The Dopamine Myth
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The Dopamine Myth
There’s a popular misconception that, since dopamine is heavily involved in addictions, it’s the cause.
We see this most often in the context of non-chemical addictions, such as:
- gambling
- videogames
- social media
And yes, those things will promote dopamine production, and yes, that will feel good. But dopamine isn’t the problem.
Myth: The Dopamine Detox
There’s a trend we’ve mentioned before (it got a video segment a few Fridays back) about the idea of a “dopamine detox“, and how unscientific the idea is.
For a start…
- You cannot detox from dopamine, because dopamine is not a toxin
- You cannot abstain from dopamine, because your brain regulates your dopamine levels to keep them correct*
- If you could abstain from dopamine (and did), you would die, horribly.
*unless you have a serious mental illness, for example:
- forms of schizophrenia and/or psychosis that involve too much dopamine, or
- forms of depression and/or neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s (and several kinds of dementia) in which you have too little dopamine
- bipolar disorder in which dopamine levels can swing too far each way
See also: Dopamine fasting: misunderstanding science spawns a maladaptive fad
Myth: Dopamine is all about pleasure
Dopamine is a pleasure-giving neurotransmitter, but it serves more purposes than that! It also plays a central role in many neurological processes, including:
- Motivation
- Learning and memory
- Motor functions
- Language faculties
- Linear task processing
Note for example how someone taking dopaminergic drugs (prescription or otherwise; could be anything from modafinil to cocaine) is not blissed out… They’re probably in a good mood, sure, but they’re focused, organized, quick-thinking, and so forth! This is not an ad for cocaine; cocaine is very bad for the health. But you see the features? So, what if we could have a little more dopamine… healthily?
Dopamine—à la carte
Let’s look at the examples we gave earlier of non-chemical addictions that are dopaminergic in nature:
- gambling
- videogames
- social media
They’re not actually that rewarding, are they?
- Gamblers lose more than they win
- Gamers cease to care about a game once they have won
- Social media more often results in “doomscrolling”
This is because what prompts the most dopamine is actually the anticipation of reward… not the thing itself, whose reward-pleasure is very fleeting. Nobody looks back at an hour of doomscrolling and thinks “well, that was fun; I’m glad I did that”.
See the science: Liking, Wanting and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction
But what if we anticipated a reward from things that are not deleterious to health and productivity? Things that are neutral, or even good for us?
Examples of this include:
- Sex! (remember though, it’s not a race to the finish-line)
- Good, nourishing food (bonus: some foods boost dopamine production nutritionally)
- Exercise/sport (also prompts release of endorphins, win/win!)
- Gamified learning apps (e.g. Duolingo)
- Gamified health/productivity apps (anything with bells and whistles and things that go “ding” and measure streaks etc)
Want to know more?
That’s all we have time for today, but you might want to check out:
10 Best Ways to Increase Dopamine Levels Naturally ← Science-based and well-sourced article!
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Xylitol vs Erythritol – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing xylitol to erythritol, we picked the xylitol.
Why?
They’re both sugar alcohols, which so far as the body is concerned are neither sugars nor alcohols in the way those words are commonly understood; it’s just a chemical term. The sugars aren’t processed as such by the body and are passed as dietary fiber, and nor is there any intoxicating effect as one might expect from an alcohol.
In terms of macronutrients, while technically they both have carbs, for all functional purposes they don’t and just have a little fiber.
In terms of micronutrients, they don’t have any.
The one thing that sets them apart is their respective safety profiles. Xylitol is prothrombotic and associated with major adverse cardiac events (CI=95, adjusted hazard ratio=1.57, range=1.12-2.21), while erythritol is also prothrombotic and more strongly associated with major adverse cardiac events (CI=95, adjusted hazard ratio=2.21, range=1.20-4.07).
So, xylitol is bad and erythritol is worse, which means the relatively “healthier” is xylitol. We don’t recommend either, though.
Studies for both:
- Xylitol is prothrombotic and associated with cardiovascular risk
- The artificial sweetener erythritol and cardiovascular event risk
Links for the specific products we compared, in case our assessment hasn’t put you off them:
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- The WHO’s New View On Sugar-Free Sweeteners ← the WHO’s advice is “don’t”
- Stevia vs Acesulfame Potassium – Which is Healthier? ← stevia’s pretty much the healthiest artificial sweetener around, though, if you’re going to use one
- The Fascinating Truth About Aspartame, Cancer, & Neurotoxicity ← under the cold light of science, aspartame isn’t actually as bad as it was painted a few decades ago, mostly by a viral hoax letter. Per the WHO’s advice, it’s still good to avoid sweeteners in general, however.
Take care!
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Honey vs Maple Syrup – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing honey to maple syrup, we picked the honey.
Why?
It was very close, as both have small advantages:
• Honey has some medicinal properties (and depending on type, may contain an antihistamine)
• Maple syrup is a good source of manganese, as well as low-but-present amounts of other mineralsHowever, you wouldn’t want to eat enough maple syrup to rely on it as a source of those minerals, and honey has the lower GI (average 46 vs 54; for comparison, refined sugar is 65), which works well as a tie-breaker.
(If GI’s very important to you, though, the easy winner here would be agave syrup if we let it compete, with its GI of 15)
Read more:
• Can Honey Relieve Allergies?
• From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose C’sShare This Post
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Heart Smarter for Women – by Dr. Jennifer Mieres
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Dr. Mieres takes us through understanding our own heart disease risks as individuals rather than as averages. As the title suggests, she does assume a female readership, so if you are a man and have no female loved ones, this might not be the book for you. But aside from that, she walks us through examining risk in the context of age, other health conditions, lifestyle factors, and so forth—including not turning a blind eye to factors that might intersect, such as for example if a physical condition reduces how much we can exercise, or if there’s some reason we can’t follow the usual gold standard of heart-healthy diet.
On which note, she does offer dietary advice, including information around recipes, meal-planning, and what things to always have in stock, as well as what things matter the most when it comes to what and how we eat.
It’s not all lifestyle medicine though; Dr. Mieres gives due attention to many of the medications available for heart health issues—and the pros and cons of these.
The style of the book is very simple and readable pop-science, without undue jargon, and with a generous glossary. As with many books of this genre, it does rely on (presumably apocryphal) anecdotes, though an interesting choice for this book is that it keeps a standing cast of four recurring characters, each to represent a set of circumstances and illustrate how certain things can go differently for different people, with different things then being needed and/or possible. Hopefully, any given reader will find themself represented at least moderately well somewhere in or between these four characters.
Bottom line: this is a very informative and accessible book, that demystifies a lot of common confusions around heart health.
Click here to check out Heart Smarter For Women, and take control of your health!
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Elderly loss of energy
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝Please please give some information on elderly loss of energy and how it can be corrected. Please!❞
A lot of that is the metabolic slump described above! While we certainly wouldn’t describe 60 as elderly, and the health impacts from those changes at 45–55 get a gentler curve from 60 onwards… that curve is only going in one direction if we don’t take exceptionally good care of ourselves.
And of course, there’s also a degree of genetic lottery, and external factors we can’t entirely control (e.g. injuries etc).
One factor that gets overlooked a lot, though, is really easy to fix: B-vitamins.
In particular, vitamins B1, B5, B6, and B12. Of those, especially vitamins B1 and B12.
(Vitamins B5 and B6 are critical to health too, but relatively few people are deficient in those, while many are deficient in B1 and/or B12, especially as we get older)
Without going so detailed as to make this a main feature: these vitamins are essential for energy conversion from food, and they will make a big big difference.
You might especially want to consider taking sulbutiamine, which is a synthetic version of thiamin (vitamin B1), and instead of being water-soluble, it’s fat-soluble, and it easily crosses the blood-brain barrier, which is a big deal.
As ever, always check with your doctor because your needs/risks may be different. Also, there can be a lot of reasons for fatigue and you wouldn’t want to overlook something important.
You might also want to check out yesterday’s sponsor, as they offer personalized at-home health testing to check exactly this sort of thing.
❝What are natural ways to lose weight after 60? Taking into account bad knees or ankles, walking may be out as an exercise, running certainly is.❞
Losing weight is generally something that comes more from the kitchen than the gym, as most forms of exercise (except HIIT; see below) cause the metabolism to slow afterwards to compensate.
However, exercise is still very important, and swimming is a fine option if that’s available to you.
A word to the wise: people will often say “gentle activities, like tai chi or yoga”, and… These things are not the same.
Tai chi and yoga both focus on stability and suppleness, which are great, but:
- Yoga is based around mostly static self-support, often on the floor
- Tai chi will have you very often putting most of your weight on one slowly-increasingly bent knee at a time, and if you have bad knees, we’ll bet you winced while reading that.
So, maybe skip tai chi, or at least keep it to standing meditations and the like, not dynamic routines. Qigong, the same breathing exercises used in tai chi, is also an excellent way to improve your metabolism, by the way.
Ok, back onto HIIT:
You might like our previous article: How To Do HIIT* (Without Wrecking Your Body)
*High-Intensity Interval Training (the article also explains what this is and why you want to do it)
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Physical Sunscreen or Chemical Sunscreen – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing physical sunscreens to chemical sunscreens, we picked the physical sunscreens.
Why?
It’s easy to vote against chemical sunscreens, because it has “chemical” in the name, which tends to be offputting PR-wise no matter how healthy something is.
But in this case, there’s actual science here too!
Physical sunscreens physically block the UV rays.
- On the simplest of levels, mud is a physical sunscreen, as you can see widely used by elephants, hippos, pigs, and other animals.
- On a more sophisticated level, modern physical sunscreens often use tiny zinc particles (or similar) to block the UV rays in a way that isn’t so obvious to the naked eye—so we can still see our skin, and it looks just like we applied an oil or other moisturizer.
Chemical sunscreens interact with the UV rays in a way that absorbs them.
- Specifically, they usually convert it into relatively harmless thermal energy (heat)
- However, this can cause problems if there’s too much heat!
- Additionally, chemical sunscreens can get “used up” in a way that physical sunscreens can’t* becoming effectively deactivated once the chemical reaction has run its course and there is no more reagent left unreacted.
- Worse, some of the reagents, when broken down by the UV rays, can potentially cause harm when absorbed by the skin.
*That said, physical sunscreens will still need “topping up” because we are a living organism and our body can’t resist redistributing and using stuff—plus, depending on the climate and our activities, we can lose some externally too.
Further reading
We wrote about sunscreens (of various kinds) here:
And you can also read specifically about today’s topic in more detail, here:
What’s The Difference Between Physical And Chemical Sunscreens?
Take care!
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The Cluttered Mind – by Deborah McKenna
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Coming from an eclectic psychotherapy background, Deborah McKenna outlines a wide array of techniques to “do what it says on the tin”, that is:
Organizing the junk drawer of your mind.
McKenna argues that it’s natural for something so gargantuan as our mind to get cluttered… but that it’s perfectly possible, with a good system, to tidy up considerably.
The benefit of this is much like the benefit of tidying a room:
Imagine a kitchen in which half the things have not been put away; there are dishes in the sink, something is growing behind the trash can… and you have a vague suspicion that if you open a certain cupboard, its contents are going to come falling out on your head. How are you going to cook a meal here?
Imagine a mind when many thoughts have been left untended; there are things you needed to process, and there’s a steady resentment of something growing in some dark part of your mind… and there’s some part of your memory that you’re afraid to even look at it, because of all it’ll cause to come surging back at you. How are you going to strategize your life here?
Fortunately, McKenna is here to guide you through doing for your mind what Marie Kondo would do for your home. And, even better, McKenna does it with a simple and clear writing style, assorted diagrams, and a step-by-step approach to getting everything in order.
Give Your Mind A Spring-Cleaning With This Book From Amazon Today
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