Author: Riley Pearce
Director of Social Media
Some of you may have heard that dopamine is a hormone associated with love. When this hormone is released in pleasurable situations, it creates a brief feeling of euphoria, calmness, and contentment.
Dopamine is not only released in interpersonal situations. Dopamine is also one of the hormones released when we eat. Back when we were living off of the land, the brain devised a system to reward us for finding food. Back then, food wasn’t just a few steps away in our kitchens or the local corner store, so we needed a little extra push from the brain to keep us fed and alive.
So although the release of dopamine when we eat came from useful beginnings, now it actually creates a bit of a problem for us.
Our desire to experience the rush of dopamine can lead us to crave those things that cause the release of the hormone. This is why snacking throughout the day, sometimes mindlessly, can occur. It is what drives late night snacking, and stress eating. We’re all just looking for the next hit of dopamine.
Going back to the times of living off the land, our hunting and gathering activities were restricted to when the sun was out. This meant that the development of our dopamine response and our circadian rhythm worked together to make sure we were hungry when the sun was out, and then able to sleep when the sun went down.
Returning to modern times, we are working, playing, socializing, surfing the web, and watching netflix at all hours of the day. Snacking before, during, and after all of these activities means that we are releasing dopamine into the body when the sun is up and when it is down.
We may be getting a lot of dopamine in our body, which feels good for a moment, but what we are also doing is disrupting the partnership between dopamine and the circadian rhythm. Our old brain is still operating on the original OS, while we exist in this iPhone 11 Pro world. So when we eat and the brain is then flooded with dopamine, it also throws off our circadian rhythm.
If you don’t know what the circadian rhythm is, it is the natural rhythm of various hormones and neutro-transmitters that run on a cycle all day and control some of our most basic functions like dreaming, waking up, hunger, satiation, and falling asleep. When the circadian rhythm is thrown off course, a few things can happen.
In this case with dopamine, it leads to more snacking at irregular times of the day. This is no longer hunger, this is cravings. Cravings for dopamine, not sustenance.
What we are trying to say is that by snacking throughout the day we disrupt our body’s natural ability to regulate hunger and satiety, which means you snack more often. What does snacking lead to? Unwanted weight gain.
So if you want to get that euphoric feeling of dopamine but also have weight loss goals, you may want to try other activities such as working out, meditating or having sex. Leave the food “highs” for your regular, well-balanced, nutrient dense meals.You can read the full summary of the research here.
