Uplifted- The Dopamine Set Point

In this episode we talk about a few key ways to up level your dopamine baseline to improve mood, sense of joy, and playfulness in life. I get into the importance of sleep, nutrition, and movement as key resources to feel more uplifted. 

Transcript

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Hey everybody, welcome to Center of the Podcast. I'm your host, Leslie Braverman, and I am sharing holistic health content that reconnects you to your most centered self, that place within you that is energized, knowing, and uplifted despite the chaos and demands of life. It's that place within you where you can become a portal of possibility. Today we're getting into what I like to call the dopamine set point. And firstly, dopamine is your a neurotransmitter and a hormone. And it's known as the feel-good hormone or the pleasure chemical. It is essential for pleasure, but what I want to look at more is its function for motivation and for the essence of joy. So let's talk a little bit about this idea of a baseline. So everybody has a set point in their nervous system for what they can not only handle, but what they can enjoy. And a lot of the nervous system regulation stuff is more about what you can handle. And I want to talk today about how dopamine impacts what you can expand into for joy. So the higher your dopamine set point or baseline is associated with more focus, more drive, more joy, whereas a low baseline or set point gets more of the feelings of lack of motivation or apathy, depression. And while dopamine is regulated by a variety of things, one of the simplest hacks for increasing your dopamine set point is movement. Movement is such, well, movement is medicine, as we know, but it is such a powerful instant mindset and energy level and just overall set point changer. So thinking about the elements that impact the dopamine baseline, we've got sleep, sunlight, and exercise, of course, which I'm calling movement, and nutrition. So we've I've done a podcast on sleep, but ideally, I'm just gonna hit these points again with this new lens. So ideally, you're in bed before 10 p.m. Because the body's rest and repair cycle and also its ability to maintain a higher dopamine baseline is based on sleep. So at least thinking about getting in bed by 10 p.m., if not asleep by 10 p.m., wherever you are. And then getting up early and getting into the sunlight, regardless of it's sunny or cloudy. I lived in a climate with constant clouds for for 25 years, really. But the difference, the quality of light difference in getting outside versus staying inside first thing is huge. I've talked in other episodes about my morning routines, but getting outside is a key part of a way to regulate cortisol and melatonin balance so that early sunlight triggers this kind of neurochemical cascade, right? That sets you up for this healthy or higher dopamine baseline. And then there are foods that help with getting the building blocks of dopamine going. Okay. And these are simple foods that you're probably already putting in your diet, but it's nuts and bananas. And also, if you are tending toward things this way, dairy and meat can help with that too, but that depends on your personal choices on diet. But just know those are kind of key base components. And then the bigger one that I want to talk about today, because it's accessible to everybody, is movement. And you can move in any way that you like to. And the idea is creating joy. And I have a whole chapter on this in the book, which is centered by Leslie, centered the art of living from within. And you can find it, access to it on Amazon or on my website, which is centered by Leslie. But what I talk about is reclaiming joy in your movement. And when we reclaim joy in our movement, we have the capacity for longer sessions where we're increasing this dopamine level and set point. Okay. So the more movement we have that's joyful, think of it as higher quality. So it's less about hitting that number of steps, unless you're you're celebrating that number of steps because dopamine is it it in it increases when you feel successful. So whether you're doing a two-minute routine or a 60-minute one, or you're looking at numbers of steps, counting, it doesn't matter. But the idea is that you want to feel successful every time. And so feeling successful is what raises your dopamine set point. Now, that said, what I want to get into today is the feeling of joy in movement and how that impacts everything in your life. So when you feel joy in your movement, there is a sense of play, there is a sense of upliftedness. And one of the ways that I really encourage this when I work with clients and when I teach group classes is getting that lift off of the ground. So we have the force of gravity on us all the time, but we have a counter force that very few people know about called ground reaction force. And ground reaction force is what happens when you push down and lift up off the ground. So you can do a heel raise and feel ground reaction force, that lift and lightness. You can press down into the floor and kick your legs up like a donkey kick or a handstand and feel that ground force reaction lifting you. And you can do it when you're skipping and when you're hopping and when you're experiencing sports like basketball, they use ground reaction force all the time. And other sports that I am not thinking of right now, but if you look at a runner and you take a picture of a couple of strides, you'll see that every stride they spend some time with both feet in the air, not touching the ground. And that's literally part of what gets that runner's high. So not only are we experiencing this lovely dopamine hit, right? This set point lift, but we're also experiencing the joy of counteracting gravity, which is I can't underscore enough the impact of this counteraction and what it does for the emotion and the energy of joy and how to build that within you. And so today we're just looking at it from the framework of dopamine set point and increasing that dopamine set point because really the goal is to feel better. And when dopamine is too low, we are more prone to feeling these more dense emotions, these lower frequency of emotions, all the way down to depression and apathy and lack of motivation. So if I can motivate you in any way today, even when you're just cruising around your house, do a little skip, do a little lightness, and see what it does for your mood and that feedback loop of your dopamine set point. All right, lots of love. I want to hear how it goes. Let me know.