00;00;02;09 - 00;00;24;14
Kolton Thomas
Welcome to the Reclaimed Recovery podcast, where Christian men are overcoming porn. If you're struggling with porn, our podcast is going to help you break the shame and rewire your brain so you can get back to living a porn free life. I'm your host, Colton Thomas. And today you're listening to episode five, where our subject is dope. It's going to be really dope.

00;00;24;21 - 00;00;53;19
Kolton Thomas
In fact, it's about dopamine. Now, if that sounded really corny to you. It's because it was. I'm sorry. I couldn't resist. But don't worry. We're going to dive right into our topic. So dopamine is both a hormone and a neuro modulator. And when we look into dopamine, we're going to find some answers to a few important questions. For example, dopamine helps us understand why porn feels so good and why it keeps us coming back, why we stay trapped in it.

00;00;53;22 - 00;01;12;09
Kolton Thomas
These are essential questions that we need to have a good understanding of and a grasp on before we can move on to other aspects of our recovery. Right. So we're going to talk a lot about how dopamine gets us into trouble with porn. But first, I want to make it clear that what I'm not saying in this podcast is that dopamine is bad.

00;01;12;11 - 00;01;36;21
Kolton Thomas
Dopamine is vital to our biological success as human beings. Now, too much or too little dopamine actually causes disease, and that's bad. But having a healthy amount of baseline dopamine is a really good thing to strive for. Now, dopamine is, at least in part, responsible for what causes us to seek out sex. All right. It has an influence on our sex drive.

00;01;36;24 - 00;01;59;13
Kolton Thomas
Sex, of course, is necessary for reproduction and the survival of our species. Right. It's a part of our instinct for self-preservation. So right out the gate, I want to acknowledge here that having desires for sex and seeking sexual pleasure because of dopamine is a normal and healthy thing. These desires that we have are innate. We were born with them and God gave us these desires.

00;01;59;14 - 00;02;25;01
Kolton Thomas
We need to remember that and we need to embrace that. We need to value dopamine and testosterone and other molecules and hormones in our body and not give up hope that there is a good purpose and reason for them, even if they've contributed some towards our struggle with porn, because they've become unbalanced and they haven't been managed properly and they've led us into some addictive behaviors, some addictive tendencies.

00;02;25;03 - 00;02;45;03
Kolton Thomas
So what I want you to see here as we go on explaining dopamine is that has a purpose. Let's not just push our sexual feelings and desires under the rug. Let's seek to understand the purpose behind them and what they're good for and how we can use them to our advantage. Now let's look at the neuroscience behind dopamine and a little more depth.

00;02;45;06 - 00;03;05;09
Kolton Thomas
And before I get into this, I want to credit the Huberman Lab podcast. If you ever heard of the Huberman Lab podcast. Andrew Huberman is a teacher of neuroscience at Stanford University. And you can actually look him up on YouTube. And he's actually one of the scientists that warns against porn use and teaches about the harmful effects of pornography.

00;03;05;16 - 00;03;27;09
Kolton Thomas
Apart from the conversation about religion, morality, and a lot of what I'm going to teach you here about dopamine and how it works has been adapted from his two hour podcast episode on dopamine. So if you want to take an even deeper dive to understand the neuroscience behind dopamine, I will leave links to some of his stuff in the show notes of the podcast, so be sure to check that out.

00;03;27;11 - 00;04;00;07
Kolton Thomas
Okay, so now let's talk about how dopamine works in the brain. Dopamine has been called the molecule of more. It plays a role as the reward center for our brain. It's what causes us to seek out pleasure, to pursue things that reward us both good and bad, and how motivated and excited and how willing we are to lean into life and pursue things is all influenced by our levels of dopamine and our ambition and our desire to achieve is affected by this molecule as well.

00;04;00;09 - 00;04;26;05
Kolton Thomas
So what's interesting is that dopamine works in conjunction with adrenaline to bring you into a state of readiness and arousal that tends to make you look outside of yourself. It tends to make you want to pursue things that are outside of yourself and do crazy things that are outside of yourself. And so we all have a baseline level of dopamine that affects our mood, motivation, how motivated, how excited and how willing we are to lean into life and pursue things.

00;04;26;07 - 00;04;48;09
Kolton Thomas
And this baseline level is different from person to person. And yes, it is influenced in part by your genetics. That's why we all probably know someone who seems to have endless drive and energy, while others seem to struggle a little bit with getting excited about things and getting excited about life. But genetics are not the only thing that influence dopamine now by a long shot.

00;04;48;16 - 00;05;12;27
Kolton Thomas
What is actually a powerful influencer of the levels of dopamine that we have in our body is our behaviors and our experiences in life. So you can actually modify your behaviors to optimize your levels of dopamine and you can modify your behaviors to sabotage your levels of dopamine. But how how can your baseline levels of dopamine be changed or modified?

00;05;12;29 - 00;05;37;10
Kolton Thomas
What you need to understand is that the level of dopamine in your brain is capable of both peaking above its baseline based on certain experiences that feel good and pleasurable to us. Right. And it's also capable of dropping below the baseline. And when it drops below the baseline is usually because you just had a peak in dopamine. And so it swings the other way as your dopamine is depleted.

00;05;37;10 - 00;06;11;04
Kolton Thomas
So here's another thing that's important to understand is that whether your dopamine peaks or dips depends on what you're experiencing now, relative, the keyword is relative to what you've experienced over the previous hours, days, weeks or months or years even. Okay. So allow me to explain. Dopamine is the way that you track pleasure and success. It helps you keep track of how much you remember enjoying something from your past and to compare it relative with what you're enjoying right now, in the moment, in the present.

00;06;11;06 - 00;06;26;04
Kolton Thomas
And so let's think of an example. Let's think of a song. Let's think of our favorite song that we love. We might be able to listen to it a hundred times, but if we haven't heard it in a while and we go back and listen to it again, that first time is going to feel different. It's going to feel special.

00;06;26;04 - 00;06;43;06
Kolton Thomas
It's going to feel more interesting, right? But by the time we get to the 100th time listening to it, it's going to lose its edge a little bit. Right now, I'm not saying that you won't enjoy it on the 100th time. In fact, there's some really interesting conversation about why some music gets better the more we listen to it.

00;06;43;06 - 00;07;02;11
Kolton Thomas
So I'm not really here to unpack all of that and get into that conversation. But what I'm really referring to is the experience we have when we kill a song after listening to it almost too many times to where we don't enjoy it anymore, that experience is at least in part, caused by dopamine. Now I want to share an example from my own life.

00;07;02;16 - 00;07;21;07
Kolton Thomas
I have to really monitor my dopamine seeking behaviors because one thing I've learned about myself is that it's easy for me to develop addictive tendencies. Some people can be more prone to addictive tendencies than others. And if you're one of these individuals that's more prone to addictive tendencies, that doesn't mean that you can't avoid being addicted to things.

00;07;21;07 - 00;07;41;17
Kolton Thomas
It just means you might have to work a little harder at doing it. So I recognize this about myself and I have to put a lot of work into being self aware and set up good parameters and boundaries for myself so that I don't fall into little addictive behaviors from time to time. One recent example of this in my life, believe it or not, is actually in playing Internet chess.

00;07;41;22 - 00;08;02;27
Kolton Thomas
Internet chess can be extremely addicting because you are competing against players all over the world and it's completely strategy based. And so I can get on my phone at any given time of the day and play someone across the world and chess. And it's my strategy and the skills that I have it, chess versus someone else's. And the game is on and you can actually play very quick games of chess.

00;08;02;29 - 00;08;31;02
Kolton Thomas
And when you add a time element, there's a sense of urgency which releases even more dopamine. And then when you beat someone, dopamine is released for that because it's such a good feeling to win. And so I have actually had to set up some parameters for myself to keep me from playing too much Internet chess. Okay. I have no shame in admitting that because it's something that I continue to go to for a source of dopamine over other things, like working, like recording his podcasts sometimes.

00;08;31;02 - 00;08;55;20
Kolton Thomas
Right. And I have to recognize that we need to be aware of the things in our lives that we're pursuing and that are offering us increasing amounts of dopamine. So let's talk a little bit more about how dopamine drops in your brain when you crave something very desirable and pleasurable and you acquire it, meaning that the chase is over and you were able to experience the pleasure that you were in search of afterwards.

00;08;55;20 - 00;09;22;15
Kolton Thomas
After the climax, your dopamine drops below baseline. And when you repeat this experience, when you peak your dopamine high above the baseline again and again and again so that your dopamine continues to go through these peaks and valleys, your overall baseline level of dopamine drops so that you're constantly living from day to day with a less than optimal amount of this important molecule in your body.

00;09;22;17 - 00;09;43;26
Kolton Thomas
You see where we're gone with this? Can you see the danger of this when it comes to porn? It should be no surprise that porn is able to take us to a huge peak in dopamine peak. Huberman and his podcast actually refers to some research published in the Journal of Physiology that measured how certain experiences and behaviors impact baseline levels of dopamine.

00;09;43;28 - 00;10;07;22
Kolton Thomas
And what they found is that sex where the pursuit of sex on average causes your dopamine level to peak at least twice that of your normal baseline level. K That's two times your normal level of dopamine, and that can vary. That number was just on average and two times your average amount of dopamine is a serious fluctuation. It's certainly more of a fluctuation than food.

00;10;07;22 - 00;10;33;28
Kolton Thomas
Even sugary food causes in your brain. And when it comes to natural sex, these fluctuations of dopamine have a purpose. And after you orgasm, when your dopamine dips below baseline, your body actually releases other chemicals. It's a chemical called prolactin that helps to balance out some of the bad feelings that could come. Otherwise when your dopamine level drops below the baseline.

00;10;34;00 - 00;10;59;03
Kolton Thomas
So that's why after you've had sex with your partner, you continue to have this good feeling for a while afterwards. And to go along with that, there's actually a hormone called oxytocin that releases when you have sex that helps bond you to your romantic partner. And that is a really cool hormone. It's actually called the love hormone or the cuddle hormone by some because it's designed to help bond you to a person in a long term romantic relationship.

00;10;59;03 - 00;11;26;05
Kolton Thomas
And of course, as a Christian, as a person of faith, I think that is a really neat clue because of what it suggests about marriage, about being committed to one person. There's this relation chip bond, and there's hormones that are released whose job is to help reinforce that love and commitment. But here's where things get even more serious Internet porn today has the potential to spike your dopamine beyond what regular sex with a real person can do.

00;11;26;06 - 00;11;52;29
Kolton Thomas
So Gary Wilson, the author of the popular book Your Brain on Porn, suggested that today's Internet pornography could fit in the category of what scientists call a supernormal stimulus, which is a real scientific term. And he suggested four reasons why it deserves this title. And there may be more, but these are the four primary reasons why porn is such an unnatural or supernatural stimulus for our brains.

00;11;53;01 - 00;12;24;27
Kolton Thomas
The first reason is novelty. So because these two sites that are out there today present porn in a seemingly endless variety, novelty activates our reward circuits. Number two is surprise or shock. And Wilson notes, what isn't shocking in today's porn. Third is the act of seeking and searching, the wanting or the anticipating. When we go to look at pornography and for is anxiety or conflict, which is using porn that isn't consistent with your values or sexuality.

00;12;24;27 - 00;12;45;27
Kolton Thomas
So yes, this one may seem counterintuitive, but the truth is things like violent porn or more extreme versions of porn can actually release more dopamine because it's not only shocking, but is in conflict with what we stand for or what we're used to. Right? There's something secret about it. There's something forbidden about it. And so the amount of dopamine that's released is heightened even more.

00;12;45;29 - 00;13;07;03
Kolton Thomas
And so what's the bottom line in bringing this up? The bottom line is that porn can train your brain by giving it these huge unnatural surges of dopamine while manipulating it into thinking that it's the new normal. Okay. And scientists call this brain plasticity, and it's the ability of your brain to create new pathways based on how it's being rewarded.

00;13;07;09 - 00;13;43;23
Kolton Thomas
And what you need to understand is that the drop in dopamine after you watch porn is substantial and repeating the cycle day after day will cause your overall baseline level of dopamine to drop below normal healthy levels of what it should be. Okay. And so if you're struggling with porn after you look at porn, after you masturbate an orgasm, if you find yourself feeling hopeless and depressed and especially down, the reason for that may not only be because you're disappointed in yourself that you did it again, but it's also because you have depleted your dopamine and your baseline levels of dopamine have gotten lower and lower.

00;13;43;23 - 00;14;07;01
Kolton Thomas
The longer you've continued to use porn to the point where you could almost be living in this chronic state of depression and not having enough dopamine, not having enough motivation or drive or willingness to put an effort when really you shouldn't be when really genetically your baseline level of dopamine should be higher. And so in this way, porn is sabotaging your levels of dopamine, it's hijacking your brain.

00;14;07;03 - 00;14;31;18
Kolton Thomas
And what this means is that nearly everything else that creates a dopamine response, meaning everything. That's not porn. Yes, that includes real sex that starts to emit less dopamine and seem less rewarding and other things start to lose their edge and excitement. And when this happens, it's called desensitization. Now, if you've struggled with porn for any length of time, you probably know what this feels like.

00;14;31;21 - 00;15;10;24
Kolton Thomas
And you probably also know that when you're in this low dopamine state and your brain is constantly seeking more, that pretty soon the porn that you're watching doesn't cut it anymore, right? You want more, you need more. And you've built up this tolerance to the porn that you're watching in order to maintain that level of dopamine and that edge and excitement that your brain is looking for, you wind up turning to more extreme versions of Internet porn and you try to layer unnatural dopamine stimulants until inevitably your baseline dopamine drops so much that you have trouble with motivation and drive related to all kinds of activities.

00;15;10;24 - 00;15;30;12
Kolton Thomas
But even real sex, which is why men develop porn induced erectile dysfunction where they can't get in arousal anymore by their partners, by real sex, because the way their brain has been trained and the way that dopamine works is that only the Internet porn is what's exciting them and arousing them, causing that state of arousal and releasing the adrenaline that they're looking for.

00;15;30;13 - 00;15;54;06
Kolton Thomas
All right. And it's sad to say, but this is how guys end up in really bad places with the things that they're looking at, right? Guys that are good guys that would have probably never ended up looking at this kind of stuff. Otherwise, if it hadn't been for the way that porn was training their brains over time. And it's how guys get into these things that don't even line up with their values, things like child pornography and violent porn.

00;15;54;09 - 00;16;16;11
Kolton Thomas
And so if you have a loved one who struggles with these things, I want you to understand that it's very likely they didn't start out looking for these types of porn. In fact, it's very likely that they never wanted to wind up looking at these types of porn. But it's due to the nature of the way that porn works with our brains that a lot of good men find themselves in this difficult place.

00;16;16;13 - 00;16;34;25
Kolton Thomas
And eventually it leads to men acting out. And sadly, this is what we see a lot in the news and even spiritual and religious leaders. And what people often don't understand is that they didn't likely just wake up one day and decide they were going to commit these acts, but rather there was a conditioning process over time that led to this.

00;16;34;29 - 00;16;53;10
Kolton Thomas
And unfortunately they were not able to get the help that they needed or they felt too isolated or ashamed to reach out to anybody, which is tragic. As part of the reason why we started this podcast is because if you're out there struggling with this and you're alone, I want you to have a chance to understand what's going on in your brain and to get the help that you need.

00;16;53;12 - 00;17;10;14
Kolton Thomas
Now, let's look at another important point here. What you need to realize is that dopamine is only available to your brain in certain quantities. There's a stock of dopamine. So it's like when you go on Amazon and you really need this certain product and they're out of stock and you're like, Oh man, you got to wait for it.

00;17;10;17 - 00;17;30;18
Kolton Thomas
Dopamine is a little bit like that. And so let me ask you this. If porn is depleting this molecule that's so important that you need most for pursuing and achieving important things in your life, how much do you think that this is going to affect you over time if porn is depleting the dopamine that you need to accomplish those things?

00;17;30;21 - 00;17;53;22
Kolton Thomas
And the answer is over your lifetime, over a long term trajectory, it's going to affect things a lot. Your life played out as a regular or even occasional porn user could look a lot different. Should you quit porn? And should your dopamine levels be at a healthy, normal baseline? And the takeaway here is that your life and your story really, really matters.

00;17;53;22 - 00;18;19;02
Kolton Thomas
You have God given gifts and abilities to be explored and pursued so that you can do good in this world and that you can help others and that you can serve others. But you will not be able to do that at your full potential. If you go on allowing porn to sabotage your dopamine, your adrenaline and other important chemicals that are in your brain that you need to be healthy and that you need to live optimally.

00;18;19;05 - 00;18;50;04
Kolton Thomas
And so do you see what's at stake here? You can struggle with porn and you can still be loved and you can still be accepted by God and you can still be saved and all those things. However, there's still a lot at stake as you go on living. And I don't know about you, but I see life is pretty short and I want to do the best that I can to optimize the time that I have and the gifts that I have so that I can serve as I can make an impact, so I can help other men who are struggling with porn right.

00;18;50;06 - 00;19;25;21
Kolton Thomas
But it's really difficult to do that when we're allowing porn to create a certain level of dysfunction in our brains. So here's the good news. You can replenish your depleted dopamine by reducing overstimulating behaviors. Dopamine can rebalance itself so that your baseline level that you live with day to day can be raised again. So whether you need to taper off from porn or if you can quit cold turkey, whatever, if you can start reducing the amount of porn that you're using, there is hope for you and your mental health that it can get better.

00;19;25;24 - 00;19;44;02
Kolton Thomas
And I can't promise you any amount of time that you'll see result. But a lot of guys who stop looking at porn and as little as a couple of weeks or a month start seeing some pretty drastic results in their mood and their attention span and their energy. And so give that a try. Just give it a try.

00;19;44;02 - 00;20;12;28
Kolton Thomas
Have some courage and go for it and see if it doesn't make a difference. If you don't feel better when you stop using porn. And so Huberman and his podcast says the key to having a healthy, optimum amount of dopamine in our body, a healthy baseline, is to achieve intermittent release of dopamine. And to do that, we want to avoid continually chasing the higher unnatural dopamine peaks and instead we want to seek them out intermittently and sparingly.

00;20;13;01 - 00;20;31;25
Kolton Thomas
Now, again, to be clear, we don't need to completely avoid behaviors just because they release a lot of dopamine. I think we've made it clear that sex is a good thing and that we should be pursuing sex and long term goals and eating our favorite dessert every once in a while and exercising all those things release dopamine and they're great dopamine pursuits.

00;20;31;27 - 00;20;54;17
Kolton Thomas
But we should be avoiding unnatural peaks of dopamine that cause our levels to crash and burn, such as porn. Porn is an unnatural way, an artificial way to achieve dopamine that is unhealthy from about every standpoint. We can look at it and when we talked earlier about oxytocin and the bonding, oxytocin also releases when you masturbate to porn.

00;20;54;19 - 00;21;14;02
Kolton Thomas
And we don't yet fully understand the implications to that. But theoretically, you are bonding to your digital device and to pornography when you decide to use that as a way to masturbate an orgasm. Now you can take that information and do what you want with it. But that's one more thing about the science that motivates me to avoid using porn.

00;21;14;08 - 00;21;40;11
Kolton Thomas
Now we're running out of time. In today's episode, so I would like to go back over the main points and bring this all together. So first, what we know is that sex, dopamine and orgasms all have clear biological purposes and it's normal to have them. It's okay to feel them. And if God created them and he bestowed them upon us, then we really shouldn't be running from them or feel ashamed of them or be resisting them even.

00;21;40;14 - 00;22;10;18
Kolton Thomas
Second, we talked about how dopamine can peak or fall below our baseline level, and we talked about how important it is to try to maintain a healthy baseline level of dopamine. When we maintain a healthy baseline of dopamine, our quality of life is improves sometimes drastically, so that we're able to pursue much healthier things, such as our godly goals and desires, and to become better leaders to step out and be seen, to think outside ourselves in a good way.

00;22;10;19 - 00;22;32;22
Kolton Thomas
So that impacts our families, our workplace, and our communities of faith. Wherever we're plugged in. So here's what I want to leave you with. If you have been trapped thinking that the reason why you can't live porn free is because you simply haven't tried hard enough, or that you don't have enough faith in God, or that you're somehow unworthy to be freed of this and that you must be unloved by God.

00;22;32;24 - 00;22;58;26
Kolton Thomas
I want you to be empowered by the science to know that there's nothing fundamentally wrong or uniquely wrong with you. It's simply the approach that you've been taking and the lack of information that you've had right. In fact, I hope that you can see from this that it's predictable what will happen to your brain and your dopamine levels when you get hooked on porn and that you're not alone, that this has happened to hundreds of thousands of other men.

00;22;59;03 - 00;23;31;24
Kolton Thomas
We could even say millions of men. So let that sink in for a moment. Let that sink in for a moment that you're not alone. And so I want you to put one foot forward today. I want you to make a commitment to manage your levels of dopamine the best that you can, and to do your best to quit porn or at least start tapering off, but also to think about the long term and don't allow the shame to stop you from acting on the science that proves that your brain can be restored, that your dopamine can be rebalanced and restored.

00;23;31;27 - 00;23;53;20
Kolton Thomas
So that's all we've got for today. In our next episode, we will continue the science conversation and we will talk about classical conditioning. Till then, we are believing in you and thanks for listening to the reclaimed recovery podcast. Hey guys, If you're enjoying listening to our podcast as a couple quick things I would love for you to do that could really help us out.

00;23;53;27 - 00;24;14;09
Kolton Thomas
One is to leave a quick review for our podcast this would help us reach more men and potentially help more lives too as the head over to reclaimed recovery dot com and check out our free training on the five shoes that we use to help men overcome pornography and overcome it for good. This training is going to go into even more depth and a lot of things that we talk about in our podcast in the training.

00;24;14;09 - 00;24;29;29
Kolton Thomas
You can also find out more about our ten week journey through our coaching app, an online course that can help bring you that transformation. You need to start living a life porn free. So if you love this podcast, you're going to love the training and other materials that you can find in our community app and on our Web site.

00;24;29;29 - 00;24;37;16
Kolton Thomas
Again, that's reclaimed recovery dot com. And you can find the links to all of these resources and more right on our homepage.