Neuro Athletes,

What are we really doing when we scroll through this email or when we look at our phones?

Every minute, every thirty seconds. Update, political scandal. Update, celebrity gossip. Update, outrage. Update, Black Friday sale starting early. Trigger. Surge. Release. Reward. Whoosh. High. Crash. Repeat. You’ve felt it and I’ve felt, so there’s no need to deny it. The little soaring adrenalin rush of finding a better deal, date, time, pleasure. We’ve built a dopamine economy. It’s profoundly addictive, deeply toxic for us as both people societies, and it’s high time to begin grappling with that.

I recently interviewed Dr. Anna Lembke on The Neuro Experience podcast and i learnt everything about dopamine. One of the most rewarding feats of the podcast (pun intended) was her dopamine fasting method which I will putline below.

Here’s a sneak peak at this topic that I posted on Instagram recently.

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Primer

Dopamine (DA) plays a vital role in reward and movement regulation in the brain. In the reward pathway, the production of DA takes place in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), in nerve cell bodies. From there, it is released into the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex.

DA plays multiple functions in the brain. It’s involved in the modulation of behavior and cognition; voluntary movement; motivation; punishment and reward; inhibition of prolactin production; sleep; dreaming; mood; attention; working memory; and learning.

Dopamine is why we achieve….

Dopamine is released whenever you predict a reward ie. hitting play on your favorite song or getting a notification on your phone. This is why you carry your phone everywhere … even when you’re in the house.

As you move towards the reward, your brain secretes dopamine to keep you focused.

Like cold is the absence of heat, boredom and lack of motivation is just a lack of dopamine.

Your brain feels like whatever you’re doing is not worth the reward or it feels like you can be doing better things.

The brain is a dopamine fiend, but it’s lazy. It will seek out the easiest path to get its fix. But this is not always aligned with our goals.

You’re hit with a deadline. You’re not enthralled with the work so you surf the web, check your phone, do your chores, anything to avoid doing actual work. “Easy” achievements.

Dopamine and Technology

Let’s use Instagram and Facebook as a tiny case study. What really happens?

You, the user, sees something impossibly glittering, an impossibly beautiful, rich, accomplished person. The dopamine crackles. You get your reward. Wow! How amazing and glamorous life can be! But now something dangerous has happened, too: your expectations have been set impossibly high, all the way to perfection. Because the truth is that even those perfect people struggle with despair and misery and longing, just like you. 

Why the hell else would they be sharing their lives like that? They want your approval, respect, admiration, too. So you click like, heart, share, and now the dopamine crackles for them, too. Surges, They get their reward. And they have to be a little more perfect every time to get it, just as you have to end up a little more depressed each time to give it.

How about a more extreme case study….

Cocaine.

It deregulates your brain’s dopamine stabilizers so you’ll secrete more dopamine than usual. It makes for some crazy nights, but when you go back to your crappy 9–5, everything becomes more dull. Nothing is the same anymore.

It’s a classic high peak, low valley situation.

After the cocaine use, the brain has to balance out dopamine secretion by releasing lower levels of dopamine for every other activity. Elongated use will eventually lead to “real-life just isn’t enough anymore.”

Dopamine and Parkinson’s Disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, affecting millions of individuals. The cardinal motor symptoms of PD are caused by the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra (SN) that modulate basal ganglia circuits regulating habitual and goal-directed movement.

Dopamine is released from two areas in the brain and when it comes to PD, the loss of dopamine is from the SN which is a different impact to the loss of dopamine in patients with addiction, depression and anxiety.

Enter the 30 day dopamine fast

Anna: I’ve been recommending a 30-day absence trial for my patients for 20 years, and I think there’s a lot of merit in it. I ask patients to identify the drug, or drugs, with which they have a problem of compulsive over-consumption, and to eliminate that drug for a month, knowing that they’ll feel worse before they feel better. The goal, essentially, is to do a kind of personalized biological experiment to discover whether or not, by resetting their reward pathways, they can feel better.

And the beauty of the intervention is that about 80 percent of my patients come back feeling better—just by eliminating their drug of choice, without me having to prescribe a pill or do any kind of in-depth psychoanalysis. It’s just, “Nope, cut this drug out of your life for 30 days, and you will feel better.” And most people do. That’s really powerful, because then I don’t have to persuade them anymore that they should temper their use or even potentially abstain long-term. People collect their own data and see the impact. So now I just have to coach and observe and support as people try to figure out the next step: “Do I want to continue to abstain, or can I reintegrate the substance back into my life with moderation?”

Check out the episode with Dr Anna Lembke here

Until next time,

Louisa x