Rewiring Dopamine Dysregulation

Your dopamine isn’t the enemy, but it might be running your life. When we live on constant stimulation, our phones, processed food, binge watching, shopping hauls, and even the rush of attention can start to feel like necessities instead of choices. I break down how artificial pleasure is engineered to hijack your dopamine reward system, why it creates a numbing effect, and how the crash that follows exposes the emotions we have been trying not to feel.

When you intentionally reduce indulgence and distractions, you don’t just notice hunger or restlessness, you hear your inner dialogue clearly. That “dopamine withdrawal” becomes useful data. It shows where your nervous system is dysregulated and what feelings you have been outsourcing to quick hits of relief. The goal is not to live joyless or to shame yourself for cravings. The goal is to reclaim your pleasure and rewire your brain toward what actually builds you up.

Listen now, then share this with a friend who feels stuck in overstimulation, and subscribe and leave a review so more people can find the tools. What’s the biggest dopamine trap you want to break first?

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Transcript

Welcome And The Big Promise

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Kamal Akar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Inshallah, today I want to talk to you about artificial pleasure and how it's everywhere. And I've talked about similar topics in the past, and this is in the spirit of Ramadan passing because I love what Ramadan Reset has to offer and I want to be able to apply it for the rest of the year. So I want to emphasize how the dopamine spike as offered by the highly engaging content of the phone, the processed food, and all of that is hiding your dysregulation. If you pick up your phone and you scroll for 30 seconds, you've already consumed more novelty than your grandmother processed in a week. Your life is not more interesting than hers, but now the apps are designed to hijack your dopamine loops in a way that humankind has never seen before. Every time you experience a high dopamine hit, especially around the unpredictable cycles of the reward, the brain says maybe the next hit will feel better than before, and the cycle keeps your mind hostage. The dopamine withdrawal from these spikes shows you your mismanaged mind, because this dopamine withdrawal is an x-ray when you're not overeating and over-scrolling or over socializing or whatever your drug of choice is for your brain, even if it is not an actual drug. When you withdraw from it, your emotional life comes to the forefront. It comes into the spotlight. Then you have to figure out a way to deal with it. And if you don't know that, then you go back to overdoing whatever activity you are engaging in just to suppress it. Withdrawal of dopamine brings to light the painful emotions and the discomfort that you have to learn to deal with. So let's say you eat a pint of ice cream every time you feel anxious. Then you have anxiety unless you eat the ice cream. So when you decide you're not gonna eat the ice cream, then you also have to have a way to deal with the anxiety, because otherwise if it's not the ice cream, it's gonna be cupcakes. When you're looking for artificial pleasure, anything related to a high dopamine hit, social media, shopping, Facebook likes, even the dopamine hit of a man's attention in a world where a girl is brought up to center their entire existence around men. So yes, a male attention also creates a dopamine hit. When girls are programmed to measure their worth with how much they're worth to a man, that and any other activity that creates a high dopamine hit creates a numbing effect to the underlying difficult emotion. Then you get stuck in the cycle of immediate gratification and unless you have the activity, you can't feel better. This artificial pleasure is the shortcut your nervous system gets addicted to because it feels like winning the lottery. This is very much manufactured, extremely concentrated, and completely divorced from real growth. So your brain is originally wired to like the potatoes grown in the ground, but somebody in a lab figured out how to slice them very thin and fry them in oil and dust them with just the right amount of chemicals to light up your reward circuitry like fireworks in the brain. So when you stop eating those potato chips and try to enjoy the potatoes without the extras, it doesn't taste as good. So when you stop overeating, over scrolling, overworking, over socializing, something uncomfortable is going to happen, and that is your real emotional life that is coming into the spotlight. The loneliness that you might have been outrunning or the exhaustion that you've been silencing with the stimulation, all of that is going to come up when dopamine withdrawal is taking place. This is an x-ray of your mismanaged mind. So artificial pleasure is engineered to overstimulate your dopamine system. It creates a shortcut, it bypasses effort, your meaning making, the depth from your life. Whenever you yourself choose to go through a dopamine detox through Ramadan or anything else, when food constant stimulation and indulgences are reduced, yes, hunger and thirst surfaces, but what also surfaces is your inner dialogue, your impatience, your fear. When you cannot reach for food or a stimulation at will, when you intentionally reduce distractions, your system can no longer rely on its usual emergency exit. The fireworks are not there as much to rescue you, and that's when you see what you've been avoiding. That way the cause of your dysregulation reveals itself to you when you're not hiding it with one dopamine hit after another. So what we're trying to do is reduce these artificial dopamine hits with a sustained pleasure. Something that does feel good in the body, but is not that intense. So a real human conversation gives your nervous system warmth, connection through oxytocin. But when Netflix drops a whole season overnight and your brain goes, Why do I have to talk to an actual person when I can binge watch eight episodes and get a much larger feeling of connection? So we're trying to replace artificial hits with intentional pleasure that rewires and regulates your system at the same time. Or let's take the fashion world. Your nervous system is supposed to feel pleasure from comfort, from your identity, from baraka in the way you express yourself. But if fast fashion is giving you a dopamine hit every time a package arrives in the mail, all your brain cares for is the spike of the dopamine of the anticipation of the package, and not so much about enjoying the content. So if you want to enjoy what you bought, make your money's worth, then you have to learn that skill. Because that skill does not have a very high dopamine reward. To learn to enjoy what you bought, you would have to rely on your meaning-making brain, what thoughts you give to what you bought. Artificial pleasure hijacks the nervous system, it numbs your emotional discomfort, while this level of created natural intentional pleasure rewires and regulates your system. The problem is that this intentional pleasure requires work on your part. It requires for you to build a bank of thoughts that you can use to drive a dopamine hit from any external activities to a meaning that you're making about what the activity was. Meaning, let's say you have a tendency to fall for all of the sales in the shops and you find retail therapy very stress relieving. But you also want to be more intentional about your purchases. Then this bracelet that you've been wanting for quite some time comes across your attention again and you want to purchase it. When you buy the bracelet to escape the discomfort created by your mismanaged mind, then the dopamine hit is going to artificially dampen the pain that you've been trying to escape and it will create a sense of immediate relief. But the issue is that this mind is going to associate the object with your pleasure. It's going to associate the bracelet with your instant happiness. When in reality your thoughts about that bracelet are creating your happiness. When you buy the bracelet for artificial dopamine hit, the fireworks, then you feel the instant pleasure. But you're also on your path of reform. You don't want to be engaging in so much shopping all the time, so then immediately guilt of indulging follows. But the way you rewire this is that you have to move on to intentional pleasure, and you get to create that from the object that is the same exact piece of jewelry. What you have to focus on is your thoughts. In this case, you think that this bracelet looks good on you. It has this right tone of gold and it has the right precious stones and it's the right price and it fits your budget and it looks great on your wrist. All of these thoughts will bring you joy. The bracelet itself does not bring you joy. If you're looking in the mirror and you think to yourself, Wow this bracelet exactly matches my aesthetic, this is a thought that's going to bring you happiness. The bracelet itself is neutral. The bracelet does not bring happiness because if the bracelet was the cause of your happiness, then the same bracelet would cause happiness in everyone, but that's obviously not the case. This is you intentionally cultivating your joy through this bracelet, through intentionally creating thoughts to enjoy your purchase. This is also derived from dopamine, but it does not feel as intense as fireworks. It's going to create more of a steady excitement in your body. And that is the work. You're going to have to rely on this bank of thoughts to be able to create the joy in your body that comes from this purchase, which is the same bracelet. One intention behind the purchase of this bracelet is that you're escaping discomfort, which is a subconscious intention most of the time, and the other one is that you're creating joy intentionally in your life. It is the same materialistic item. This level of natural intentional pleasure requires participation. It requires your attention. It asks you to generate intentional thoughts instead of escaping discomfort. The same object can be an emotional band aid or an intentional act of joy, and the difference is not in the object, it is in your thoughts about it. What all of the acts of immediate gratification have in common is that they bypass depth. They require no effort on your part, because they're designed to speak to a version of pleasure of you that is chemically much louder and much less fulfilling. While artificial pleasure is fast, real pleasure is earned, and the work ahead of you is that if your nervous system is addicted to fireworks, you're going to start to recognize the beauty of the simple sparks. This instant gratification loop of intense pleasure, when it hijacks your nervous system, it creates an overall net negative effect in your life. While it is still based on a naturally and beautifully created reward system, it is not being used properly with instant gratification. The same dopamine system has the potential to have you enjoy the pleasures of life immensely and create a net positive result in your life. If you think of relaxation at the beach, if it brings you warmth, if it brings you joy, and you enjoy the sun and you love burying your feet in the sand, you love the ocean wind giving your whole nervous system a full body exhale, that's real pleasure. Your brain is working to register safety, beauty, and gratitude all at the same time. Or if you enjoy sitting in your living room floor and playing board games with your kids, nothing else is trying to monetize your attention. You have your inside jokes and belly laughs and this feeling of warmth and fullness inside of you. This comes from your thoughts that you have about your children, about this valuable time that you're spending with them. Your mind is telling you you're exactly where you're supposed to be. This meaning requires intentional attention for the joy to be extracted from that moment. When you cultivate more and more of these thoughts and raise your bank account of these thoughts, it's going to rewire your reward system to seek more intentional pleasure. Or if you enjoy a walk around the block with your husband when you're not rushing, or if you're cooking something simple in your kitchen, and your nervous system is used to translating that into stability and belonging and love only if you've been able to give that cooking the meaning of belonging. Otherwise, your brain will still opt for another more immediate gratification activity. Or your intentional pleasure activity might be reading a book in bed while you lose track of time in the best way possible, or studying for an exam and working very hard to see the fruits of your labor and drawing joy from your hard work. These are simple intentional thoughts that will refill you. Dopamine spike is addictive, but if you refine your thoughts about the low dopamine activity that you are still engaging in, you are learning the skill of self regulation. And at first, this rewiring will feel underwhelming because your brain has been trained to expect fireworks. But what feels boring is just your nervous system recalibrating. This level of natural intentional pleasure is slower and steadier. It comes from presence, connection, effort, spirituality, meaning making. And the real control point in all of this is your conscious thought. Both artificial and natural pleasure pathways enter through the same doorway, your nervous system, the dopamine reward system. And your point of control behind all of this is your conscious thought. The subconscious runs old loops. The conscious mind interrupts them. When you eat to escape anxiety, the food is not the problem. The instruction your mind is giving you is the problem. When your mind is telling you that I cannot tolerate this anxiety, therefore I must eat, that meaning making has to be changed. That is the point of your control, your conscious thought. The work is to learn to send a different instruction. Like this discomfort is survivable. This feeling is information for me. I am able to generate joy without escape. The origin of the pleasure, the target of the pleasure, and the translation of the pleasure all run through one system. Your thoughts, your brain, your body, the dopamine system. Which is great news because this means that this dopamine spike system that you might be addicted to is not out of your hands. You're not hostage. You're not hostage to your cravings or the overstimulation. Your point of control is always the same. What are you making this activity mean? What are you making this food mean? The transformation happens when you stop letting your subconscious run the show and start deliberately choosing where you drive your pleasure from. You start generating pleasure from foods that nourish you. You start tolerating natural dopamine instead of the dopamine spike. You start teaching your brain that your healthy pleasure counts. Not only does it count, it builds your life up. And once you start to see the net positive results in your life through more natural dopamine activities, your brain will have evidence that delayed gratification also works. Your brain is always listening. It will start to rewire accordingly. This is why people think that healthy habits don't feel as good. It's because the brain hasn't learned to translate it yet. It's not because the pleasure itself isn't there, it's because the brain hasn't built the bank of thoughts yet. The moment you begin to consciously direct your thoughts, this nourishes me. This feels good in a very clean and healthy way. My body deserves this. My nervous system loves this safety. When you start to think these thoughts, the pleasure shifts to a more sustainable version. If you find yourself bored and you can't tolerate it, this is your nervous system showing you where you are dysregulated and where you need to heal. At a low consciousness set point, a chronically dysregulated state, the brain is drawn to high dopamine activities. Solitude feels like loneliness and it becomes intolerable, maybe even threatening because it is so unfamiliar. All of that because when stimulation drops, your inner dialogue gets louder. So you clean, you scroll, you snack, you overwork, anything to avoid that dialogue. If intentional solitude or otherwise known as Khalwa, any kind of boredom feels unbearable, it means your baseline is dependent on stimulation. And if that is the case, use this as a diagnostic data point. I am not demonizing dopamine, I'm asking you to reclaim it. And when you do enough of that, your life looks completely different and you become a woman whose pleasure just cannot be hijacked. Here are some high dopamine activities that are very intentionally pleasurable and feel deeply healthy. A belly laugh with your best friend that makes you fold forward in a way that you're wiping your tears. A powerful workout where your muscles burn and your brain lights up. When you're lifting heavy weights or you're cycling, that kind of exertion brings exhilaration to the body. Finishing a big meaningful project. While you worked hard on it, when you hit submit and you close that laptop, your brain will give you a natural dopamine explosion because you've earned it. Because your thoughts are I deserve to relax now, because you're proud of your accomplishment. These are all banks of thoughts that you're counting on. Or if you're traveling to a breathtaking place for the first time, the awe that you experience, the architecture, the mountains, the fields, this is a powerful form of natural high vibration pleasure. If you experience a spiritually deep moment, like a dua that lands in your chest, and you feel that intensity, that purity, a meaningful, deep, connected conversation that goes late into the night. Or when you learn something new that blows your mind, that happens to be my favorite natural dopamine hit because I have so many thoughts around how new and novel that is and how unique and how it changes my life. This also gives me a dopamine surge and feels this also feels as a dopamine surge, but requires intentionality on my part and it creates a positive outcome and momentum in my life. Or if you show up for yourself in a moment where you normally previously didn't, you set a boundary, you spoke confidently, you chose courage. All of these are dopamine activities. They will feel empowering to you if you give them the right attention. But the problem is, which is what I've been trying to tell you in this podcast, is that these acts will not feel satisfactory until you refine your thoughts about these actions. Remember, your point of control is your conscious thought. So when you're doing these actions, your brain can label them as wholesome and fun, or it can label them as a waste of your time. And depending on where you are on this journey of directing your brain, you will be able to label it something as beneficial or something that is not. So rewire the dopamine from dysregulation towards your self-regulation, and this work is well worth the effort. With that I pray to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, Ya Allah, expose to me what I've been numbing and what I'm using to numb it. Help me tolerate the discomfort and help me heal from it. Help me rewire my reward system towards what builds me up as a human and as a servant of you, O Allah. Raise my consciousness and anchor my joy in you. Amin Yarabul Amin. Please keep me in your draas. I will talk to you guys next time.