Hope for Your Brain: Neuroplasticity, Dopamine & Healing

In this episode of the ABC's of Parenting Adult Children podcast, James Moffitt hosts Amanda West, who shares her journey of overcoming long COVID and fatigue through dopamine management. Amanda discusses her book, Dopamine Mountain, and offers insights into how parents can support their adult children by harnessing neuroplasticity and dopamine management to address mental health challenges. The conversation covers the importance of structured routines, the impact of instant gratification, and practical strategies for fostering resilience and productivity.

Keywords

dopamine management, neuroplasticity, mental health, parenting, resilience

Takeaways

• Dopamine is crucial for motivation and mood regulation.
• Structured routines can enhance mental well-being.
• Instant gratification can lead to dopamine decline.
• Parents can model positive behaviors for their children.
• Neuroplasticity involves learning through effort and reward.
• Exercise and challenging tasks boost dopamine levels.
• Avoiding negative media can improve mental health.
• Amanda West's book offers strategies for dopamine management.
• Morning routines can set a positive tone for the day.
• Optimism and self-care are vital for overall well-being.

Sound bites

"Dopamine is our motivation." "Structured routines boost well-being." "Instant gratification harms dopamine." "Model positive behavior for kids." "Effort and reward drive learning." "Exercise boosts dopamine naturally." "Avoid negative media for mental health." "Morning routines set the day's tone." "Optimism is a wise choice." "Self-care is essential for balance."

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction to Amanda West
• 00:00:00 Understanding Dopamine
• 00:00:00 Impact of Instant Gratification
• 00:00:00 Structured Routines and Mental Health
• 00:00:01 Amanda's Journey with Long COVID
• 00:00:01 Practical Strategies for Parents
• 00:00:01 The Role of Optimism and Self-care

Richard Jones. I am an RN with over 34 years of Nursing Experience, much of that experience working with young adults in the corrections system. 

Hello, James here !

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Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:06.498)
Welcome to the podcast ABCs of Parenting Adult Children. Please join us as we discuss parenting adult children and the unique struggles that it comes along with.

Speaker 1 (00:25.262)
Hello and welcome to ABC's of Parenting Adult Children podcast. My name is James Moffitt and I will be your host. This evening I have Amanda West. You go by Amanda or Andy? Okay, so I have Andy West here as a special guest and you're from Australia?

I go by Andy.

Speaker 2 (00:42.232)
Yes, Brisbane, or near Brisbane at the moment. Thanks for having me, James. Yeah.

Well, that's wonderful. Thank you for being here. Do me a favor and introduce yourself to the listening audience.

So I'm Andy and I've written a book called Dopamine Mountain and the book came about when I was really struggling with long COVID and fatigue and executive function, which is really, really similar to ADHD symptoms, but very debilitating ones with the fatigue. And I basically

found some protocols, put them together and they started to work really rapidly. And so then I had to write a book about it. But in my research, I found amazing insights into why our dopamine acts the way that it does and how we can modify that with some really simple steps that no one is talking about. So there's protocols everywhere out there, but no one's really talking about how to use them properly. So I thought, why not chat about it to people and try and spread the word a little bit.

That's wonderful. So I'm going read this little paragraph off of your profile and we can just kind of jump off from there. It says, how parents can harness neuroplasticity and dopamine management to support adult children with mental health challenges, chronic pain and depression. The conversation can guide parents in creating supportive environments for their children's recovery and self-development. So I have to admit to you that I'm totally ignorant about dopamine and all of that.

Speaker 1 (02:09.037)
This will be very educational for me and I'm sure some of my listening audience may be in the same shoes that I'm in. so one of the recurring topics on our support group as well as the podcast is self-care. And when I read your profile, I thought, this would be a very educational, know, mind, body, know, mind, body and spirit. And, you know, we're, it's important that parents take care of themselves.

physically, emotionally, spiritually, right? And so thought this would be an excellent topic to cover.

Well, when you say you're ignorant about dopamine, dopamine is just a fancy word for our energy, motivation and mood. And amazingly, it's all the same thing. It's all controlled by this one neurotransmitter. And there are other, yeah, there's other things that come into play. But when our mood is down, it's because our dopamine is down. So and when our motivation is up, it's because our dopamine is up. So when we do anything at all,

Dopamine is what motivates us to do the thing that we go towards. So it's our energy to go towards something. And the only other real motivator that we have is fear. And fear is controlled by another neurotransmitter called glutamate. So that's why you often hear people say, are you driven by love or driven by fear? And really,

These are two completely different sides of the brain. So dopamine and the forward moving side is the left hemisphere of the brain in general. And overall, the right hemisphere of the brain is our withdrawal in fear and our fight or flight kind of mechanism. So even our mindset can vary whether we're doing something out of fear or we're doing it out of joy or self development and growth. So for example, if we feel like,

Speaker 2 (04:02.872)
have to go to school right now, I have to go to work right now. Not really. We're choosing to go and educate ourselves. We can use our mindset to say, I'm going to go there and learn, I'm going to make myself better, or I'm going to go to work because I choose to create wealth or to earn some money for myself. I don't have to go to work. I could go live in the forest under a rock if I wanted to, but I choose to put myself somewhere where I will grow. I'll educate myself, I'll get better at what I do.

And that's why mindset is so important for our dopamine, just for our overall wellbeing.

So can you define dopamine? You probably just tried to do that and I missed it. Can you define it a little bit, make it in layman's terms?

Sure, so it's just a chemical that tells the brain are we moving forward or are we going to move backwards? So when we move forward we use dopamine to go towards something that we like and enjoy. So towards food, towards love, towards pleasant things, towards enjoyable things. However, when we are frightened and we're put into our fight or flight mode, which is when we are backing away from something or startled, a whole different neurotransmitter jumps in

the brain and that's called glutamate and that's the one that controls our running away aversion pain and fear so it is the driver that takes us backwards.

Speaker 1 (05:25.288)
Okay, so these are chemicals that are already inside of us, right?

Yes, yeah, we have both of them. We have a blend of both of them and they switch up and down all the time.

I always tell people I've interviewed quite a few nutritionists and people that are in the mental health realm and whatever. I'm like, well, we're just huge chemistry sets. Yes. And it takes very little to get us out of whack, I guess.

Yeah, we are.

Speaker 2 (05:51.798)
Absolutely it does. Even sometimes a harsh word from somebody can drop our mood and that is our dopamine going down. So dopamine is just a fancy word for mood really because everything then sort of radiates from our mood. we happy and forward moving and confident or are we afraid and backing away and anxious? So really we have more control over these two sides of the brain than most people realize.

So how did tell us a little bit about how you and don't let me forget. I want you to talk about your podcast as well, but tell us a little bit about how you started in this started researching this and writing your book.

I'm a teacher, or I was a teacher, and after running my own business for a while, I ended up with COVID and also during the COVID lockdowns, I got quite ill. And during COVID, I really thought, wait, there must be something I can do to help myself here. So while I was trying to recover from long COVID and fatigue, I was reading and reading that dopamine kept coming up over and over again.

But I couldn't figure out what to do about it because usually if you want to modify dopamine, you take a drug. so basically all drugs of abuse work on the dopamine reward system. So that's just the part of our brain that rewards what we do. So that's why addicts, and I actually used to be an addict, but addicts, when I was a young party person, that's a whole other story, I suppose, but it didn't do my dopamine system any favors at all.

So when we take a drug of abuse, it spikes our dopamine and we go, yes, I want it again. I want to go towards it again. I want to repeat and repeat and repeat. So that's how dopamine comes into addiction. Whole other side note, our whole society is basically now addicted to sugar and screams and porn even, which is, yeah, that's something we can talk about.

Speaker 2 (07:50.53)
But getting back to my story, I just wanted to read as much as I could about dopamine, but I could not figure out what to do. And it took me over three years, almost four years to find a protocol that actually worked. And the key was doing difficult things first, first thing in the morning. And what that does is because we don't like it we don't want to do it, it pushes our dopamine down on purpose. Now, dopamine only feels good when it's rising. So if it's stuck at one level,

we don't feel good, we don't have a good mood, we don't have energy, motivation or anything and they've shown in rat studies that without dopamine we just don't even move to feed ourselves. So dopamine must be moving up. So the trick is to push it down deliberately first, kind of like pushing a helium balloon down and then it can rise. If it's stuck at the ceiling, it's sure you can give it pleasure and sugar and high dopamine things and you can...

give it all these, you know, screen time of anything that you want to do. However, it needs to be pulled downwards with something we don't want to do before it can rise. And the secret, and not that it's a secret, but if we do this first thing in the morning, that's the magical time to get the things done because we wake up with extra dopamine that we can use. So if we pull that helium balloon down,

and then we do the things that we want to do. The rise rewards doing those things. It rewards our actions. So it really is training our brain just like you would train a pet or something to repeat what you want it to do by giving it some dopamine that's giving it the treat. So what I do is in the mornings, I go for a run first thing in the mornings. Now,

I never did this before. I was no kind of athlete. I didn't want to run. I don't even like it. I just get up and I forced myself to do a hard run, but not extreme. with my fatigue, I really had to balance hard, but not extreme. So that took a lot of sort of self-awareness. Then I do a cold shower. And then I have a black coffee. So black, bitter coffee that I don't really like. But what I've done is I've pushed my dopamine, which is the things I don't want to do.

Speaker 2 (10:03.468)
I've pushed that down and then I can allow it to rise, which means that when the actual bit of caffeine gets to my bloodstream, that will give me a dopamine rise because that raises the mood and the energy. And then I'm ready to do other things that I actually want to do.

Okay. So, so it was during your time that you were, that you had COVID, that's kind of what motivated you to research this.

I was so debilitated that I had to. I just would stare at the wall. I could hardly have any even thought passing through my mind. I felt like I was getting dementia. I could hardly make a cup of tea. Like honestly, I didn't know if I would survive it. And I just had to find something that, and it turns out the things that I really, really didn't want to do. Like I don't like having a cold shower. I didn't enjoy it at all this morning. My skin shivers, but.

I was in there doing it anyway. it was just, was honestly forced into doing it. Well, actually really I chose, there was a point that I didn't want to do it, but I still chose. I choose trying anything to make myself better. And so I did choose it, but it was a tough decision.

Do you mind my asking whether or not you were vaccinated?

Speaker 2 (11:20.692)
I was not actually vaccinated. So I got COVID really early on March, 2020 when it only just hit Brisbane. And because I was so unwell from that, I didn't think a vaccine would help my body at all. I really didn't think that I was in any physical state to handle more of COVID. So I chose not to have it personally, but my partner at the time did have it. So I just felt it was a personal choice. If your body was fit enough and you wanted to have it, I was okay with

My wife and I, because we're on the elderly side and we have underlying health risks, diabetes, hypertension, she has COPD, different other things. We discussed it and talked about it. We decided to get both of the shots because we felt like with our underlying medical conditions that we were, you know, possibly putting ourselves in more danger by not doing it. However, I will say that I fully support and believe that

Right.

Speaker 1 (12:20.736)
It's an individual decision that people have to make for themselves, right? And so I appreciate you sharing that with us. Didn't mean to pry or anything, but I was just.

Mm.

Speaker 2 (12:31.662)
No, that's okay. I chose that if I did get COVID, I would stay well away from people. So I was willing to not even go to the hospital because I didn't want to give it to anyone. So I thought if I did get really sick, I would completely just isolate myself. So to try to minimise the risk of anyone else getting it.

Yeah, my wife, Katie, she got COVID even, I think she got COVID twice now to think about it. But the symptoms were very much, very, very minimal, right? I think the worst thing she had to deal with for a day or two was a bad headache, but that was it. I think, knock on wood, maybe, I think maybe the fact that she got the vaccine might've helped to alleviate some of the symptoms. don't know. I'm not a medical expert. I know there's probably...

Plenty of people out there that would like to argue that fact with me. Anyway, that's not what this podcast episode is about. Let's move on to what else do you want to, hell else. mean, I got a list of questions I can ask you, but.

think for your listeners, one of the key things that I was hoping to chat about was the fact that we are basically raising our kids as addicts. Now, when we do only the things we want to do, like we want to jump on the iPad or we want to watch the cartoons and we want to eat our sweet cereal, you know, all these things that kids want to do.

Your grandparents and mine would have grown up in a time where you can't just get what you want straight away. Everything needs to be worked for. If you want breakfast, you've got to go out and work for it. You know, we have to put in hard work first and then we get the reward. And that's when the dopamine can actually rise. But now, because we live in such relative luxury and privilege, our kids can just get up and have their cereal straight away or their sugar and they can play on the iPad.

Speaker 2 (14:23.608)
But then when they have to get ready and put their clothes on and go to school, that is going to feel relatively worse. So that's a dopamine drop. So they're going from things they really want to do first to things they really don't want to do second. And when we do things in that order and dopamine drops, it feels bad. Our mood will drop as well. But if we get up and do our hard stuff first, like we make our bed and we do some chores first, for example.

and then we have the things that we want to have, the dopamine goes from low, from the chores, then to higher. And that has been the secret of the dopamine reward system. And that's how basically all creatures live their lives. If they want something, they've got to go work for it. If an animal wants to eat, they've got to go and forage or hunt for that food and the food is then the reward. So when we do things in the opposite way and when we wake up, we get pleasurable things or we scroll,

We're setting ourselves up for a dopamine decline and people don't realise this. They reach for their phone straight away, not knowing that they've just, you know, had all this dopamine from doing the stuff they want to do and their day is going to then start going downhill, unfortunately. And if we keep doing this and keep stacking this kind of dopamine slide from higher to lower, we are going to get low mood and we're going to get depression.

Yeah, we do live in an instant gratification era, don't we? And I'm happy to say that the first thing I reach for in the morning is not my telephone or my laptop. It's my medicine. and I don't, it's a mixed bag. Sometimes, you know, I mean, it's necessary. I have to take it, right? It's a part of getting older. But on the flip side of that, I really would rather not take medicine, right? I'm not sure. I'm not sure where my dopamine is at.

Yes.

Speaker 1 (16:15.63)
at that stage when I'm waking up going, it's time to take another eight pills and I have to do it early. I have to do it early in the morning or I'll forget. The first thing I reach for is my little pill container, you know, where I separate all my medicine.

and then what next?

What do I do next? Then I pick up my phone and then I check my bank account. I don't get on social media, but I do check my bank account, see where I'm at. And I keep close tabs on my banking stuff just to make sure I'm not getting hacked and robbed. Right. It's kind of sad. You got to stay on top of that stuff.

Right.

Speaker 2 (16:50.605)
Yeah.

Well, then the morning routine starts. I'll just say that.

Yep. And does it start with the fun stuff or the hard stuff for you?

No, it's mostly, you know, taking a shower, getting dressed, taking the dogs out to go use the restroom, just chores, know, stuff that stuff that has to get done before I can go out the door, you know.

Yeah, that's great. Really? Yeah, because you've prioritized the things that need to get done. And then maybe after that, do you have like a cup of tea or coffee after that or something to eat?

Speaker 1 (17:24.92)
Yeah, when I get to work, I'll go through McDonald's and get a mocha, like a medium-sized mocha and breakfast. It takes me about, I'm only about 20 minutes from work, but sometimes with the traffic, it might be 40 or 45 minutes. So I have that while I'm driving down the road.

So if you want to supercharge your mornings a little bit more, when you take your dogs out, if you take them for a brisk walk, or if you just do something that's a bit of a challenge, if you put something in your morning routine that's a bit harder than normal and a bit more of a challenge, like an extra chore or something like that, then when you do have your mocha and your breakfast, because they raise your dopamine, because they're enjoyable, it will actually give you a little bit more of a natural raise and you'll start to jumpstart your dopamine a little bit more.

That's good idea.

Yeah, and so when people are, because we have a lot of depression and health problems amongst our teens and our young people at the moment, because a lot of those people will just wake up and reach for the phone straight away. And then they will have their coffee full of sugar and cream, you know, and so then they think, how am going to face this day? Well, it's hard when your dopamine is declining. So if they can just throw firstly, something hard in there,

even if it's quick, it just has to be hard and challenging and then enjoy the things you want to do. If you can cut back on sugar, to be honest. Sugar is a drug of abuse. It spikes the same parts of the brain as cocaine and other drugs of abuse. So we can actually use it to train ourselves. If we've got a really, I was doing this yesterday, if we've got a really hard thing to get through and it's piling up and we feel overwhelmed by it, the experts always say, break it down into easy steps.

Speaker 2 (19:12.544)
Okay, sure, but here's the secret. Do the step and then a little reward. So hold off on that reward. And like you said, instead of instant gratification, we just wait, we do the hard thing, and then we get the thing that we want. And to break up a hard job into those little, little snippets and then reward after each step, it jumpstarts our energy and it gets us on the track. And so some people are

are just go, go, go. They're just doing all the hard things in the morning, all the hard chores, then they go to work and then there's the children and then there's, you know, all these things that are difficult, but they also need to stop and reward themselves, you know, and have a little rest at certain points when they've achieved something because we still need to give ourselves that little break in between all the hard stuff, otherwise we'll burn out. So there's two sides to dopamine.

It can be used really wisely if we have the pleasurable things after our hard work and just remember to enjoy them and just to stop. And when we do have our cup of coffee, just to sit and breathe and just enjoy that cup of coffee because we've earned it.

All right. So I'm going to ask some of these questions off your profile if you don't mind. How can parents help adult children overcome dopamine related challenges?

They can teach their children to work for something, to wait for something, and to really value it when they get there. So if a child really wants a cookie, yet they haven't done any of their chores, instead of just like, here's the cookie, or no, there's no cookie, what about negotiate? Okay, well if you clean up your room and put all your toys away, or if you finish that assignment that you had and do your homework, how about then we have a snack, or then we go out for ice cream?

Speaker 2 (21:00.244)
and they can negotiate the things that they might want to have. So instead of having all of the dopamine pleasures in one go, all right, how about we do our assignment, then we'll go out for ice cream. When you come back, we will clean up the yard or whatever the thing is that needs to happen, and then you can have the screen time. So just negotiating a little bit of a wait, some sort of challenge, and then a reward at the end of it. So just reordering what they have.

you. Okay. Here's a good question. How did you leverage neuroplasticity to recover from chronic conditions?

So neuroplasticity is another fancy word that just means our learning system. So everything that we learn is based on what we want to learn and then a reward at the end. So dopamine is very deeply tied into our learning system. basically harnessing neuroplasticity just means to train ourselves to wait for things and then have our reward. So basically what I already described just to

Put in effort, hard work and challenge and then remember to reward it and that locks in the learning in our brain. The same way if we would train an animal, if we're training it to sit, it has to do the hard work of sitting first and then we reward it at the end. It doesn't work if we just give our puppy random snacks at random times, it won't know what to repeat. But it will learn and those programs will lock into the brain. yes, I sit, I get a treat.

And every time I want to treat, I will sit. So the dog is much more inclined to, if it wants something, it will sit and then look for the treat. So that's another form of neuroplasticity.

Speaker 1 (22:45.716)
So it seems like, it seems like we naturally are already kind of aware of these things, but maybe because we're in an instant gratification society, especially here in America, we kind of short circuit that.

Yes, each generation, it seems that each generation is having life so-called easier and easier. And I don't mean that in a mental health kind of way because a lot of people are really struggling with their mood and their mental health and their anxiety. But in terms of survival needs, those come quite easy to us. We mostly have shelter.

We don't have to build our own shelter first to get out of the rain like some of our ancestors would have had to do. If we want something to eat, we don't have to go out with a spear or a gun and shoot it or spear it. I mean, some people still do and you know, those people are working for it and then they get their dopamine reward, the pleasure part at the end of that. Yeah. So these days with instant gratification, our grandparents actually had an advantage.

because there was a lot less depression and obesity and other health related problems because they had to put in so much hard work and then they had their rewards.

So why are structured daily routines crucial for mental well-being?

Speaker 2 (24:05.55)
Having the structure, again, it's just putting yourself, your dopamine low by doing that challenging thing and earning that dopamine reward. We don't love structure, most of us don't want to do that. We might want to just sort of get up and do the things that we are interested in doing, you know, the high dopamine things.

But even though we don't like that structure, it really goes in our favor if we do it. And it only took me a few weeks of doing my protocol in the right order of the hardest to the easier stuff to really get my dopamine on track. It really was within a few weeks I went from so deep fatigue and hadonia and just feeling completely

gatter-brained all of the time to having better focus because I trained my focus by doing these things and also writing the book. I would sit down and force myself to do the difficult task of writing. So that was a part of my morning routine. After I had my black coffee, I would force myself to write and just doing those hard things. put my brain back into a

proper mode, might be losing you there, sorry. It just put my brain back into action mode instead of uncertainty and not understanding what was happening. So my brain really needed that jump start. And yes, in probably under two weeks, it was like a completely different brain. I had energy, I could organise things, I could move towards things I wanted, I had excitement again. So it was life changing.

So I was thinking about daily routines. think most adults probably have a daily routine. I've got a daily routine here at the house. I've got one at work. And I think we're mostly creatures of habit, right? And I think we have grown accustomed to those routines. So explain how that works.

Speaker 2 (26:07.212)
Yes, well, I didn't really have a routine. And that is probably why my dopamine reward system did not go extremely well when I had COVID because I was in lockdowns at that time. It was really early. was before any vaccines were around when I had mine. And so without that structure of getting up and going to work during lockdown, I didn't really know what to do with myself. And so I just would get up and scroll or I'd get up and eat something sweet. And I didn't know that that was really going against me.

But I know that a lot of my peers don't have a morning routine. They get up and do whatever they feel like. And then they go, no, it's time for work. And they rush out the door running late. And they don't really have a structured routine like some of your generation, my parents' generation, older, really had to get that in place. But I always hated routine personally because there's more dopamine in novelty.

That's a quite a well-known thing about dopamine. We have more excitement and interest when something is novel. So unfortunately, I grew up just chasing novelty and did not know the way to really structure my time or my mornings. Every morning was different. It was random. What I would eat, what I would do when I woke up. So now I'm lucky that I found this structure that I can put into place because if I don't do...

my hard challenging things in the morning, I do not have a good day. I don't have energy. I don't have focus. I don't really, you know, I don't just have any motivation to get things done. It's a real struggle. Yet if I make my morning really hard on purpose, it has to get easier from there. That's the beauty of dopamine. When we, when we recalibrate it to make something hard and difficult and challenging, when that is over the relief,

just gives us ease and so then everything after that is relatively easier and so dopamine responds and we get more energy.

Speaker 1 (28:01.708)
How can parents encourage positive behavioral changes in adult children?

I would say to model some of the behavior themselves, if they think, well, this is great. This person is telling me things that I need to do with my morning. Nobody wants to be told what to do. It has to be free choice if you want to make a positive change. So if you think my kid is struggling with their mental health or with their energy or just with their general, you know, drive and their spark for life, which is quite common these days.

Well, they could try it first. They could say, all right, well, I'll get up and I'll go for a brief 10 minute walk in the morning first thing, or if not, if the weather doesn't support it, maybe do some squats or some sit ups or jump on the treadmill or something like that, and just find out, does this work for me or not? Because it's all well and good for someone to tell you how to live your life. But until we learn those things and really feel for ourselves whether this helps us or not, we can't really just go tell other people how to live their life.

If you think that your child is struggling and could do with some of these things, give it a try. Jump on that treadmill in the morning. It is better to actually get outside, I should say, and walk because we have left and right eye movements when we're outside scanning the ground, which we don't really get on a treadmill, especially if we're just staring at the screen or staring at the handlebars of the... So when our eyes move left and right, that actually enhances dopamine and getting out in the sun does as well.

Even if there's not much sun early in the morning, there still is some natural light. So give it a try. Just give 10 minutes of your day to getting out, doing something brisk, first thing in the morning, and then do the rest of your routine. And in a couple of weeks, because it does take a little bit of time to build up. So in a couple of weeks, decide, am I having an easier and more flowing day now that I've put that challenge in place? Like does my day?

Speaker 2 (29:57.208)
jumpstart in terms of energy. And then if so, maybe we could suggest that to other people. Cause experts do know that yes, she is exercise is very good for mental health. We do, we do know this has been proven in many, many studies. However, I haven't seen any studies yet that finding the time of day to do it. And if it's very first thing in the morning so that we can sort of jumpstart that energy.

it would be good to find out if there are studies looking at the time of day. There probably are.

Okay, so do you have a copy of your book that you can show us?

Yes, I have dopamine mountains sitting here underneath my cup of coffee. That's it there.

That's very colorful.

Speaker 2 (30:40.416)
It is so the dopamine spike when you see colors that actually spikes dopamine. That's why little children love it and they want to go towards those bright colors. really? Yeah so that that is a little hit of dopamine just looking at that. That was designed by Phil Solomon a designer out of Melbourne who's a good friend of mine and yeah he did a great

very visually stimulating.

Yeah, yeah. So hopefully that's enough to sort of get people to have a little bit of a look through. And there's over 800 references in there of the scientific studies that back up these dopamine enhancing activities that people can do.

So as you've been talking about dopamine, I was thinking about exercise, different types of exercise. And I know that that releases endorphins into your bloodstream as well. What's the difference between endorphins and dopamine?

Endorphins are endogenous morphines. So they are just a feel good chemical. Now some people get those and some people don't. Personally, I don't really get them. Even when I work out really hard, I personally don't get endorphins. But what I do get afterwards is when I stop doing the exercise, I get some relief and just enjoy the fact that I'm no longer putting myself through that. So I have spoken to some people who do get them and

Speaker 2 (32:04.928)
And that is enough for them that actually encourages them to go for their run. That's like a reward. Right. Yes. So it's just a different part of the reward system.

I know that, well, I'll just say that in my personal health journey, I guess you would call it, in the last two years, I've lost 80 pounds and I still need to lose another 50, but I've come a long way in that I've had to regulate my blood sugar. You know, I'm diabetic, so I had to learn how to eat correctly. The proper food groups are how much to eat, portion control and all of that. And so I used to, they say that

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 (32:41.294)
Mmm.

Speaker 1 (32:45.934)
Losing weight is 90 % of what you stick in your pie hole and 10 % exercise. And so I used to go work out at Planet Fitness four or five times a week. And I loved how I felt after that, right? After the workout, felt energized. I felt good mentally. You know, I felt good about sticking with the workout routine, blah, blah, blah. of course my

My problem was that I was like, okay, well I'm working out for 90 minutes every morning and so I can just eat whatever I want to because I'm burning all these calories.

Mmm.

That was bad. No, can't just, even if you work out 90 minutes a day, five or six times a week, you still can't eat just whatever you want to because sugar is bad, carbohydrates are bad, you know, all of that. All, all, what is it? Processed foods, carbohydrates, sugar, pastas, anything white. Basically the nutritionist told me that if the food tastes good, you're not supposed to eat it. It's not, you know, you can, you can eat a little bit in moderation, just a little bit, you know, in moderation.

And we have to train our taste buds. know, our taste buds love ice cream and cookies and soda pop. I used to drink six or seven soda pops a day. it's no wonder my A1C was at 11, you know, three or four years ago. And now it's down to, I think, 5.6. It needs to get a little lower than that, but I've come a long way, you know.

Speaker 2 (33:48.066)
Yes.

Speaker 2 (34:04.653)
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (34:11.992)
Well done. Yeah, that's great. And I used to be told as a child, when you've eaten your vegetables, then you can have some dessert at the end. But these days, we don't really live like that. And as an adult, I didn't want to just have dessert at the end. Why not just have dessert first? And so I

because I could do what I wanted to. So I would have dessert first and then I wouldn't feel like the vegetables. So I would just not eat vegetables and I'd only eat the high pleasure foods. And a lot of people are doing that these days, but if you can have your nutrition on your plate, have your vegetables and then save, if you're gonna have something sweet, just a little bit at the end, it rewards us for eating those vegetables.

And it tastes relatively much more sweet after we've had our nutrition first and then we've saved that. Even if it's the best bite till the end, it doesn't even have to be something sweet. You know, of the meal, if there's some part of that meal that's our favourite part, just save that bit for the end and have the more nutritional things first.

So I don't want to forget this. So talk to us about your podcast.

I don't have a podcast, I'm only a guest on other people's podcasts. No, not me. But I would like to one day, I would love to.

Speaker 1 (35:25.479)
I thought you had your own podcast.

Speaker 1 (35:30.828)
Mistaken. well. What if you had a podcast? What would it be about?

It would probably be about dopamine. But I would like to talk to other people about hacks that they've implemented in their lives that they've really found that work. Things that people swear by that help them to have a better day. Because we all have our little things that we, if we don't do them, we find that we don't really have as good a day. so I would, well, what are yours? What are your ones?

What? missed that. What was that?

What are your hacks that you like to do? Or not necessarily a hack, but something that you put into your day. And if you don't do that thing, you just don't have as good a day.

That's interesting. Well, getting a lot, getting more than four hours of sleep at night is a struggle at times because we raised four children and they're grown and gone. And so we're empty nesters. And my wife was, we've always had pets through the years, right? But anyway, we have two dogs and two cats. And of course the dogs like to wake me up multiple times a night to go outside, right? And so that makes me a grumble, right? Makes me an angry bear.

Speaker 1 (36:44.002)
Don't poke the bear, right? So, honestly, me, if I can get four or five hours of uninterrupted sleep, that starts my day out way better than if I don't, right? And of course, I already told you about my daily routine. What else? You know, I work full time. I'm an IT specialist. And so eight hours a day to pay the bills, I have to do my profession, right? Because I haven't gotten to the place yet where I can...

I'd love to do photography, podcasting, and writing. I'd love to do all three of those and have been doing them on and off for 20 years now. And I would love to get to the place where I could substitute my eight hours of end user support and technology support for those three things. would love to, you know, and I'm working towards that goal. you know, trying to establish a passive income stream sooner than later, right? So that I can figure out a way to

You know, I'm 63. I'm only going to get older, right? So I, if I could have retired yesterday, that would have been a wonderful goal, but that that's not reality. So I'm going to have to work for, you know, for the foreseeable future anyway. I didn't answer your question. Yeah. Yeah. I would say that, that I, one of the hacks that I have is, is that I don't pay attention to all of the negative garbage media, you know, TV.

Yeah, no, you did a little bit.

Speaker 1 (38:12.366)
You know, I read medium articles, read sub stack articles and everybody here in America is ranting and raving about, know, who or the, or the, know, who's the two central clowns, you know, and I'm not even able to say their name because I don't think it's worth it. And so I, kind of avoid reading those kinds of articles, you know, there it's so prevalent right now that this is all people are writing about. And so I just kind of, I'm like, okay, well.

Everybody's just regurgitating all that negative energy. I don't want to.

I don't want to. I agree.

I don't want to consume that.

That is a good hack. That's a really good hack. And I do that as well. I try and keep fairly well away from most politics. And I know that that is a privilege to be away from politics, but it's so divisive. And it brings your mood down. And I'm an optimist because I choose to be an optimist because I know that it feels for me much better to look for the good people and look for the good in the world and the good news that's out there. Cause of course,

Speaker 2 (39:17.016)
They want us to click on all this scary stuff. They want to scare us. They want us to be kept in fear. But when we can find other people who are interested in growing and learning, people like yourself that have podcasts that want to share this with other people, enrich other people's lives.

These are the people that I would like to be like. And so I stay well away from most media and the click bait and the divisive stuff because we're humans and we can encourage each other to live a happier and better life and even a more hard working life. In some cases now I try and use hard work to my benefit to get stronger from it, to grow from it. So yeah, I think that that kind of hack is important. Optimism is a little bit forgotten at the moment.

because it's really easy to get dragged into the worst case scenario thinking. But what if we flip the script and say, well, yeah, maybe that could happen. However, I'm going to insert the opposite thought. Maybe your podcast will blow up and you'll get to do your photography and you'll get to do all of the things that you want to do. You know, and maybe the things that I'm finding hard at the moment will make me stronger and make me smarter and will maybe force me to learn even more stuff.

and I might meet, we might both meet interesting people who really want to do great things in the world. So I think optimism, it's a choice, but I think it's a wise one.

Well, you know, it's all about self-care, right? And body, mind and spirit, you know? You know, we train ourselves in those nutrition. You know, we have to recalibrate and retrain our minds to know what to stick in our mouths and what not to stick in our mouths. So we know exercise is good. We know eating fruits and vegetables are good. We know all, we have all this knowledge, right? And so having the knowledge is the first step.

Speaker 2 (40:48.685)
Yes.

Speaker 1 (41:13.528)
But then applying that knowledge to our lives, know, knowledge is power, but knowledge is that power is useless if you don't engage with it, right? And so we get all this knowledge for our bodies and then, you know, we're spiritual creatures, so we have to feed that, we need to feed that with faith of some sort, right? And then we have the mental peace, our minds, right? And we have to keep our minds strong.

And how do you do that? You keep your mind strong by exercising it, right? And consuming the knowledge that will make you better, right? And so those three things encompass our whole being.

Mm-hmm.

And when I stay away from consuming enormous amounts of negative crap, know, politics, all of that, when I steer away from that, it's not like I'm sticking my head in the sand because I know what's out there. I know it's real. And I know people are being affected in a negative way. There's just so much going on. Personally, I can't alter that reality.

That's right. And we weren't designed to handle this much bad news. No one has had this in the past, all this bad news thrown at them.

Speaker 1 (42:31.436)
Right.

Speaker 1 (42:35.822)
So what we can do is we can work with other people, other like-minded people to identify the problems and to work towards a solution in a positive manner, right? And so it's like crowdsourcing, right? And if I were to create another podcast, which I'm not, is enough, if I were to create another podcast, it would be a podcast that would be positive. It would talk about

mind, body and spirit and how all that works together. And then I would want to figure out a way to crowdsource other intelligent, positive minded people to address all this negativity and stuff that we see in our environments, know, local, county, state, federal, right? Where you live, the subdivisions of your government are probably a little bit different, maybe not, I don't know.

But it's like as humans need to, it's like, and I hate talking politics, but it's like our political system here in America is, you we have Republicans, Democrats, and we have the Libertarians. Well, the Libertarians are so, they have no political clout or power. So they're not even a conversation. So it's the Democrats and the Republicans coming up with their version of the clown that they think is going to be the answer, right?

And so in our political system, both of them have an agenda. They've had that agenda for 238 years. look where it's gotten us. Quote unquote, we're the land of the free and the home of the brave. And I am very patriotic and I'm very much proud of being an American. There's no doubt about that. However, we've got to do better.

Yes.

Speaker 1 (44:22.616)
Certainly in America we have people, some intelligent people that can come up with some solutions that has nothing to do with the Republican or Democratic party's agendas, right?

think everyone wants to create a better society and a better world, but we just disagree on how to make that happen. But if we could put politics aside and stop saying, you know, arguing the points all the time and just really debate things and find what is the way forward? What is the way to help us be healthier and happier and have a society that gets along and is cohesive and is safe? We all want the same thing, really.

But if only we could come together and make that work, it would be amazing.

figure out how to do that we can become millionaires right? Maybe not millionaires but maybe the planet that we're living on. It's like you hear and I say it too. It's like why can't we just all get along? What's wrong with us? can't we just all get along? So anyway. All right so I'm gonna read this takeaway for listeners. Listeners will gain insights into supporting their adult children through scientifically backed mental health and neuroplasticity strategies fostering resilience and productivity.

Mmm.

Speaker 1 (45:37.25)
I like that. It's really good.

Yeah, so a bit of mind, a bit of mindset goes a long way when we when we have a challenge to do. Let's go towards the thing for our own development instead of saying, no, I've got this thing, this assignment that I need to do. I've got this project I need to do is going to kill me. What about.

Okay, I'm going to learn from this. So my mind is going to grow from this. I'm going to take on this challenge. I'm going to go towards it and I'm going to become stronger at the end. It's not, it's going to, you know, what doesn't kill me is going to make me stronger. Let's embrace that kind of mindset and use neuroplasticity to our benefit.

I agree. Amanda, thank you for being here on the podcast episode. The conversation went real well and I think that the listening audience will probably get a lot out of it. At least I hope they will.

Thank you, James.

Speaker 2 (46:29.558)
I am sorry, it's been good to talk to you.

Yeah. To my listening audience, I'll say thank you for the privilege of your time. Thanks for listening to this episode. You can listen to the audio version of the podcast on activate.fm, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, Apple Podcast, and Public Radio. I think 80 % of my listeners listen on Apple Podcast because everybody's got an iPad or an iPhone. If you listen to one of the podcast episodes while you're on your Apple device, right there on Apple Podcast, you can actually leave a review. If you would do that, I'd appreciate it.

You can watch the video episode on Rumble. That's R-U-M-B-L-E dot com. That's a conservative alternative to YouTube. Our website's located at parentingadultchildren.org. That's parentingadultchildren.org. On the website, you can get my contact information. You can write me an email. You can leave me a voicemail and I'll respond to you. Upcoming show schedule. If you go to the blog portion of the website, you can scroll and look for upcoming schedules. And I put two months ahead of time.

on there so you can go look and see what's coming up. You can also leave a review for this podcast episode. I also have a parenting adult children 125 Instagram channel. That's parenting adult children 125 Instagram channel. So I put little media clips, magic clips, Riverside calls them magic clips. So it creates like one minute blurbs, different segments from each podcast episode. And so a week before the Friday,

I release a podcast episode at 8 a.m. every Friday. So a week before, like a Monday, I actually go take some of those magic clips and I sprinkle them into my Instagram channel so you can get a taste for what's coming. So stay tuned. Go to Parenting Adult Children 125 Instagram channel. And yes, this is an advertisement. Doesn't cost you anything. Just everybody's on Instagram, I think, pretty much. So just go to that Instagram channel, subscribe.

Speaker 1 (48:27.34)
And every time I put new content out there, you'll get a notification when you go to Instagram and you can watch it and go, this is what's coming out. This is great. I love it. But anyway, Amanda, thank you again for being here and being such a wonderful guest. And I will say goodbye to everybody. Everybody have a good night and good evening. Good morning, wherever you're at in the world. And we'll talk to you later.

Thank you. Please tune in next week for another episode of our podcast on parenting adult children.