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Rebalancing Dopamine (Without “Dopamine Fasting”)
Plus: how to fix shoulder pain quickly
The 10almonds Team
December 20, 2023
Today’s almonds have been activated by:
Recovering from a respiratory illness? Make sure the air in your home is not too dry; a humidifier can help if necessary (or a damp towel on a radiator or similar).
⏰ IN A RUSH?
Today’s 30-Second Summary
If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:
Dopamine detoxing, per se, doesn’t work. However, we can leverage our understanding of dopamine responses, to get off the “hedonic treadmill”, and ultimately feel happier and suffer less.
Pleasure and pain are processed by the same part of the brain, and understanding the relationship between the two can allow us to “cut through” an unfavorable cycle
Methods today’s featured expert recommends include strategic abstentions (of some things only!), and counterintuitively, certain kinds of deliberate suffering.
Being unable to easily participate in spoken conversations is not just an inconvenience; it’s also a [causal, fixable] risk factor for age-related cognitive decline.
Today’s sponsor, Hear.com, are offering the most cutting-edge dual-processing technology in hearing aids that isolate and separate speech from background noise.
Read on to learn about these things and more…
👀 WATCH AND LEARN
"Rhomboid Pain": How To Fix Shoulder Blade Pain Quickly (4:33)
Shoulder menu:
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖
🧠 MAIN FEATURE
Rebalancing Dopamine (Without “Dopamine Fasting”)
This is Dr. Anna Lembke. She’s a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic—as well as running her own clinical practice, and serving on the board of an array of state and national addiction-focused organizations.
Today we’re going to look at her work on dopamine management…
Getting off the hedonic treadmill
For any unfamiliar with the term, the “hedonic treadmill” is what happens when we seek pleasure, enjoy the pleasure, the pleasure becomes normalized, and now we need to seek a stronger pleasure to get above our new baseline.
In other words, much like running on a reciprocal treadmill that just gets faster the faster we run.
What Dr. Lembke wants us to know here: pleasure invariably leads to pain
This is not because of some sort of extrinsic moral mandate, nor even in the Buddhist sense. Rather, it is biology.
Pleasure and pain are processed by the same part of the brain, and if we up one, the other will be upped accordingly, to try to keep a balance.
Consequently, if we recklessly seek “highs”, we’re going to hit “lows” soon enough. Whether that’s by drugs, sex, or just dopaminergic habits like social media overuse.
Dr. Lembke’s own poison of choice was trashy romance novels, by the way. But she soon found she needed more, and more, and the same level wasn’t “doing it” for her anymore.
So, should we just give up our pleasures, and do a “dopamine fast”?
Not so fast!
It depends on what they are. Dopamine fasting, per se, does not work. We wrote about this previously:
However, when it comes to our dopaminergic habits, a short period (say, a couple of weeks) of absence of that particular thing can help us re-find our balance, and also, find insight.
Lest that latter sound wishy-washy: this is about realizing how bad an overuse of some dopaminergic activity had become, the better to appreciate it responsibly, going forwards.
So in other words, if your poison is, as in Dr. Lembke’s case, trashy romance novels, you would abstain from them for a couple of weeks, while continuing to enjoy the other pleasures in life uninterrupted.
Substances that create a dependency are a special case
There’s often a popular differentiation between physical addictions (e.g. alcohol) and behavioral addictions (e.g. video games). And that’s fair; physiologically speaking, those may both involve dopamine responses, but are otherwise quite different.
However, there are some substances that are physical addictions that do not create a physical dependence (e.g. sugar), and there are substances that create a physical dependence without being addictive (e.g. many antidepressants)
In the case of anything that has created a physical dependence, Dr. Lembke does not recommend trying to go “cold turkey” on that without medical advice and supervision.
Going on the counterattack
Remember what we said about pleasure and pain being processed in the same part of the brain, and each rising to meet the other?
While this mean that seeking pleasure will bring us pain, the inverse is also true.
Don’t worry, she’s not advising us to take up masochism (unless that’s your thing!). But there are very safe healthy ways that we can tip the scales towards pain, ultimately leading to greater happiness.
Cold showers are an example she cites as particularly meritorious.
As a quick aside, we wrote about the other health benefits of these, too:
Further reading
Want to know more? You might like her book:
Enjoy!
❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE
Hearing So Clear It Has No Peers
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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free
🌏 AROUND THE WEB
What’s happening in the health world…
Why alcohol before bedtime leaves you awake at 3 am, desperate for sleep
Prunes pack a powerful punch against inflammation and bone loss in postmenopausal women
Blood testing identifies biomarkers of suicidal thoughts
Small HDL particles in brain appear protective against Alzheimer’s disease
Designing non-hallucinogenic psychedelic treatments that may accelerate research on mental health benefits
Study looks at alcohol intake, mortality link in steatotic liver disease
A substantial number of Parkinson's disease cases can be attributed to preventable risk factors, researcher says
More to come tomorrow!
📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World – by Dr. Elinor Cleghorn
For a demographic that makes up a little over half of the world's population, women are paradoxically marginalized in healthcare. And in other ways too, but this book is about health.
Dr. Cleghorn had to fight for seven (!) years to get her own lupus condition recognized as such, and continues to have to fight for it to be taken seriously on an ongoing basis. And yet, 95% of the book is not about her and her experiences, but rather, the bigger picture.
The book is divided into sections, by period in history. From Hippocrates to the modern day, Dr. Cleghorn gives us a well-researched, incredibly well-referenced overview of the marginalization of women's health. Far from being a dry history book in the early parts though, it's fascinating and engaging throughout.
The modern day sections are part shining a light into dark areas, part practical information-and-advice "did you know this happens, and you can do this about it", and part emphatic call-to-action to demand better.
Bottom line: this book is in this reviewer's "top 5 books read this year", and we highly recommend it to you.
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May today see you happy and healthy in every way,
The 10almonds Team