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Brandon Held - Life is Crazy
This is a Podcast of perseverance, self-help, self-Improvement, becoming a better person, making it through struggles and not only surviving, but thriving! In this Podcast the first 25 episodes detail my life's downs and ups. A story that shows you can overcome poverty, abusive environments, drug and alcoholic environments, difficult bosses, being laid-off from work, losing your family, and being on the brink of suicide. Either way, I hope anyone can listen and find a place to share life stories and experiences. Allow everyone to learn from each other to reinforce our place in this world. To grow and be better people and help build a better more understanding society.
My podcast is a story of the journey of my life. The start from poor, drug and alcohol stricken life, to choices that lead to success. Being raised by essentially only my mother with good intentions, but didn't know how to teach me to be a man. About learning life's lessons and how to become a man on this journey and sharing those lessons and experiences with others whom hopefully can benefit from my successes and failures. I've led a fairly unique life with some highs and very low low's. I believe listeners would find my experiences worth listening to and learning from and take them with them on their own journey.
Brandon Held - Life is Crazy
Episode 37: Hack Your Brain Chemistry and Beat Fatigue and Anhedonia with Andy West
Andy West, author of "Dopamine Mountain," shares powerful insights about rewiring our brains through intentional dopamine management to overcome fatigue, depression, and low motivation.
• Dopamine functions as our energy system, controlling motivation and linking directly to mood
• Challenge yourself first, then get rewarded - this counterintuitive approach creates sustainable dopamine regulation
• Our ancestors followed effort-reward-rest cycles naturally, but modern life provides too much instant gratification
• Depression and fatigue often result from dopamine depletion, requiring baby steps and small rewards to rebuild
• Frame challenges as growth opportunities to activate dopamine instead of stress chemicals
• Morning is optimal for hard tasks because we wake with slightly elevated dopamine
• Discipline isn't inherent - it's simply choosing action over quick dopamine, practiced one step at a time
• Rewards feel better when moderated and earned through effort
• Write down difficult emotions through journaling to process them and engage dopamine pathways
• Never settle for being stuck - even small movements like leg planks in bed can start rebuilding motivation
Find Andy West at DopamineMountain.com and on social media platforms as Dopamine Mountain. You can also find her on Amazon.
Go to BrandonHeld.com/Podcast and subscribe to the Podcast
Dynamic Content Middle
Hi, welcome back to Brandon Held. Life is Crazy. Today's another special day because I have a guest that I'm really excited to talk to, all the way from Australia, and she has some great information that I think you will find really helpful and really beneficial. And her name is Andy West and she's the author of her book called Dopamine Mountain. Hi, andy, how are you doing today?
Speaker 2:I'm good, thank you. How are you, brandon?
Speaker 1:I'm great. So yeah, just jump right in, Tell everyone about your book Dopamine Mountain, and give them a little discussion about how you came to write this book and let them know.
Speaker 2:Yes. So Dopamine Mountain. The analogy is anything we want to get some benefit from. We will experience much more benefit if we just do a little climbing first. So the mountain is like an analogy of those hard things in our lives that seem so challenging and so difficult to overcome. But when we put in effort and we just take that first step, we can start to move up the mountain and then the view is so much more beautiful from the top and if we want to slide down the other side, we get so much reward from the slide.
Speaker 2:So the book came about when I was in the biggest rut of my life and I've been in a few ruts. I've been in addiction and I've been through depression, and when I was young I was suicidal. So I've been through some ruts and this one, which was to do with chronic fatigue and also long COVID, was honestly the hardest thing I've ever had to do. So the writing of the book is how I got myself out of that, the steps I took and how, hopefully, if other people are in a rut of fatigue or anhedonia which is what I was in or depression, how to take some steps to dig ourselves out, because we are all capable of doing so if we know how to do it.
Speaker 1:That's great. I think almost everyone I personally know in life has experienced that at some point. For the lucky few that you haven't had to deal with that, good for you. But I think for the majority of us we deal with some depression or some kind of fatigue and energy issues. So let's just get into some of the facts and the process. So let's just talk about how you can use dopamine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so people may not know what dopamine is, and that's because it does so many things in the body. So some people will think of dopamine seeking as just drug seeking behavior or pleasure seeking. And yes, it's involved with that kind of motivation, when we are motivated to get pleasure or to improve how we feel. And that's also why dopamine is very intimately linked to mood as well, because our mood and our dopamine go up and down together. They act as one and the same. So in depression and many mental health, if not all mental health illnesses and problems, dopamine is paramount to how we feel with our mood, and it's also paramount to how we move towards things, things that we want and things that we like. And so we could think of our dopamine just as our energy system. It's basically the energy system that runs all of nature, all of the animal kingdom. So animals need dopamine to move towards anything at all. And in studies they've found that with a rodent, if you place food right in front of a rodent and you deplete that rodent's dopamine levels using chemistry, that animal will not even move a millimeter towards the food because it literally can't. So when people are very stuck in terms of energy, it's not that they're lazy or they can't be bothered. It's that their brain will not provide the energy resources for movement. And the amazing thing is, we can change this. We can hack this system at will. Now, it's certainly not easy, but it is possible. So, if anyone's listening and they are really struggling with their energy, what we need to do is take baby steps, because we need to retrain our brain for action using neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity just means that we retrain and regrow new synapses at will. We take control of our own learning, and we can do that with dopamine.
Speaker 2:So, to get into the basics of how dopamine can rise and fall, there's really two ways that dopamine can rise. One is when we get something that we want, and so we can raise our dopamine with a drug or a substance like caffeine, like sugar and enjoyable things that are instantly gratification scrolling. Some people use porn, which I do not recommend. It's terrible for dopamine. However, I don't judge it, but things that we straight away want, and so that's one way of raising dopamine. Now the problem with these external dopamine hits, so to speak, that we can only release so much dopamine before it must go down, so we can think of it like a wave. It's always going up and down, and these days we have a lot of access to pleasure. To put it bluntly, we can get all these pleasures without a lot of work first, and now this is where our lifestyle can become a problem.
Speaker 2:So many people stuck in depression don't realize that they may have accidentally stacked too many dopamine sources in a row without deliberately dropping the dopamine first. So I mentioned there was two ways that we could raise our dopamine. The other way is to push our dopamine down first, which is completely counterintuitive because it doesn't feel good. Ways that we can push our dopamine down first are things like a dopamine detox and things that are difficult, challenging and hard work basically chores. When we wake up in the morning, we have a little bit of extra dopamine. Now that can be supercharged by pushing it down first doing a hard workout, a hard chore, a cold shower something we do not want and do not like. So this is the secret to motivation that a lot of doctors don't even really know. They're giving us drugs that boost our dopamine, but they don't know that to naturally regulate that ourselves, we can use challenge to our advantage, and that's how I got out of my rut to our advantage, and that's how I got out of my rut.
Speaker 1:That's all really great information. Personally, I rely on coffee in the morning for my morning dopamine shot, but, like you said, it falls. It crashes a little bit after that after a while, and I'm sure a lot of people do that Also. I would imagine our lifestyles nowadays. Most people have a job, a sedentary type job, where they're not moving around too much, or they're like me I sit in front of a computer all day for work. So I would imagine all that is playing into the effects of dopamine as having on our body.
Speaker 2:That's right. And when we say that dopamine only feels good when it's rising, we need to think of where our dopamine started out. So if we wake up and we do all these high dopamine things like sugar and coffee and scrolling on our phone, we've just raised our dopamine high. Now what's going to happen is going to drop. So then when we go to work, we're going to experience a drop, because that's just how it works. It's all based on what happened before and what happened after, so it's relative to what just happened.
Speaker 2:But the way to hack this is, when we wake up, if we do something deliberately hard, like we deliberately do the hardest thing in our day, first we've pushed it down and then it must rise like a wave. The next thing will be relatively more easier. So going to work is going to feel easier than if we do a harder workout. That's how I was able to structure my day and to use that little bit of morning dopamine to my advantage. And now people who are in fatigue you were saying that you've been diagnosed with chronic fatigue, was that right?
Speaker 1:Yes, I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome about four or five years ago.
Speaker 2:Yes, me too about the same amount of time ago. And when we are in fatigue, we've got a buildup of glutamate, which is a different neurotransmitter that kind of runs opposite to dopamine. So that's generally that is the neurotransmitter of fatigue. Actually, it controls fatigue the same way that dopamine controls motivation. But when we have fatigue it is very difficult and even painful to do anything hard. So what we need to do is do tiny baby steps and then reward them. So the dopamine reward system runs on effort and then reward and then rest. And so what we need to do is use a positive mindset to remember that every movement we make is a success and we need to mentally reward that and not see it as failure, because we need to activate GABA, which is the neurotransmitter of many things, including success and enjoyment.
Speaker 2:So when we take that step, we need to build on that step again, the same way as if we were a little baby and we wanted to crawl towards the toy on the other side of the room. We take a step and even if we're just one inch closer, we realize, okay, we feel better now because we got a little bit closer. The baby doesn't give up and say I have problems, I don't have any energy. The baby sees the success and then goes again, and so this is also how people with a stroke or people doing rehab physically for injury they start again by baby steps, absolute ground level, and then they build upon that. And so the old ways of doing things may no longer work, and we have to accept that, that the old ways have been changed, the pathways in the brain have been changed and often overwritten. So we need to just start again and count every single movement as a success, because it really is, and that is how we start to move out of any sort of rock bottom situation.
Speaker 1:So, listening to that explanation, I try to take that into practicality and put it with the common man or woman, the common person. And if I'm going to get up and do an eight hour work day and I want to work out after work and I find that many days it's hard for me to pull together the energy and desire to even want to work out because my dopamine levels are so low, I'm so tired. What would be the best course of action, in your opinion, to allow yourself to be better prepared to do that?
Speaker 2:For me, I do the hard stuff first in the morning, so I would do the workout first in the morning. If there's any way that you can reorder that Because you can not only use that natural bit of dopamine that we've got, which is energy, but also that will mean the rest of the day is easier is a growth mindset popularized by Carol Dweck. Dr Carol Dweck, that has been shown to have many benefits. So not only is it optimism, but it's seeing our challenges as like a sparring partner, as a way for us to grow and expand. So when we see our difficult things in life that we don't want to do as something beneficial and something for our brain and body to use to grow, we can actually use dopamine to move towards these things. Now, when we see challenge as a threat, we're actually not using dopamine, we're using its arch nemesis, glutamate. So glutamate, even though it's very important for the overall body, when it gets out of balance, we get into fight or flight, we get into withdrawal, anxiety and running away. So we need to remember the way that we look at our challenges is paramount to which neurotransmitter we're going to use. If we are doing everything out of fear and out of a sense of threat, then that's not having the same effects on our brain and body than if we use mindset to choose these things for our own growth. And so a lot of people don't realize that how they frame things is really important for their mental health, and a lot of people who have been to therapy learn this kind of thing. But we can often forget and just think oh, I don't want to go to work, oh, I don't want to do this, everything's collapsing in on me, everything is so hard. Yes, life is hard, but hard is where we get the progress. Hard is where we move forward. So if we can take that hard stuff and instead of backing away and saying I'm a victim of this, we can actually become a master of the hard things. Because life will always be hard.
Speaker 2:Even if we stack a million pleasures and we only do the high dopamine things, the brain says this is the new normal and it will make that the low, and there's only so many receptors in the brain. We just can't go above that. Even if we stack every dopamine pleasure we can think of, life is going to get very hard, because how is our dopamine going to rise from there? So some people with seemingly the most privileged lifestyles are the ones suffering from the most depression, because dopamine will just flatline, and we could think of dopamine also like a helium balloon. This is one analogy that I like to use.
Speaker 2:If our helium balloon of dopamine has gone up and up from all of these instantaneous things that we want, like using screens and Netflix, and sugar and porn and all of these things, it's going to hit a ceiling and just flatline, and the only way to pull that down will be with hard work, challenge and effort. And then, once we pull that down, then it may rise and then, if we really want a dopamine bonus, we we can then reward ourselves for that challenge. So not only have we pulled the balloon down, then we've allowed it to rise just from relief, because relief is rewarding, and then we can put a dopamine reward on top of that, which means we are going to repeat that thing. So if you've ever trained a puppy or a pet, when we want the animal to repeat the action, we raise its dopamine with a snack or a treat.
Speaker 2:Same thing with our brain. If we do hard work and then we reward ourselves, we're more likely to want to do that hard work again because we just got a reward for it, and so that's how we actually master our dopamine. And it starts first thing in the morning, and I can tell you, many mornings I wake up and I do not want to go for a run and I do not want to have my cold shower and do my hard things. But I know for a fact that if I don't do them, my energy starts slipping back and my brain fog starts creeping back in and I just don't have the ability to think clearly and to organize. And I just don't have the ability to think clearly and to organize.
Speaker 1:So now that's just what I do. I know that it's better than turning topics. I actually tell my kids and always have. I have three sons and I always tell them life is what you make it. If you think life is miserable, you're right, it's miserable. If you think life is good, you're right, life is good. So it's going to be how you wire your brain to think of these things.
Speaker 1:And even though I know this, it's not a perfect system. I've been depressed before. I've been suicidal before. I've been in fight or flight most of my life because I had abandonment issues and all those things. So it really is.
Speaker 1:Even even getting rid of the fight or flight in me was just a rewiring of my brain. It was me finally being attached to someone my wife currently that I just didn't want to lose. I don't want to know a life without her and the only way I could make that exist was to rewire my brain. So I totally see what you're talking about here with the rewiring for your dopamine use. I wish I could work out in the morning. I wish I could, but I have to start my day at 530 am and I just can't get up earlier than that to work out. So I have to do it after work and some days I just don't have the energy and I don't know if trying to move around a little bit throughout the day because, like I said, I'm stuck behind a computer all day is a better way to prepare me, or if conserving my energy is the better way to go. That's why I was alluding to that question.
Speaker 2:In your case, where you can't work out earlier, if there's anything in your day that you can do that is hard to get done first. It might be a hard chore or it might be the hardest thing in your workday. It depends how you can structure it. But if you try and get the hard things done first, in whatever they are whether it's hard mentally or hard physically that will set your day up for better energy and because you have basically found your way out of the difficult situation you were in and you found your way out of fight or flight. For you this isn't so important now because you've come so far Like it's still important for people, but it's more so going to be something that people who are still really struggling can actually use to dig themselves out. People who have pretty much got their dopamine in check, like they're balanced in their life. They're doing hard things but they're also doing rewards. They don't really need to change too much, just a minor reordering. Like you are working out already, so that's amazing. You probably don't have to change too much, but remember to reward your workout somehow. It might be playing your favourite music on the way home. Just remember not to burn out and the way that we avoid burnout is by taking our rewards after our efforts, because if we just do effort, we will experience fatigue and burnout. Because we have a dopamine reward system and the way that our ancestors accessed this and all of the animal kingdom works as well is when we wake up in the morning. Our ancestors couldn't just go to the refrigerator and get pop tarts or get sugar or ice coffee or whatever it might be. They needed to apply effort first to get food, hunt it or gather it or farm it, and then the food itself is the reward, because our dopamine rises, because we now feel better than we did a moment ago. So our dopamine rises and our GABA rises as well, which is our liking. And then we rest and digest. So that order of effort and then reward and then rest is paramount for how our brain actually works. So this is just using nature and tapping into that. So if we get the effort and we get the reward and we get rest, we will have a balanced system, and it also means that we can moderate the things that are our rewards.
Speaker 2:So for me, I only use sugar after hard work. I don't eat sugar in the rest of my day and I don't eat many other carbohydrates either. I like to be mostly keto. That means that I can control when my dopamine rises so I can get my reward for when I do something that I want to do that betters myself. It might be chores or my workouts or whatever that is. That means I am the one in control of my dopamine. I'm not just chasing random sugar hits and spikes and things all over the place.
Speaker 2:And same with my snacks and meals and coffee. I use them as a reward for myself for getting things done. So for me that's chores around the house and then I'll reward it with a snack or if it's a hard work I'll have. One Skittle is what I use Like. One small candy is my reward, because I don't need much sugar, because that will actually spike my dopamine. Yes, so that's how I just master the things I want to do. That's how I got my book written, because writing a book took over a year and a lot of focus and research and it was definitely hard and I never really thought that I could do that. But it turns out I could, and so that's because I could. Now there's a book and other people can learn if they would like to use these techniques.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's all great stuff. It's like a blueprint for success for people. So that was phenomenal information right there. So what I want to do is I understand you wrote another book and it's called Anhedonia Wastelands, and I just want to give you an opportunity to talk about your other book. Tell us all about it, what it's about, thank you that's it.
Speaker 2:There, anhedonia wastelands. So a lot of people might not know what anhedonia means, and it's very similar to depression, although one can have anhedonia without feeling sad. So it's like a chemical form of depression. It can either be where our dopamine system isn't working properly or our GABA system isn't working properly, and it can also be because we have too much glutamate built up and so this actually feels you feel like a zombie. This is what I had after I had long COVID and all these things in my life kind of collapsing all at once.
Speaker 2:It feels very pessimistic and depressed because we don't have access to these neurotransmitters that keep our brain healthy, and it feels extremely not just boring, but heartbreakingly, tragically low in dopamine. And hedonia is the chemical form of depression. So we may not actually have low self-worth and we may not have low self-esteem, but we just don't have access to any feel-good chemicals. So what we need to do is just to take small steps to deliberately push the dopamine down even further, and then it may rise after that when we reward it, and actually that reminds me of a point. So to really jumpstart dopamine, what we can do is really push it down in the morning. So a cold shower, stacked upon chores and stacked upon stuff we do not like and do not want to do, and then to do an extra spike in dopamine, so a really strong coffee with sugar in it and maybe if we have nicotine patches which are different than cigarettes, or just other ways to spike dopamine.
Speaker 2:Now, this would only be for people who are really stuck in anhedonia or depression. A dopamine jumpstart this isn't for the every person. If we've got a generally normal situation going on, we just need little steps. So this jumpstart is really for people who are really flatlining and it's a one-off thing to help, like jumpstarting a car just to get it moving, and then we can start doing things to regulate and moderate. So we could just have to save our pleasures for after we do something hard.
Speaker 1:Great. One of the things I want to ask you is it's an information era, it's an information age, right? We all get all this information and then a lot of times it goes in one ear and out the other, or it maybe sticks in our brain and we just don't even know what to do or how to do it. What's a simple action that someone can do to get the discipline to do this?
Speaker 2:Yes. So discipline is just simply choosing action over quick dopamine. That's all discipline is. And, like any muscle or anything we want to practice, to get discipline, we just have to do one thing we don't want to do and then we build upon that. So people think that discipline is this thing that, oh, I don't have it, it's so hard, where do I get it from? You can start right now, do one challenging thing that is hard, that you don't want to do, and then reward it and then just go again. So I actually look around for things in my day if I'm feeling a bit stuck, okay, what will my reward be? It will be a Skittle or a candy or something, and what will I do to earn that? And I look around and find a chore or something hard. And that is discipline. It's just one time of putting your action ahead of your quick dopamine, so in the right order, and then just go again.
Speaker 2:And I also found that my focus used to be terrible. I had all of the symptoms of ADHD because I had basically all my life just chased the dopamine around and I hadn't practiced focus. But focus is also our attention span can be enhanced by just choosing focus over quick dopamine. So if we practice focus things like meditation or forcing ourselves to do a long and tedious task that's boring and then a reward we will actually enhance our attention span. And anyone can start enhancing this with practice straight away. Boredom is just a low dopamine state and if we start to learn to become comfortable in boredom, we can really take control of our mind, instead of it wanting to go straight over to YouTube or to go on TikTok or whatever it might be. We can practice both discipline and focus by embracing boredom, actually feeling what it feels like and not being scared of it. Not running away from boredom, but actually going towards it and finding what can I learn from this? So that's also where mindfulness can come in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. A lot of this is focusing on rewiring the brain, even with small steps. I've had to do that so many times in life and it really does work. If you can just get yourself to take the reward system, the reward has to make sense, right? Like you said, you reward yourself with a Skittle. It doesn't make sense to go do a workout and then after that go get a thousand calorie ice cream or something it's. You're destroying everything you just did, so it just makes more sense to make a reward something that doesn't kill everything you just did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. I think that also, when we are moderating our rewards and having less of them and at the right times, they feel better. So we don't need many. I really don't need a lot of sugar. It's just what works for me. For other people it might be a handful of nuts or whatever spikes. They're doing it's something they really like me. For other people it might be a handful of nuts or whatever spikes their dopamine something they really like and because we need to make ourselves wait for things in this age of instant gratification. So if we can wait and then have our reward afterwards, everything will just fall into place. I don't overeat sugar at all. I don't even have the need or want to. I have one and then, because my dopamine went from the low from the task and then to high from the sugar, I'm quite happy and it spurs me on to go do something else. So it's been a really good way to not overeat as well.
Speaker 1:I totally agree with you. I even get to the point where when I'm working out consistently, when I don't work out consistently, when I don't work out, I feel worse, so I have to work out to get my dopamine reward. I don't know, maybe that's just me, but that's how it works for me when I'm consistent. This is all incredible information, and I know that your books are going to be very beneficial and helpful for anyone who gets the opportunity to read them and picks them up. Do you have anything on audiobook or anything like that, or is it just paperback right now?
Speaker 2:Audiobook not yet, but I'm working on that but I think things like this podcast if someone would like to listen this podcast is the perfect opportunity for them to hear the main key points, and there's a lot to gather here so they might want to download it and listen a couple of times because, like you said, all this information in this era flies at us but to actually take it on and practice it. That's where the hard work is. So, listening to things, that's well and good, but where we actually embrace things and do the hard task of practicing it, that's where the real growth actually happens. So there are things that we can do to. I don't know if you've ever done any journaling. Have you tried journaling?
Speaker 1:I have. I didn't stick to it for long because I'm just not much of a writer. I'm more of a talker than a writer, which is why this podcast even began in the first place. But I do understand the rewards of journaling, because it's very much like when you get something off your chest. Right, you tell something and it makes you feel better and you get it off your chest. Journaling is the same thing. You're just not speaking it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. And because we actually write it down. It's better if we write it with a pen because we're using our motor cortex and our dopamine to actually physically write stuff down. So we're engaging dopamine in one way and we're also engaging it in the hard job of going towards that hard emotion. So it's writing down every difficult and challenging and negative thing that we feel, not only to get it off our chest, like you said, but also because it's hard to do that stuff. We're dropping our dopamine on purpose and then it may rise afterwards.
Speaker 2:So there's so many dopamine benefits in doing things like journaling. I use it anytime I'm struggling with something, if I've got low energy or low mood or if I've got just things on my chest that I need to process. Just writing them all down and then you can throw it away or burn it or whatever afterwards. But yeah, it's just one of those tools that anyone can use and there are studies that show that this can be really beneficial. So, yeah, just getting it done If we don't want to. We don't like those hard emotions, but again, we're using them to our advantage this time.
Speaker 1:Awesome. You have given a ton of valuable information. I hope listeners download this, pause it, replay it, write down the information, whatever it takes for you to make this dopamine work for you, and so I still want you to try to sell books, though, so let everyone know how can they get ahold of your books.
Speaker 2:So I'm on DopamineMountaincom. I'm also on Facebook and Instagram as Dopamine Mountain, so you can jump on there and have a look at some of the tips that I've got.
Speaker 1:All right. So we got about two minutes left and I want to just give you the floor to basically say anything else that you feel like you haven't said, or a last bit of advice.
Speaker 2:You want to leave with the listeners um, just remember to share this with people that you might feel are a little bit stuck in their life. And if you do feel stuck, never settle for stuck. Just take one little step and reward yourself, even if getting out of bed is hard. You can do leg planks in bed to drop your dopamine. You can actually. That's an exercise where you hold your legs straight up and it will actually hurt because it is exercise. So, even if you would like to do some bicep curls using the water bottle next to you, that is growth. That is expansion. You're growing your brain every time you take on a challenge. So just keep going and you will get there.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Andy, I want to thank you so much for being on my podcast and I want to thank my listeners for listening and I hope that you got some valuable information from Andy's visit today. And I thank you all for listening and I do not take that for granted, because the most valuable thing we have in this world is time, because we only have so much of it. And you took your time to listen to me, this podcast and Andy today, and I want to thank you. So until next time, have a good one, and I'll talk to you then.
