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You are listening to the Navigating Adult ADHD Podcast with your ADHD coach and expert, Xena. Hello, hello, hello, my friends. Welcome back. We are navigating some ADHD together today. Oh, man, I'm in a funny mood. So watch out. Before we dive in today, we are going to be talking all about dopamine and I actually had two different ideas in mind for this episode, but a listener sent me an email and that solidified to go with the dopamine episode today, which I'm very excited about because I love talking about dopamine and emotions. Like, those are my two favorite ADHD topics and I'll talk about them all day if you let me. And I get to. But what I wanted to do before we dive in is I just wanted to say a shout out to anyone who has emailed me or reached out recently on social media, especially anybody from the podcast. I've had quite a few of these lately. Like, I've had some emails come through. I've had some messages. I'm thinking like DMS on Facebook, Instagram, that sort of a thing. Now if. If it's on Instagram, just FYI, I've been, like, super inactive. If I haven't got back to you, I am sorry. I will check it. I will check it. But I wanted to say thank you because it takes. Sometimes it takes courage to reach out to somebody, but also, like, it takes effort to reach out to somebody and say, hey, thank you, this has been really helpful, I really enjoy this, etc. I don't take it lightly and I really, really appreciate that. I reply to every single message or email myself. So I wanted just to share a little snippet from one that I got recently that spoke to me. It just hit me. It hit me in the feels, I think, because this person speaks my language. So I'm just going to read a portion of it. Episode number 149 was far too relatable. Now I want to reference 149 because it was actually an episode about dopamine layering, which is very relevant to today and what we're talking about. So I'm gonna link it in the show notes. Okay, so episode 149 was far too relatable. And I'm putting a bit of that into action. I bought your planner thingy to print out at work and I just turned off my speaker. Turns out the birds are chirping like mad outside. So I'm gonna try and peel away some of those dopamine layers and get some slow dopamine tonight. Anyway, thank you. You're ridiculously relatable. I like that you don't censor the swearing. Yeah, I don't. And that you use clear but fun analogies, deliver simple, actionable advice, and you bounce off the science and psychology enough that I know you aren't full of shit. But without my brain switching into oh, useful facts to memorize mode instead of listening to what you're actually saying. So, cheers. Thanks. I've had a really shitty time lately inside of my own head, and you've helped clear that a bit. So I'm not going to give this person's name. I'm sure they're listening and I just want to say, hey, thank you. I again want to shout you out and just say I really appreciate that. As I said, I've had a few of these emails lately, but I love that this person's into my swearing because not everybody is. Trust me, I get a few negative reviews because people don't like the way that I am, and that's okay. Totally not for everyone. So all of that to say, thank you. I appreciate you all, and if you're leaving, you know, a rating and a review and that sort of thing, I love you guys. Thank you so much because it helps again, to get this in the hands of more adults with adhd. All right, so let's get into the episode. So I always just thought that I had an addictive personality. That might be something that you relate to, thinking that, you know, you're just really bad with moderation. For me, too much scrolling, too much Netflix, too much alcohol, too much chocolate. Like, anything sweet. Yeah. Like, I would eat the whole block of chocolate. I would eat the whole packet of biscuits. Could never just do one or two, right? On paper, my life did look pretty good. So I had a really good job. I, you know, owned my own home. Like, from the outside, people thought, you know, she's doing pretty well. All of this international travel, all of this sort of shit. Right? But on the inside, it did feel like chaos. Like, it felt pretty awful. And for years, I was really stuck in this loop of constantly checking my phone or listening to something, needing something on in the background 24 7, eating more junk food than. Than actual real food and filling every spare second so that I didn't have to be alone with my own brain. And I'd really just labeled all of this as, you know, I just have a really addictive personality. But the more I have learned about ADHD and about dopamine, what I now know is really, underneath the surface, all of that is actually dopamine related. Okay? So today, my friends, we are going to talk about dopamine. We're going to talk specifically about why not all dopamine. Dopamine is created equal, why that matters so, so much if you have adhd, and how understanding this can quite literally change the way that you live your life and definitely improve your life. Okay, so starting at the top, what even is dopamine? Dopamine is a chemical messenger in your brain, right? It goes around your brain, circulating in your head, delivering messages to different parts. But you can kind of think of it like motivation, fuel. It helps with things like motivation. That's a big one. But it also helps with focus and attention, with movement. And when I say movement, if you're sitting on the couch, dopamine can help you to get off the couch, to get, you know, walk over to the fridge or to the kitchen to make dinner. Okay? So that sort of movement, movement to act and do something. Dopamine also helps with learning and habit formation. And it's definitely the mmm, that feels good, let's do it again. Feeling that we can get. Okay. Now, it's often referred to as the pleasure chemical, but it's not just the pleasure chemical, obviously. Okay. Modern neuroscience sees dopamine as more of the wanting system than the liking system. So it's the part of your brain that goes, ooh, that might be good, or, oh, that sounds like a really good idea. Let's grab that Snickers bar, out the fridge, and let's move toward it. Let's get up and let's go and do that. And while you know that first bite might taste amazing, the rest of it might not taste amazing. So it's not necessarily liking or enjoying the thing, it's the wanting to do the thing. Okay, so if I was to give this in an analogy, if you were to think of dopamine like petrol in your car, okay? It does not drive the car for you, but without petrol, you're not going anywhere. Right. Without the correct amount, you can't start the car, keep the car going, get wherever the heck you're trying to go. If you've got dodgy fuel or like wild surges, like, the engine might start to sputter or stall and, you know, stop. It can be really unhelpful. So now if we add the ADHD layer on top of that, this is where shit gets interesting, my friends. Okay, so let's talk more about the ADHD dopamine connection. Research shows that people With ADHD tend to have less. Lower. How do I want to say this? Less baseline dopamine in our system. Okay? This is what scientists have seen. Less. Basically, you can just think, like, we wake up with less fuel in the tank each day. That's exactly how I talk about it. We also have smaller dopamine bursts in response to rewards. So if we're doing something, and this is seen especially in more sort of boring tasks, we're doing something, we might get less of a release of dopamine than maybe our neurotypical friend would. They also see in the science that we have differences in how we learn from rewards and how quickly we lose interest. No surprises there. So if you. Back to the car analogy, right? If you do, imagine it like, we've got a smaller fuel tank, we've got a leaky fuel line, and a brain that just needs a little more oomph, shall we say, to get going. There's also evidence that when dopamine dies, does show up. Some of us are more sensitive to that dopamine that we get. So what that can mean is we get these big swings, these bigger surges of it. We could be super into something and then totally and utterly, like, over it, like, in the matter of hours or days. Okay? So all of that to say we have less dopamine, less fuel in the tank, we are more reliant on it to function. And when we find something that gives us a big dopamine, hit really fast. Think TikTok sugar. Online shopping. Our brain goes, yes, that. Give me that again, again, again. Now, now, now. Okay, now, of course, this is not a character flaw. This is neurobiology. This is your brain wiring, my friends. So let's talk about why we seek dopamine. We seek dopamine for two big reasons. Number one, because it feels good, right? That really satisfying feeling that you get when you are watching a Netflix episode and it finishes on a high. When you see a notification pop up on your phone, you open your Instagram and It's got like, 20 notifications or whatever. When you bite into something delicious, right? When you take a sip of your wine, when you buy something shiny and new, okay, that shit feels good. The second reason we seek dopamine is because it helps us to escape discomfort. And this one is huge for us, especially when we struggle with emotional regulation. So feeling bored, feeling anxious, feeling ashamed, overwhelmed, Lonely? If you've ever pulled your phone out when you're waiting in line at the supermarket, if you've, you know, opened up Instagram and Started scrolling. When you're on the bus, if you're sitting in bed scrolling on your phone, watching videos to avoid the I really need to go to sleep thoughts. You know, jumping into Netflix instead of opening the scary email that you really need action, that, my friend, is your brain reaching for a fast dopamine source to numb or distract from discomfort. So again, we seek dopamine for the pleasure and also for the escape. So if you were to rewind 400,000 years. All right, rewind with me back 400,000 years. We're living in caves, caveman, cave woman days, and imagine you and your sparkly ADHD brain living in this cave. Back then, dopamine was so necessary for survival. It was huge. Dopamine created the motivation we needed to go out and do the hard, uncomfortable shit that was going to ultimately keep us alive and evolve right into where we are today. Things like going out to in the cold weather to hunt, building and repairing shelter, gathering food and gathering firewood, exploring new areas and new lands and finding new resources and water and those sorts of things, right? Putting in the effort to raise and protect children. Those things weren't instantly fun. They, you know, dopamine didn't exist back then to help us to binge Netflix. It was there to help us get over the, ugh, I don't really want to hump and sort of move us towards the action that ultimately was going to create a long term payoff. So as you can tell, it required effort and gave us a longer term reward. So built into our brain is that very old wiring. Do this effortful thing now and you're going to get a reward later. Okay, now this is important. I'm going to circle back to it today. However, if we fast forward back to today, my friend, we live in a world that is quite literally saturated in dopamine. It's everywhere at our fingertips 24 7. And I can't go past the work of Anna Lemke, author of the book Dopamine Nation. She's an expert in the field of dopamine. She's an a psychiatrist and an addiction expert. And she describes our current world as a place of unprecedented access to high dopamine stimuli. So think ultra processed food, alcohol, nicotine, social media, online shopping, gaming, gambling, porn, streaming, anything, any video, anytime. Anna Lemke, she calls this the age of indulgence and talks about the druggification of, of everyday life. Ouch. Every time I read that, I'm like, oh, that gets me. And one of her famous lines is that the Smartphone is the modern day hypodermic needle. Ooh, again, that one gets me. Because in reality, it does. It delivers dopamine hits 24. 7 directly into your brain via the likes and the notifications and the messages and the endless novelty with no effort required at all. So here's a couple of things that stand out from Anna Lemke's research. Every time we push hard on that pleasure side, the brain pushes back on the pain side of the balance. And she describes this as like a seesaw, okay? And our brain always wants to come back to balance. So too much of, you know, too much dopamine in a specific way, and I'm going to talk about the two different types in a minute. But too much of this, you know, scrolling on our phone, eating all of the junk food, you know, doing the wine. Look, I can give you. Trust me, trust me, I can do this. Well, I can scroll on my phone, watching TikTok videos. Cats is my thing, of course. And I could, you know, sip on a glass of wine and snack on some chippies or whatever. Like, I can layer all of that dopamine up and have a great old time with it, but too much of that, Too much of that high dopamine stuff, and what happens? We end up in a dopamine deficient state. So I want you to think feeling flat, feeling joyless, feeling more anxious, and having more cravings, ultimately, like, feeling worse, feeling like arse, my friends, which, again, when we feel that way, it makes us want to reach for more of it, more of it, more of it. To try and make the feeling go away or to numb it. And that, of course, pushes us deeper into the cycle. Now, if we have adhd, hello, we do. We're right here together. Having ADHD with less dopamine in the tank to begin with, that cycle can steamroll you. Ask me how I know. So all of this to say, not all dopamine is created equal. If you're a longtime listener of the podcast, you will have heard me say this multiple times. Like, I am preaching. Not all dopamine is created equal. Okay? Some dopamine hits are like slamming a double espresso and a donut. Awesome. Others are more like, you know, having a really yummy, nourishing meal. Okay, so I break this down into two buckets. You've got your fast dopamine and your slow dopamine. One of my favorite ways to explain this, especially if I'm speaking on stage, is with a lemon. Yeah, I'll take my lemon with me. So if you were to imagine I had a lemon and I chopped my lemon in half. So with the first half of my lemon on the left side, I am going to take my lemon and I'm going to squeeze all of the juice out of it. And that would be like me getting my phone scrolling on TikTok for 20 minutes. Okay? When the 20 minutes is up, there's no juice left in my lemon. It's gone. Absolutely nothing. If I was to take my other half of the lemon and I was to go for a walk, I live opposite the beach, I go to the beach for 20 minutes, walk along the beach and come back. That type of dopamine is like getting my lemon and slowly squeezing it, drip, drip, drip, drip. Even after I've been for the walk, there are still drips of juice coming out of my lemon. That is the difference between the fast dopamine and the slow dopamine. One is when you're doing it, you get this massive release of the juice and as soon as you stop, there's nothing left. Whereas the other type is you get a little sprinkle of it and there's more being sprinkled throughout your day, even after you've finished. So fast dopamine is quick, it's easy, often it's on a screen and it basically requires little to no effort at all. So examples of fast dopamine are things like scrolling on our phone, scrolling social media, binge watching sugar, ultra processed foods, nicotine, vaping alcohol, online shopping, gaming, gambling. So in our brain, right, if we think neuro wise, these tend to cause a really big spike in dopamine followed by a very big drop. What goes up, comes down. And if you imagine you threw, if you're in a pool, you're standing in a pool and you throw a ball up, out, out above your head, right, Throw it up and then it comes down and it crashes into the pool. What does it do? It dips below the surface. That's exactly what happens when we're doing this frequently is we don't just come back to the baseline level, we don't just come back to the surface of the water, we have this massive spike and then we drop below the surface, below what we initially started from. And what happens that leaves us feeling flat, restless, a bit empty, and we reach for more. For our ADHD brains who are already lower on dopamine, we've got a little less in the tank. These spikes and crashes and can actually worsen our attention and our brain fog can increase our irritability and our emotional dysregulation. I don't know about you, but I don't need no more of that. I got enough on my own, Right? Making it harder for us to start especially boring but important tasks. Okay, so slow dopamine is different. Now. It usually requires some effort up front. It doesn't necessarily feel amazing for the first few seconds or minutes, but it creates a steady. Oh, dear. Steady, sustainable. Look, look at me, I did it. I got it out. It creates a steady, sustainable rise in dopamine and other helpful brain chemicals as well. Okay, so what happens? It leaves you feeling more regulated afterwards. That is good to know. Some examples of this could be eating protein, right? Having protein helps with the production of dopamine. Okay. It specifically provides some amino acids. One of them, I think, is L. Tyrosine. Off the top of my head, yeah. Tyrosine, which is used to sort of build and make dopamine. Exercise, any kind, anything you like, right? Even just a brisk walk for five minutes, anything like that. Getting outside, sunlight, being outside, those sorts of things. They also support the production of serotonin, another really good feeling chemical. So sunlight, getting outside, getting out in nature. These are really supportive for slow dopamine, but also a lot of different things that our ADHD brains can. Can need cold water, right? So if you like to have a cold shower, which my partner does, I think he's crazy. It's not my thing. But, you know, cold plunges, even going for a swim in the ocean, the lake, what have you. That is fantastic for your slow dopamine. Working on meaningful goals and hobbies, getting sleep, resting, connection, right? Creating, if you are somebody, like any hobbies, anything you love. Like, at the moment, my thing's puzzles. Okay, I'm just into puzzles right now, but it might be writing or art or making music or building things, anything like that. That's your slow dopamine. So again, an ADHD language. Slow dopamine helps your brain to generate stimulation from the inside, okay. Not just so you're helping your brain to create the chemicals that it needs to be able to function better throughout your day. It will increase motivation to do things that matter, but might not instantly be fun, right? It's going to support your executive functions, things like focus, working memory, and also it helps with boosting mood and over time helps to also increase resilience. So if you think of it as topping up the fuel tank with some really good quality fuel regularly so that your brain isn't desperately, you know, siphoning from any dodgy Source that it can find. That's what we're doing here, my friends. Okay, so I wanted to play this out with a bit of an example and put this into like a real life scenario. So scenario A, if we think about living a mostly fast dopamine life, this could look like you wake up in the morning, you immediately check your phone, and you scroll on your phone for 20 minutes in bed before you even get up. You get up, you grab your coffee, you might have some real sugary cereal for breakfast. And then all throughout the day, you're constantly grabbing your phone, checking your phone, scrolling on your phone, you get Uber eats for lunch. Again, some sugary hit mid afternoon, and then at night it's Netflix. And from the minute you walk in the door to going to sleep, there's lots of snacks, lots of scrolling on your phone in between. And the end of the day, what happens by the end of the day? Your dopamine system has been spiked and crashing repeatedly and your baseline level drops. So what that is like if we go back to the pool analogy, if you're standing in the pool over time, if we continue to do this, we're gonna have less and less and less water in the pool every day. We're gonna wake up with less and less dopamine in the tank over time. So we're gonna regularly feel like life is dull and we're flat. Boring tasks are gonna be even more unbearable for us. Okay? And our ADHD symptoms might become even louder. Think, you know, emotional emotions and mood SW and distractibility and impulsivity and all of that, right? And maybe you're telling yourself if this is you, like, I'm lazy, I just have no discipline. But the reality is your brain is just riding a biochemical roller coaster. It did not sign up for. Okay, zero judgment. I want to be really clear about that. Man, I have been right there. That has been me. I have been scenario A. Okay, so zero judgment. So scenario B is where you're intentionally adding in some slow dopamine. Okay, so same person, same ADHD brain, but we tweak a few things. So that means perhaps starting the day not checking your phone straight away, but instead getting up, getting outside for five or 10 minutes, moving your body around, getting a bit of sunlight, maybe even drinking your coffee while you do that. Having some protein with your breakfast, whether it be like a Greek yogurt or eggs or whatever your thing is, protein powder, whatever. Setting a couple like two to three phone free pockets in your day times where you don't have your phone with you for me. I love to do my walks without my phone. And then on your lunch break, you do a five or ten minute walk or maybe even mid afternoon when you've got that slump, you just do like a five or ten minute walk, or you do some stretches to help kind of get your brain back on board, and then you just swap one of those nighttime episodes of Netflix for a shower, maybe a few stretches and an earlier bedtime, right? You can still have the fun dopamine. You can still have the fast dopamine. Hello, we're human. Of course we do. I do, too, Trust me. But not every two seconds. Not every couple of minutes. Okay? So now in this scenario, your dopamine system is getting fewer extreme spikes and crashes and more of that slow dopamine top up, kind of like recharging. Recharging. So over time, this can mean that you're gonna feel more motivated to start tasks. You can stay with something a little bit longer before you need an escape. Your mood's going to be more stable, right? The ADHD tools, the body doubling, all of these sorts of things, they are working better because your fuel in your tank, right, is making it so much easier for you to use and utilize these things. So if we were to go back to Dr. Anna Lemke for a moment, okay. Author of Dopamine Nation, huge shout out to her works. Incredible. And I did briefly say before how she describes the brain as having a pleasure pain seesaw. So on one side is like your pleasure and on the other's your pain. When we indulge in something very pleasurable, that seesaw, of course, tips towards the pleasure side to keep it in balance, though, which our brain wants to do. It wants to always come back to balance. It then tilts back towards the pain side. Not the someone punched me in the stomach kind of a pain, but more like a restlessness, anxiety, low mood, irritability sort of a pain. And if we keep hammering the pleasure side with all of the high fast dopamine activities, the seestore can see, store seesaw can end up getting stuck really sort of leaning towards pain, which feels like that chronic, maybe low grade depression or emptiness. And I talked a lot about this, actually in the episode I referenced at the beginning, which is on dopamine layering. Again, I'm going to listen link to that in the show notes here because I definitely recommend, if you have, if you haven't already, go and check that one out. Okay. And Anna Lemke's core message, and mine as well, is like, we're not saying never do the fun things again. Hell no. It's about restoring balance, right? Especially in this age where, you know, we are literally saturated in dopamine and it's everywhere at our fingertips. Okay, so for adhd is that can look like noticing where you're hammering that fast dopamine all of the time, deliberately investing in just a little bit more slow dopamine. Again, just think about it like a seesaw and just trying to balance that seesaw out, right? Balance out the amount of fast dopamine you're getting with, you know, a little bit more slow dopamine, so it's a little bit more even. And what that means is sometimes we're going to have to tolerate a little bit of short term discomfort, like getting off the couch, you know, putting your shoes on to walk around the block, putting your phone another room, you know, turning off all of the devices, you know, trying to get creative with. What did I used to do when I wasn't always on a phone or distracting myself with a screen or what have you? What did I used to do? Oh, I used to like to paint or garden or whatever. Okay, my friends, fast dopamine is not evil. It's not the devil. It's just very loud and very needy. Slow dopamine is quieter, but it is the one that really helps you to fuel your ADHD brain and create a life that you actually like waking up to. All right, speaking from experience. All right, my friends, I feel like we covered a lot in this episode today, but this is such an important topic because when we really understand, dopamine helps us to work with our brain and ultimately improve our life. All right, Huge, huge love and gratitude to each and every one of you listening. All right, I'll speak to you next week. Take care, my friend. Bye bye. Hey, friend. If you want some more help navigating and thriving with ADHD and some help applying everything that you're learning here on the podcast, then head over to our website, navigating adultadhd.com.