Dopamine Management: The Neural Hack to Contentment

Do you ever find yourself mindlessly scrolling through social media for hours on end? How about binge-watching a full season of your favorite TV show in one sitting? Ever opened a slab of chocolate to eat a block or two, and before you know it, you’ve inhaled the entire thing?

Are you a workaholic, adrenaline junkie, or even chronically stressed? 

If you’re anything like me (or even just remotely human), there’s a good chance you can relate to at least one of these patterns of behaviour. And while most of these activities aren’t inherently unhealthy, you’ll notice a key commonality tying them all together – excess!

Engaging in any such activity or consuming any substance in a compulsive manner is a clear sign of unhealthy dopamine-seeking behavior (we reference this term often, so let’s abbreviate it to UDSB for ease of reference).

The good news is it’s within your power to break any of these unhealthy behaviors through knowledge and self-awareness! 

The difference between healthy and unhealthy forms of dopamine stimulation at healthy substitutes, and what can be done to free yourself from dopamine slavery.

In today’s article, we look into this issue of UDSB and how these can be avoided to improve your general quality of life. We’ll explore the following topics:

The biology behind dopamine. If you’re not particularly interested in the science behind it, feel free to skip this part.

The mechanism of dopamine, how it functions in your body, and why it’s so important to be mindful of the stimuli you expose yourself to.

First – A brief look at the biology behind it all:

Dopamine is an essential neurotransmitter, a type of chemical messenger transferring information between the different structures in the brain and body. 

Dopamine plays a key role in several vital bodily functions:

1. Movement Control: Dopamine is crucial for coordinating smooth and controlled movements. It is significantly involved in the function of the basal ganglia, a group of nuclei in the brain associated with motor control. In Parkinson’s disease, the loss of dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra leads to the characteristic motor symptoms such as tremors, rigidity, and bradykinesia (slowness of movement).
2. Reward and Pleasure: Dopamine is often referred to as the “feel-good” neurotransmitter. It plays a key role in the brain’s reward system, reinforcing behaviors by making them pleasurable. When an individual experiences something rewarding, such as eating delicious food or achieving a goal, dopamine levels increase, promoting feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.
3. Cognition and Attention: Dopamine is involved in several cognitive functions, including attention, learning, and memory. It affects the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in complex cognitive behavior, decision-making, and moderating social behavior.
4. Regulation of Prolactin: Dopamine inhibits the release of prolactin from the anterior pituitary gland. Prolactin is a hormone involved in lactation and reproductive functions in the female body.

We start getting into the thick of the science now, so feel free to skip to the next section if this is not for you. 

Dopamine follows a cycle of synthesis storage, release, and disposal/recycling:

1. Synthesis: Dopamine is produced by neurons located at the base of the brain (substantia nigra and ventral tegmental areas) in two phases.
   1. Phase 1, the amino acid tyrosine is converted into a second amino acid, known as L-dopa. The body acquires tyrosine in two ways:
      1. It’s either produced from another amino acid called phenylalanine.
      2. Or it’s taken in through diet via beans, nuts, oats, and wheat (for our vegan and vegetarian friends), as well as from dairy products, meats, fish and eggs (for our omnivores).
   2.  Phase 2, L-dopa is converted by enzyme action (decarboxylation) into dopamine. 
2. Storage: From there, dopamine is stored in tiny bubbles called synaptic vesicles within presynaptic neurons inside nerve cells, waiting to be released when needed. Let’s put this in simpler terms using emailing as a metaphor. If information is being transmitted between two neurons (communication between two people via email):
   1. The presynaptic neuron is the starting point (the sender of the email)
   2. The synapse is the gap between the two communicators that facilitates the transfer of information (the internet and your email service provider).
   3. The postsynaptic neuron is the recipient of the neural signal (the person to whom the email is addressed).
3. Release: Certain outside stimuli, such as actions that cause feelings of happiness or achievement, trigger our brains to send a signal (much like clicking “send” in an email) which causes these vesicles to release the “bubble” stores of dopamine into the small gap between nerve cells called the synapse (or synaptic cleft).
4. Receptor Binding (dopamine in action): Dopamine then binds to special receptors on nearby nerve cells (the postsynaptic neuron, or email recipient), which helps carry the signal forward. This process is essential for functions like movement, motivation, and feeling pleasure.
5. Reuptake and Recycling: After dopamine has done its job, it is cleared from the synaptic cleft primarily through reuptake into the presynaptic neuron. This process is mediated by the dopamine transporter (DAT), which transports dopamine back into the presynaptic neuron.
6. Metabolism and Breakdown: Dopamine that’s no longer needed is either stored for reuse or broken down by enzymes into other chemicals, which are eventually washed out of the body through urine.
   1. The breakdown of dopamine occurs through the action of two main enzymes:
      1. Monoamine Oxidase (MAO):
         1. This enzyme exists in two forms, MAO-A (expressed in heart, placenta, and intestines) and MAO-B (expressed in brain, liver cells, and platelets). 
         2. It degrades dopamine into dihydroxyphenylacetic acid (DOPAC).
      2. Catechol-O-Methyltransferase (COMT):
         1. Chiefly produced by nerve cells in the brain, this enzyme further metabolizes DOPAC into homovanillic acid (HVA), which is then excreted in the urine.

Next – Looking at dopamine’s mechanism:

Anna Lembke, an American psychiatrist and Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University wrote a book called “Dopamine Nation: Balance in the Age of Indulgence” in which she explores the modern world’s struggle with addiction and the pursuit of pleasure. More to the point, she highlights how the overabundance of pleasurable stimuli leads to widespread addiction and mental health issues in modern society.

According to Dr. Lembke, humans release a tonic (standard/baseline/healthy) level of dopamine in the brain which she referred to as the “heartbeat of the brain”. 

She goes on to discuss how the intake of certain stimuli results in the “rewards of dopamine release” in the body. An example of experiments done on rats shows how the intake of chocolate increases the release of dopamine in the body by up to 55% above this baseline level. More potent stimuli such as sex, nicotine, cocaine and amphetamine were shown to increase the baseline release of dopamine up to between 100 and 1000% above baseline! Crazy right?

The key issue is how we approach pleasure and pain. While we actively seek out pleasure and reflexively avoid pain, we’re beginning to understand that a more mindful and balanced approach is required for healthy living.

Pleasure and pain processing centers are located in the same part of the brain, showing they’re more interlinked than we realize. Because they’re two opposing forces acting on the same point, your reward pathway can be thought of as functioning as a balance scale, or seesaw. This means any activity resulting in pleasure will tip the balance in one direction, while activities resulting in pain tip the balance in the opposite direction.

The balance of this scale is subject to specific rules, three of which are relevant to today’s article:

1. The balance naturally and always seeks to be level. This is referred to as homeostasis and it’s a rule that governs many functions of your body.
2. Continued UDSB results in long term decrease in positive gains and an increase in severity and duration of the dopamine deficit state.
3. Neuroadaptation causes your brain to forever remember the process enacted to reach homeostasis under the condition of unhealthy levels of dopamine stimulus.

The problem with your body’s attempt to reach homeostasis is it does not return you to your baseline state instantaneously. Instead, it’s going to match the level of the initial pleasure stimulus, but on the opposite side of the scale.

Let’s visualize this more practically:

• Imagine your pleasure/pain scale has a maximum pleasure rating of +10 on the left end, and a maximum pain rating of -10 on the right, with 0 (homeostasis or baseline) falling exactly in the middle.
• Now imagine you’ve partaken in an activity or consumed a substance that brings you pleasure (let’s use chocolate in this example).
• Imagine you’ve eaten a block of chocolate and it pushes your pleasure rating all the way up to +10.
• What happens next (in the absence of further pleasure stimuli) is your body will fight to reach homeostasis by enacting a nearly equal but opposite reaction that pushes your reward pathway scale closer to -10.
• This is the moment where you’ll mostly likely begin engaging in UDSB:
  • Because your body doesn’t want to be in this state of “pain” and because you have a ‘quick fix’ readily available in the form of chocolate, your instinct will be to eat another block.
  • If you allow this to continue, you’ll find yourself in a continuous oscillation between the two extremes of your reward pathway. Now, you’re stuck in a perpetual cycle, moving between +10 level pleasure stimulus provided by the chocolate, and the -10 level ‘pain’ reaction exerted by your body in its battle to return to a baseline state.
• Repeated exposure to high-dopamine activities alters brain chemistry and structure.
  • Your brain adapts to the scenarios not only in its response, but also by remembering how it previously reacted to a problem so a ‘resolution’ is met more quickly the next time the issue arises (not unlike the immune response in your body). 
  • Your body more consistently pushes the scale to the -10 side of the balance and this is when you find yourself in a state of ‘addiction’. 
  • This change in brain chemistry (or neuroadaptation) makes it more difficult to find pleasure in your everyday activities and increases your dependency on these stimuli, resulting in addictive behavior patterns.
  • When in this state, your drug of choice now only brings you back to baseline rather than bringing you pleasure, and you need ever-increasing amounts to bring you back to a state of pleasure.

• The resulting neuroadaptation also creates cravings outside of the addictive behavior itself.
  • This means that you don’t need the intake of the stimulus itself to start a dopamine oscillation in your body, something as simple as a trigger that leads to the expectation of a stimulus is enough to kick-start the process.
  • Going back to our chocolate example: imagine you’ve been a little off-the-rails and you’ve been eating way too much chocolate lately. You’ve made a concerted effort to remove it from your diet, and you’ve done really well for the past week. However, it’s the weekend, your bestie has invited you for a meal at your favourite breakfast spot, and this place just so happens to have an amazing bakery. They keep all their confectioneries on display at the front of the house, and as you walk in, you spot the most incredible-looking, chocolate-stuffed croissant you’ve ever seen in your life. You’re not a particularly huge fan of croissants, but it’s on your mind throughout the entire meal, and by the time you leave, you crack, break your chocolate fast and buy it, cursing yourself for your lack of willpower and your friend for landing you in this mess in the first place.
  • So what exactly went wrong? In short, just seeing that ‘drug of choice’ was enough to cause a spike in your dopamine levels. As we know by now, the resulting reaction in your body is of equal magnitude but on the opposite end of your reward pathway balance. Now, you find yourself in a dopamine deficit. This is why you feel this strong craving to alleviate that sense of ‘pain’ and why people often fail the test of willpower. 

• The dangers of this sort of behavior are clear: engage in this sort of activity daily, and in no time you’ll find yourself suffering from any number of ailments ranging from minor to life-threatening.
• The good news is that it’s completely within your power to save yourself from this dopamine deficit state (-10 on the scale) and to avoid landing yourself in a state of poor health or addiction – all it takes is a little mindfulness and willpower!
  • If you can avoid eating the second block of chocolate, your body will again release dopamine to push the scale back to the positive end in its inevitable and unavoidable pursuit of homeostasis.
  • By allowing your pain/pleasure scale to oscillate naturally, it will eventually bring you back to baseline.
• The key is knowing when to stop and accepting that life is equal parts pleasure and pain.