The DOPAMINE Myth

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trying to figure out how to State this um there’s one thing that we know for sure about dopamine no one really understands the complexity of dopamine if you do a deep dive on dopamine your head is going to literally spin because there are so many theories just when they say they have it figured out well no that doesn’t work they’ll say it’s a motivation molecule or the thing that gives you pleasure or the thing that’s involved with reward no it’s not it’s associated with these behaviors but it’s not the thing that gives you these Sensations you give yourself these Sensations dopamine has many many many different functions in one part of the brain it works this way and another part of the brain it works completely differently dopamine is involved with motion and movement like body movement that’s why like in Parkinson’s disease the person will always have low dopamine and they’re very rigid they can’t move freely dopamine is associated with behaviors and certain emotions but anyone who is on the lower emotional scale is going to have low dopamine and have low other neurotransmitters as well as low hormones their entire biochemistry is going to be on the low side dopamine is also involved in the sleep cycles it’s involved in the gastrointestinal motility the movement of things to your GI system food intake learning kidney function blood pressure and yes it does get increased with pleasure but it also gets increased with stress and pain so when someone is using a drug to help balance this one molecule boy does that come with the package which I’m going to talk about there’s been a recent like upsurge of people doing dopamine detox we’re trying to detoxify this toxic dopamine hormone the problem is not dopamine okay yes we need to balance it out if it’s low it’s the synthetic Sensations or the experiences or the stimulus that we’re doing that we need to get rid of whether it’s scrolling with social media 24 hours a day on Tick Tock gambling nicotine drugs and then you also have like caffeine and pornography all these things are artificial or synthetic ways of experiencing certain Sensations and when you try to get these Sensations artificially or synthetically it comes with a package but I think we should instead of doing a dopamine detox we should do a bad lifestyle detox there’s certain medical problems that involve low dopamine you have Parkinson’s schizophrenia add or ADHD and even depression and people that treat these conditions to try to increase dopamine are doing something that they just don’t understand they don’t ever look at the diet they don’t look at the nutritional cofactors that could be involved you have to realize a dopamine is a system it’s a pathway it doesn’t ever work as a single molecule it’s involved in this complex biochemical pathway and when you treat it as an individual molecule you will always lose and when we’re talking about losing I’m talking about mainly with the side effects that come as a package not only do these medications deplete other neurotransmitters but for example anti-schizophrenia medication has a side effect it can create motivational disorders paranoia even lactation in men and women and another side effect is addictive behaviors now let’s take another category of medications which are antipsychotic medications what are the side effects of those one is Parkinson’s symptoms and then when people take medication for Parkinson’s okay one of the side effect is they become a gambler which is a an addiction so you have to understand that dopamine has many different functions and it works differently in different parts of the body and on top of that dopamine is a neurotransmitter it’s a signaling molecule that works within the nervous system it’s like a communication hormone-like particle and hormones are the communication particle that works through the blood and you know what’s interesting about that all your hormones all of them require dopamine for those hormones to work I mean there’s over a hundred thousand research papers on dopamine in PubMed right now all trying to find a new treatment without the side effects but they’re never going to be successful because it’s impossible dopamine again is not a single little molecule that acts on its own to create this one specific effect it creates many many different effects for different parts of your body you can have years of stress bad eating have deficiencies of the cofactors that make dopamine and end up with low dopamine you can also have a serious traumatic event let’s say a loss of a loved one and be very depressed and have low dopamine because of that lowered emotion but by trying to increase that hormone without looking at the whole picture it’s not going to work it’s just it’s not logical so what can someone do well number one start getting rid of the artificial synthetic experiences or stimulus number two start looking at natural ways to help balance dopamine in other neurotransmitters and I’ll give you a couple consistent regular exercise being outside will naturally increase dopamine what’s interesting about dopamine it works with serotonin in opposites so people that are inside a lot have more serotonin uh and people that are outside have more dopamine now I’m talking about the relative uh ratios here but the more outside that you are the more dopamine that you’re going to have uh even the Sun and even vitamin D3 can help increase dopamine you also have other experiences like music the Arts doing things that you like being connected to people and also having all the cofactors the things that help this hormone be reduced like tyrosinase and even having the cofactors these are things that help the production of this dopamine like tyrosine which is an amino acid you can get that just by consuming or focusing on adequate good protein sources like animal protein and just as a side note if you have very low neurotransmitters and you have a lot of body problems and you need a lot of repair it’s very important to consume a little more protein and make sure that is animal protein as well as animal fat for the healing process because that’s going to give you the raw materials to help build up these neurotransmitters but a lot of these neurotransmitters are also influenced by the gut microbiome so having a healthy gut is also very important and the other two nutrients that are involved in dopamine are vitamin C you can get that from leafy greens or sauerkraut make sure it’s raw and copper which is a trace mineral now where do you get copper from shellfish okay or seafood if you just have seafood or shellfish once a week you’ll get enough copper but just as a side note to that if you consume a lot of zinc without the copper you can create a copper deficiency also having just a lot of stress in your life and consuming a lot of sugar will increase the demand for this vitamin C in Copper and just the last point about this topic you want to look at the body as a whole not as an individual molecule the body molecules are not in control they’re at the effects side and they’re involved in biochemical Pathways that involve many different steps and each one of those steps involve enzymes and each one of those enzymes involve cofactors those are like vitamins and minerals so a lot of this comes back to having the right diet which unfortunately many doctors do not look at that piece of the puzzle so look at the whole body if you’re going to treat something like this use natural remedies that don’t have side effects and one last little point about dopamine your gut microbiome help you make neurotransmitters for more information on that you should watch this video right here