planning for the future and the long term so here's some tips by Andrew human to overcome a video game addiction first try a video game detox you have probably heard of a dopamine detox or abstaining from an addictive activity is a basic step towards recovery and that's because it works as mentioned by Andrew human addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure where

a person only has excitement, and can achieve dopamine release to the same extent, doing that behavior and not other behaviors. Some of you might be asking, what should I do if I experience a drop in my baseline level of dopamine because of engagement with some activity or some substance that led to big peaks? Just to put some color and example on this, a few episodes ago I talked about a friend who I have known a long time. Said actually, the child of a friend who has basically become addicted to video games. He decided actually after seeing that episode with Anna to do a 30-day complete fast from phone, from video games, and from social media of all kinds. He's now at day 29. He's really accomplished this. Not incidentally, his levels of concentration, his overall mood are up. He's doing far, far better. What he did is hard. In particular, the first 14 days is really hard. But the way that you replenish the releasable pool of dopamine is to not engage in these dopaminergic

seeking behaviors. Because remember, typically, people arrive at a place where they want to stop engaging in these behaviors or ingesting substances when that dopamine is depleted. When they're not getting the same lift, doing a video game detox will reset your dopamine levels, and you can begin enjoying other stuff other than gaming. We've seen this time and time again in our community on Game Quitters over the last decade. We've seen hundreds and thousands of people take a dopamine detox or a video game detox and report that their lives improved significantly. This is especially important for people who have an addiction or a gaming problem of some kind. Now to find out if that's you, you can head over to GameQuitters.com and take the quiz on the home page. Next, set realistic goals and take small steps forward. So here we're talking about goal setting. What we're saying is set goals that are realistic but that aren't so realistic that they're easy. The goals need to be realistic and truly challenging. Don't set goals that are so

challenging, and so lofty that they crash that blood pressure system in the other direction, and make you or anyone feel unmotivated. If you have a bad video game addiction, perhaps it's not such a good idea to overwhelm yourself. Some people do better by just going cold turkey, and other people do better by reducing a bit over time. Understand yourself, and if you are someone who does better with reducing, then start reducing gradually, a little bit each day. Now, if you're someone who has gone cold turkey and done a detox, then taking small steps forward might look like starting to read for 15 minutes, and then 30 minutes, and then an hour, and doing that slowly but surely. The key is to gradually but consistently improve, instead of trying to do everything at once and then crashing and burning because you didn't take your challenges or weaknesses and progress into consideration. For some people, not gaming for even a few days can be such a big deal, however, for others, not so much. The important thing is to set your goals to be realistic, but also challenging

not too easy. The challenges where your growth lies. And so, again, I just encourage you. If you're curious, go over the gamecores.com and take the quiz on the home page. It will ask you a set of nine different questions to determine the severity, whether not a problem, a bit of a problem, or a problem with gaming. Finally, you want to have accountability. How do I access this alertness? Well, there are a number of ways. Some people use some pretty elaborate psychological gymnastics. They will tell people that they're going to do something and create some accountability. That could be really good. So, accountability, perhaps it's your close friends, casual friends, or family that could support you and hold you accountable to your gaming habits. That's one way, but arguably a better way is to have accountability from people who are going through the same thing as you. That's why I urge you to join our free Discord community on game queries and get rid of your gaming problem once and for all. The links for that are in the description. And thanks.

to Andrew human for all of his great work. I look forward to sharing more of his content soon. Now, if you're curious if you should play video games after your detox, then check out this video from me from, well, quite a while ago, okay.

How Gaming Affects Your Brain (Andrew Huberman)

Game Quitters

The Power of Dopamine: Shaping Your Feelings and Behaviors

Dopamine plays a crucial role in shaping our feelings, motivation, and mindset, as well as in modulating our level of desire and effort.

Contrary to common belief, video games have the highest potential to increase dopamine levels above baseline, even more than sex or nicotine.

Dopamine not only creates peaks of pleasure but also influences the overall circulating level, impacting how we feel in the long run.

The Power of Dopamine: A Key Player in Motivation and Addiction

Dopamine levels impact how we feel, our motivation, and our drive to accomplish things.

As a neuromodulator, it influences the activity of neural circuits and plays a role in pleasure, motivation, and time perception.

Video games can lead to addiction by triggering intense dopamine release, narrowing the individual's sources of pleasure, and potentially leading to depression and serious consequences.

The Impact of Video Games on Dopamine Release

Playing intense and stimulating video games can lead to a high release of dopamine, similar to the levels released by smoking or even cocaine.

Andrew Huberman highlights the role of novelty in video games, with high-novelty games causing a significant dopamine release.

However, he also points out the danger of video game addiction, which can lead to neglect of other hobbies and a decrease in overall quality of life.

A video game detox is recommended as a first step to overcome addiction, with the potential for significant improvement in dopamine levels and overall well-being.

A video game detox can help reset dopamine levels and improve overall quality of life for those struggling with addiction.

Setting realistic and challenging goals is important for a successful detox, whether it's through gradual reduction or going cold turkey.

It's crucial to understand individual differences and progress gradually to avoid feeling overwhelmed and unmotivated.

Managing Gaming Habits and Seeking Support

com and taking the quiz can help determine the severity of a gaming problem.

Creating accountability through friends or family, or joining a free Discord community for support, can help manage gaming habits.

Seeking support from others going through the same thing is recommended for overcoming a gaming problem.