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Jessi Gold saw some of the first signs of her depression back when she was in college.

We put the bar at, Well, I'm getting good grades, so I'm fine. I'm still seeing friends, so I'm fine. I was very much that person for a long time until really I blew it off until I couldn't anymore. And some friends and some family members were like, You need to go talk to someone about this. I saw a therapist for the first time in college my junior year.

Ultimately, Jessie was able to get help, but says the experience of finding treatment simply wasn't easy. That's what motivated her to become a psychiatrist. An assistant professor at Washington University in St.

Louis.

I want to be a safe space for people to get help where they don't feel like that experience. A lot of people are asking for help for the first time in college, and I don't want them to be scared to do it. I don't want them to have an experience where they don't understand what's going on and I don't want them to feel like for some reason they did it wrong.

Today, she's in her mid-30s, and Jessie is busy helping her students and her patients with some of the same struggles she experienced in her own life. She's been really open about the journey. But during the pandemic, something happened. Dr. Gold says she started to do some reflecting and realize there's one part of her therapy journey she's never been as open about.

I've been on medication for years at this point. No changes, same meds, they work for me. I haven't really had an episode of depression in years. I don't understand why I'm hiding that in some capacity.

Now, what Jessie did next was honestly a little bit meta because she took the anxieties about being treated for anxiety to her own therapist.

I talked to my therapist about it for a while, and she was like, What does medication mean to you? I was like, Well, I give medicine to everybody all the time. It's the same as taking medicine for blood pressure. What do you mean by what does medicine mean to me? She was like, No, but for you, not for other people. When I thought about it deep down, what I thought was like, if I'm on medicine and people know I'm on medicine, that will mean to them at some point I was sicker or at some point maybe I'm not as good of a doctor as I should be. My therapist actually told me she took medication, too, and said, Did that make you think any differently about me? I said, Absolutely not. She was like, See, it doesn't make you any worse at your job, or it doesn't make you change your mind about someone you already think is a good doctor or professional.

Here's the reason I wanted to start with this today. I think Jessie's story is relatable for a lot of reasons. We've come so far when it comes to talking about mental health, but let's be honest here, there's still a lot of stigma out there. After all, even a psychiatrist like Jessie was reluctant to talk about her medications. At the same time now, rates of depression are rising. You can see where I'm going with this. Nearly one in five Americans has been diagnosed depression at some point in their lives. Now, according to most recent CDC health statistics, more than one in eight Americans report taking an antidepressant drug. But the story I'm telling you today is even more complicated than that. Because while antidepressants can be lifesavers for some people, the other truth is they don't work so well for others if they work at all. For me, as a brain scientist, it raises a fundamental question. What exactly is going on in our brains when we are depressed? Along those lines, why do certain treatments like antidepressants help some people like Jesse, but not as much with others? Then there's a lot of discussion about new treatments on the horizon, psychedelics, for example.

Today, we're going to explore all of this, the inner workings of the depressed brain. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupto, CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent. This is Chasing Life. As we started to research this episode, one thing really became clear to all of us. There is a lot we don't know about depression. Despite how common it is, we still don't know exactly what causes it, and we don't know how treatments, including antidepressants, actually work. There's also a lot of debate, controversy, sometimes even misinformation when we do talk about the best way to treat depression. When it came to this topic, I knew I wanted to turn to someone I could trust.

I'm Charles Raizan. I'm a doctor. I'm a psychiatrist. I carry a title of Professor of Human Ecology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Madison. But I do some other interesting things. I am the Director of Clinical and Translational Research for an entity called USONA Institute, which is a nonprofit medical research organization that's developing psilocybin as a potential treatment for depression.

Charles and I go way back. He used to be a mental health contributor at CNN. He's a really trusted voice in this field for me and for so many others. I'll tell you this personally. I would sometimes call Charles after covering a particularly tough assignment, being in a war zone, covering a natural disaster. Those were tough times, and sometimes I'd ask his advice in terms of how to care for my own mental health. I decided I wanted to share some of his wisdom with all of you. I wanted to turn to him to talk about these topics and right off the bat, Charles said something that really surprised me, that the very origins of depression could actually go back to our evolutionary drive to survive. Depression could serve a purpose.

I actually think depression evolved as a way of helping us cope with adversity, even though it's very painful. I don't endorse depression as a good thing, but that doesn't mean that it's not always unhelpful. So a lot of the work that we did at Emory back in the days when you and I were working together was looking at inflammation and depression. And there's some really pretty interesting evidence that depression caused by inflammation across evolutionary time might have helped humans survive infection, right? And there's some interesting data that at least in certain contexts, depression may actually help people recalibrate how they're dealing with their lives, how they're dealing with other people, and begin to take more productive pathways. But if we think about it, that's thinking about it like an adaptation. One of the interesting questions is, why is depression so common if it's so maladaptive? And I think the answer is that like a lot of adaptations, like the immune system, it can over shoot. And when it overshoots, it can really cause problems. And then I think a lot of things may cause us depression now in the modern world that we just didn't evolve to cope with.

So how does someone know then that they should try to make a visit with someone like you?

If you're feeling down, if you've lost interest in life, if your sleep and your appetite are altered, if you feel hopeless, if you are having thoughts of hurting yourself, these sorts of things, that's what depression is, right? People have different combinations of them, but that's what it is. You need to come see somebody like me when those symptoms are interfering with your life. That's, I think, the simple answer, right? And especially you need to come and see me if those symptoms have been going on for a while. If something bad happens in your life and you have those symptoms for a couple of few weeks, I think people like me now increasingly think, Let's watch and see if it resolves rather than immediately pull out a pill. But if you say, Oh, I've been like this for two or three months. Yeah, it's time to go see a doctor or to go see a clinician and get help.

One of the things that we're really focused on in the podcast is trying to understand what is happening in the brain during various conditions of life. If you were to do a scan of the brain and you pick the scan, a PET scan or MRI scan, functional MRI scan, and someone who is depressed.

Could you see depression?

With an MRI scan? No. Just looking at the brain? No. Just the structure of the brain would not tell you that. But if you looked at the function of the brain with an fMRI, let's say, could I put you in it, look at it and say, Oh, my God, Sanjay, you're depressed. No, I couldn't do that. If you give me 40 people who are depressed and 40 people who are not depressed, and I do certain things in the scanner onaverage, the depressed people's brains look different to some degree, but that doesn't always pan out across studies also. For instance, if you give me a group of depressed people, there are several studies that have shown that if I put the depressed folks in the scanner and I show them pictures of faces, their brain is less likely to notice happy faces and more likely to notice scary, angry, sad faces, and they get more of an activation in an area called the amygdala down deep in the brain, as you know, which is activated by danger and threat. And there's some older work by a woman named Yvette, Shalene, showing that if you treat people with an antidepressant, their brains, that overshoot of the amygdala calms down and they start looking more like folks that aren't depressed.

So this is it, though, right? There's nothing that's anywhere near like a brain test for depression.

Is that a goal?

Or is that a lark to try and say, One day we could objectively measure depression? Or is the very nature of what we're talking about something that is immeasurable?

Well, interesting. Again, it depends what thing depression turns out to be. One possibility is that it'd be a little bit like trying to measure something like dropsy. Remember, dropsy was this disease back in the 19th century, water on the lungs. But water on the lungs turns out to be could be a heart failure, it could be pneumonia, it could be cancer. There's different reasons to produce those symptoms, right? Will we ever find a test for diagnosing depression? No, because depression is like dropsy. It's a probabilistic cloud. It's not a specific mechanistic neurobiological disorder. The problem is it has to do with to get fancy, the ontological status of depression. Depression is not a single thing that's going to yield itself to a single test. So we got to either break depression down into its component parts, if we could ever do that, or we need to think differently about depression.

One of the things that I think really inspires a conversation like this is that it is seemingly so common. I mean, nearly one in five adults diagnosed with depression at some point in their lives. That number seems to be rising.

First of all, just.

Broadly speaking, how would you characterize the state of mental health in the United States right now?

Yeah. So you've been asking me all these questions, and I've been equivocating. This is an easy one. It's bad. It's bad. Well, I mean, there's just no doubt that depression and anxiety and suicide and substance abuse have been on the rise in the United States. They've been on the rise in the United States for probably 20, 25 years, maybe longer, but they've really been on the rise over the last 10 years. And the data are really consistent. The rise is not equal amongst all age groups. The people that are really suffering are young people. So people between the ages of like 15 and 35, that's where you see this really, really disturbing increase. So something's going on in America that is really counterproductive to the emotional wellbeing, especially of young people. Not every country in the world is seeing this, but it's pretty common in industrialized societies that whatever we're doing in this zeitgeist that we're in right now may be good for productivity, but it's not good for our emotional wellbeing.

There is always this.

Question, are we more aware.

And able to identify depression, or.

Is it true that the numbers are really going up?

This is a good point. It's a complex question. They're going up, meaning that if you ask Americans the same questionnaire, the scores are rising. Now, does that mean that they're actually feeling more miserable, or does it mean that they're aware that they're feeling more miserable? But I think most of us think that people really are, in fact, more anxious and more depressed. And so, yeah, again, you see this just the same scales, these large scale surveys of American populace, and the numbers are creeping up. So yeah, I'm one of these people that thinks it's a real effect. One thing, though, that's clear is that parallel to that rates of the use of antidepressants in the United States have skyrocketed over the last 20 years, rate in line with the increase in rates of depression and suicide. So at the very least, it suggests that something's not working right. It's a thorny and frightening problem.

That.

Seems to be a big topic of discussion lately that, as you mentioned in the United States, rates of depression, suicidal behavior, anxieties have all gone up. Interestingly, even before the pandemic, life expectancy in the United States had gone down, and one of the top drivers of premature death was suicide. At the same time, we're taking more drugs, including antidepressants than ever before.

So despite the.

Fact that we have higher rates of depression, we take more medications, the numbers just keep getting worse. If someone were to piece that together, visit from another planet and say, Hey, what's going on here?.

That would not make sense.

Yes. The question of the use of antidepressants, which are the first line treatment for depression in the United States, is incredibly complex. Whenever I start with this, I always start by saying anybody that's worked as a psychiatrist or in mental health knows that these agents, standard antidepressants have man, they are lifesavers for some folks. But as we've gone along in the last 20 years, we've had to metabolize the field a number of very hard truths about antidepressants and their effectiveness. One hard truth and the most obvious one is that they don't work nearly as well as we thought they did 30 years ago. And in fact, they probably... Give me a whole group of depressed people and let me start an antidepressant and have them take it every day, probably 30 % max are going to get a full response and probably another 20 %, 25 % are going to feel better. And there's going to be a bunch of people that really don't get much benefit. Now that's a huge problem. And studies we now know from studies that the first one didn't work, so we're going to try a second one. Okay, but by the time you're doing third and fourth, your chances of responding go down, down, down.

So it's like there's a group of people that are antidepressant responsive, and then there's a lot of people that aren't really very antidepressant responsive, and that's a problem. And there is some evidence, not much talked about that at least sometimes antidepressants might set you up for having more depression if you decide to stop them. And that is something to worry about. And I talk about this often just because the data are not conclusive, but they're concerning, right? It really highlights the fact that it's a good thing we have treatments, but man, we need to keep looking for new treatments for these things because there's a lot of room for improvement.

Is depression a chemical imbalance?

Not the way that it's meant colloquially, meaning that I can't look into your brain like a dipstick and measure your serotonin or your norepinephrin. No, in fact, the vast majority of people depression don't have obvious measurable abnormalities in any brain chemicals. Nowadays, I think many of us think that if there is a brain thing that we can understand, probably has to do more with how the brain areas talk to each other. So no, I think that it's becoming increasingly clear that these older simple ideas of chemical imbalance, they don't fit the data very well.

Yeah, it's a nice narrative, right? I think, again, and we like narratives. We like to hear that your cholesterol is too high and that's going to cause you to have heart disease. Your serotonin is too low, so we'll give you an SSRI, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor just to keep your serotonin around longer, and that should help. But it's interesting. On one hand, I was reading an article that said you can give aspirin for pain, and that should help your pain. But that doesn't mean you're aspirin-deficient. You can give serotonin or you can create more serotonin for your brain. It doesn't necessarily mean you're serotonin-deficient, even if that serotonin does help alleviate your symptoms of depression. I know that sounds like maybe talking in circles, but I think it makes the point that you're making, which is it's very hard to call this a chemical imbalance. Even if a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, SSRI works, it doesn't necessarily mean there was a chemical imbalance. It meant that getting more serotonin actually just made you feel better.

That's right. But there's an implication of that, which is that, yeah, antidepressants are not doing something natural. So it's not that your serotonin is low, so we're just going to fill your tank. It's that if you give people an agent that pushes serotonin signaling in the brain for some group of depressed people, it makes them feel better. But that antidepressant is pushing on the brain to make them have that benefit, which again, is why when people take away the antidepressant, rates of relapse are probably so high because the brain was needing that push of the medication. The medication was not restoring some pre-existing balance that was lost. It's doing something novel to make the person feel better.

Look, it's all still pretty mysterious in reality, but I've got to say, I do like the way Charles approaches all of this. It's important to acknowledge that for some people like Jesse, who you heard from earlier, antidepressants not only work, they're a lifeline. But at the same time, there is data to show it's definitely not a one size fits all treatment, and we're not even entirely sure why or how they even work. That's why, after the break, Dr. Raisson and I are going to talk about other options, newer options on the horizon, including psychedelics.

They are probably the most interesting development in the treatment of mood and anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, probably alcohol and drug abuse that I've seen in the 40 years, the 30, 40 years that I've been a psychiatrist.

That's a significant statement coming from you.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it's quite remarkable.

We're going to talk about the future of depression treatment in just a moment. But before we go, a reminder. If you or someone you love is struggling, there's help available for you right now. You can call the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline anytime, 988.

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One of the things that's come up quite a bit is psychedelics, and this is an area of interest of yours as well.

I got to say, it's.

Pretty compelling. I'm pretty conservative on these things, even on cannabis. It took me a while to fully appreciate, which I do now, the medical benefits that cannabis can offer for certain things.

What about psychedelics?

You're a well-regarded, well-known psychiatrist in this country. I listen to you. You're the guy I go to. What do you think about psychedelics and depression?

You've come to the right place, actually, because this is what I spend much of my life doing these days, is trying to understand do psychedelics work? What do they work for? And then how do they work? One of the hats I wear is directing research for a very novel medical research organization called Yusona Institute, which is one of the entities in the world that's working to get FDA approval for psilocybin, which is a psychedelic as a treatment for major depression.

This is mushrooms?

It's the psychedelic substance in mushrooms. We produce the psilocybin, as do other commercial entities. We produce it. So it's.

A synthesized substance, but it's based on what's in mushrooms.

Exactly. It's the same thing. We just did this 104-person study with people who were really depressed, gave them a single high dose of psilocybin with psychosocial support. Huge improvement in their depression. One dose, and the study lasted for six weeks. At the end of six weeks, a lot of the folks that were really depressed were significantly better with the psilocybin. And this has now been shown over and over again. There are now just a handful, a growing handful of studies, some of them, like ours, fairly large, showing that a single high dose of psilocybin produces a very rapid, very robust and sustainable antidepressant effect. I'm one of these people that thinks that although these agents are going to have their challenges, of which there are many, and they're going to have their risks, they are probably the most interesting development in the treatment of mood and anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, probably alcohol and drug abuse that I've seen in the 40 years that 30, 40 years that I've been a psychiatrist.

That's a significant statement coming from you.

Oh, yeah. It's quite remarkable.

What do psychedelics do in the brain that causes such a benefit when it comes to depression?

Yeah, we don't fully know. But it's interesting. The most consistently observed predictor of response is not at this point a brain measure, it's actually a behavioral measure. So psychedelics are very different. Prozac, Paxlo, whatever, the SSRIs, you're depressed, you start taking them and maybe you feel a little bit weird because they have side effects. And if they work, you feel better in a couple of weeks, but you don't know why you feel better. It's not like you had a Urika, aha moment. Psychodelics is totally different, though. So in our studies, you come in, I give you a 25-milligram dose of psilocybin, almost everybody is now going to have a very intense psychedelic experience. And those experiences tend not to be random. They tend to have characteristics that if those characteristics occur, people are going to be undepressed afterwards. And so, for instance, one of the things that psychedelics tend to do is they induce these things called mystical experiences, which are really the states where people feel much more deeply connected than they had previously to other things, to the universe, to God, to other people. They have this feeling that their lives are meaningful in ways that they didn't realize before, and this fills them often with this sense of joy.

They're like, Wow, I am meaningfully part of something larger that matters that's going someplace good. When that happens during the psychedelic experience after you take the drug, the more that happens, the more likely you are to be undepressed six weeks later, six months later. And then the other thing that psychedelics do is quite interesting is that they tend to bring people face to face with the issues that they're dealing with. So one of the things we know about depression is when you're depressed, you tend to avoid things that are very painful, and you get depressed because you avoid things that are very painful. Psychotics interrupt that process. So if you're struggling, if you're depressed because you're feeling bad about yourself because of something, psychedelics will very often put that something right in front of your face. And this can be very, very difficult for people. And so many people in our studies that have depression will really have a rough go during the psychedelic experience. They'll cry. It's just emotionally very powerful. There's no escape. It's not like I could say, Oh, I'm just going to forget about it. If that happens to you and if you deal with it, if you face the problem, if you feel like you've either faced it in a way that's going to let you make a change or faced it in a way that's going to let you accept something that you cannot change, in the field it's called emotional breakthrough.

And if that happens, people are also much less likely to be depressed and anxious weeks and weeks later. That's the thing we know about these agents at this point, is that it seems like there's something... It's more like psychotherapy in that regard. This is where sometimes people think it's like a year of psychotherapy in a day. It recalibrates how you see your life.

This eureka moment Dr. Raisson is describing highlights, I think, a key difference in the way traditional SSRIs work versus psychedelics in terms of treating depression. Compared to SSRIs, psychedelics are going to work much faster and they're going to appear to have longer-lasting effects. That's because they seem to ignite this explosive neuroplastic response. Your brain just starts to light up all over the place, and it causes the brain to create these entirely new pathways, or at least unobstruct existing pathways making these connections between parts of the brain that normally don't communicate much. For example, he said, The feelings we keep buried away in the emotional centers of the brain, they suddenly pop into conscious awareness. Think about that. You keep these things buried away, you take this psychedelic, according to Dr. Ryson, and all of a sudden, those things that were inhibited, that were buried, pop into our conscious awareness. Another key difference, Dr. Ryson said, is that unlike an antidepressant pill that you have to take every day, psychedelics appear, and I want to be careful here because this is still new science, but psychedelics appear to set something in motion in our brains that somehow stays in motion.

It becomes self-sustaining, so you don't have to take them frequently, certainly not every day. Charles referred to SSRIs, again, these selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, these antidepressants, he referred to them as a gas grill that will go out if you don't keep giving it gas. Psychodelics, he said, are more like a campfire. Once you light it, it burns for a while. Now look, again, these findings are promising, but there's still a lot we don't know about how psychedelics treat depression, just like we don't know how antidepressants really work. There's also the question that a lot of you are probably immediately asking about the federal regulations.

We and everybody else in the space working to get FDA approval is synthesizing these agents to this insane purity that you have to do for the Food and Drug Administration. And we're doing the studies that if they're positive, traditionally cause the FDA to say, Okay, we're going to give you approval to use this medicine. I think it's very clear that because psychedelics induce these very powerful, acute, psychedelic, what are colloquially called trips, they're never going to be agents that you take at home on a Saturday morning. Almost certainly they will be administered in a clinical setting where there's safety. They will be administered with people that are in the room with you in case you really start struggling. But these are hurdles. There's some real challenges there.

I remember back when I was a medical student, there were some papers that were actually written about hypothermia and actually patients who are in acute crisis, mental health crisis, to actually use hypothermia. What you've written about is the effectiveness of heat therapy. Is this something that can work? Oh, yes.

Hypothermia? Yes. Oh, yes. This is another thing that I often tell people I spend my research life just trying to retread ancient practices. We're talking about psychedelics. They've been around for thousands of years. Heat has been a healing modality in almost every culture for millennia, all of Native Americans and all sweat lodges and the baths in Asia. So we've known for a long time that heat has beneficial properties. Cold, though, probably does, too. And I've got a colleague out in Colorado, Christopher Lowry, who's showing that in animal models, cold and heat have very similar signaling capacities on the brain. And now some of my colleagues have done studies showing that if you're depressed, that I can put you in a machine of one sort or other that will elevate your body temperature. We like to get people up to about 101.3 Fahrenheit, which is 38.5. Centimeter is hot. If you're pouring sweat, it's really hot. But if I do that, and if I do that in a group of depressed people very reliably, their depression scores dropped by about half. Some people get much better than that. And the biggest study that we've done, we gave people a single treatment, their scores dropped considerably and they stayed down.

They stayed improved for six weeks. So this is another one of these more ancient ways of doing things that I think can be spruce up and be another option for folks. But people now, of course, they ask me about it because we've really shown that there seems to be something here. And what I tell people is if you go to the sauna and you feel better, if you can stand doing it by yourself, just a regular old rectal thermometer, put yourself in the heat and monitor your body temperature a couple of times, see what it feels like to get up to about 101.3, and then try to do it, because we know, we look at people in our studies very carefully, and there's a dose-response relationship. You do get more of an antidepressant response at higher temperatures. Frankly, it's worth doing. I do this all the time. You do? Oh, yeah. I've got a steam shower, and I used it every day. For me, it's huge.

When you listen to Charles and other psychiatrists talking about the new treatments on the horizon for depression, you can't help but realize that what was old can be new again. We're talking about plants, we're talking about heat, we're talking about ancient traditions. In some ways, I think that should make you feel a little bit more hopeful. Don't get me wrong, the statistics, the rising rates of depression that we talked about, that is real. That is something we have to pay attention to. Right now, it feels like the world around us is pretty inflamed. But at the same time, as Charles points out, at this point in history, there are more treatments for depression than ever before, and there are many more promising treatments on the way.

But what I like about psychedelics and what I like about hypothermia is they share something in common that I think is a potential path forward as we think about novel treatments for depression, which is this, unlike a pill that you take every day that the brain then accommodates to and begins to push against, psychedelics and hypothermia, but especially psychedelics, seem to set their drugs. They're very powerful drugs. They come from the outside. They set something in motion, but then they're gone. And whatever they've set in motion stays in motion, and it becomes something that becomes self-sustaining within the mind, body, brain complex. It requires oxygen and things from the environment like everything does, but it has a self-sustaining life of its own. Psychodics like the match. They seem to light something, and then the fire burns for a while. I think that metaphor is one that we should take more seriously in terms of trying to identify new treatments.

That makes a lot of sense. I'll stick with me for sure. Let me just ask you in closing. I'm very diligent about exercise. I know exercise can help new brain connections, more BDNF. It's called brain-derived neurotrophic factor. I meditate every day now. I know that can help with feelings of stress and anxiety. I'm really diligent about sleep. As busy as you and I both are, my guess is you're diligent about sleep as well. You told me just now you also do steam showers to try and raise your body temperature.

But I have a.

Terrible history of a family history of heart disease.

I do all these.

Things to ward that off.

To prevent.

Mental illness, mental health problems later in life. What should I be doing? What do you do?

Well, all the above. So everything you said is those are all fantastic things, right? So if I had a short list, you've just named a bunch of the short list. The thing that I do, in addition to that, that I found very helpful is to work on developing an attitude of thankfulness for the fact that I exist, thankfulness for the people in my life, trying to foster a... I'm looking out the window and it's a beautiful autumn day up here in Wisconsin, trying to foster this sense of wonder that in this crazy, amazing universe, we're here and we're conscious. I have this idea that there are certain mental states that make depression impossible. Grief is possible in those states, but not depression. It's just it's very hard to get to those states. But we talk about psychedelics. Psychodelics often put people in those states, at least briefly. So that's the other thing I do, is I really try to foster that sense of wonder and gratitude. That, for me, helps a lot. That and the steam showers, they help me a great deal.

Steamy.

Showers and gratitude. What I like about these two parting pieces of advice from Dr. Rysan is that these are small things anyone can try. And just a reminder, of course, that this isn't going to help with all kinds of depression. If you or someone you love is seriously struggling, there can be help available for you. You can call the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline anytime, 988. Also, we'd like to hear from you. Give us a call. What are some tips that have helped you care for your mental health? Give us a call 470-396-0832. Your message could help others, could be featured on an upcoming episode of the podcast. Plus, next week, we're going to dive into the world of dating apps or introducing apps, as they are.

Now.

Called. How have they changed how we find love? And what is all that swiping doing to your brain? The answers might surprise you.

The.

Brain is built to.

Love, and all these dating sites, introducing sites are built for only one thing: introduce you to people.

So that.

You can.

Then.

Pick up the.

Ball and.

Move it down the road.

That's next time on Chasing Life. Thanks for listening. Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Aaron.

Matheson, Madeline Thompson, David.

Reind, and Grace Walker. Our senior producer and showrunner is Felicia Petinkin. Andrea Cain is our medical writer and Tommy Bazarion is our engineer. Dan de Jula is our technical director and the executive producer of CNN Audio. This is Steve Lick-Tie. Special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealy, and Nadia Kunang of CNNHealth.

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