Hi and welcome to the Mindful Shape podcast. I’m Paula Parker, and I'm a life coach specializing in weight loss. So I’m all about figuring out how we can optimize what we know about how our brain works to achieve our natural weight and get out of mind drama around food. One area that really interests me is neuroscience and so I went really in the weeds doing research for this episode and I’m going to summarize hours and hours of learning about neurobiology for you in the context of weight loss. I know that for me, when I understand what’s happening in my brain and body, it not only helps me do what I need to do practically, it also really takes away the shame and guilt about overeating. 

So we’re going to nerd out today, but I’ve simplified it down so that by the end of today you’ll understand….

What dopamine does and why it’s important to know about

How to harness dopamine for weight loss

The neuroscience basis for embracing the journey

The neuroscience behind being in a rut

I’m going to be referencing the work of some very smart people whom you may want to check out yourself. Both are Standford professors.  One is Dr. Andrew Huberman and the other is the author of Dopamine Nation which I’m listening to right now on Audible, Dr. Anna Lembke. I’ll link to both of them in the show notes for you in case you want to go into more depth on their research.

What Dopamine Is 

So let’s talk about dopamine. Dopamine is not only responsible for how you feel right now, in this moment but also how you’ll feel an hour from now. 

You’re probably familiar with the idea of dopamine hits - like that pleasure sensation you get from a lick of ice cream or something. But what I’ve learned is that’s actually a very narrow understanding of dopamine and after listening to this episode, I think you’ll really appreciate knowing the full story PLUS you’ll be fully equipped to impress your partner with all your new neuroscience acumen over dinner tonight. So here we go.

Dopamine is a neuromodulator. Which means it’s coordinating neuron activity. It determines which circuits in your brain will be active and which will be inactive. So it’s very powerful because it has this broad effect which is why it can affect our energy and our confidence in whether we think we can achieve something or not. 

For example adrenaline and dopamine often work together. Adrenaline or epinephrine is responsible for energy and dopamine colors the subjective experience of an activity. So for example, adrenaline without context is perceived as fear. But Adrenaline with dopamine is excitement. Many years ago I went to an amusement park in Ontario called Wonderland and I went on a ride that was mimicking an elevator in free fall. Now think of how terrifying this experience is without the context, the safety of knowing it’s a ride. It’s the same physical experience of the body but sheer terror without the dopamine from providing context. 

This is so important to know when it comes to our thought work because of course WE get to provide the context right? And this is how we can harness dopamine. But I’ll talk more about this later and give you very specific ways you can start optimizing your dopamine system.

Dopamine is often associated with pleasure but it’s more accurate to think of it as drive. Your dopamine system is the primary determinant of your levels of motivation, desire and your willingness to push through difficulty. So important when it comes to weight loss right? 

All animals have this same system and it’s responsible for drive - for the desire to consume. It makes us look outside ourselves and pursue things outside ourselves. So if you’ve ever found yourself with energy to go to the store at 9pm and get snacks or bake cookies, it was driven by dopamine. Or if you’ve had one cookie and then wanted another right after, that’s dopamine too. Same things goes for your willingness to achieve and go after your weight loss goals. Dopamine will help you create a healthy food plan for the week and sign up for a meditation class. 

No motivation = low dopamine state

Lots of motivation = high dopamine

So you might be wondering now, is dopamine a good thing and I want more or a bad thing if it’s getting me to get off the couch and make cookies at 9 o’clock on a Tuesday night? The answer is more nuanced than that. Dopamine feels good - when our brain is flooded with dopamine or when it’s released even a little bit, we feel a pleasurable sensation so on the one hand we do want to ensure we have it. But there’s a downside to too much dopamine. 

Dopamine is something you don’t want too high or too low for too long. It’s all about staying in a dynamic range and that’s because of the Pleasure Pain Balance. So let’s talk about how this works because it’s so so interesting and really relevant to overeating and snacking. Then I’ll share how we can actively manage this system.

Dopamine System: Pleasure Pain balance

I want you to picture one of those balance scales. They’re also known as Scales of Justice. They have the stand in the middle and two scales or plates on either side. This is a dopamine balance scale and on one side is pleasure and on the other side is pain. Pleasure and pain are collocated in our brain that means the same parts of the brain that process pleasure, process pain and they work together like a balance scale. So imagine this balance scale is at rest meaning it’s parallel with the earth - Let’s say this is it’s baseline - where it’s level, where it’s perfectly balanced and this is where it wants to be at all times. Now remember that term baseline because I’ll be referencing later on. Your baseline is where your dopamine levels are set and that can change. It is also related to genetics. So if you can think of someone who’s always been really motivated and energized all the time, it’s likely their baseline is set higher than average. 

When we do something pleasurable or rewarding like eating a cookie or finishing a work project, we put pressure on the side of pleasure and when we do something painful like stub our toe, there’s pressure on the side of pain. 

As you can imagine when we put pressure one side of this balance it goes down and the other side goes up in equal measure. The dopamine system in our brain works the same way. The brain will work very hard to restore balance because our bodies like homeostasis. 

So when you eat a cookie, have a glass of wine, I want you to imagine you’re piling those things on your dopamine scale, on the pleasure side and that releases dopamine. Then your brain restores balance and it does this by putting pressure on the pain side in an equal and opposite amount. And this can happen very quickly. That’s that moment of wanting just one more cookie, another glass of wine, one more episode of Too Hot to Handle (don’t pretend you’re not watching it). 

In that moment your brain is pressing hard to the pain side in order to even things out and there’s a strong urge to elevate that discomfort with instant pleasure by simply watching another episode, having another cookie. This is the neuroscience of urges. It’s not that you lack willpower - it’s that your brain is functioning normally. Your brain is trying to balance out its dopamine levels again.

This is where allowing your urges comes in. If we wait a little bit, even ten minutes, that intense discomfort and longing will go away and our dopamine balance will naturally be restored. The balance scale goes back to being balanced again. And we want that to happen because when it’s balanced, it’s more sensitive to small amounts of pain and pleasure. 

So think of it like this, when it’s balanced, those natural pleasures like reading a good novel, petting your dog or having a bath all feel really pleasurable. It only requires a little pressure to get a release of dopamine and feel good. 

When we don’t wait and allow that urge, when we go for another cookie, another glass of wine or another episode, we make ourselves less sensitive to dopamine. So think of it this way, the pleasure side is getting heavier with another cookie and so the pain side of the balance scale is getting heavier too and as it gets heavier, it requires a longer to rebalance. Meaning you’re in pain longer. With repeated exposure to the stimuli, we down regulate our dopamine receptors, meaning what once gave us pleasure no longer does it and we need more and more.

We need more and more on that pleasure side to get that scale to move from the pain side up. And now it takes longer and longer for us to wait for that balance to get restored. So it’s really hard to experience pleasure when we’re not eating the sweets. Without more and more, we experience all the pain, the withdrawal, insomnia, dysphoria. All around, the river of misery. We’re even worse off than before we ate the first cookie.

It’s really important to know that the extent to which that pain side of the scale drops is proportional to how high it peaked. So that’s why things that really spike our dopamine like sugar and flour cause us to want more and more - it’s big on pleasure then big on pain. This is also true in other areas of life. 

I got married almost 5 years ago now in Tofino and we had a really small wedding - immediate family only. This was pre covid but we it just suited our personalities to have something quiet and intimate. And maybe you can think back to the days following your wedding. Did you mood drop? Were you a little down? Maybe that’s why they invented honeymoons who know. Because after a big event - a big emotional high, you’ll inevitably experience a low. Now you know this was completely  due to a drop in dopamine - your dopamine system - that balance scale leveling out. Some of us experience that drop more quickly and more dramatically but everyone experiences that drop.

So this is natural and normal. Imagine if you were getting married every weekend - how many weddings would you have until you experienced zero dopamine from this experience? Probably not many. Our brain’s aren’t designed to keep doing the same peaked pleasurable experience over and over again.

So imagine you’re eating sugar every day and that pleasure side of the scale is getting super heavy, then you remove the sugar completely. Immediately that pain side will slam down because the pain side is equally as heavy. And if you don’t continue to have more sugar, you’ll hangout on that super heavy pain side for some time. Not fun. But if you wait long enough, the scale lightens up and your dopamine balances out.

It’s hard because we think that we’re turning to food because it relieves the stress, the anxiety, the boredom. But the truth is that we’ve bombarded the dopamine reward pathway and it’s causing even more stress, depression and anxiety. 

But when we don’t understand how this works, we keep thinking that it’s the food that’s going to bring us pleasure and there’s a narrowing of rewards meaning that balance becomes less sensitive and we derive less pleasure from our lives. We become more focused on food deriving our only pleasure from it. But as we know, eventually the food doesn’t even provide much pleasure because our dopamine receptors are so down regulated and that’s when we can get really depressed. Now I know some of you can really relate to being in this place and if that’s you, know that it’s totally fixable. Nothing has gone wrong and it’s not about you or that you’re damaged or that you don’t have what it takes to be naturally thin. You totally do when you get this reward pathway recalibrated okay?

But let’s say you’re not quite there - let’s say this is an average week for you: you eat mostly balanced, healthy meals with a few dopamine rich meals throughout the week, meaning foods that have a high reward for you personally. For some of you it’s ice cream, for some of you it’s pizza and then on the weekend maybe you’re making pancakes or muffins and having a couple glasses of wine. Let’s say you also spend time cuddling up with your partner watching the latest season of Ozark, you exercise a few times a week, you check instagram throughout the day and you shop online occasionally.

This doesn’t seem so bad right? Seems like a pretty balanced lifestyle. But when you start looking at it in terms of dopamine, there’s a lot of movement on that balance scale. There’s a lot of impact on that pleasure side and in turn the pain side and ever so imperceptibly, that pain side has gotten heavier and heavier until you’re not really getting pleasure out of your life anymore. You just feel like you’re going through the motions - you’re in a funk. 

What we tend to do is look for even MORE pleasure to pull us out of the funk, but that only weighs down this pain pleasure balance scale more and what we need to do is lighten it by taking a break from the rewards. 

You might be interested in what increases dopamine. 

Chemically:

Chocolate increases baseline level 1.5 times and then goes away after a few minutes. 

Cocaine x2.5 increase in dopamine

Caffeine: increases a little however regular ingesting of caffeine increases dopamine uptake. So it makes you experience more of dopamine’s effects. 

Subjectively:

Exercise - depends on subjective experience up to 2 times but if you don’t enjoy it, zero dopamine. 

This is important because it means that we can get more dopamine from something by talking about it, by journaling about it and by showing appreciation for it. You can’t force enjoyment of something, but you can enhance it. 

Origins of Pleasure Pain Balance

So you might be thinking this is a kind of a cruel joke from an evolutionary perspective right? Every time I experience pleasure I must also experience pain? Why is this the case?

Dopamine helps us seek substances and pleasure for our survival. So you can imagine in hunter/gatherer days, you look around and notice there’s no food, you need to generate energy to go get food, you need to cultivate that desire otherwise you’ll die of starvation. So dopamine (the desire) and adrenaline (the energy) kicks in. So you go out, you find food then your dopamine peaks and if it stayed there, if it didn’t balance out, you wouldn’t ever forage again.  That’s why we have highs and lows.

But is there a way for us to experience these peaks without the dopamine withdrawal?

If dopamine is responsible for desire and drive, how do we stay motivated and keep our dopamine levels stable and healthy? 

Managing Dopamine

Let’s talk about how to keep this dopamine balance scale level while enjoying life and feeling pleasure. 

Remember, the pleasure pain balance is governed by dopamine. Pain including cravings and urges is coming from lack of dopamine that follows the peak. So we want to avoid or limit intense peaks from things like sugar, flour, alcohol and we want to allow time to naturally rebalance our dopamine levels after we do experience a peak, whether it’s from a cookie or a great run. We want to get out of the habit of constantly trying to change our state when we feel a natural low. 

Recommendation to reset dopamine balance: 1 Month abstaining (making that pain side of the teeter totter lighter) First 2 weeks is the hardest.

So that’s the obvious one. Now that might be your first step. But let’s talk about how we can manage our dopamine system to optimize how motivated we feel. 

One method is creating an Intermittent release of dopamine. 

So we don’t want to expect or chase high levels of dopamine in everything we do - even healthy activities that produce dopamine. 

What’s really interesting is we are more motivated when we don’t always get the pleasure we expected. This is why it’s more exciting when you’re first dating someone and you don’t always know if and when they’re going to text back and why that whole playing hard to get thing is a thing. Interestingly I never put this together before, but I was told by our dog trainer that dog training is more effective when you DON’T give them a treat every time they do the trick, but instead you give it MOST of the time. We are all animals, our brains work the same way. 

So if there’s something you’re trying to stay motivated at, can do something called intermittent reward scheduling. It’s when dopamine sometimes arrives, sometimes doesn’t and sometimes does moderately. So think of it in terms of high dopamine, low dopamine and moderate dopamine. 

We can create this purposely: 

So for example, Let’s say you’re a runner and you want to stay motivated to run for the whole year. You can purposely modulate your dopamine response by controlling dopamine enhancing activities associated with running.

To peak your dopamine and pleasure from your run you can play your fav music, put on your fav running clothes, run in the nicest weather.  Just know that by doing this, you are increasing the number of conditions required for you to achieve pleasure from this activity again. So what you can do is the next day, you will want to run without some or all of those conditions, so that your brain will be rewarded by only the act of running itself and will have moderate dopamine levels. If you don’t do this, you’ll eventually NOT get pleasure from your runs and will lose motivation. It’s like your brain becomes tolerant to running. A peak shouldn’t occur too often and dopamine needs to be varied. 

There’s no schedule to this - it needs to be random, intermittent for activities that you want to do over time. Remember that you want to have peak pleasure - tip that dopamine sometimes but more often than not, maintain the balance. You can even flip a coin to decide when you’ll have a peak dopamine experience and listen to music and when you won’t.

This is good news for those of you who are getting on the scale every day right? When it goes up, I suspect that’s low dopamine, stays the same moderate and goes down you get a dopamine release. Kind of an interesting way of seeing that number in the scale - if you don’t get in your own way by telling yourself it’s not working, you’ll never get there, you might as well eat, you’re being motivated to continue to weigh yourself. And we know that if you’re weighing yourself everyday, you’re more likely to see that number improve than not.

Which brings me to my last and most important point about how we can use what we’ve learned about dopamine to reach our weight loss goals.

Why focus on the journey?

I know you’ve heard it a million times, focus on the journey, not the destination. But if you’ve been as resistant to that concept as me, you really need to hear the neurobiological case for doing this. It has really shifted things for me personally when thinking about my goals.

What you may be doing now is attaching your peak pleasure experience to your goal weight. This looks like waiting until you reach a certain number before you will be happy. THEN and only then you will get a dopamine hit and feel good about yourself. But just know that when you do that, you are making the journey so much harder than it needs to be.

Because of how dopamine relates to our perception of time, when we hold out on experiencing the reward until our goal weight is accomplished, we start to disassociate the reward circuits that normally would have been active during the activity. 

However, you can evoke a dopamine release from the effort when you’ve learned to remind yourself that your effort matters. So if you say, I’m just going to push and push and push through until I get to my goal weight, you’re actually making it MORE painful along the way and make yourself less efficient at it bc if you were able to access the dopamine throughout the process you’d be increasing the amount of activation energy in your body, and in your mind- in your ability to focus. 

I’m sure you’ve heard of growth mindset - this involves learning to access rewards from doing - from the effort. 

The key is to attach the friction and effort to an internally generated reward system. The wanting, the craving of your pursuit is a form of pleasure itself. So what you're thinking and feeling about yourself and what you’re doing.

For example, it requires awareness first. During tough moments you can say to yourself, yes, this is very painful and because it’s very painful it will increase my dopamine later and my ability to access dopamine from my life. This pain is raising my dopamine baseline.  In that moment - you are doing the hard thing by choice. That low level or even high level of agitation of getting what you want is actually good because it connects you to activation energy (adrenaline). 

Another thing that goes wrong when we focus ONLY on the end result is called the Dopamine Reward Prediction Error - you expect something to be really great and it doesn’t turn out to be that great - your dopamine baseline lowers. Now you are starting from a lower place and are less motivated. 

If you’ve ever booked a vacation and had all this pent up excitement and then the day comes and you have to pack and get the kid’s stuff organized and get to the airport and then your flight is delayed and then it’s 5 hours on the airplane and you arrive at the hotel and you’re exhausted and there’s gross hairs in the sink…this is Dopamine Reward Prediction Error. 

This can happen if you’ve been so focused on the goal number, reach that number and then are thrilled for a couple of days -huge dopamine peak but then guess what, that dopamine drops - you look around and think, what the hell? My life isn’t amazing? I don’t feel good all the time? What has this all been for? Then you might start to gain the weight back. 

So I’m not saying don’t look forward to reaching your goal, but just yeah know, keep in mind that it’s not like you’re going to get there and all of your problems will go away. 

Deprivation

Another way we can manage dopamine is through deprivation. I know many of you don’t like that word, especially when it comes to food. However, we get even more dopamine when we’re really hungry because our perception of dopamine is heightened when we’ve been deprived. The longer you restrict from an activity, the greater the dopamine release because of the upregulation of dopamine. 

This is why limiting to 2 meals a day might work for you. It might freak you out at first but you might find it’s easier to NOT eat at all then to not overeat during your meal. And for some people they attach dopamine to their fasting periods by how they’re thinking about it and actually enjoy that time - they feel more focused, they have more energy. What they’re doing is increasing the reward aspects of deprivation.

This is why intentional thought work is so powerful.  What you’re telling yourself is literally shaping these reward circuits, the dopamine system in your brain. 

Learning how to regulate your dopamine system:: 

• Experiment: decide to actively refrain from following impulses that lead to a dopamine response like checking your phone (keeping these dopamine circuits tuned up)

• Avoid dopamine spikes that aren’t associated with hardwork or effort (your phone) for the first hour of the day because at night is when your brain has achieved all of it’s neuroplasticity and so that first hour upon waking is when you receive the download of all of that work. If you immediately go to pleasure on tap, you don’t benefit from the processing your brain did at night. Especially emotional processing. 

• Odd hours don’t check your phone.

• Avoiding high palatable foods will help make broccoli taste better. Because remember your current level of dopamine is dependent on your previous level.

How to increase your Dopamine baseline:

 - cold exposure (cold water bath/shower) Huge initial increases in adrenaline then dopamine gradually increases (2.5x)

• Close Social connections stimulates dopamine pathways

Summary

When you think of dopamine, remember the pleasure pain balance scale. When we put pressure on one side of this balance it goes down and the other side goes up in equal measure. The brain will work very hard to restore balance which is why you feel craving and drive to eat just one more. That’s the pain kicking in after that dopamine spike.

Whenever we have a really pleasurable experience, there’s always a little let down, a little less excitement - embrace that and wait for dopamine to rebalance. Don’t try to get out of that discomfort. 

Repeated use of high rewards like sugar and flour, leads to dopamine depletion because it lowers your dopamine baseline.

Solution? You need to recalibrate that dopamine balance by NOT pursuing dopamine peaks and instead get pleasure through discipline, motivation and hard work. When we consistently get a small amount of dopamine from our efforts our baseline stays high and stay motivated.

Without using your prefrontal cortex (planning, abstract thinking) the reward systems of our brain like our dopamine system will become the primary director of our choices and our lives.  If there was ever a better case for coaching, I haven’t heard it. 

So listen if you’ve made it this far into the podcast, I know you are into this stuff as much as I am and are definitely ready for coaching to release your weight. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve recently finished my maternity leave and I still have a few openings for private coaching so if you are at all curious, book a consultation with me to see if coaching is something you want. Go to mindfulshape.com to book directly into my calendar and we’ll chat! Okay talk to you soon. Bye.