Ever wonder why you feel the compulsive urge to check your phone? What contributes to the feeling of euphoria after a run? The answer lies in a tiny little molecule called dopamine.
The majority of us have heard the phrase ‘dopamine high’ at some point in our lives. A lot of us, when asked to define dopamine, would likely use the word ‘pleasure’ or ‘reward’ at some point in our answer. More importantly – even without knowing what dopamine is – all of us have certainly felt its effects.
As a runner, I’m fascinated in the role of dopamine in both my training and performance, and equally the involvement of dopamine in the ‘runner’s high’ satisfaction felt at the end of a run. As a human being, I’m intrigued by the role of dopamine in my day-to-day life, particularly the effect on my wellbeing and my mood.
And I’m definitely not alone. I see dopamine mentioned everywhere. Across social media, some things I commonly see: Are these dopamine highs sustainable? Can I become addicted to dopamine? Am I getting enough dopamine? Do I need to artificially increase my dopamine? Let’s find out.
Dopamine: Movement, Memory, Mood and Motivation
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical messenger – most commonly produced in the brain. Inside the brain, dopamine is made by neurons (nerve cells), and is synthesised from amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Once created, dopamine is stored in small, fluid-filled sacs called vesicles, which will hold the dopamine until a signal triggers its release. Upon release, dopamine crosses the gap between cells, and binds to specific receptors on the next neuron. This binding triggers a cascade of other signals, and the process is repeated, allowing important messages to be communicated chemically throughout the brain.
One of the most common myths surrounding dopamine is that its only function is creating a feeling of pleasure. In reality, dopamine signals travel along four major pathways, each having a different function, and therefore, a different outcome.
- The Motor Pathway: Dopamine feeds into a fundamental loop within the body that controls voluntary movement, inhibits involuntary movement, and aids the learning of new motor skills.
- The Cognitive Pathway: In this pathway, dopamine strengthens short-term memory, helps to filters out distracting noises, and to supports flexible thinking and decision-making.
- The Emotional Pathway: Dopamine plays a role in emotional learning and memory, by helping the brain to store these emotional memories. Dopamine is also used in the regulation of baseline mood.
- The Reward Pathway: The most well-known dopamine pathway. Dopamine is used to create the feeling of satisfaction after a rewarding experience, which therefore motivates repeated behaviour to achieve the same satisfied feeling. Very quickly, dopamine creates a strong relationship between stimulus and the reinforced behaviour, which is vital in habit-forming.
From Fire Building to Instagram Likes: Is your Dopamine System Overloaded?
The role of dopamine stretches back to some of the earliest multicellular life. Some studies even suggest that dopamine in humans contributed to our evolutionary developmental advantage over other primates. In short, dopamine is fundamental to us, and we absolutely have a biological, evolutionary drive to seek out behaviours that cause dopamine to be released.
However, the modern world is completely unlike the environment where these mechanisms evolved. In the past, there were far fewer triggers for dopamine spikes – the foraging of food, finding new territory, or building fire. Today, we are bombarded with triggers – a text message, an Instagram like, online shopping. Dopamine evolved as a rare reward linked to genuine effort, with our ancestors having far greater gaps between dopamine spikes than we do now, where dopamine is released constantly, and often without effort.
These constant inputs cause artificial dopamine spikes, where our brains cannot differentiate between high-effort behaviour that deserves a reward, and trivial behaviour that does not. Over time, the brain becomes desensitised to dopamine – it releases less overall, and is less responsive to that which is does release.
This dysregulated dopamine system has two core impacts.
- Loss of motivation for effort-based activities (Dopamine Fatigue): Activities which require focus and hard work should be rewarded with a dopamine spike. This spike reinforces the behaviour, and drives motivation to do it again. With a brain desensitised to dopamine, from constant stimulation, the response to meaningful triggers is far lower. We’re so used to instant gratification, that motivation for activities such as running becomes significantly reduced. The brain no longer tips in favour of a 30-minute run for a dopamine reward, and, therefore, we lose drive for focussed goals.
- Addiction to short-term dopamine highs: On the flip side, because our brains are so attuned to receiving instant gratification, addiction to harmful behaviours becomes a real issue. Take online shopping, for example. The anticipation of a new item, the pressing ‘buy’, the confirmation email, the 20% off your next order all create small, but significant dopamine spikes in the brain. When dopamine drops, the brain is so conditioned to expect constant triggers, the craving for the next hit begins, which results in more online shopping, and the cycle continues. A similar loop can be formed in running, the constant craving for extrinsic validation such as a new personal best, or receiving kudos on Strava reinforce potentially damaging behaviours such as overtraining, pushing through injury or burnout just to feel the hit again.
Resetting Dopamine: Practical Steps to Take
The good news is that research suggests the effects of over-exposure to triggers is reversible, and the dopamine system can effectively be reset and re-sensitised. By intentionally reducing stimulus, such as switching off notifications, focussing on one task at a time and scaling back on ultra-processed food allows the brain to recalibrate and restore natural dopamine balance.
Mindfulness meditation provides the perfect environment for limited stimuli. Meditation trains the brain to override the desire to seek instant gratification such as playing a YouTube video or sending a text message. Some studies have even shown that meditation can increases baseline dopamine by over 50%, making the brain more sensitive to subtle, natural pleasures such as the sun, or the sound of the sea.
Purposefully planning an activity with delayed gratification, such as going for a run, learning to play an instrument, cooking with raw ingredients can also help to rebalance the dopamine system. These activities lead to intrinsic motivation, the brain is trained to enjoy the process rather than an instant reward, realigning the feelings of satisfaction and focus with meaningful activities.
Dopamine and Exercise: A Winning Combination
Dopamine Sensitivity Through Physical Exertion
Exercise has a profoundly positive impact on the brain, and particularly in relation to dopamine. With regular physical activity, the expression of specific growth and repair proteins (BDNF and GDNF) in the brain are increased, which plays a vital role in growing and protecting neurons. This neurobiological support not only modulates dopamine release and preserve existing pathways, but promotes the growth of new neurons, and, therefore, dopamine receptors in the brain. Research has shown this process to happen particularly in areas linked with motivation and reward.
Further, exercise gradually activates the dopamine system through effort-based stimulation, rather than instantly overloading the system with artificial dopamine spikes. This steadier activation attunes the brain to become more sensitive to dopamine by upregulating dopamine receptor sensitivity. Resultantly, exercise-based behavioural loops are formed, in which meaningful effort is rewarded.
Training Your Brain to Enter Flow
Flow states, or the feeling of being “in the zone” or “locked in” are optimal mental states whereby concentration is fully fixed to one task. They are deemed the most productive state of mind to be in for performance, but are often difficult to achieve consistently.
Taking the example of running, a flow state in an interval session requires a well-regulated dopamine system, as dopamine plays a vital role in focus and task-orientation. The brain needs to release a sufficient, moderate amount of dopamine to maintain attention and focus on the pace in each interval, but not too much dopamine to overwhelm the brain and cause anxiety, or too little dopamine, whereby focus or motivation is lost, and the rep goes incomplete.
Regulating dopamine in day-to-day lifestyle choices helps to reset the balance by making the brain more responsive to effort-based cues. This, in turn, helps to enter flow state during training or performances, and improves the likelihood of success in pre-defined goals. Gradually, the brain associates flow state with positive outcomes, which re-inforces a self-sustaining cycle.
Rethinking Dopamine in Public Health
It’s important that we dispel the misconception that the only role of dopamine is in response to pleasure. Not only this, but we must promote education that differentiates between healthy dopamine signalling, and artificial spikes induced by the stimuli in the modern world.
The effective regulation of dopamine is crucial to maintaining both mental and physical health. Small interventions could have a huge effect on improving the wellbeing of our population.
Education on the Risks of Dopamine Dysregulation
Public health interventions need to illustrate why repeated exposure to stimuli and instant gratification is bad, and lead to dopamine dysregulation. This overstimulation disrupts all four of the dopamine pathways, affecting mood, diminishing motivation, reducing the capacity for learning and even has impact on our motor skills. Showing real life examples of these risks may help regulate engagement with digital technology, and promote healthy alternatives.
Empowering people with strategies such as mindfulness, meditation, enforced breaks from technology should all form part of mental health campaigns, with focus on the impact on dopamine. Restoring healthy dopamine systems have been shown to improve emotional resilience, and help lessen the symptoms of mental health conditions, such as depression.
Device-Free Zones and Practical Alternatives
Establishing device free zones, particularly in schools and universitites will help to reduce unnecessary dopamine overstimulation. Removing digital distraction will provide a rest from constant triggers, and allow the brain even a short period to reset. In these spaces practical alternative activities should be provided, which stimulate effort-based dopanine, rather than that which would have been achieved through scrolling on phone. Promoting access to places with green spaces for gardening, exercise or skill building activities all promote dopamine release and intrinsic motivation.
Physical activity in natural environments has benefits stretching far and wide, but in terms of dopamine, there should be communities which support low-pressure, inclusive exercise. The focus shouldn’t be on performance metrics, but moreso on participation and socialisation, which reinforce positive dopamine loops, without the compulsive nature to achieve and seek extrinsic reward.
Useful Studies
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8301978
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1257629/full