Ready to breathe a sign of relief? Welcome to Ask Dr. Jodi where you get trauma-informed mental health and relationship advice that you won’t hear anywhere else. Today, we’re exploring the dopamine cycle and its crucial role in shaping our motivation, happiness, and emotional well-being. I’ll explain how our brains rely on dopamine to push us toward rewarding activities, social connections, and new experiences—and why modern routines, screen addiction, and isolation can throw this balance off. Together, we’ll uncover practical ways to reset your dopamine cycle naturally, like taking a digital detox, spending time in nature, diving into creative projects, or getting active. Let’s reignite your joy, build resilience, and create a healthier, more fulfilling life!
Today, we’re diving into the dopamine cycle, exploring how it affects our mood, motivation, and even our relationships. We’ll look at what dopamine is, why it’s so important to our well-being, and how we can reset and boost it naturally. If you’re feeling a bit stuck or unmotivated, this episode is for you—let’s get back to enjoying life!
In this episode, Dr. Jodi discusses the science behind dopamine, the brain’s “feel-good” chemical, and its role in motivation, satisfaction, and joy. She explains how the dopamine cycle naturally fuels our desire for novelty and achievement, encouraging us to take on new challenges and maintain social connections. Dr. Jodi highlights how factors like routine, isolation, and screen addiction can disrupt this cycle, leaving us feeling unmotivated, isolated, and disconnected.
To help listeners reset their dopamine levels, Dr. Jodi shares practical strategies to reignite motivation, including engaging in creative activities, spending time in nature, and setting achievable goals. This episode also covers the importance of balancing routine with novelty and the need for occasional digital detoxes to maintain a healthy mind.
Thank you so much for listening! If you enjoyed today’s episode, please take a moment to leave a five-star review onApple Podcastsand share it with someone who needs inspiration or help to heal!
Dr Jodi Aman: Do you want to understand the dopamine cycle? So dopamine is a hormone that's in our brain and it's associated with pleasure, with happiness, with gratification. Satisfaction, actually, so it releases in the brain when you're doing something that you like so that you keep doing it. Right? So our brain functions because it wants us to survive and thrive.
[00:02:15] Dr Jodi Aman: These are biological functions of the brain. It wants us to survive. And it wants us to thrive in this life, because if we're thriving, then we're having relationships and, um, the future of our species is guaranteed. So that dopamine cycle is really important to the survival of our species. That's why biologically it was created in our body.
[00:02:38] Dr Jodi Aman: So if we do something we like, um, and yes, that includes, uh, any, any kind of play and yes, it includes, you know, procreating, um, It's really about thriving in relationships, having fun, kind of wanting to live, right? You want to live, like biologically, we're like, we have to live. We try to keep ourselves safe.
[00:03:02] Dr Jodi Aman: We, uh, try to stay alive as long as we can. You know, when we're in danger, we try to get out of it. So there is those functions that happen in the brain, but the dopamine cycle wants us to thrive. So it's a little bit more than biological, like we want to live, we want to relate to other people, we want to try new things, we want to get creative, uh, we want to problem solve.
[00:03:27] Dr Jodi Aman: That is all connected to the dopamine cycle. So the brain has reasons for everything, so it's really interesting and very helpful. My dog is sniffing around back here. Um, you know, it's really helpful to understand what the brain's doing so you don't feel so crazy when it's doing something weird. When you understand it and it doesn't have as much mystery, like when you understand anxiety, stick with me, if you don't understand anxiety and anxiety is a mystery, it makes you feel helpless and it overwhelms you.
[00:03:57] Dr Jodi Aman: That scares you more, that upsets you more and it, it, it, triggers the anxiety, right? Being afraid of the anxiety or not understanding the anxiety makes you feel helpless and hopeless about it. So what we do here in this show is we try to understand ourselves. We understand our world, we understand other people, and then everything gets a little bit easier when we understand that stuff.
[00:04:23] Dr Jodi Aman: Because then we can make sense of it. Then we can make decisions and change it. Decisions to make herself happier, to decisions to open our heart or heal from trauma or whatever we're doing, whatever we're talking about. I go live every Monday at 8 PM. And so you can see me here. Um, occasionally I'm away and then I'll just post a video at eight, but usually I'm live.
[00:04:45] Dr Jodi Aman: So if you are watching me on YouTube, you could put comments in and I should be able to see them. Um, So I hope you do that. And I know that my, um, sorry. I know that my quality on YouTube has not been very great. I'm changing my internet provider and I'm going to come to you in a much clearer way starting next week.
[00:05:10] Dr Jodi Aman: And next week, I'm really excited because I have a great guest. She's a health teacher and she talks about skill based. learning. And I think it's going to be so wonderful because I think that's what we're getting away from. I talk about Generation Z all the time and trying to help them and help ourselves as their guides.
[00:05:29] Dr Jodi Aman: Uh, but skills based, skill based learning is what we've gotten away from by this modern culture because we don't do a lot of chores. We don't do a lot of survival Chores that we used to do. And so we've gotten disconnected with our skills. We have skills because we have been adapted. Our brain is adapted for millions of years to be what it is now.
[00:05:55] Dr Jodi Aman: And it's adapted to be adaptable. Adapted to be adaptable. So we could do it. The dopamine cycle is really important to that adaptability Because we're attracted to and we want to repeat things that we like So if we achieve something if we figure out a problem and we solved it, it feels good. It releases our dopamine We feel amazing and we want to try to do that again You know, we'd like challenges, not challenges that are awful and that are problems.
[00:06:24] Dr Jodi Aman: We have those too, and we don't want more of those. We want exciting challenges, interesting challenges. We want to keep our interests charged up. One of the biggest problems out there with our mental health is we're bored with life. Things are boring. We don't have to figure things out and we get kind of complacent and a little stagnant.
[00:06:46] Dr Jodi Aman: And that stagnation usually is isolating. And when we're isolated, no dopamine comes. No dopamine gets released, no dopamine cycles. It's like dead there. Um, so I started to notice this in my practice. I'm a psychotherapist. I started to notice this in my practice many years ago, that these symptoms that we associate with depression, like isolation, withdrawal, not being interested in stuff, were actually symptoms of isolation that happen when people are sad, they isolate themselves.
[00:07:19] Dr Jodi Aman: And after a while, when you're isolated, many things happen. One is the negativity that's already in your head. You know, we're encultured to look at our deficits and have negative thinking. We have so many thoughts, nothing to do with them all. You know, we don't have to use them all to survive like we used to.
[00:07:37] Dr Jodi Aman: And so we just, They just all the extra thoughts turn negative. And when you're isolated, there's no one to combat them. There's no way to get out of your head and into somebody else's story or into the world. You're stuck in there. So that's one thing that happens when you're isolated into the negativity.
[00:07:56] Dr Jodi Aman: And when So much negative thoughts over and over and over again, the dopamine cycle kind of gets stagnant. You don't have much dopamine and so you don't get interested in doing anything. Like nothing interests you at all. If you ever had that feeling that nothing interests you, or if you ever had one of your young people in your life, uh, if you were an adult and you're, you have, uh, young people in your life, did they ever say like, just not interested?
[00:08:24] Dr Jodi Aman: Like they're not even interested in feeling better. This is a dopamine issue, and this is, uh, this suggests that they are highly isolated and they need to come back and do stuff. They need to spark their interest in something, uh, and so you need to, if you are a friend, because they don't care. So if you're a friend of somebody in the state, you have to try to get them out.
[00:08:48] Dr Jodi Aman: It does come back. The dopamine cycle comes back. We saw it during the pandemic that people had quite stagnant dopamine because they weren't doing anything novel. They weren't doing much at all. Some people compensated for that and started baking, or they started making obstacle courses in their backyard, or they started to do something creative to make up for the lack of their routine and their lack of what they were doing because they were stuck home during the pandemic.
[00:09:16] Dr Jodi Aman: But once people got out into the world, you could see them kind of regulating and getting back to normal pretty quickly. So we could instigate that dopamine cycle to kind of come back and regulate. And then we feel, you know, ourselves in normal again, when we were isolated or the dopamine cycle is stagnant, we don't feel like ourselves at all.
[00:09:39] Dr Jodi Aman: We don't feel like ourselves. We're like, we don't care about things that we used to care about. It doesn't feel like our values. Like our values are so much part of our identity. And who we are. And so not to have any, not to care. And it's not like I don't care if I murder somebody. I don't mean that. It's like, I don't care if I get better.
[00:09:58] Dr Jodi Aman: I don't care if I do anything today. I don't even care if I eat today. I don't care if I get off the couch today. That kind of not caring is what I'm talking about. That means that reward system, that dopamine cycle is just, uh, you know, I don't want to say it's dead, but. like the inertia of it is just stalled and we have to get it back.
[00:10:20] Dr Jodi Aman: Uh, so there is a blog that goes with this video and you can see it under in the, um, the description. Maybe you're watching this on the blog right now. And so I outline a bunch of things that you could do to trigger that dopamine cycle. And they all are, surprise, surprise, something that sparks excitement.
[00:10:41] Dr Jodi Aman: Something new, right? We want novelty. We need novelty. We need a challenge. We need a goal because those are what our brain, like our brain adapted to like problem solving so that we could continue problem solving and survive. It's kind of amazing when you think about it that way. So when we're not problem solving, when we're really bored with life and we don't have to do much, people get bored.
[00:11:15] Dr Jodi Aman: It doesn't feel bored. It feels like they don't care. It feels like they're indifferent. It feels like they're depressed. It feels like they, nobody likes them, but it is boredom in some ways. I don't mean to be, I don't mean to be depreciating your feelings when I say that because it's devastating. It's devastating.
[00:11:35] Dr Jodi Aman: on the psyche. This is not what we, helps us thrive emotionally or mentally or physically. It does not help us or even spiritually. It doesn't, boredom is not good for our psyche and it could have devastating consequences. So I'm not saying, Oh, you're just bored. And that's like, whatever it's all in your head.
[00:11:57] Dr Jodi Aman: And this is not a big deal. It is a very big deal. It's a much bigger deal than we're really looking at. Right? When we lost these survival skills, when we live in smaller and smaller households, we're not using those parts of our brain that charge us up and we're not releasing those dopamine cycles. And you add into the mix a cell phone.
[00:12:20] Dr Jodi Aman: Add into the mix a cell phone and the dopamine cycles that are hitting with our notifications or what we see in our phone, positive and negative. It's affecting, so it creates a bit of an addiction to our phones because that's the only place we're getting dopamine. We're not getting it anywhere else.
[00:12:39] Dr Jodi Aman: Especially if you're on it a lot, that's where you're getting it, and so it feels like I can't put it down. I need to know what if I miss something and so this, this, The connection between our phones and the interruption in our dopamine, though it is going off, it's, it makes us think that that's the only thing that'll help it go off.
[00:13:03] Dr Jodi Aman: And it puts, it's almost, it's the same, it's very similar to using a substance. So some of the steps to recharge, um, reclaim or remaster your dopamine cycle is to do different things. Do novel things. Novelty means it's something new, something you haven't done before, something different. You want to change it up a little bit.
[00:13:29] Dr Jodi Aman: Our brains love routine. makes us feel safe, and then it gives us a bandwidth for doing other stuff. But we don't want exact routine every day and no novelty at all. We need some novelty in there and it doesn't have to be about everything. You can have routines about most of the stuff and then do something fun that's novel and that will trigger the dopamine.
[00:13:50] Dr Jodi Aman: Uh, so even it could be a little as sometimes I have clients like paint their nails a bright color when they just need to do something and it's a cycle. So it's It's cyclic because if you do something little, it gives you a little bit of. Excitement or thrill, very little, but it's enough to give you maybe the energy for one more thing and maybe the energy for one more thing.
[00:14:14] Dr Jodi Aman: And then it gets better and better and better, right? We're, we're reversing the inertia. Inertia means like an object in motion stays in motion and then the object at rest stays at rest. If you're at rest, it is hard to get moving. But if you're moving, Sometimes it's hard to stop, but it's easier to keep moving if you're moving.
[00:14:35] Dr Jodi Aman: So when you're at rest and you need to start moving, you need to do something, you need to do something. And if you can have a friend that helps you have a parent that helps you, uh, I, I think this for social beings, we need help with this. Sometimes you're so isolated and we've had no dopamine hit at all for a really long time.
[00:14:56] Dr Jodi Aman: We need someone else to pull us out of it. But, um, so, so get that. You know, you don't have to do this all alone. And then when you do one thing, it gives you the energy for the next and the next and the next. So that's, that's what explains it. So um, so do something novel, uh, step out of your comfort zone.
[00:15:18] Dr Jodi Aman: That is novelty. Anytime you're stepping out of your comfort zone, it might be scary, but there's a really fine line between thrill and fear, isn't there? Like people jump out of planes to have their adrenaline go or they drive really fast to have their adrenaline because they love the thrill of it. And so it's not the adrenaline itself that makes you afraid, it's how you make meaning around it.
[00:15:38] Dr Jodi Aman: When it comes out of the blue and you don't know what it's for, uh, and you feel really awful like something bad's going to happen. It makes you feel horrible, but if you're driving really fast and it feels really great and you know that you have control and power in the situation, um, then you have the thrill.
[00:15:56] Dr Jodi Aman: Same hormone. It's how you think about it. Okay. So, uh, okay. So delay gratification if you can. We're so used to, with our phones, we're so used to that instant gratification, that if we spent more time getting our mind and body used to delayed gratification, the gratification that comes with the, after the delay is so much better.
[00:16:21] Dr Jodi Aman: We feel so good about it. Productive or achieving. Um, we feel good about ourselves. Like it's so much more satisfying when you wait and also it, it releases more dopamine, like sustainable, happier dopamine that really gives you energy for the next thing so you could sustain it. The phone just gives you enough dopamine.
[00:16:41] Dr Jodi Aman: not tear your eyes off it. Okay. So one of the things you could do is do a digital detox temporarily and regularly. Take some time away from your phone, like go for a walk without it. Do something without it. Um, hang out with people without it. If you go meet your friend for coffee or something like don't take out of your bag the whole time and you're talking to your friend.
[00:17:07] Dr Jodi Aman: If you have something to show them, show them later or text it later or whatever, tell them about it. Describe it. When you're taking a walk and not looking at your phone, you're looking around you and, and that's really amazing. Uh, take a substance detox substances, any substances that you, you could use that mind altering substances, take you Out of the dopamine cycle, out of the regular dopamine cycle, because the substances, when you're not on it anymore, it strips you of dopamine, and then you have to use a substance again.
[00:17:40] Dr Jodi Aman: That's why, that's why people keep using it, right? So you want to have a substance detox, a digital detox, uh, one, maybe more than the other. You want to exercise because exercise is going to release those feel good endorphins and it's going to make you feel good. You feel like you achieved something. So mentally you're feeling good and releasing that dopamine because you set a goal.
[00:18:05] Dr Jodi Aman: I'm going to exercise today. And you did feel good about that. Creativity. Creativity is so good for your mind and body and spirit. Being creative. We are, I kind of think in a lot of ways we are on this earth to create. We are physically, uh, on this earth to create the next, um, the next generation, of course, but also we're, our brain has evolved.
[00:18:32] Dr Jodi Aman: evolved all this time so we could create, and yes, you could see the results of that. Human, humans have been creating for millennia, right? And we see all, we see all the ancient ruins still and the things that we're creating today. It's like unlimited what we could create, but that keeps us alive. It charges us up.
[00:18:51] Dr Jodi Aman: It makes us really happy. It releases our dopamine. So it's really good for your dopamine cycle. A healthy, happy, um, working for you Dopamine cycle. All right. What else? Deep breaths. Deep breaths reset the nervous system. And so it resets the dopamine cycle as well because the dopamine cycle is connected to your nervous system.
[00:19:17] Dr Jodi Aman: So if your nervous system is on like survival mode, if your nervous system is just like, uh, has no energy or no motivation at all, a reset deep breathing could bring some energy in and settle any nervous energy. And so it resets the system. And so it might, when you're doing, when you're approaching something, you might not be thinking about all the other stuff after a deep breathing session.
[00:19:43] Dr Jodi Aman: You deep breathe for a couple minutes, even a couple, even one minute. If you deep breathe a little bit after that session, things look new. Your perception is a little more acute and in things seem new and better. And so your dopamine cycle gets back to regular as well after our deep breathing session, sleeping well.
[00:20:07] Dr Jodi Aman: I mean, you could hear this list. These are things that make us happy. Keep us healthy. Right. These are not news. Oh, this is something new. Jody's talking about today. I never heard of sleep being good for your health. Yeah. Sleep is good for your health. Sleep is good for every single system in the body. So if you don't get enough sleep, it's going to affect your pleasure, your motivation.
[00:20:32] Dr Jodi Aman: It's going to affect your energy levels and that's going to affect your dopamine cycle. So I'm not eating a lot of sugar. Again, general healthy tip, right? Don't eat a lot of sugar or don't eat a lot of carbohydrates because that's going to spike your energy because your sugar is going to go up and then you could crash back down.
[00:20:53] Dr Jodi Aman: It's going to affect your pleasure. You want to eat more sugar sometimes and then sometimes you feel really bad when you're away from the sugar and you got a crash coming. Um, you just, you know, Don't feel good at all. Don't want to do anything. Totally unmotivated. And so that, um, so decreasing your sugar overall is going to decrease that huge up and down the intensity of those huge up and down.
[00:21:20] Dr Jodi Aman: And lastly, one of my favorites is, um, spend some time in nature. You know, you want to spend some time in, um, I'm just looking at the chat chat disconnected. My chat's disconnected. I don't know. Sorry about that. I'll fix that for next week. But anyway, so spend some time out in nature because nature naturally makes you feel good.
[00:21:47] Dr Jodi Aman: Naturally releases those endorphins. First of all, you're usually moving when you're outside and always you could be sitting still, but that fresh air, the breathing, the looking at beautiful things, the connection that you feel with the world around you totally resets the dopamine cycle. Thank you for listening to this episode of Anxiety.
[00:22:09] Dr Jodi Aman: I'm So Done With You with me, Dr. Jodi. Here, I give trauma informed advice to parents, educators, counselors, and teens. Please leave me a comment and give me five stars on Apple Podcasts. If you wanted to catch me live, I stream this talk show on YouTube at Dr. Jodi, at D O C T O R J O D I. I go on every Monday at 8 p.
[00:22:32] Dr Jodi Aman: m. Eastern. And if you're there, you could ask me your questions in real time. Get on the list for reminders at jodiahmond. com slash guide, and you'll get my Generation Z Mental Health Resource Guide. I'll talk at you next week, but in the meantime, be present and let that you that you want to be shine through.