Dopamine is one of the hottest topics in health and wellness, and has been for decades.
Why?
Dopamine is essential for frontal lobe function - executive function, short-term memory, personality, and executive function.
Blood pressure regulation and cardiac function.
Energy and responding to stress.
Most of my patients and clients are "driven." This means that they need more dopamine than the average person (90% of people). I held a webinar on this last week, which was extremely well-attended. If you missed it, it will be available in our course, Fundamentals of Wellness.
People who are driven have dopamine receptors that are less efficient. They need more dopamine than most people to feel happy, excited, or "normal."
I will be holding a webinar entitled, "How to Manage Insane Ambition and Prevent It from Destroying Your Health,” sometime in March. Make sure you subscribed to the email list at StillmanWellness.com for updates on all my webinars and speaking appearances. I do not have time to announce all of them here.
Jim Laird and I already hosted a webinar on this topic which is now in Dr. Stillman's Wellness Secrets, which is part of The Fundamentals of Wellness Course + Coaching program.
Whenever I look at "treating" something, like, say a low dopamine level, I start by asking myself a simple question. Am I treating a number or am I treating a symptom?
I wrote these two posts on this topic, for those of you who want the full theory behind that statement:
You must also remember that nutrition is not just about what goes in your mouth. It's about your total environment. There's more to dopamine levels and production than just the supply of nutrients in your diet. A critical, and often overlooked, element of dopamine metabolism is your energetic environment.
We need light to make dopamine. We need light to make energy, which is, after all, essential to production of more complex chemicals, like dopamine. This is why I love sauna and photobiomodulation. We need melatonin to keep our brain healthy, which is why people are now proposing that ADHD, which is associated with low dopamine activity in the frontal lobe, is in fact a "circadian" disorder. As in, it is primarily mediated by light. This is why I love blue blockers and low-blue light lightbulbs.
I am also very concerned about the effects of EMF on dopamine metabolism. In study after study, we see organisms reacting to high levels of EMF with the stress response. What does the stress response consume? Dopamine! This is why I recommend the mitigation strategies recommended by my friend Dr. Mercola in his book on EMF.
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.
- John Muir
Low dopamine levels in the brain can manifest either in numbers (lab data, vitals, answers to questionnaires, and so on) or symptoms (how you feel and function). If I suspect you are low on dopamine, I will use a special protocol I designed to boost dopamine.
I've decided to share this protocol as the protocol of the week. It's for premium subscribers only, not because it's something you can't find elsewhere (you can - everyone is talking about dopamine these days), but because there are important caveats to its use that you can't find elsewhere. If you don't understand how dopamine works, you have no business supplementing it. And I'm not talking about "how it works" from an academic perspective - I'm talking about how it works in the real world, giving people with real problems high doses of nutrients to alter their dopamine levels.
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