Episode 45: How to fix your dopamine deficit

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Hello everybody. So before we get started, I wanna remind you that I am doing a live master class this Wednesday, April 19th at 6 p.m. Eastern, and also Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern., I’m doing the same thing twice, so you can choose your time–there’s an early evening as well as a midday option for you. This is a master class on my accelerated recovery process.

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Specifically, I’m going to highlight the emotional sobriety component that I teach and we practice in my 12 week program And so I encourage you to come if you’re at all curious as what this emotional sobriety thing is and why emotional sobriety should be your primary focus in recovery and The radical reshift that I teach is that you are responsible for everything that you think and feel—and you can learn to think—and therefore feel—in a way that serves you on purpose.

I teach you how to deconstruct the chaos in your mind so that you can extract the emotions out of a situation. When you think differently about life, you react differently to life. Don’t get me wrong…Emotional sobriety is not living an emotion-free life, not at all. It’s just untangles you from the subconscious emotions jerking you around with self-fulfilling prophesies and self-sabotaging behaviors.

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Basically, I’m going to explain how to manage your inside voice so that you are no longer at the mercy of whatever thoughts are going on in your head. And if you’re like I am, kind of that perfectionist, all or nothing thinker, over thinker, the tools of emotional sobriety are a game changer. And I will also dangle a carrot in front of your face, anybody that comes to the master class live.

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not just watch the replay, but actually attends, bring your questions, all of that, will get a $100 credit for any program that I offer. So you’re gonna be $100 up if you come. It’s gonna be a fabulous presentation. I’ve been working on it for a few weeks now, and I’m so excited to get it. So get in the show notes, get the link, and get registered. So today I’m gonna be doing a deep dive into dopamine and how...

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our dopamine levels impact how we feel and specifically the dopamine deficit that most of us, all of us experience when we are kicking an addictive habit, whether it be a behavior or whether it be a substance. When you’re in recovery from alcohol use disorder, you’ve probably heard about post-acute withdrawal syndrome.

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which essentially is a dopamine deficit. And there’s not a lot of information out there about this. And I did a deep dive into post-acute withdrawal syndrome, also referred to as PAUSE, in episode eight. So after this episode, you don’t need to listen to that to listen to this, but after this episode, if you want more information and even a deeper dive,

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you might go back and listen to episode eight. In the show notes of episode eight, I also have links to resources on my website that go deep into suggestions that I have and cognitive tools and behavioral tools that you can use to combat pause. But in this episode, it’s really more of a broad overview of how dopamine works in our brain. And...

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how addiction affects dopamine. And then I’m going to give you the tools that I have found and tried and experienced and worked with clients on to accelerate the process of recovery. There are so many things that you can do to feel better faster. And I will be honest,

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For the first 18 months of my post-drinking career, I suffered. I suffered with moderate depression, which is not something I’ve ever really dealt with. I’ve always been more of an anxious person. So this overwhelming sense of low motivation and low energy and mood swings, I spent a lot of time crying or feeling frustrated.

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or just feeling apathetic and numb. And it was really confusing because I know I expected when I quit drinking to feel a whole lot better. And I did feel better physically. You know, it only takes 10 days to get the metabolites like acetylaldehyde and other toxic substances that build up in your body from chronic alcohol use. It only takes 10 days to get those out of the body.

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The real journey to recovery is recovering your brain health, recovering your mental health. I often explain that alcohol use disorder is a thinking problem, not a drinking problem. And this episode is not about the cognitive tools and the reframes and the emotional sobriety that I teach, but it is more about the brain chemistry.

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because what you’re thinking has a lot to do with your dopamine levels in your brain and of course other endorphins. Today I’m highlighting dopamine. But understanding how to kind of step back from whatever experience you’re going through and self-diagnose, learn to be aware of your dopamine levels. And so this is really just a framework for you to make sense of your own experience.

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And then also, of course, I’m gonna give you the tools to change your experience. I know as a drinker, and for most of my life, not just drinking, it’s not all about the alcohol, but I’ve always been a person who thought that I could manipulate the way I feel using substances and behaviors. And not all of them were unhealthy. I would say caffeine,

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and energy drinks are fairly neutral. They can interfere with your sleep and they can actually lead to an energy crash later, as I’m gonna explain, what goes up must come down. But if I had low energy, I was reaching for a substance. And if I was anxious, I was reaching for supplements like ashwagandha or kava kava or big dogs like Xanax or Ativan to modulate how I was feeling.

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And of course, using alcohol to calm down or to de-stress myself at night. Of course, it doesn’t de-stress me, but I didn’t know that, you know, happily in denial. But I also used a lot of healthy coping mechanisms too. I was a person who regularly worked out every single day and I would go to hot yoga or I would go on long runs to sweat out. And I was motivated to do that for a couple of probably more unhealthy reasons. The first of being

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I wanted to be skinny and pretty and perfect. And so you have to work out to have the perfect physique. And so I was motivated by that fear of being fat, I guess. And then the other thing I was motivated was to prove I didn’t have a drinking problem. Obviously, alcoholics aren’t at hot yoga sweating it out at 8 AM or running marathons. Even though most of them, all of the marathons I ran, I was horribly hung over.

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and did so much damage to my body, but in my brain I thought running was healthy and I thought that I could balance bad behavior with good behavior. I thought it was just mental math. And so every single day I tried to balance the scales in the favor of healthy coping mechanisms to offset the damage I was doing from the negative coping mechanisms. But as I moved into recovery,

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The real challenge was learning how to sit with my feelings and how at the time I did not know that there were tools. I thought my job was to feel my feelings and suffer. And while taking the time to untangle your thoughts and feelings and kind of unpack subconscious beliefs and taking the time to make sense of your story.

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and to change the way you think. Like I said, you get into some really crazy thinking patterns when you’re in addiction, and I’m going to explain why in a minute, but taking the time to do all that is important. You can’t bypass your feelings, but it’s also not nearly as painful, and it does not require all the navel gazing that we tend to think that it does. Untangling your feelings.

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doesn’t really take that long. What we mistake for feeling our feelings is the ruminating and the overthinking and the wallowing and not realizing that we are caught in a story and that our thoughts are actually perpetuating our suffering and perpetuating the stress and keeping us stuck in a thought loop, just like we get stuck in behavior loops. So this episode is really about me giving you information to empower you that when you are feeling bad,

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Yes, it’s important to figure out why, but if you can discern that you’re just in a dopamine deficit, then there are very specific action steps and then this becomes a skill. This learning how to manage your brain slash body and take it from periods of low and apathy and low motivation and low energy and really give yourself what you need.

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which if you’re low energy, you might just need more sleep. And accepting that you actually need eight hours of sleep, and accepting that you can’t run like a chicken with your head cut off for 25 years, and then expect that when you stop doing that, that there’s not gonna be some sort of repair and recovery process required. So big picture, you have to shift your focus from changing the way you feel

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using your feelings to identify your needs so that you can respond to your needs and fix them. But today’s framework is going to be about dopamine. So first let me start with how addictive substances impact the dopamine in your brain. For the purposes of our discussion, dopamine is your feel-good hormone, although it’s not the endorphin of satisfaction. It’s more of the, I want more.

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Dopamine is your motivating brain chemical. So at any given time, you have a baseline of dopamine in your brain that allows, that propels you through the world and to get the things that you want. So let’s imagine the visual of a bathtub. So you have a certain set amount of water in your bathtub. So you have a certain set amount of dopamine in your brain.

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And this is just an analogy. It’s not scientific, but it really helps to visualize this. So think about the levels of dopamine in your brain as the level of water in your bathtub. When you ingest a substance or engage in a behavior that lights up your reward circuits, such as, you know, I think of gambling where you get lots of lights and feedback, or just scrolling on your phone, where...

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you know, your dopamine is being stimulated and driving you to repeat the behavior so that you can repeat the spike in dopamine. Well, whenever there’s a spike in the dopamine, then of course, there’s a crash. What goes up must come down. So for every high peak of dopamine, there’s an equally low trough, trough, trough, trough, trough, trough. There’s an equally low trough.

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So think about you’re making waves in your bathtub. And what happens when you start making really big waves like alcohol, you know, alcohol causes about 10 times the dopamine spike that normal everyday activities. Certain crazy drugs like meth or heroin can spike like up to a thousand. I think nicotine can spike up to about 150.

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percent higher than normal. So you get you get varying degrees of how your brain reacts to various activities. But with alcohol, let’s stick with that. It’s about ten times the normal level. So what happens when you make really big waves in your bathtub is that some of the water spills out. And the more you make those waves, the lower the baseline level of the water is in the tub. Which means that

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The more you engage with addictive behaviors or substances over time, your baseline levels of dopamine fall. So you feel less and less okay when you’re not doing the thing and not feeling okay, subconsciously drives you to do more of the thing. And that’s how you get hooked. The desire to continue is latent.

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You’re not really aware of it. That’s why I say it’s subconscious. You just know that when you stop, there’s going to be a calm down. There’s going to be some pain. There are two reasons that we use substances. It always starts out as pleasure seeking. We’re doing, we’re ingesting the substance or we’re doing the behavior because it makes us feel better. Our dopamine responds in our brain. We get a reward and we like it.

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But the more you ingest a substance or use a behavior over, do a behavior over time, the more you are seeking that behavior out to avoid the pain of not doing that behavior. Your baseline dopamine levels have fallen. And what also accompanies addiction is that the brain, because there are such high spikes of dopamine,

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the brain stops producing dopamine in response to other activities. Andrew Huberman describes addiction or defines it as a progressive narrowing of your focus of things that you’re going to get pleasure from. And again, this happens very subconsciously. But if, let’s say for me, I was a regular drinker, over time, I

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started experiencing my daytime as really just an obstacle course to get to happy hour. Because I was so focused on getting the next reward. I wanted the dopamine spike and I wasn’t really present, which also affects how your your brain responds to certain things. I was distracted. Usually I was thinking about

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possibly how much I had had to drink last night, and then doing some mental math to see if that was a problem or what else I needed to do to offset the negative consequences, and then rationalizing whether or not I was gonna drink again tonight, and then moving into the planning phase of, okay, I am gonna drink, but I’m only gonna have two glasses, or I’m gonna go out with friends and moderate, whatever. So the more, anything that’s addictive,

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It just steals your focus so that mentally, you are all caught up in the use of that substance or the repetition of that behavior. And over time, everything that you’re doing that’s not associated with that behavior gives you less and less happiness. You know, this is one of the things that I didn’t really understand until recently, that our brains are always changing.

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So we have this idea that the way we use or are affected by alcohol is set. And I’ve seen this specifically with pot use. I don’t smoke pot. I’ve tried, it doesn’t really do much for me. Just puts me to sleep. So for sure I’ll take a gummy if I need it. I don’t very often, unless somebody gives me one, I don’t have any. But I’ve seen this with pot users where at some point in their life,

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was very helpful, not maladaptive. They perhaps were dealing with a lot of anxiety and pot just became their drug of choice. So they get this belief in their head that pot helps me relax. But the thing is, because of the way all substances interact in our brain, especially addictive ones, the way your brain responds to the substance changes over time.

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This is neuroplasticity. And the good news is your brain changes over time for the better as well as for the worse. But the more you use anything, the more you grow the tolerance, you increase your agitation when you’re not using it. And then of course, with tolerance comes increased use, which means the negative side effects are also increasing. And so there just is no...

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perfect set point where you’re running an experiment and you think you’re getting all the same results. Like this is a scientific experiment where the variables are always changing. And so getting a belief in your head that, you know, pot helps you relax or alcohol helps you relax. The thing is, is that can be true. The problem is not giving yourself enough time, not giving your brain enough time to recalibrate.

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from the pain of the withdrawal. So the real problem with, like we all use addictive substances all the time, right? Caffeine, alcohol, phones, like you name it. Where addiction happens is when you begin to use the substance, not to seek the pleasure, but because you’re in pain from not using the substance. So proper moderation or

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or the ability to interact with an addictive substance where you can take it or leave it, means that you are aware of the dopamine deficit that occurs after use and you’re able to tolerate it. And you don’t use the substance to correct the dopamine deficit that the substance created. That’s when you get stuck in the cycle. And that’s what I’m learning in recovery is the more I learn

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I can trust myself because when I’m able to identify that the reason I’m not feeling good is because of something that I’m doing that did feel good, I no longer get stuck in my head. I immediately understand the cause. Okay, I’m dealing with a dopamine deficit. And I understand that even if I do nothing, that’s temporary. Time can cure the dopamine deficit.

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But what doesn’t cure the dopamine deficit is more of the behavior or substance that caused the dopamine deficit. And that is key in recovery. And that is why for the most part with quitting alcohol, for example, people experience post-acute withdrawal syndrome and they mistake the depressive episodes that they cycle through basically as an alcohol deficit,

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Well, you know, I wasn’t feeling good, so I quit drinking, and now I’m still not feeling good, so I guess I’ll go back to drinking. And by opening up your awareness and your ability to identify what’s going on in your brain, the more you can proactively understand that the dopamine deficit is temporary and that certain base things improve your baseline of dopamine. So now, as I have...

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reintroduced alcohol and found that to be absolutely fine. I’ve had about one glass of wine several times, but I only will in, I would never drink wine two nights in a row, and I guess never’s a long time, right? But I’m learning that having one glass of wine in a appropriate communal

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setting where it almost feels ceremonial, you know, and I’m in the same place as somebody else and we’re having wine, like that is fine. Now, I do notice that maybe there’s a little bit of a come down the next day and it’s so subtle and I’m for sure overthinking it and I’m also working on not overthinking it, but I know I can trust myself with alcohol because I now understand the process of this the dopamine spike and the dopamine trough.

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thinking of it like a wave, and I understand that I need to recalibrate my dopamine levels before I play with that again. And I’m now extrapolating this knowledge into all areas of my life and using it to gauge my behavior and allowing biofeedback, how I’m feeling in my body, to guide my choices about what’s good for me and what’s not and how much is too much.

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and what I need. It’s really like amazing when you realize that your body will guide you and all you have to do is listen to your body. You know, having this information now you can listen to your intuition. I will say just quickly that a period of abstinence, if you’re listening to this and you’re still a drinker, a period of abstinence is essential to accelerate your recovery.

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You just got to quit dancing with the devil. According to Anna Lemke, who wrote Dopamine Nation, fabulous book, she says that it’s a minimum of 30 days. But research also shows that for alcohol use disorder specifically, the average is 14 months, which is why if you are considering quitting drinking, trying to moderate yourself through the recovery,

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It’s just going to take longer and it’s going to be less fun. I got to be honest, it’s going to be less fun. It’s a longer route. I’m sure you can get there, people do it. But when I bring new clients into the next chapter, which is my 12 week accelerated recovery program, I do ask them to commit to 12 weeks of sobriety. And quite honestly, if you’ve been a...

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drinker for longer than a decade. I mean, I was drinking for almost 30 years, of course, stopped during pregnancy and stuff, but I was a daily drinker for about 12 to 15 years. And then I did almost three years of complete abstinence. But the first 18 months of that was me not having a clue about dopamine and how to naturally restore balance. And I’d like to give credit to where I get, I...

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I’m getting the following list. What’s interesting is while I’m gonna give Andrew Huberman credit, cause I listened to his three and a half hour podcast, that guy can talk and it’s very chewy and very sciencey. While I wanna give him credit, I wanna say that last week when I was preparing for this podcast, I made the same list. But I guess in giving him credit, I wanna legitimize the list that I compiled basically from my own experience. And then of course, reading and everything that I do.

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that inspired the experience, but I do wanna let you know that this is science-based, this is evidence-based research that shows that this is effectiveness. This is not just me saying that, oh, you should do these things. And that being said, they are things that I have done and I’m shocked at how well they work. So here we go. The first thing, the foundation of your health is sleep.

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eight hours of sleep and once the alcohol is out of your system and you’re sleeping well and your REM sleep has come back, getting eight hours of sleep is an absolute baseline self-care priority, especially if you’re in recovery. That just has to be a non-negotiable. You can’t play catch up with sleep. I mean, of course you can, but I’m talking about in terms of dopamine.

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baselines. If you want to restore your baseline dopamine levels, you need eight hours of sleep consistently every single night. And research shows that getting eight hours of sleep every single night can improve your baseline dopamine levels up to 60%. So that’s huge. So if you’re struggling with overwhelm or anxiety or depression or pause, you know, the big umbrella category, any of that.

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just deciding that you’re going to get eight hours of sleep, which I know if you have a busy life, that you, that’s so easy to say, well, I can’t. Well, you can. I would draw an analogy to if you’ve been a parent and you have a two-year-old, like is it really an option for the two-year-old to be running on two hours less sleep than they need? No, everybody’s miserable. And so that’s part of recovery also is

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stop telling yourself that you can’t take care of your body. Like self-care is basic babysitting 101. You’re in charge of what sometimes feels like a two-year-old who has a driver’s license who can buy vodka. Like you’re in charge of that body and it needs sleep. It’s just non-negotiable. So, and that may mean that you need to be in bed for 10 hours. That may mean you can’t watch TV at night and that you have to start reading.

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that may mean that you have to give up caffeine or other stimulants or change something else that’s interfering with your sleep and solve that problem. But either way, it’s just not an option. And I can tell you from somebody who’s had sleep issues and been also a coffee drinker, like, you know, mainlining coffee, that I don’t drink coffee on a regular basis. I’ll have a cup, you know.

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I love a cup when we’re traveling in the airport. I love it. If I have a layover, I’m getting myself, and actually though, I don’t even get coffee anymore. I get a chai that has very little caffeine in it because I value my sleep and I’m not going to drink caffeine. And what I was gonna say is that I have so much more energy now that I don’t drink caffeine. You know, caffeine’s an addictive substance too.

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And so everything that I’ve said about addictive substances and your baseline of dopamine applies to caffeine too. Eliminating caffeine may restore your energy and make you feel better. And caffeine’s a pretty easy one to give up. I mean, psychologically, if you’re just super like, I can’t live without caffeine and I love coffee, it might be harder. But I can tell you that replacing my morning coffee

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my favorite tea in the entire world, and I’m not a huge tea drinker. I think a lot of it tastes like butt water, let’s be honest, but I’ll still drink it if it’s good for me. But in terms of enjoying it, there’s this sweet and spicy tea by Earth, Good Earth, Good Earth, it’s by Good Earth, that is, every time I make it for people, they’re like, that’s better than coffee. I’m like, yeah, I know. And also, normal is just what you do every day. And...

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If you want to sleep and you want to feel better, then something’s gonna have to change in your life. And giving up caffeine or nicotine, if you’re a vapor, nicotine will keep you up at night too. I never knew that, who knew? I did not. But looking at the behaviors in your life that you wanna change and then asking yourself, what’s harder, living a life where you feel tired and perpetually hung over or depressed?

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or getting over the hump of breaking an addiction. It’s really easy to break a physical addiction. I had very little trouble with alcohol. I had bed sweats and insomnia around day nine, and then I struggled more with the post-acute withdrawal syndrome. But as far as giving up alcohol itself, like it wasn’t, I can’t believe it was as easy as it was to give up the alcohol.

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then I had to learn to deal with life. That was not easy. But actually giving up the alcohol or breaking the caffeine, you can break that in a couple of days. I mean, you don’t even have to go cold turkey. You can just wean yourself off, replace it with decaf. Like it’s not complicated. Okay, so the second step is nutrition. But before you bow out of the rest of the conversation, I’m gonna keep it real simple and give you one supplement.

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Nutrition is really important. Stopping the processed crap because that stuff’s addictive too. So that stuff is also spiking your dopamine and leaving you in a trough and lowering your baseline levels of dopamine. The more you can eat whole, unprocessed foods, the better. But I do understand that changing your diet is a process. And so you can start. Start with one meal where you make it a little healthier or just start introducing.

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uh, you know, maybe a kale smoothie with all the good stuff in it, or introducing more vegetables or cut up vegetables or introducing a salad every day. Like that’s a whole other approach when you want to change your diet. So here’s the supplement. It’s an amino acid and it’s called L-tyrosine. And that is the precursor that makes dopamine in the brain. And scientifically.

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there’s a lot of evidence that shows that taking L-tyrosine as a supplement, especially in the mornings, I buy 500 milligrams and in early recovery, you can take up to 2,000 or even 3,000. I did an episode with Chris Engen about 10 episodes back called Nutrition and Supplements or

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using using amino acid supplements to get through recovery. So that’s a great episode. Chris Engen is a great resource, but in general, like easy, simple, generic advice is to get some tyrosine and start taking anywhere from 500 to 2000. And Chris’s experience is that for alcohol use disorder,

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that higher doses work. Often people say don’t work, it’s because they’re not taking enough. So I would recommend starting with whatever the doses on the package, you know, if you’re getting 500 milligrams, it probably says take one up to three times a day and start with that. And then if you don’t feel better, the cool thing about amino acids is it’s an immediate relief if you’re taking enough. So you...

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you have to figure out what dose works for you so that what that would look like is opening a capsule and taking it under your tongue because that’s quicker than swallowing it and it doesn’t taste bad, but opening the capsule, putting it under your tongue, giving it five minutes, and then if you don’t feel much, bump it again and continue to do that until, let’s say you do get all the way up to 2000 milligrams.

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then the next day you don’t have to go through all of that again. And then that dose should be consistent for a couple of weeks. But then as your dopamine baseline levels restore on their own, you don’t need to continue to take tyrosine. Like it’s not a drug, it’s not going to hurt you, and it’s just a bridge to get help you get where you want to go. So nutrition is really important. L-tyrosine is a supplement you can use. The third tool is morning sunlight.

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game changer in my life. So I started this winter making it a habit of not just walking my dog, which I’ve been doing for two or three years now, but actually going first thing between seven and eight and watching the sunrise. You know, it’s my favorite time of day and it allows me to get outside, but more importantly, it exposes my eyes. We are animals, people. We are

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humans and animals and we’ve evolved and exposing our eyes to real sunlight, not behind a glass, not well lit indoor areas, but outside sunlight, just five to 10 minutes. According to Andrew Huberman, research shows that that also can drastically increase your dopamine baseline levels. Okay, so morning supplement just five morning sunlight, just five to 10 minutes.

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And then the fourth thing is daily movement. You have to move your body. And in early recovery, I found all of my motivation to exercise and by exercise, air quotes, I mean go to the gym and lift weights and run, like gone, it was gone. But that is when I started introducing just the concept of movement. So there’s just no pressure.

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Movement is the opposite of sitting. So might be walking around my house, doing some light chores, might be taking a walk. It might be throwing on my hula hoop and doing a few minutes there. Like the more you’re sitting on the couch in your office chair at the kitchen table, like just get up and move your body. Movement is directly tied to dopamine levels in the brain. And the last thing, and I have saved the best,

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for last. Also, you’re not gonna like it. If you’ve seen on social media, the biggest trends are cold water exposure. Everybody’s getting themselves cold tubs. And you know what? I’m gonna be getting one too. As soon as they drop the damn price, because I’m not spending $5,000 on a cold plunge tub. And you don’t have to. So at some point in unrelated

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pretty painful because I had a really narrow window of tolerance for temperature. If it was 69 degrees, I was fucking cold. And if it was 71 degrees, I was fucking hot. And I decided that’s pathetic and annoying. And also, I was able to kind of see that I could expand that tolerance. Like it wasn’t set. I was just being a snowflake. I learned that through scuba diving.

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I would come out of the water in 85 degree water temperature and 90 degree weather and my lips are blue and I’m shaking. And I’m like, I’m dying of hypothermia. And my husband’s like, I don’t think you’re gonna die of hypothermia in 85 degree water. And I’m like, I’m sure gonna try. I learned from becoming a better scuba diver and having the motivation to scuba dive. Like I loved to scuba dive to get over the cold thing. And my body did acclimate.

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So like I said, I was going outside and walking on a regular basis while I live in Indiana, hit me back about what you think about November through March, not warm. And I would be so bundled up, but what I found is the more I went outside in the cold, when everybody else is like, oh, it’s too cold to go outside. I’m like, I actually like it. Like I just found that I enjoyed being outside so much, I guess it does affect dopamine,

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my brain was like, let’s do that again. Let’s do that again. So I have expanded my tolerance for temperature because of being outside in the winter. And so if you are kind of like where I was, you’re gonna wanna start slower. Instead of cold water exposure, you might just expose yourself to cold weather. And short of that, you might throw some cold water on your face. But the first level, the more you expose yourself to cold, the more...

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the quicker you acclimate to it. So start small. The first time I turned my water in my shower to cold, I thought I was gonna die. Like, so I had talked myself into it. I was talking smack with my brother and he’s been doing it. So I was like, ah, I’m gonna do it. And I jump in. And so I get into the shower and my body reacts like the biggest hyper spastic

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you know, what do they call it? Histrionic. My body just like seized up. I was, ah, but that was the first time. And it was funny because I don’t do Wim Hof breathing. I know a lot of different styles of breathing, but Wim Hof isn’t one of them. And I feel like my body just started doing that. And I was like, I don’t even know. I’ve never read about the technique, but I’m pretty sure that was Wim Hof, what I was doing. Just like, oh, oh, oh, oh.

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You know, and so I started and then very quickly, shockingly quickly, as shockingly cold as it is, as shockingly how quickly you acclimate to it. And within two weeks, I was able to do it without contorting my body. Like now I can just turn the shower to cold and continue rinsing my hair and hell, I could shave my legs. Like it’s crazy.

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I would use an analogy. Like, do you remember if you’re a female, when you first started tweezing your eyebrows and the first time you pulled the eyebrow out, you’re like, oh, you know, and your eyes are tearing up and you’ve just never, nothing has ever hurt worse. And guys, if you’ve ever had your eyebrows threaded or pulled or waxed, like that feeling, well, the more you do it, the more you’re able, like it doesn’t hurt at all. The more like, I don’t know, there’s some sort of internal resistance or you can hold your skin taut or something.

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Same thing in cold water. Like I can stand there for three minutes. I get out because I’m bored and I don’t wanna waste any more water. Like that’s it. And my next level that I’m gonna do is buy ice and do my bathtub. But I do hate to waste water on that. So I don’t know. But anyway, just doing the cold shower and exposing yourself to cold water, whatever your tolerance level is, just pushing yourself.

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beyond it for as long as you can stand it. So for you, it might be sticking your face in cold water for 30 seconds or five seconds. For somebody else, it might be 10 seconds in the cold shower and then getting out and then gradually just turning that dial on your tolerance and forcing yourself. I tell you what, there’s such a big, big bang in my brain for the cold water shower. I’m looking forward to it.

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my brain is like, we’re in, we’re on board with that. So the first couple times I had to force myself to do it, but very quickly, it became an activity that was self rewarding. So to recap the five things that you can do to accelerate your recovery and reset your dopamine baseline levels are number one, sleep, eight hours.

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Number two, nutrition, specifically the supplement L-tyrosine, start with 500 milligrams and increase up to 2000. Number three, morning sunlight, just five to ten minutes. Number four, movement every single day. And number five, cold water therapy. And do let me know.

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how those cold showers are going, I would love to hear from you. And I do wanna invite you, if you’re listening to this episode in real time, so I dropped the episodes on Monday, this Wednesday, the 19th, and Thursday the 20th, I am doing a live masterclass called Accelerate Your Recovery. And dealing with the dopamine deficit is just one of an umbrella of tools that you can use

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to quickly recover from addiction, not just from substance, but also all of the behaviors. The thing is, is we are all addicted to our lives, our phones, our foods, our pharmaceuticals, and life is so much better when you don’t need crutches just to make it through the day that are actually making it harder to get through the day. It is such freedom to

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reclaim your brain and that also includes you know emotional health and emotional recovery and learning how to think differently and I refer to the the cognitive changes that you need to make as emotional sobriety and that is going to be my primary focus in the master class this week. So it’s Wednesday at 6 p.m eastern.

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and also Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern. So I’m offering two sections. And I’m going to spend that hour dissecting what emotional sobriety is, what it looks like, and how to start practicing it. In the masterclass, I’m going to give you kind of the foundation, the framework of the model that I use to teach emotional sobriety. And then I’m gonna zoom out and show where

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and how emotional sobriety fits into the big picture so that you can see exactly what you need to do to accelerate your recovery, how to get where you’re wanting to go. And the first part of the masterclass, I’m gonna start out with how to figure out where you are, which if you are dealing with a drinking problem, likely you’re thinking where I’m at, I’m stuck in an addiction. And I’m gonna completely reframe.

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what the real problem is and what the real solution is. And of course sobriety is part of it. Like I said, a period of abstinence is very important for recovering your brain health. However, it truly is emotional sobriety that’s going to change the way you think and change the way you show up in the world and allow you to completely rewrite the story of your life so that your past is no longer going to be dictating your future.

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take control of yourself. And we do that with emotional sobriety by starting with the promise that you are your own problem because you are also your own solution. And then I give you the steps to how to create that solution for yourself. So if you’re interested, I’m gonna put a link in the show notes. Please register for that, spots are limited. I don’t know where we’re at. We’re probably about half full, although I’m recording this.

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Friday. So I don’t know where we’ll be Monday, but spots are limited to 100. So please sign up as soon as you can. And I hope to see you on Wednesday.