#4. The One Where The Gremlin Works For Us

all about dopamine, baby.

Really excited about this week’s line-up. Today, we get into dopamine—how it works in our body and how our current context of living requires us to be deliberate about our actions so that it works for us and our well-being. Later this week, our first dialogue league segment where a reader asks a question!

what to expect from this edition:

• mine: personal essay about what I learned this week

• ours: dialogue of the week–earned dopamine

• yours: the thing I’m on-pilates

• two flows and a slow–a soapy teen drama, chat with a colleague and quarterly taxes (yay! 🙃) 

If you want more info and my full disclaimer (abridged version: I’m a therapist, but not your therapist—even if you are a client of mine ~hi there!~ this isn’t a session. dialoguing is an educational and informational newsletter, not a substitute for mental health treatment) check out the about page here. If you’re new here, a great place to start is my first edition of this newsletter 

dialoguing with myself: what I learned this week

I’ve been using a term that doesn’t really seem to exist and maybe that’s OK?

I’ve had this concept “earned dopamine” in my head ever since I listened to Dr. Anna Lembke’s interview with Armchair Expert (AE) in April 2022, however the google search I did as I began my research for this newsletter resulted in zero hits with that exact term related to her work. Which was a real head scratcher for me. So, I’m going to level with you (and with myself), apparently it’s not something she said. I’m guessing what happened is through listening to the interview and the way she described how dopamine works in our bodies and how to get it to work for us and our well-being, I constructed a whole ass thing in my head called “earned dopamine.” I see other articles mentioning it, like this one on Medium, that is pretty good actually, and that big daddy Huberman tweeted about it once, but I didn’t read that article or see that tweet before today so not sure where I heard the term.