Chronic stress - why it impacts our motivation

Hello all,

Today I write from Berlin. The impact of earlier sunset, cloudy sky and lower temperatures is quite substantial. I came to realise the importance of sunlight and warm temperatures, when you spend some time in warmer, sunnier climates.

But, good times. We will look into stress and motivation today. Let us quickly recap two themes before we jump into today’s topic.

Review: anticipation and dopamine

We discussed:

1. Anticipation: our brain making constant calculations combining “bottom-up” inputs from our environment / senses, and “top-down” learnt knowledge to make decisions. Each of these calculations follows a prediction-error-circuit or process.

2. Dopamine is critical for motivation and action (movement / decisions). Dopamine is released in various areas of the brain, and fundamental for our ability to learn through prediction-error-circuits.

Dopamine is constantly being used for many important functions in our brain. We looked into the dopamine curve and dopamine as a finite resource, but renewable chemical in our brain.

Impact of low dopamine levels

Low dopamine can cause:

• lack of mental capacity e.g.:

  • reduced ability to focus

  • reduced ability to prioritize

  • reduced ability to ignore external stimuli

  • reduced ability to process “bottom-up” information

  • reduced reaction times

  • negative bias effect

• low self esteem

• reduced ability to learn

• reduced time perception (often perceiving time shorter)

• tiredness

• disturbed sleep and lack of deep sleep

Sever dopamine deficiencies, which can have many causes, can lead to:

• depression

• ADHD

• Parkinson’s

When I first looked into this I was astonished! The effects are all over us.

Before you ask: “Why can’t we just take a dopamine pill and get over with it?”

Because dopamine can not cross the brain-blood barrier and hence won’t get into the brain where it’s needed. Yes, this is nerd stuff knowledge, I am glad you asked, sometimes it is not just as easy as popping a pill. 😬

Stress and dopamine

Most of the literature discusses the positive effects and dopamine increasing stimuli.

Less is written about events that have decreased dopamine outputs, beyond the “sleep / eat / exercise”.

One I find interesting is the effect of (chronic) aversive events.

Remember the prediction-error-circuit (process): our brain tries to calculate the reward at the end of an action. If the reward is better or as expected, dopamine is released in larger amounts.

If the event has a negative intense outcome, the dopamine production is reduced, to the extent that dopamine falls under your average baseline.

While moderate stress stimuli can initially increase your motivation through dopamine release, ongoing exposure to the stressor (chronic stress), results in diminished dopamine release and reduced sensitivity of your nervous system to the little dopamine that is released.

Long story short, at one point the same “stress - negative outcome” cycle will not motivate you any more, but slow you down.

Chronic exposure to stressors and intense stress can result in stress-related depression because dopamine and dopamine sensitivity in your body becomes lower and lower.

This is a dangerous cycle, because stress, which as we just learnt, causes a reduction of dopamine overall, and as such, you make worse decisions, eat bad food, sleep badly, don’t exercise.

Instead, we seek to increase dopamine again through “unhealthy” and “easy to go after” dopamine hits: alcohol, sugar, social media.

All of these give short-term boosts to the dopamine output. But we know: after every dopamine high comes a dopamine low.

Hence, the ultimate effect is a further net negative, depressing your motivation even more.

Okay, so what do we do then?

Increase dopamine

Dopamine is the result of biochemical reactions.

Phenylalanine into tyrosine

Tyrosine into L-dopa

L-dopa into dopamine

Phenylalanine, tyrosine, iron and vitamin B6 are important building blocks.

The more of the “raw material” we have available, the more dopamine can be produced when needed.

These “building blocks” can be found in food:

• sesame / pumpkin seeds

• avocados

• bananas

• almonds / cashew / walnuts / macadamia nuts

• poultry

• cheese (especially Parmesan cheese)

• brown rice

• unsaturated fats (omega 3, especially EPA, not so much DHA)

What I love to eat as a snack:

half an avocado, a small amount of macadamia nuts, both sprinkled with olive oil. Being full of unsaturated fats, it is high in calories but won’t impact weight.

You could take tyrosine and l-dopa as supplements, but especially l-dopa might have side effects.

Now that we built the base for dopamine productions we can engage in activities, that have long-lasting effects on your average dopamine levels.

• exercise (exercise post heavy mental work showed to increase learning process, probably through increased dopamine release)

• cold water (I hate it, I do it, it does help, but don’t do it post exercising)

• music (I will write about binaural audio soon)

• Non Sleep Deep Rest (this is really fantastic! I was very sceptical, but I use it especially to overcome jet lag)

• coffee (does not really increase dopamine, but seems to trigger the sensitivity of dopamine receptors, but has a similar effect.)

I realize this was slightly technical. But I believe that understanding some mechanisms, which cause negative mental states (like being sad and not motivated), allows us to actually attack the issues better.

Let me know what you think.

See you on Sunday.

Alex