If you keep going the way you've been going, you need more reward to feel pleasure and it'll take less injury to feel pain.

Hey everybody welcome back to the Primal Potential Podcast.

I am Elizabeth Fenton.

This is our Consistency 365 series and if you are in our Primal Potential Facebook group, See going through the book Dopamine Nation together. I did an episode about the concept

of the book and then decided that it would be fun to read it and discuss it in the Facebook

group. It's a great book. It's called Dopamine Nation and essentially the author

describes how with social media with television with news apps, with food, with alcohol, with so many different

things, we are becoming dopamine junkies. Completely discontent with any degree of boredom. We need to be listening to something,

watching a video, checking a notification, responding to our texts want more stimulation.

And what happens as our dopamine goes on overdrive and we're just constantly flooding our system with these minor or major pleasure-inducing events,

and it is proven to be pleasurable

to look at a text message when you see that notification

or click on Facebook, when you see somebody

commented on your post, not to mention food and alcohol and marijuana, all of those things,

what happens is there's a process called neuro adaptation, and that process means that over time it takes more for you to

feel any type of pleasure and less

less boredom or less downtime for you to feel pain associated with it.

This has become something very, very important to me as I have a teenage stepdaughter and I worry so much about things like social media and tablets and computers and YouTube and Snapchat and all of these different things and there's a very clear and undeniable link between this dopamine seeking tendency and things like anxiety and depression and low self-esteem.

And as I read more about it for that purpose in a mom role, in a parent role, I realized how prevalent it was for me.

And I started paying more attention to the ways that I'm always seeking pleasure.

Oh, it's quiet, let's listen to a podcast.

Oh, I have a new text message, I need to look at it or somebody just commented on this post on Instagram.

...