How to make Dopamine to your Mood Booster

In my past posts I talked about depression and how it relates to stress and inflammation. Now, I want to address the relationship between depression and my favorite neurotransmitter: DOPAMINE!



Dopamine is responsible for pleasure, motivation, movement, action, seeking goals and striving towards anything we get pleasure from.

In a nutshell, dopamine is what keeps us going, gives us motivation, makes us feel energetic and happy about our endeavors and achievements.



In fact, low dopamine levels are associated with the inability to feel pleasure, which is one of the symptoms of depression.

We don’t even need to go as far as proper depression, it’s enough to look at a somewhat physiologically depressed state most of us experience from time to time: tiredness, loss of motivation and drive. This reduces our well-being and we want to get rid of it when it happens.



The question is: How to make sure that our dopamine levels are high and we feel good?



One of the most popular and highly misused methods is getting dopamine externally, from substances and potentially addictive behaviors, such as food, alcohol, drugs, sex, social media, video games, checking emails and messages, TV shows, etc.  All of it releases dopamine.



However, this comes with a downside. The human body always strives towards balance. Once the dopamine level increased the body tries to bing it back down and dopamine starts dropping again. It is the drop in dopamine we experience as cravings. We want to get more of the thing that gave us pleasure and bring dopamine back up. If we repeatedly boost dopamine, because we can’t resist our cravings, over time, we will need more and more of the substance/activity that brings us pleasure - aka. we may develop addictive behaviour.

To  make it worse; if we don’t give the body the chance to restore its balance and boost dopamine every time we get cravings eventually our dopamine levels drop below baseline (the dopamine level we initially had). This way we can get into a dopamine depleted state, lose motivation and feel unhappy. 

To sum up: Boosting your dopamine with external stimuli is a bad idea. It makes everything worse long-term.

 

It is much better and more sustainable to boost dopamine with actions we are less likely to get addicted to because they involve overcoming adversity. Overcoming adversity, aka putting in effort, is also related to dopamine release.

A good example for this is cold exposure. Cold exposure increased dopamine levels by 2.5 times, which is comparable with cocaine.  However, it is less likely that you get addicted to cold exposure (e.g. cold shower/bath), as you need to force yourself to get into the cold water.

Another example is exercise (if you enjoy it). To give you a real-life example, how much challenging lifts boost my dopamine levels and make me happy, just check out the video below (to see the full challenge-reward-picture, go to the second video). Overcoming any exercise challenge you enjoy will most likely have a similar effect for you.

 

If you don’t want to do anything as extreme as submerging yourself into cold water, or grinding out your lifts like me, there are a few mental strategies you can use. Dopamine is released when we predict reward. Be conscious and connect daily activities with the reward you get from them. This will make you release dopamine and motivate you to address them. A few examples below:

  • Do you have a challenging task at work? Instead of dreading and procrastinating it, predict how good it will feel when you complete it and address it immediately.

  • Be mindful about things you do every day and enjoy, your cup of tea/coffee in the morning and smelling the smell of freshly made coffee, hot shower, seeing sunlight, a hug…


To go one step further, when we receive a higher reward than we predict, or if the reward as a surprise, we release even more dopamine.

What about making someone a pleasant surprise, you will do a good deed and spike his/her dopamine levels and get gratitude in return.

Speaking of gratitude – particularly receiving gratitude – is associated with increased motivation, reduction in fear, anxiety and inflammation. As you know by now, inflammation is closely connected with depression. It’s a win-win situation, you give a dopamine boost and receive motivation and anti-depressant effect in return.

 

To sum up your plan of action:

  • Don’t use any substances or addictive stimuli that give you pleasure. It makes the entire situation worse long term.

  • If you are hardcore enough go for cold exposure or intense exercise you enjoy

  • Be mindful about your daily actions and visualize how much you’re going to enjoy them

  • Surprise someone with something nice

 

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What to eat for a healthy mind; Good gut health = Good mental health

Inflammation is the villain.

Inflammatory molecules are key players in depression and other mental and physical diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, obesity etc.

 

There are several things that can cause inflammation;  

  • stress

  • isolation and lack of social contacts

  • shame (read more about it here)

  • feeling as "being not good enough" (lower social rank)

  • unhealthy diet based on processed foods


Indeed, a research study found out that people whose major part of calories comes from ultra-processed foods, such as packaged snacks, chips, breakfast cereals, cookies, breads, report 81% more depressive symptoms and 19% more anxious days. 

 

I don’t need to say that processed food is bad and you should eat healthy. It’s common knowledge. But still, millions of people don’t do it. Otherwise we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic and steadily increasing numbers of mental health problems.

 

Instead of preaching a sermon how evil processed food is and detrimental to your physical and mental health, I want rather to focus on what you can add to your diet – not on what to avoid - to reduce inflammation and have a positive effect on your mental health.


But first let’s have quick look at the basics first; why processed food is bad and wholefoods good.

To give a very simplistic answer without going much into nerdy science-details; it’s because of our gut microbiota. Processed food, filled with sugar and junk, makes the bad gut bacteria grow. Fiber-rich wholefood makes the good gut bacteria grow.

There is a constant communication between the gut and the brain, called microbiota-gut-brain axis (MGB). The communication happens via hormones, inflammatory molecules, and neurotransmitters. It is not surprising that the molecules produced by bacteria in your gut influence your brain and also your mood.

 

Unhealthy diet doesn’t only make the bad bacteria grow, but also increases gut permeability. It is a normal – and a good thing – that the gut walls are permeable. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to absorb nutrients from food. However, if the gut is too permeable more bad stuff can get into the blood stream, such as toxins and all kind of inflammatory molecules that are produced by the bad gut bacteria.

 

What can we do against it?

 

It’s simple: Reduce the number of bad bacteria and increase the population of good bacteria.

One method to do it are probiotic supplements. In the past I have been very skeptical regarding probiotics. Simply, because there wasn’t enough research to make solid recommendations what bacterial species are truly effective. By now there is more research – even though, the data is still scattered, not completely clear and often comes from animal studies. But the collective evidence has convinced me that it may be beneficial to give probiotics a try when it comes to such an important things like mental health than not trying anything at all.

 

So, when you get a probiotic, what should you watch out for?

 

Here are species of good gut bacteria that decline in people suffering of depression and we should ideally get from probiotics:  

 

  • Lactobacillus

  • Bifidobacterium

  • Faecalibacterium

  • Dialister

 

Most probiotic supplements contain Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium. When choosing a probiotic, it is important to choose one that contains both. Lactobacillus works in the small intestine and Bifidobacterium in the large intestine. You want to cover your entire intestine.

 

However, this is not the end of the story. Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium have many different species, such as Lactobacillus rhamnosus,  Lactobacillus acidophilus or  Lactobacillus bulgaricus. Which one should you go for?

 

Here I made a list of the species that were shown to have some beneficial effect on mental health in human studies, if possible choose these or at least some of them:

L. rhamnosus, L. casei strain Shirota, L. plantarum, L. paracasei, L. gasseri, B. breve, B. longum, Clostridium butyricum

Abbreviations: L = Lactobacillus, B = Bifidobacterium

 

The commonly used dose is 1-10 billion (10^9-10^10) colony forming units (CFUs).

 

A few words of reason: Even though, I gave you some pointers on what probiotics to choose, please don’t forget that supplements are about supplementation, on top of a proper diet. The package we get from food is complete containing many important components we don’t even know about and can’t mimic with supplements.

 

Supplements are just the top of an iceberg, a thing that is good to try ‘just in case’ or in emergency case, when getting what we need from real food is not possible.

Speaking of real food…let’s have a look at probiotic-containing real food and how effective it is.

 

A research study compared the effect of fermented food that naturally contains probiotics with the effect of a fiber-rich diet. Fiber – is prebiotic – food for good gut bacteria that makes them reproduce and their population to grow.

 

The results were surprising. In contrast to the popular belief and pushing attempts of a fiber-rich diet, an increase in fiber intake didn’t increase the diversity of gut microbiota, nor reduced inflammatory markers.

 

In contrast, a diet high in fermented foods increased the diversity of gut microbiota and reduced inflammatory markers, which are the villain we want to fight!!

This doesn’t mean that increasing fiber intake is a bad thing. The fiber group experienced an increase in fiber digesting enzymes, which in turn could lead to an increase in gut microbiota diversity long-term. However, the research study already took 10 weeks. How much longer do we want to wait to see beneficial effect?

 

Thus, fermented food is the new fiber. It’s the thing!

 

Practical applications:

 

What fermented foods that contain probiotics:

  1. Dairy products/ plant-based replacements: yogurt, kefir, fermented cottage cheese

  2. Vegetables: fermented vegetables, such as sauerkraut or pickles, vegetable brine drinks 

  3. Traditional soy products: miso, tempeh, 

  4. Drinks: kombucha, and other fermented non-alcoholic drinks

 

Pay attention that fermented foods you buy contain “live cultures” or “active cultures” (check the label). This means that the microorganisms weren’t killed by heat (e.g. pasteurization) or by the addition of anti-microbial agents, such as vinegar or different sulfites.

 

How much to eat:

In the research study the participants ate on average 6 servings a day. Each serving was about 4-6 oz / 110-170 g.  

This is a lot of fermented food, e.g. up to one kilogram sauerkraut every day!

Luckily, the beneficial effect of the fermented food was more related to the duration of consumption than the amount consumed.

I plan to stick to the lower side of the serving size range. I personally would go for one soy yoghurt, 170 g tempeh, 120 g sauerkraut and 150 g pickled vegetables a day. This amount of fermented food is doable for me and relatively easy to add to my diet.

 

Additionally, it is important to spread the fermented food intake throughout the day rather than consuming all of it in one sitting and also allowing your body to get used to it. In the research study, there was a ramp-up period of 4 weeks, in which subjects gradually increased the amount of the fermented food to avoid digestive distress.

 

A few more cool things the research study found I want to point out:

  1. Eating fermented food didn’t only increase the number of good bacteria these foods contained, but also of other species. This suggests an overall beneficial effect of fermented food on gut microbiota. As I mentioned before in the supplement section; real food is a complete package. We can’t just isolate some parts of it and expect the same effect.

  2. The subject added fermented food on top of their habitual diet. They didn’t make their diet healthier or increased their fiber intake. I don’t suggest here to eat a shitty diet and trying to make up for it with putting sauerkraut on your pizza. I just want to say that it doesn’t ask for any drastic changes from your side to make your gut healthier, decrease inflammation and potentially improve your mental health. I don’t ask you to remove anything, just to add more good stuff.

 

Speaking of good stuff: In ideal case you should also add prebiotics and not only probiotics to your diet, because prebiotics is what your probiotics feed on. Good prebiotics choices would be asparagus, artichokes, bananas, oatmeal, leeks, chicory root, and beans.

To sum up:

  • Inflammation is the villain

  • To fight inflammation on the dietary level you need to keep your gut bacteria healthy

  • You do this by addition of fermented foods to your diet that contains “live/ active cultures”

  • Eat up to six 110-170 g servings of fermented foods spread throughout the day ramping up your intake slowly

  • Keep probiotic supplements in your tool kit for the case of emergency (e.g. after antibiotic treatment, or after binge drinking or huge cheat meals to bring your gut microbiota back in balance)

If don’t know how to improve your mental health and what to eat for a healthy mind and body, I am happy to consult you and create a meal plan individually for you. Click here to learn more about my consultation program.

 

It starts in our heads - how to destroy the origin of depression

Refresher from last posts

  • Depression is an evolutionary survival mechanism

  • There is a connection between Inflammation, Isolation and Depression. It’s a vicious cycle, once one of them occurs it fosters the appearance of other two.

  • Lower social rank – subordinate or submissive behavior or thoughts – leads to depression.

  • Social media subconsciously lowers our social rank. It’s a constant reminder that other are better than us or that we aren’t good/wealthy/beautiful/fit enough.

 But social media is not the only villain that makes us depressed. We do it to ourselves…and it starts in our heads. Hereby I don’t only mean obvious things like negative self-talk, but also things that you may simply ignore and not being aware of.

 

Like ruminating thoughts that you don’t have enough money, need to go to work even if you don’t feel like it or you don’t have enough calories to eat this cookie because you’re on a diet.

 

Even if it’s a small thing like not being able to eat something you want right now, it can cause a subconscious reduction of social rank.

 

Not being able to do something gives the evolutionary signal to your brain that you are in the subordinate position, not the leading and dominant one, in which you can do whatever you want.

 

On the molecular level the brain can’t distinguish if it’s about not being able to do something because it’s dangerous –  e.g. in evolutionary setting the leading ape is going to kick your ass -  or if it’s just about a stupid cookie.

 

On the molecular level the effect is the same; release of stress hormones and inflammatory molecules, which in turn are the molecular basis of depression.

 

Rumination itself is supposed to cause depression.

 

“According to the analytical rumination hypothesis, depression is an evolved adaptation (like pain or anxiety) that served in our ancestral past to keep people focused on complex interpersonal problems until they could arrive at a resolution.”

 

Honestly, I see it on myself. Ruminating about problems makes me feel depressed, even if it’s not a big personal problem, but some research I work on and scientific question I try to answer. Focusing on a problem for too long and playing it over and over in my heard lowers my mood, which eventually can down spiral and cause a real depressed state.

 

What do I do in such case?

  • I force myself to break the cycle.

  • I force myself to stop overthinking things, particularly when these are things I can’t change.

  • I force myself to reword the things I am not allowed to do by telling myself why I do them and what benefit I get.

 e.g. “I choose not to have this cookie, because this helps me to reach my goal faster, look better and be healthier.” This helps me seeing things in a more positive light.

 

 Speaking of positivity. Happiness research supports this approach. In order to flourish, meaning feeling good and not just not being depressed, you should have 3 times more positive experiences than negative in your everyday life – for great content on positive psychology and fitness follow my friend and former colleague Thomas Campidell.

 

Positive experiences and thoughts not only make our lives happier and more enjoyable, but also help recovery from health incidents, increase immune function, lower the stress hormone cortisol and inflammatory response to stress. As you know by now, cortisol and inflammatory molecules are linked to depression.

To go even further there is a link between positive experiences and longevity.

Positive experience isn’t reduced to only physical things or interactions with others, it starts in our heads and how we see things.  

 

What you have to do:

Recognize thoughts that lower your social rank

These can be thoughts, such as

I am not allowed to do this or that…or…

I don’t have enough XYZ…or…

Why do I need to do this? I don’t want to!

 

Once you spotted them, think why you’re doing what you’re doing. What is deeper meaning or reason behind it? If you look at the big picture, does it bring your forward?

 

e.g. I don’t want to work, but I want to have money to live a good life. Think about good life you’re creating. 

e.g. I don’t want to diet now, but I really want to have these badass sixpack. Visualize the badass body you’re building.

e.g. I don’t have enough money now, but I can work harder to get into a higher position. Take it as motivation to progress and make your life better.

 

Recognize rumination

Rumination means overthinking and obsessing over things that may happen. Often the things we overthink don’t even depend on us and we can’t do anything about them.

 

e.g. What if my plane will be late? What if I won’t arrive in time?

e.g. What if he doesn’t call me back?

 

If the things you ruminate don’t depend on you, stop your thoughts immediately. Every time this thought comes into your mind send it way, forbid yourself to engage into this anxiety fostering discussion in your head. You are in control of your thoughts. Just do it.

 

If you can do / change something about things you ruminate on, let it out of your head. Write a plan of action with backup options.

  1. If this happens, I do this (Plan A).

  2. If plan A doesn’t work, I will do this (Plan B).

  3. If plan B doesn’t work, I will do the following (Plan C), etc.

The important thing is to write it down clearly and then every time the thoughts come into your mind refer to the list and not to continue thinking the same thoughts and ruminating on them.

 

You have the control over your thoughts. You determine what is in your head. Your head is your castle.

It’s all about Social Rank - Your Depression, Anxiety & Co

Even though, we are the ‘smarter’ species on this planet, we are still driven by the same motivations as our ape ancestors, such as the Social Rank.

 

We fight for domination, attention, recognition. One of the most fundamental foundations for our behavior is the drive to acquire a higher social rank aka status.

 

Doesn’t it sound familiar to you that people want to get more money, more power, more likes on social media? All this is wired in our evolutionary program.

 

At the end of the day, it’s about the rank order. Domination of the strongest.

 

But what if I am not the strongest?

 

Well, then the likelihood is high that I get depressed (in the meaning of depressed/slowed down bodily functions and the loss of motivation to act).



Depression is a survival mechanism. A mechanism that intends to protect us from physical harm a stronger individual can do to us during his dominant rage attack.

 

This makes sense, considering that once the rank order is established, it’s better to go out of the way of the stronger ape not to get the ass kicked again.

 

Depression causes us to withdraw from the society, to isolate ourselves.

 

Isolation leads to an increase in the stress hormone cortisol and inflammatory molecules in the human body.

 

Interestingly, an evolutionary theory about the origin of depression – the sickness hypothesis - suggests that depression is consequence of infection. This means that increase in inflammation due to sickness, causes us naturally to transition into a depressed state and to isolate. This makes sense from the evolutionary point of view, as this is likely to happen to protect the tribe around us and to increase its survival chances.

 

Another depression theory suggests that depression is about energy conservation, preventing us wasting energy on currently unnecessary tasks – such as having social interaction – and focusing on processes that makes us survive, such as getting healthy for example.

 

Well, there are more depression theories out there. I don’t want to go into detail and discuss them at least for now. The thing I want to point out, however, is the connection between cortisol, inflammation, isolation and depression.

 

It’s a cycle. It doesn’t matter where you enter the cycle, the result will be the same:

 

Inflammation – due to sickness – leads to depression and isolation.

 

Isolation – due to social factors – leads to inflammation and subsequent depression.

 

Depression – for any reason, like being unhappy with your life – leads to isolation and inflammation.




 

Everything is connected. And this is what causes us trouble in the world we live in now.  


If you remember my previous post, I already described there that submissive behavior due to a lower social rank leads to an increase in cortisol and inflammatory molecules, which we now know lead to depression.


In our modern world, being surrounded by social media showoffs, shiny commercial, beautiful photo-shopped peopled who seem to have the perfect life, we are constantly reminded of the things we don’t have.


This is something that happens subconsciously…but dozens of times per day marginal evidence appears in front of our eyes, why we are lower in our social rank than others. Even though, the evidence is so small, so that we hardly notice it - at least not consciously - over time even very small drops adds up and can fill a cup bringing it to over-floating.

 

Surprised why we have so many mental health problems and depressed people in the world today?

 

I am not, as I think that our (social) media addiction as one important puzzle piece to the global depression problem.

 

Every time we look at our phones, we get a reminder that we are lower in our social rank then others. This makes us feel small, release more stress hormone cortisol, cause inflammation in our bodies and become depressed.

 

We are biologically not adapted to the advanced world we created.

 

What can we do about it?

 

Creating new survival strategies and applying them as quickly as possible to survive in the modern world, before the ancient survival mechanisms – depression, anxiety & Co – kill us.

 

What are these strategies?

 

Well, I already have a few in mind and I will share them with you in my future articles. Stay tuned!

Depression, anxiety, eating disorders…How all this mental mess started

Well, what shall I say…biology is messy…evolution is messier…and this mess started with shame.

 

To be more precise, with pro-shame…a gene you can find in animals. Yes, our monkey brothers, for example.

 

Pro-shame in the animal kingdom is an adaptive mechanism to submit to the stronger. To survive, to stay within the group. This makes the survival easier.

 

Shame is a human analogue to pro-shame. In the human culture, in our society shame is something that makes us belong…BELONG…yes, the feeling we so often look for…belong to a group, belong to a social cycle, belong to someone…the one significant other.

 

But what exactly is shame?

 

Shame is a protective mechanism against physical harm or punishment from a dominant individual (animal kingdom) or a group (humans).

 

Shame is dependent on cultural standards.

Shame emerges from the idea of being observed by others.

Shame needs audience.

Shame is a social emotion, a sensitivity to the opinion of others.

Shame makes people feel small, inferior, wanting to hide.

Shame is the failure to live up to some else’s standards, norms or expectations.

 

 

But there is one thing that is existential to shame…this is that we accept the social standards. Otherwise, there is no shame. If we don’t care what others think…we don’t feel ashamed, no matter what we do.

 

But but what if we feel ashamed of ourselves? Well, my dear, this is not shame, this is guilt.

 

Guilt, in contrast to shame, is not about the audience that observes you. It’s about yourself. It’s about your own moral. It’s about the failure to live up to your own norm, your own standards, your own expectations. Guilt is action focused. Whereas guilt is about feeling bad about a certain action you have done, shame is about being ashamed of the sort of person you are.

 

I don’t say that guild and shame can’t occur simulations. Often they actually do. Especially now, in our individualistic societies they are more difficult to distinguish one from another than before.

 

Why?

 

Because it’s not about what others think, it’s about what we think what others think.

Think about it. What do you think others expect of you? Do they really expect this of you? Or do you just think that they expect this of you?

 

In individualistic societies - I mean the societies we live in based on our own norms, the societies that reward us if we do things we think are right…not what others do…those in which we don’t care about the opinion of others - guilt becomes the new shame.

 

But let’s go back to the animalistic origin of shame for a bit; the submissive behaviour.

Both shame and submissive behaviour are physiologically correlated. Both are meant to keep the individual in the group.

 

Both lead to increased cortisol level (aka. stress hormone), which leads to a release of cytokines (inflammation molecules)…yes, I know, it’s biochemistry nerd stuff, but bear with me for a while.

 

Speaking of which, please remember these two characters: cortisol and cytokines. These are the two major villains, for my future posts, in your life, and for the future of the humanity.

 

Increased cortisol and inflammation are correlated with subordinance and frequency of a submissive response in the animal kingdom, as well as shame inducing experiences in us humans. Both are the base of the physiology of shame, social withdrawal, and disengagement.

 

Guess what, both are also the molecular markers for depression. During depression social withdrawal and disengagement are the two central factors. What does it tell us?

 

Well, everything is connected. What started with pro-shame leads to major problems we globally have; depression, anxiety & Co.

 

What to know more about depression, anxiety and how to kick their asses? Stay tuned until my next post.

 

 

Why is it so difficult to stick to a diet? - Because you need to fill your ‘pleasure tank’

I am sure you had times in your life when sticking to a diet wasn’t a problem. You were motivated, committed and totally rocked the healthy eating and exercise things. 

But sometimes it’s just a fucking nightmare. You want to lose these few extra pounds, but it just doesn’t happen. Even though you really want to clean up your diet, an occasional cookie or piece of chocolate somehow lands in your mouth in a mindless moment and throws off your calorie balance. 

Why does it happen? 


Imagine every person has an inner ‘pleasure tank’.  You want to have your pleasure tank always full to be happy. 

If your pleasure tank is already filled to 95% because it’s warm and sunny outside, you just got a salary raise and you are in an amazing relationship, then there is only 5% left to fill. You can use delicious food as a tool to fill up the tank completely, however, you won’t need too much of it. For this reason, you are more likely to be in control of your eating behaviour and your portion sizes. 

In contrast, if your life sucks; there’s a storm outside, you feel cold and uncomfortable, stressed by all the stuff you have to do, and there isn’t a single pleasure drop left on the bottom of your pleasure tank, then it’s very likely that you will look for a way to get some pleasure. At the end of the day, that’s how we evolved as humans. Comfort food is nothing but a tool to get some pleasure and satisfy your craving for comfort. 

The question is: what can we do to resist temptations and stop using food as comfort tool? 

Project into the disappointing future 

Before grabbing this cookie, think about it how you will feel after you eat it and realise that you didn’t stick to your diet again? 

Will you feel disappointed about yourself? Frustrated? Angry?

Usually, when we get tempted to eat something that doesn’t fit into our diet we just imagine the moment we eat it. The delicious taste, the amazing texture and how it makes us feel good. We don’t think further to the moment we realise that we acted against our health or body composition goals.

Use the thought that motivates you to eat food to get comfort as a cue to think further. Continue this thought to project how disappointed you will feel not sticking to your diet. Eating this cookie gives you only a minute of sugary pleasure, but the feeling of disappointment not being able to resist and follow your diet will stay for hours.

Projecting negative emotions should do the trick to make the tempting food less appealing and helping you to resist the temptation.

Eating what you shouldn’t eat is mostly a symptom of a problem, not the actual problem

Food is often used just as tool to increase neurotransmitter levels that give us happiness, motivation and pleasure, such as serotonin and dopamine. However, food is not the only thing that increases these. So do social interactions, light exposure, and doing things that feel comfortable and you enjoy, such as listening to music, having a hot bath etc. 

Maybe you are lacking social interactions or daylight light exposure in the first place, because you work hard or don’t feel like going out, especially now, as it is cold in winter. This is the reason why your brain suggests using food as a tool to increase dopamine/serotonin levels to feel better.


Impulse to get something that gives you pleasure is just a suggestion the reptile part of your brain makes. Suggestion, on how to leave the pain zone and get into the comfort zone. It is up to the rational part of your brain to decide if to follow these suggestions or not. You have the power to resist!

To sum up, your plan of action: 

  1. Go out for at least 20 min every day to get daylight exposure.

  2. Pay attention to have social interactions every day; meet a friend, call a family member or in emergency case message with someone on social media.

  3. When you get the impulse to grab something that doesn’t fit to your diet, project into the future and image how disappointed you will feel for not sticking to your plan.

Pro tip: make a list of activities that give you pleasure and pick one thing from this list and every time you feel the craving for comfort. 

If you need help with getting your nutrition back on track and get rid of bad habits that prevent you from losing weight, consider our nutrition coaching program. Click here to learn more.


We didn’t evolve to be happy. We evolved to survive

Tim Ferris dropped this statement and it made me think. I am very familiar with the survival part, having done my PhD in an evolutionary lab. However, I never thought about the happiness part. 

Happiness is something most people want to achieve, but it doesn’t come naturally to us. We just didn’t evolve for it. 

Evolution used happiness as ‘a tool’ to make us survive, but happiness has never been a trait worth evolving. 

Here is what I mean: 

In order to survive as species we need to eat and to reproduce. That’s why evolution has built in mechanisms into our brains that reward us for seeking food and sex, and subsequently eating and having sex. These mechanisms cause the release of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin, that motivate us to do something and give as pleasure aka. happiness. 

However, it would be a disaster from the evolutionary point of view if pleasure and happiness constantly persist. If we constantly feel pleasure there is no drive to go out and seek food and sex, because we already have the reward both of them normally give us. 

If we (or our caveman ancestors) don’t have the motivation to go out and search for food, we will eventually die. 

For this reason the levels of reward molecules that give us pleasure and happiness have to drop shortly after we get the reward. This motivates us to keep going and surviving. This is the reason why it’s not in the interest of evolution to keep us happy. 

Also, don’t forget that we look at the things in evolutionary context. It wasn’t easy for our ancestors to get food. They had to leave their caves, face the dangers, wild animals, make their way through rain and storm, freezing and suffering, just to find a few berries, tubers or anything else they can eat to survive. Hunting required even more effort. 

Evolution had to come up with really smart tricks that made it for our ancestors more painful to stay in the cave than going out and seeking food. 

Well, these are the evolutionary mechanism that we still carry in our brains. Pain motivates us to move towards pleasure. Interestingly, the same area in the human brain is responsible for pleasure and for pain. 

The evolutionary take-home message from it is fairly simple: You aren’t designed to be happy. You are designed to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. In the moment you get pleasure, the equilibrium in your brain is shifted towards pain again, so that this vicious survival cycle keeps going. 

This is the reason, why happiness doesn’t come naturally to us. Why we need to put effort in to maintain a happy state.

Happiness is very subjective. Different things make different people happy. However, there are a few things you can do to keep your pleasure molecules in balance and avoid extreme drops causing pain. 

Don’t spike your happiness to much

With every high comes a low. If you spike your dopamine too much with sugary/fatty food, alcohol, drugs, binge watching your favourite series or anything else that gives you pleasure and makes you feel excited, subnqueltny your feeling of happiness will fall below the the level at which you started. 

That’s why: don’t obsess over anything that gives you pleasure and don’t get overly excited, consume things in moderation and keep balance. 

Work on biological clock habits 

Biological clock aka circadian rhythms is crucial for our health and happiness. 

Light and food intake regulate our biological clock making sure that right hormones and neurotransmitters are produced in right amounts at the right time. Here are a few simple things you can do to make sure that your neurotransmitters and hormones are in better balance: 

  1. Go out to get at least 10-20 min light exposure in the morning. Natural light is much more effective to set our biological clock than artificial light.

  2. Stop eating about 2-3 hours before you go to bed.

  3. Don’t use any bright light in the evening. Use dim light, candles or string lights instead.

Having your neurotransmitters and neurobiology in the right place is the foundation for psychological happiness. Because you can’t create happiness if your brain makes you feel pain.  

Do small changes, set yourself up for big, happy results ;) 

If you are looking to make a changes towards a healthier lifestyle, eating a diet that is right for you, strengthen your body and mind, you will love our nutrition and training programs. Click here for more info. 

Acknowledgement: inspiration and neurobiological content for this article came from Humberman lab podcast. 

Cravings! - what to do and how to resist

Cravings are like an itchy mosquito bite. You feel the itchiness and want to scratch. However, if you give into your desire to scratch the bite, it doesn’t get better. It becomes worse. The more you scratch, the itchier it becomes. 

The same applies to cravings. The more you give into them, the stronger they get. 

Why is it like this? 

It is because of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is responsible for pleasure, motivation, movement, action and striving towards anything we get pleasure from.  

Getting what we want and consuming it releases dopamine. It can be food, alcohol, drugs, sex, social media, video games, emails, messages, TV shows, etc.  

However, the human body always strives towards balance. Once the dopamine level increased the body tries to bing it back down and dopamine starts dropping again. It is the drop in dopamine we experience as cravings. We want to get more of the thing that gave us pleasure and bring dopamine back up.

BUT! We have to resist. Because by giving into cravings we act against body’s natural mechanism to restore balance. 

If we repeatedly boost dopamine, because we can’t resist our cravings, over time, we will need more and more of the substance/activity that brings us pleasure - aka. we may develop addictive behaviour.

To  make it worse; if we don’t give the body the chance to restore its balance and boost dopamine every time we get cravings eventually our dopamine levels drop below baseline (the dopamine level we initially had). This way we can get into a dopamine depleted state, lose motivation and feel unhappy. 

What to do? 

You have to resist cravings. Resist the impulse to get more of the substance or activity that gives you pleasure. You have to let your dopamine level go back to the baseline before you boost it again. 

How to do it? 

Set limits - for time and quantity. 
e.g. you are allowed to have only 3 cubes of chocolate as your afternoon snack. In contrast to snacking on chocolate every time it comes to your mind. 

e.g. you’re allowed to watch 2 episodes of your favourite series every evening. Not as many as you feel like ending up binge watching it all night. 

Strengthen your mental muscle - don’t give into impulsive behaviour 

In the modern world it is challenging to resist impulses. Ever time we see a new notification on screen we have to check our phones. Every time we get a question we instantly grab the phone to google it. Every time a thought of tempting food comes into our minds we can actually get it almost instantly - the fridge isn’t too far away, if not the fridge, then the shop at the corner or in the emergency case, we can just grab the phone and order the food we want. We don’t even need to leave the house. 

Giving into these impulses causes the same dopamine dilemma described above. Thus, train resisting.

Suggestion of how you can train it: Commit not checking your phone for at least 1 hour, for example. Not acting upon any impulsive thought you get.

This way, you train your mental resilience, your mental muscle, which will also help you to resist cravings. 

You are stronger than you think!

If you need help getting your habits back on track and get back on the healthy lifestyle and healthy eating wagon, I’d be happy to help you. For more details click here. 

What the fuck, evolution? - How to resist temptations

Ever thought about this paradox of life: 

what once was crucial for our survival is now detrimental for our mental health 

The drive to eat AND to overeat made our ancestors survive for thousands of years. This drive is the reason why we exist today. Why I am here to write this post and you to read it. 

But times change. Nowadays when we overeat, we feel guilt. We feel guilty that we can’t control our behaviour. We feel guilty that we don’t act based on the ideal image we have of ourselves. We feel guilty that we put on weight. We feel guilty for something that is programmed deep inside our brains. 

If we zoom out and look at it from distance: what exactly do we feel guilty for? 

We feel guilty that we evolved the drive to survive. 

We can’t fight our biology. We can’t fight our nature. We can’t fight being human. 

The dilemma is that we as humans evolved to be smart enough to have ‘body composition prestige goals’. These, however, often counteract our primitive evolutionary survival settings. When these animalistic instincts kick in, like the drive to overeat, we hate that our rational minds lose control. We feel guilty because we sabotage our attempts of reaching the ideal image we have for ourselves. 

What can we do? 

We have to be a rational human before our biology kicks in. We have to make sure that no food is around in large amounts that can trigger the drive to overeat.  

Just to give an example, this means: don’t buy large packages of junk. Get the junk in single serving packages when you crave it. Don’t stock up on any food that is really tempting to you. Don’t go shopping hungry, as you will probably buy and eat more than your rational minds wants… 

Your major task is to limit the chances of doing something your rational mind doesn’t want when your evolutionary instincts kick in. They usually kick in in a weak moment… when you are stressed, tired, seek for comfort, or just act impulsively without thinking.


One tool I used successfully with my clients in the past years it the “ban scale” 

Categorizing food based on the likelihood of you overeating it will help you make smarter decisions on what to buy when you go shopping and to avoid the situations where you eat more than you should when your willpower isn’t the highest. 

This is how you use the ban scale: 

Imagine the worst situation ever; you are tired, stressed, angry, sad or maybe even just bored…basically, your brain is screaming for getting pleasure right now.  

Go through all the foods you have at home (fridge, freezer and pantry) and ask yourself this question: 

“How easy is it to resist this food in the worst situation you can imagine?”

Group the food according to the numbers in this chart. Everything that scores higher than 3 has to go. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have the food occasionally, rather you just shouldn’t have it at home as your normal staple food or the food you buy frequently.


In case you do buy some of the food that scores higher than 3, you should get a smaller serving size (e.g. a 30 g/ 28 oz. chocolate bar) if you really want to eat this food. 

What I want to say is that it’s better to be safe than sorry. It’s not about restriction or not trusting yourself or anything like that. The fact is just that there are mechanisms in our brains that drive us to eat, even if the rational part of the brain would rather resist. 

There seem to be even binge circuits in our brains (something I recently heard on the Huberman Lab podcast). These circuits that are programmed to make us to eat as much food as fast as possible in a very short time. It’s really weird crazy evolution came up with!

So, why making it unnecessarily difficult for us to resist temptations? Why risking doing something we don’t want to do and feeling guilty after, if we can actually make it easy and feel good? 

If there is an easy path, take the easy path. Life throws enough difficulties at us. We don’t need to add more to it. Let’s be kind to ourselves :)

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