How often do you grab your phone in a day? 10 times? 100 times? 500? Do you even notice when you reach for it anymore? In episode 74, I'm sharing a personal ride through my own dopamine addiction and the hard truths about our mental health in a world full of cheap dopamine hits.
With insights from Dr. Anna Lembke's book "Dopamine Nation," I'm talking about how we use technology, junk food, romance novels, etc to avoid feeling uncomfortable and negative emotions and how avoiding the hard stuff makes the good stuff.... well, less good.
Breaking your addiction and adding in healthy ways to feel good so you start to love the little things in life again and feel a full range of emotions is simple when you have help
- Creating routines
- Swap one feel-good habit for another
- Take care of your physical and mental health
- And have more fun.
To talk to me about how I can help you create these new habits, CLICK HERE and schedule a call.
Help others find this resource so they can calm, confident, and have more fun by leaving a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review wherever you listen.
Find me on Instagram
Find me on Facebook
Schedule your consultation and let's talk coaching!
Thanks for listening!
How often do you grab your phone in a day? 10 times? 100 times? 500? Do you even notice when you reach for it anymore? In episode 74, I'm sharing a personal ride through my own dopamine addiction and the hard truths about our mental health in a world full of cheap dopamine hits.
With insights from Dr. Anna Lembke's book "Dopamine Nation," I'm talking about how we use technology, junk food, romance novels, etc to avoid feeling uncomfortable and negative emotions and how avoiding the hard stuff makes the good stuff.... well, less good.
Breaking your addiction and adding in healthy ways to feel good so you start to love the little things in life again and feel a full range of emotions is simple when you have help
- Creating routines
- Swap one feel-good habit for another
- Take care of your physical and mental health
- And have more fun.
To talk to me about how I can help you create these new habits, CLICK HERE and schedule a call.
Help others find this resource so they can calm, confident, and have more fun by leaving a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review wherever you listen.
Find me on Instagram
Find me on Facebook
Schedule your consultation and let's talk coaching!
Thanks for listening!
Welcome to the More Than Anxiety podcast. I'm Megan Devito and I'm the Life Coach for stressed out and anxious women who want more out of life. I'm here to help you create a life you love to live, where anxiety isn't holding you back. Get ready for a lighthearted approach to managing anxiety through actionable steps, a lot of truth, talk and inspiration to take action so you walk away feeling confident, calm and ready to live. Let's get to it. Hey there, welcome to episode 74 of the More Than Anxiety podcast. My name is Megan.
Megan Devito:I'm super excited you're here today because I'm going to talk to you about something that has been on my mind recently. I said last week that I was going to talk this week about dopamine addiction, dopamine detoxing, and my head has been full of so many ideas because it's such a huge topic and there's so many different areas to talk about. For the purpose of this podcast and trying to stay at least a little bit constrained, I'm going to talk about how dopamine can affect your mental health and help you feel happier with less dopamine. I'll get into all of that. This all started when I had a meeting with a friend of mine named Derek, who is going to help me with some of my personal branding stuff and he recommended this book. I've been listening to the book called Dopamine Nation. It's by Dr Anna Limbke. If you like what you hear on this podcast episode, definitely get the book. I'm listening to it on Audible. I have to admit, when I first started reading it, or started listening to it, it freaked me out. Now I'm just a little bit obsessed with it. It's such good information that I think is really beneficial for everyone, especially in America, and how, face down in our phones, we are all the time. Some things that I'm going to touch on in this episode that I've seen with myself, with my kids, with the students that I've taught and that continue to teach, and how maybe not a 100% detox, but at least being mindful of where we're getting dopamine and how you can reduce that and feel so much happier than you do even when you are getting those little dopamine hits. That's where I'm going to go in this episode.
Megan Devito:I've got a lot to say and I'm going to try not to get off track and I know sometimes I do that but I really want to tell you how the book started with this one story that I was like, oh God, she wrote this whole book about me. I've kind of an embarrassing story to tell you and it's something that if I think about it too much it can get up in my head. But this is how the book started. The author was telling a story about how she read Twilight yes, the whole series and was like instantly addicted to it. My shameless admission is that that was pretty much me. I read it and I was like, oh my God, I love this. I mean, yes, I know maybe that it's like crappy writing, crappy storyline, whatever, but I was in. I was hooked and I was kind of happy to hear I wasn't the only person. She talked about how she was in it and how she would just read it and she just wanted to feel as good as she did the first time and she read it over and over. This was kind of my story, but I took it to a whole nother level guys. She mentioned moving on to other like romance novels, which, yes, I also did. Don't forget that we followed up Twilight with Fifty Shades of Grey, which I thought was utter garbage and I hated. But I started playing in an RPG, which is an online role playing game where you create a character and you play these different characters and you write storylines, incredible storylines, and the RPG that I played in. And I played several characters for several years was about Twilight.
Megan Devito:So as soon as she said how much dopamine she got from that, I'm like, oh Lord, it is all downhill for me, like I'm screwed. But I was just honestly really happy to hear I wasn't the only person that was maybe my age and going a little crazy over that. So what she was explaining in a nutshell is that dopamine, which is a chemical in your body, it's a neurotransmitter and sorry, I barely got that word out a neurotransmitter and its job is to motivate you and to bring pleasure and to give you rewards. Dopamine in itself is a really great chemical. It's good.
Megan Devito:I am not knocking the fact that we need it to feel good. I want to make it clear from the start because I know that sometimes I do and maybe you do have a tendency to get kind of all or nothing on things. So this is not we shouldn't have dopamine. That is certainly not what I'm saying. We definitely need dopamine and some of us are actually deficient or have too much of it naturally, that's not what I'm talking about in this episode. What I'm talking about is avoiding feeling anything bad by seeking out cheap hits of dopamine and how I've mentioned in the that life is 50-50. I saw a thing on Instagram this morning and it was the idea of thirds, where a third of the time you should feel great, a third of the time you should feel good or decent or kind of average, and a third of the time you should actually be kind of annoyed with yourself or feel badly or have a negative emotion. So, whether it's 50-50 or third, third, third, I'm talking about finding ways to avoid not feeling anything bad ever.
Megan Devito:So here's what happens with dopamine. It works in your brain to give you feelings of, like I said, pleasure, satisfaction or motivation, but it also helps to help you store and create memories. It determines your mood. It helps you sleep better and learn new things and concentrate. It regulates your blood pressure. It's a pain reliever, a physical pain reliever. So we use those dopamine hits to make our entire body feel good. So it's very addictive, and when you're addicted to the right ways of getting it, it's not so bad. But when you're doing other things to constantly feel like good. And so remember that a lot of times we get dopamine from things like street drugs, like meth, or from OxyContin or things like that, because it takes away the pain. Or we get it from things like porn or from, I mean, sex, or even weird things like I mean we get it from food or apparently Twilight or romance novels, but things like that. All of those things that make you feel good because you get that dopamine hit can become addictive.
Megan Devito:So what I want to talk about isn't those big heavy hitters. I'm not going to talk about being addicted to meth. I'm not going to talk about being addicted to porn. Those are much bigger issues than what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the cheap hits that we take in all day long, very innocently, because it's simple and it's so, we think it's so, it's just not a big deal. It's what we do. I'm talking about things like social media or binge watching Netflix or avoiding situations, and staying really into those things. Like I could just scroll my feed and get these little hits off of watching reels for hours and then I don't have to feel negative things and we all do it, me included. I noticed myself doing it yesterday as I was writing this podcast, when I would get annoyed with myself and I would pick up my phone and scroll. I'm like there it is again, I'm doing it again, and one of the things that gives us that dopamine hit that keeps us coming back for more are things like notifications, things like how many likes we get on a post, watching other people do things and making us laugh and to be sure that it's not bad to laugh, it's not bad to see those things. It's how much time and how dependent we are to feel good and we use those things to get that good feeling. So the problem isn't that we want to feel good. It's when we only want to feel good.
Megan Devito:And the more dopamine you get, the more dopamine you crave. You can get dopamine from smelling cookies baking. So you, let's say, you smell the cookies. You get dopamine. You're like, oh my God, those smell incredible. Dopamine hit, that's amazing.
Megan Devito:So you eat one and you get a little more dopamine because that felt really good. And it felt so good that you're like, oh, I'm gonna eat another cookie. The immediate reward feels really good, but it quickly goes away. So you crave another cookie. This is how you can sit down feeling stressed out and mindlessly devour an entire sleeve of Thin Mints. Tell me you haven't been there.
Megan Devito:And it is Girl Scout cookie time, isn't it? You know those little girls are gonna be at the grocery store when you go in. They're gonna smile at you and they're gonna feel like you're gonna look at them and think, oh, how can I tell that sweet little face no. They've got it all figured out. So this is my warning for you If you're gonna stress eat Girl Scout cookies, don't be surprised if you sit down and the entire sleeve of Thin Mints is gone.
Megan Devito:So, before you know it, you're out of cookies and you're out of dopamine fixes. Other things like sex, like I said, notifications on your phone, likes on your post, shopping, even the little rewards you get when you level up on Candy Crush, and they're like congratulations and the little, I don't know the little cartoon kid or cartoon, whatever that thing is comes out. Or they give you the fake stickers. How are we motivated by a fake sticker, you guys? But we are. Oh, I got this badge on my iPhone. Like I get this new little reward that you never see again because you worked out. Those badges, those rewards give you that feeling of success. They give you that feeling, whatever, it's a dopamine hit and it keeps you coming back. I am a slave to my Apple Watch because oh congratulations dopamine.
Megan Devito:So maybe that's a good addiction, maybe it's not, but that's how it happens. But it can quickly become an addiction when you're spending more time or more money trying to feel good all the time. I feel sad. I go buy a shirt. I feel sad I get on Candy Crush. I feel sad. I scroll my phone. I feel sad. I go have sex. I feel sad. I eat a cookie, whatever.
Megan Devito:The more you feed that need to feel good, though, the less you can handle the negative emotions you need to be able to feel to balance out the good and the bad. So eating a couple of Girl Scout cookies every once in a while is not gonna hurt you eat them. But eating a sleeve every time you feel down becomes a problem. That's the difference, and the more you use anything to feel good or to numb out whether it's cookies or social media or the really heavy bad stuff the more your brain will crave it and the more it takes you to, the more dopamine it takes, or the more of whatever it is that created that dopamine hit for you it takes to feel that same level of pleasure. And the more pain you feel when you don't have the dopamine in your system, the more you're going to crave whatever it was that you get that dopamine hit from. We are literally making ourselves hurt more physically hurt more by trying to hurt and feel less, because your brain needs that now to feel good. So I've been on this kick lately, thinking about how many people out there are literally avoiding anything that makes them feel nervous, or angry, or sad, or disappointed or whatever else it is that doesn't feel good because they don't like it. Of course they don't like it, it doesn't feel good, but they refuse to be sad or bored or uncomfortable and dopamine is the easiest fix for it and we have it in an arm's reach at all times.
Megan Devito:Do you actually go without your phone for very long? I was looking last night, I was looking like posting something for the school system that I post things for, and I saw a post by a local news station that said they were offering someone $10,000 to give up their cell phone or their iPhone or whatever for a month. So I went and I asked two of my, I asked both my daughters. I said, hey, you wanna make $10,000? And they were like yeah, and I was like you have to give up your cell phone for a month. And one of them was like how am I supposed to talk to my friends? Which is true, because we didn't even have a, we didn't even have like a wired in phone anymore like a home phone. And the other daughter was like I would absolutely never do that. What if I got in a crash on the highway? How would I call the ambulance? How would I do that? So we are a little bit of a slave to our phone. But they also like never even considered it and I'm like $10,000. I will rewire a phone into my house for $10,000.
Megan Devito:But I started thinking, could I really do it? I think I could, because that would be pretty good motivation. I mean that $10,000 would definitely be a dopamine hit. But it's interesting how many places we see this, this concept of giving up dopamine, like giving up that way of getting dopamine just popping into things. And maybe it's because I'm listening to the book on on my phone, but certainly WANE TV didn't post that there because it's, I'm telling you it's like the local TV station, but it's out there. So, like I said, I've been on this kick lately about how many people are avoiding, all the things, but your phone's always there. It's an easy fix except every time you avoid feeling that negative stuff or the hard stuff, you make the good stuff a little less good too. So you're stuck always finding more dopamine and it takes more to feel good. And I learned so much about this in this book that I'm still really honestly working my way through. I haven't finished it yet, but for the purpose of this episode, I think the fact alone is this fact alone is super important.
Megan Devito:When you are avoiding feeling the bad stuff, you're making those simple things that used to feel good ineffective. Think about when you were little and how good things, like good little things, felt in your life. Simple things like playing in the snow or with your puppy, maybe listening to your favorite song, or, for me, Saturday mornings with pancakes and cartoons because they weren't on all the time. You had to wait for Saturday mornings. Sparklers on the 4th of July. Those happy memories were happy partly because you got dopamine from them.
Megan Devito:Your brain, your entire body wants to be in balance, and when you refuse to feel bad things, your brain isn't in balance. It will get its way back there. So your brain, your entire body wants to be in this thing called homeostasis. That's the balance and it will do its best to pull you back to that level every time. So when you have too much dopamine, the hard stuff becomes harder because it has to make that drastic swing to get back into balance. So, to be clear again dopamine is necessary and important and you want to feel the happy stuff.
Megan Devito:I'm not suggesting that everybody needs to get sad more often. That's not what I'm talking about. Some people naturally when they have that lower level of dopamine in their bodies and they need that boost. What I'm talking about here is avoiding those bad things by finding artificial ways to numb out so that you get more pleasure from the good things that are happening. So if you feel unmotivated or unfocused and you're tired and you can't concentrate from not having enough dopamine, what I'm going to say next is going to be really helpful for you. You can reset your dopamine levels so you're not dependent on likes or social media or video games or smexy books or shows or whatever your addiction of choice is. You can reset those levels.
Megan Devito:It takes time and you can expect to feel like life is a little icky for a while, but there's some really purposeful things you can do that give you that feeling of accomplishment or happiness or joy or satisfaction, whatever it is that you're looking for. One of the things that you can do is make a routine, and I have talked about this on repeat. I'm going to say it till I'm blue in the face. You have to create routines in your life. Your brain craves them, especially if you have an anxious brain or you have a brain that's looking to feel better. So make a routine that includes fun things to do, something as simple as playing with Play-Doh or petting your cat or your dog, and then schedule in your own small treats. You know those silly little pretend stickers I was just talking about. Make your own small treat like go grab yourself a cup of coffee or call your best friend and tell her something hilarious, but give those treats to yourself at specific times so that you have something to look forward to Give yourself with your own legitimate dopamine hit.
Megan Devito:Talking to your friend on phone is a dopamine hit. Petting your dog is a dopamine hit and it's a real one. It's not as heightened and you get to control it. Another thing you can do that's gonna help you reset your dopamine levels, and I'm not talking about dopamine detoxing here, that's like no dopamine. Let's not do that. It's going to bed early and waking up at the same time every day, even on the weekends Getting lots of good sleep to help your brain reset itself, to get those levels back naturally and Really, to help you be in a better mood all day long, because when you're tired you're gonna get grouchy, and then when you're grouchy and tired, you're gonna be looking for more ways to feel good. But when you're sleeping and you naturally feel better, you're already on the right track.
Megan Devito:A Third thing that you can do to help reset those levels is to pay attention to what you're eating. If you're eating food to get dopamine, yes, Thin Mints, also other comfort foods like mac and cheese or cookies, whatever it is try eating more fruits and vegetables and lean meat. I know that's practical knowledge and some people are like, oh my god, here she goes again with a nutrition thing. Guys, I don't make this stuff up, I don't, I do it. I tell you these things because I do it myself. But if you can eat more fruit, more vegetables, more lean meats and just get rid of anything where you can't pronounce the ingredients, that junk stuff and the processed food.
Megan Devito:If you don't know what a processed food is, a processed food is where it's not an actual food. It's like a food product. So If you know what every ingredient on the label is, it's probably not processed. But if it has things that's like lots of letters that you're like I can't really pronounce that word, I don't know what that i,s that's probably processed. If it comes from a factory, it's a processed food. If it comes from the ground or the ocean, it's not a processed food. So things like fruits, vegetables, meats, cheese, things like that, and even breads can be processed, or they can be Not or less processed, I suppose. So read the labels, eat better, so that your body's not craving that junk food hit that you can get from cheap sources like candy bars Processed foods because those also give you dopamine hits. That's why we get addicted to Doritos and not Brussels sprouts. Dopamine and I mean Doritos tastes really good too, but I like Brussels sprouts. But yeah, you can get dopamine hits from junk food, so they're easy to get addicted to.
Megan Devito:Another thing that's gonna be really helpful for you is to start moving your body 30 minutes of a day. Get your heart rate up and help your brain start releasing that dopamine when you finish your workout. Please don't expect the dopamine hit when you are thinking about going to work out because in my experience it doesn't work that way. I feel good after the workout. I feel tired, I feel sore, but I feel good. The dopamine isn't like yeah, I get to go downstairs and feel miserable for a half hour. It's afterwards.
Megan Devito:Everybody said that for a long time and I didn't believe it until I started doing it, and it's 100% true. The dopamine comes after the workout, not before. You don't have to go to the gym, you can just take a walk. You can subscribe to Bodi or Daily Burn or something - Apple Fitness, whatever it is, any of those things. Playing with your kids outside in the yard, dancing, get your heart rate up for a half hour a day. And finally, of course, always I'm going to go back to practicing mindfulness and meditating, because when you meditate, you calm your brain down anyways, and when you're mindful, you know that it's okay to feel sad because it's only going to last for a little bit and it's going to go away. So these activities will give you that dopamine hit when you do them, but you have to be consistent and create that routine.
Megan Devito:If you struggle to create a routine, you are not the only person. Your brain is going to want you to keep doing those things that feel good. So, breaking that addiction to your phone or to whatever it is that you feel really drawn to all the time, every time you feel bad, you've got it right Like in the beginning, you've got your brain working against you, but it doesn't have to stay that way. It just has to be a determination that you make, a decision, that you make, that I'm going to do this and then setting yourself up for success. Your brain is going to push back on changes, even when you want them because you're safe and it feels good, and this is especially true when you feel good from things like those dopamine hits that you're getting.
Megan Devito:So here's what you can do and here's how coaching can help you, whether you talk to me or you talk to another coach, because coaches just help you find the triggers and thoughts that cause you to create habits. In this case, we would be talking about what it is that you're getting dopamine from and then replace those habits with other things that give you the peace or the joy or the energy without the artificial dopamine hits with incorporating things like exercise or consistency or nature or food swaps, whatever the heck it is for you. So if you notice that you grab your phone every time you feel anxious or sad or bored, I can help you catch yourself and come up with a new plan. Coaching gives you that weekly accountability check to be sure that you're following through, even and especially when you want to give up and grab the phone with the grace that you need, not to go cold turkey and to try and do it perfectly every time. So we'll work together to make these new habits stick so you don't roll back into your old habits. Or, if you do notice you're backsliding a little bit, which is totally normal, you know exactly what to do to restart and to keep moving forward. So you learn your habits and your mood and what it takes to get back on track.
Megan Devito:And when you get to a place where you've created those new habits and you feel good, like oh, I'm not reaching for my phone all the time, I'm not reaching for this food all the time, I'm not avoiding things, I'm letting myself feel these emotions and I'm noticing that like, oh, I feel better. And what I mean by better is you can focus because you're not always grabbing your phone just to get that quick hit or you have. You're more productive because you're not grabbing your phone all the time, you're not being distracted by trying to find this. I just need to go do this one thing really quick. I need to put down this trashy romance novel that I'm addicted to but I just can't because it feels so good for me to read this. And when you get other things done, you're going to be more creative. You're going to crave that junk food far less, or your phone less, or the things that you are kind of stuck with right now less and you're going to have so much more energy to be able to go out and do the things you want to do. And I'm going to circle back really quickly to what I was talking about at the beginning.
Megan Devito:When I was playing that role-playing game, I was having serious fun, a lot of fun, and making all kinds of new friends, and I was writing and I was being creative and there were like emotions involved, like becoming your character. I don't know how writers write and don't get totally wrapped up in what they're writing. After doing that, it was so much fun, and I was exhausted and I was snappy and grouchy, and I was checking my phone hundreds of times a day to reply, to do the next thing, because it was all happening on Twitter. And then on all these other platforms too. It was big, it took up a lot of my brain and a lot of my time and I just thought I was having fun and it wasn't very long afterward that I was like, oh my gosh, like I was 100% addicted, it felt harmless, it felt fun and it was just wrecking my life.
Megan Devito:Now there are certain things about that I don't have regrets from, because I have some pretty great friends that I met playing that game and we all kind of went off the rails together. But that's how it can start. It can start with fun and before you know it, you are over your head. And Since I quit playing that game, I'm still friends with these people. I Sleep better, I have more energy, I can focus, I'm more present with my kids, I'm doing all kinds of things that I wanted to do then, but my brain was so tied to being in that game and being in that hit of fun, fun, dopamine, feel good, just escape.
Megan Devito:Don't. You don't have to do these things. That's Wow. Like looking back, I can't believe, like how deep I was and how much better I feel now. And people were noticing, right. So that's Is what I have for you today.
Megan Devito:I know this was a little bit here, there and everywhere, but there's just so much to it. But I do hope you understand what I'm talking about when I talk about those hits that you get from whatever it is that you use to feel good or to avoid feeling bad. And again, of course, social media. We already know that kids are totally addicted, and so are adults, to be fair. Video games, the smexy books out there, whatever it is that is.
Megan Devito:Keeping you stuck doing something to feel good Is an addiction, and there are good addictions and bad addictions. But if you want to start being addicted to things that will really benefit you, you can get that dopamine in a natural way by just Changing some habits that you do and creating systems and routines that allow you to break the current dopamine addiction that you have to Create other ways to get it to feel even better. If I can help you, if you are ready to go there and ask for help, it's super simple you just go to the show notes and you click the link where it says schedule a call. You call me, we talk on the phone about what you want, what you're seeing happen right now, and we just decide of coaching is the best next step for you. You can also message me on social media. I am Coach Megan Devito on Instagram and Facebook and there's also Megan Devito coaching on Linked in all those different opportunities to be able to reach out with me.
Megan Devito:Ask your questions, of course, tell me what you want to hear on this podcast and we can connect that way. So I hope this was beneficial. I hope this was helpful to you and I hope that you will check out that book, Dopamine Nation. Again, it's by Dr Anna Lembke. It's a fantastic read and I will be back next week. I'll talk to you then. If I don't talk to you before, take care. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the More than Anxiety podcast. Before you go, be sure to subscribe and leave a review so others can easily find this resource as well. And, of course, if you're ready to feel more relaxed, have more energy, more confidence and a lot more fun, you can go to the show notes, click the link and talk to me about coaching. Talk to you soon, you.