Overcome - A Mental Health Podcast

The Truth About Dopamine and Depression | Andy West on Mental Health Recovery

• Travis White | Mental Health Advocate • Episode 21

Share episode

Struggling with depression, brain fog, or burnout? Author Andy West reveals how dopamine resets, mindset shifts, and small daily challenges helped her recover from anhedonia, addiction, and chronic fatigue—without relying on medication.

In this episode of Overcome: A Mental Health Podcast, host Travis White sits down with Andy West, author of Dopamine Mountain and Anhedonia Wastelands, to explore the powerful link between dopamine, mental health, and recovery. Andy opens up about her raw journey through childhood trauma, addiction, a drug-induced psychosis, and the years-long battle with anhedonia—a form of depression where nothing brings pleasure.

She shares how she rebuilt her brain from the ground up using dopamine-focused lifestyle changes, including cold showers, exercise, mindset shifts, and deliberate discomfort. Andy explains how to rewire the brain’s reward system and gives practical tips on overcoming depression, fatigue, and addiction—without relying on quick fixes or medication.

This episode is packed with actionable advice, neuroscience-backed insights, and inspiration for anyone battling anxiety, depression, addiction, or looking to better understand the role of dopamine in everyday motivation and joy.

Topics Covered:

  • What is anhedonia and how it differs from typical depression
  • How dopamine works and how to reset your reward system
  • Breaking addiction through behavior-based dopamine resets
  • How daily challenges can rewire the brain for resilience
  • Natural strategies for chronic fatigue and low motivation
  • The danger of ease and the power of discomfort

 Together, we fight stigma with every episode. 

📘 Connect with Andy West:
Visit dopaminemountain.com to find her books.

Follow Andy:

https://www.instagram.com/dopaminemountain

http://x.com/mountdopamine

Shop Merch:

https://overcomepod.com/shop

Follow Overcome - a Mental Health Podcast

Listen to us

Want to have a real conversation about your mental health? Fill out this form!

Travis White (00:01)
Hello and welcome to Overcome a Mental Health Podcast, a place where you can share your story. And I'm so excited for today's guest. We are speaking with Andy West. Andy is the author of Dopamine Mountain and is here to discuss her mental health journey. Welcome to the show, Andy.

Andy Y West (00:20)
Thanks, Travis.

Travis White (00:22)
and to get us started I'm just going to hand the microphone and tie them over to her.

Andy Y West (00:27)
Okay, well, I guess starting my journey in childhood, I was bullied and I kind of thought everyone kind of was back in the day. And it turns out that did affect my mental health because I was always in that fight or flight kind of head space and didn't have a very good sort of teen sort of experience because I was always looking out for my own safety.

And I didn't really trust anyone. So anyway, I was quite depressed. I was actually suicidal in my late teens, early twenties. And then I found drugs and alcohol. So I did have quite a interesting journey on drugs and alcohol, some really good, to be honest, and some really bad. So I guess I was just always chasing my dopamine around.

And when I say dopamine, I basically mean happiness because dopamine and mood are extremely correlated. when dopamine goes up, mood goes up. And when it goes down, mood goes down. So it basically is the chemical of mood, but also of motivation and just overall general wellbeing and happiness. Although of course there's a lot of other things that come into it. So yeah, I did have some struggles, but then I...

kind of read some amazing books in my mid-20s and late 20s and then I was great for a while. And I actually was really happy with my mental health because I did a lot of journaling, I did a lot of processing of the old emotions, did not feel depressed for a very long time. And then kind of just when I least expected it, during early COVID lockdowns, I had what I called a mental breakdance.

So I kind of had a lot of things in my life implode at the same time. I did get sick with something at the very start of COVID, which we don't even know if it was COVID because there wasn't a test then. But at the same time, there was lockdowns, was bulk fear going on. I had an accidental drug-induced psychosis just to sort of put everything on the table at once. I had relationship problems, money problems. And so from there, it might have been that I had

like a encephalitis or something from when I got sick, but I did not recover. I was sick for ages. I struggled. I was in brain fog. I could hardly get out of bed. I had chronic fatigue and my whole body kind of crashed at that time. And during that drug-induced psychosis, which what happened is very strange. It's very hard to find any evidence that this even can happen, but I was using a

THC, which is a cannabis oil, but using it as a muscle rub without thinking that I could actually be intoxicated by it because I'd used it many times before, but on a few occasions I had a rash and I was using it on a rash. And it just somehow all at that time I was having anxiety and hallucinations. So I'm pretty sure I was getting high accidentally.

And this was at a time where I wasn't even really trying to get high. Like I was occasionally, I still was occasionally using some party drugs. Like I was using a little bit of ecstasy now and then. But at that time, yeah, just, my brain collapsed pretty much. And I went into a very fearful state, a very fight or flight state at that time where I got really paranoid. I thought, you know, all the conspiracy theories were true. And

Yeah, I just had a bad time of it and my brain didn't recover for like three years. It was only quite recently, almost four years. I was so brain fogged. My attention span was in seconds. I couldn't plan. I was getting anxiety about driving because I just couldn't focus on the road. I felt like I was drunk all the time, even though I wasn't drinking at all. I wasn't taking any substances. But my quality of life

I felt like I was running on one brain cell all the time and it was so debilitating because I could barely work and work was extremely hard. It felt like running a marathon every day because of the chronic fatigue. I felt like my limbs were full of concrete, no energy, no drive and it felt like depression. It turns out what it was was anhedonia. Have you heard of that term before, anhedonia?

Travis White (04:50)
I've heard of the term but I'm not extremely familiar with it.

Andy Y West (04:54)
So it's basically like depression, but without the sadness. So it's chemical depression where your body just doesn't have the chemicals to feel good or it can't access them, but you don't necessarily have low self-esteem, low self-worth. So that's what I had. I thought I can't have depression because I'm not sad. I just have nothing in the tank. I have no energy, no mental clarity. I felt like I was in a haze or a fog all the time.

So turns out that was called anhedonia, which I didn't realise. So hedonism means to seek instant pleasure. So anhedonia means no pleasure. You can't access pleasure. Nothing feels good. You're not driven to want anything even because there's no dopamine and no GABA. And there's another kind of anhedonia where if you have really high glutamate, that cancels out the dopamine and the GABA as well. So basically chemical numbness.

And is horrible. It feels so bad. It's heartbreaking to feel that way every day, just waking up, just knowing that basically you're going to fail. Your day is going to fail because you just can't do anything. You can barely get out of bed. So there's a lot of people struggling with this. keep finding more and more people struggling with this. But the good news is I used some protocols to come out of it. So I combined a number of protocols. I just happened to stumble upon a

combination that worked for me after trying for three to four years. And then it started to work so rapidly that I thought I need to write a book about how to do it because it can be done if I could do it from that state. Like if I could turn one brain cell back into my normal self over a period of weeks to and then a few more months, you know, I eventually got better and better than anyone can do it. And I just want people to know that if they're stuck in that way that I was stuck.

there are ways out of it. And it turns out that anxiety, which I was having, and depression can really be turned around with mindset, not just mindset, but it starts with mindset. And once you get the mindset in place, you can start to do all these other cool protocols, which I learned from other people. So I don't want to take credit for any of it. I just happen to find it.

in the right order that worked really fast and I just wanted to share that with your listeners and viewers.

Travis White (07:19)
Yeah, first of all, I just want to say like, go back on to what you're explaining how you feel like the lack of interest of getting out of bed, but your self-esteem stuff is still there. I can't honestly grasp like having that sort of depression because I'm so used to like, just, you know, feeling like I'm worthless and having all those negative thoughts and stuff there. So that's, that's thank you for teaching me something new.

Andy Y West (07:34)
Mm.

cool.

Well with the whole worthless thing, I went through that when I was younger. But a couple of books that I read by Eckhart Tolle and Louise L. Hay are all about boosting our self-worth. And the thing is with our self-worth, every human is worth the same. You know, even though we might have got some just some negative thoughts that we started to accidentally poke in there, we're all worth the same because I don't care where you're from, what you look like, what your abilities are.

Our ability to learn and to help other people and to share our knowledge and our wisdom with everybody else is equal. And anyone can impact the world in a positive way. Like starting right now, if you want to, like just smiling at someone actually brightens the world. does. I've had people smile at me and almost brought me to tears. So you can change the world like right now.

Travis White (08:39)
Yeah, it's like one of those moments that you're like, you know, I really needed that today. I really needed that person to say hi.

Andy Y West (08:42)
Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. So we all do impact the world in positive ways. So I am an optimist now because I choose to be because I know that choosing optimism, I can spread optimism, you know.

Travis White (08:56)
Yeah, so somebody like struggling with like mental health, whether it be depression, anxiety or whatever. What do you think is the first step for them to kind of get over that?

Andy Y West (09:08)
I think mindset is the first step and the way to induce like a positive and optimistic mindset is to take on challenges on purpose. So we all have challenges and we have struggles and we have heartbreak and unfortunately the hard stuff is a part of life. But with a growth mindset or a positive mindset,

Instead of running from those things, we face them head on and we look at them and say, what can I learn? How can I grow? How can I use this as my training partner to get stronger? And when I started, because when I was in fatigue, everything was so freaking hard. And of course I didn't want to do any hard stuff. To make my life even 1 % harder felt like it would kill me. But turns out it didn't and

So my dopamine had kind of flatlined and when we take on really hard and difficult things, we are challenging ourselves to use some dopamine, almost investing a little bit of dopamine to get more dopamine. these days when we have a lot of, it doesn't feel like we've got an easy life sometimes, but we can get things without the same amount of effort that our ancestors had to apply.

They like when they woke up, there was no food. If they wanted food, they had to go hunt it or gather it, you know, and work for it. So putting in that effort first thing in the morning was something that everyone had to do. And then the reward was the food that we earned or found or hunted or whatever, you know, but now we can wake up and we can have coffee. That's a dopamine spike because it feels good. We can have sugar. That's a dopamine spike because it feels good. We can scroll, we can get porn.

We can get Netflix, we can get food delivery in a lot of places. So all of those high dopamine pleasurable things, when we stack them all on top of each other, it means when we haven't applied effort first, our dopamine flatlines. Like it's a wave, it needs to go up and down like waves in the ocean to function. That's where its energy comes from. But if we flatline it, especially early in the day, we are going to get depression. And so to...

do hard things deliberately in the morning is a way of moving our dopamine down on purpose so then it can rise. It only feels good when it's rising, not when it's flatlining from too many stacks of the pleasurable things. So we have to deliberately push it down with effort, unpleasantness, hard work, and then it's allowed to rise after that. And then we can use that little boost, that little jump start of dopamine to do it again.

You know, so it's kind of like we have to just initiate it one time and it's not easy. It's, it is one of the hardest things, probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my life to trust myself, to do hard stuff when I feel like I have absolutely zero in the tank, but it is possible. just have to start really small reward each time you do something hard, whether it be verbally or whether it be with something, you know, dopamine spiking, something reasonable. So if just getting out of bed.

is really hard, you can reward that. But then choose something else hard to do and pick the reward early. They always say, you need to break down your goals into smaller manageable pieces. But what they often forget to say is we have to reward those little steps because that's how our dopamine reward pathway works. It works on effort, then reward and then rest and it cycles through those things.

So if we can just make one positive step that's really hard, then reward it with something reasonably rewarding. So getting out of bed, I wouldn't reward that with a beer, that's a little bit too extreme. But maybe getting out of bed, then do one hard thing and then have a reward for it and then set another reward and work towards the next one. And that's kind of how I get myself through hard days, I think. So.

Personally, I use one small candy as my reward, but I don't eat sugar the rest of the time. That's only the reason it works because it spikes my dopamine. If I was eating sugar all day, that wouldn't work as a reward. It has to be something novel and to be able to spike my dopamine. if I'm like yesterday, I was doing some chores and I would say, all right, I have to do this part of the chore. Then I get one candy. So I would do the chore and I'd have my one candy. And it sounds silly.

But that's just how the brain reward system works. And that's how we learned as children, if we wanted something, you know, we had to move towards the toy. You know, we couldn't just sit there and the toy won't just come to us in most cases. You know, so we need to practice that moving towards the thing, physical action, and then reward. And that's how we get through it.

Travis White (13:56)
Yeah, and it's kind of amazing too, is like when you're challenging yourself how much you can actually learn from it. But I do have a question though for you. Is there such thing as like overdosing on dopamine like too much of it?

Andy Y West (14:01)
Mm.

Mm.

Absolutely, absolutely. So we kind of want to just have a sort of equal amount to what we've, to the effort that we've put in. So if you have too much dopamine in your system, you actually go into euphoria and mania and that's what bipolar is about or manic depression. So the manic is the too much dopamine side and then the depression is the too low dopamine side. And

If we're just having too many dopamine things in a row without the low dopamine first, you'll get into that flat line situation and it will turn into depression because that becomes our new low. The body goes, so this is our normal now. So where are we going to get a dopamine spike? How is it going to rise? And it would take something massive to raise it again, but when it's actually dropping first before, and then it can go up afterwards, that rise after the difficult thing.

is where we find the dopamine will build up and we will experience some pleasure from that. It's small. To start with, it's very small. It doesn't feel like pleasure, but it feels like momentum. You can tell that, okay, I can move, I can do things, I can function. And after a couple of weeks, it turns into kind of just a general pleasure. It's weird for me to say this, but now in my life,

I just have a general feeling of contentment and pleasure about things because I now challenge my dopamine system every morning. I exercise that system every morning so that I can function in the day because if I don't do those things, I don't function as well and I start to slip backwards into brain fog. So I get up now and first thing I just put on shoes and socks and I run in the morning. It doesn't have to be a really long run, but it has to be hard.

It has to be the hardest thing I do all day because then it guarantees the rest of my day is easy, you know, because that's how dopamine works. It's on a balancing scale. So if I make that hard, but not extreme, I don't do extreme because I've had chronic fatigue. And if you go too far into extreme, you crash. So I just had to have that balance of doing that hard run in the morning. And then I have a cold shower after that, just a brief one, because I have to do things that are unpleasant that I do not like and I do

do not want to do. And then after that I can do things I do want to do because it actually wakes you up when you have a cold shower in the morning. It's hard, but it works.

Travis White (16:40)
It definitely is hard. I've tried a cold shower once or twice, well a few more times than that, but it's definitely something that you have to get used to.

Andy Y West (16:46)
Mm.

Yes,

and you never really get used to it. Like each time it's going to be hard, but guess what? You're going to survive it. It's only a few minutes. You'll be fine. You know, and then you can turn it to hot water after that if you really need to. doesn't matter if you turn it to hot water. You will enjoy that hot water more than just, you know, a normal shower. You really will because when your dopamine goes from lower and then that you really enjoy it more because of that contrast.

Travis White (17:17)
So I'm just curious, like what inspired you to kind of start researching dopamine, like instead of relying like more on the conventional treatments that are offered?

Andy Y West (17:29)
Well, while I was unwell for those three and a bit years, I was trying the supplements. I even tried the ADHD medication. I forget which one it was, some sort of amphetamine. And it actually worked for me, but I didn't want to do amphetamines because I've had amphetamines in the past. I had a problem with amphetamines in the past and it's a band-aid solution. It's a very temporary solution. And then we get tolerance.

because the body goes, well now I just get my dopamine from amphetamines. I don't have to do the hard work and I'll just always have that, but we won't always have that. There's a shortage of it here and I don't know how far that shortage actually reaches, but that just means that it's harder for our body to naturally get dopamine if we're just relying on outside sources from it. So although it's really hard to start resetting it and making our body do its own dopamine production,

It's, it's, you're just so independent from medicines anymore. You know, you can do that yourself. You're your own pharmacy and it's great.

Travis White (18:31)
Yeah, I love that. I love that you're not okay with the band-aid because I feel like, and I'm not saying that people don't need the medication, but there's so many, if you look into stuff, there's always an option if you're willing to put in the hard work.

Andy Y West (18:46)
Yeah, it does seem that way. And I also don't judge anyone who wants to use the medication, but know that if you would like to gradually step it down under a doctor's supervision, there are ways to naturally get that, but it's going to be hard. And we don't want hard these days. Nobody wants challenge. No one wants anything to be hard. No one wants pain. You know, we medicate every bit of pain or discomfort or, you know, we turn up the air conditioning at the slightest discomfort.

But it's going against us. Ease is killing us. What we need to do is get comfortable in discomfort, go towards challenge, find challenge and become stronger. And it pays off. I'm telling you, it pays off. It's saved my life.

Travis White (19:30)
You remind me of a thing that one of my former managers used always say, he used to always push me to, you know, be better and try hard things. Like when it came to the workplace and he always said, you know, if you're not uncomfortable, you're not doing good today. And so he, yeah. And so he always said that. I was, he'd always throw me into situations that I was totally uncomfortable. like, I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I'll.

Andy Y West (19:49)
You're not growing.

Travis White (20:00)
Get through it one way or another.

Andy Y West (20:01)
Yeah. And when you use growth mindset, you look for that and you remind yourself, am I going to be anxious? No, I'm going to grow from this. You know, I go towards it because people don't realize this and even many professionals don't realize this, but I found evidence and I've put it in the book that when we run from stuff and avoid stuff, you know, and, we don't challenge ourselves and we insulate ourselves from hard stuff, that increases anxiety.

It actually makes anxiety worse to avoid the hard things. And I found that now I remind myself, no, I look for hard stuff to do. If I feel avoidant of something, I go, hold on, I wanna use this to my benefit. I wanna grow from this and I go towards it and I challenge myself on purpose and it's changed my life. I'm not anxious about anything anymore. And if I do feel anxiety come up.

I don't run from the anxiety, I actually feel the anxiety, I embrace it, you know, and I try to actually use all of that to my advantage now.

Travis White (21:11)
That's really good stuff. I love that you're just taking all this bad and this depression, anxiety, whatever you want to call it, mental health, and just challenging yourself to rise above it.

Andy Y West (21:23)
And I learned from the author Eckhart Tolle, who I reference a number of times in the book just because I found his ideas so transformational, that when we have anxiety, to actually slow down, go towards it, no one wants to go towards the hard and scary stuff, obviously, but if we can turn around and just face it and just be comfortable in it, and he says to sit in the feeling.

and really embrace it and find out what is this feeling, like what is it doing to my mind and body? Then we actually become comfortable there instead of pushing it away. And to be comfortable in that feeling is really empowering because we learn that, wait, I've done this before. I've felt this feeling before. It didn't kill me. I opened up to it and embraced it and found that

I was able to overcome it slowly, you know?

Travis White (22:19)
Yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you're saying. It's like with my anxiety when I admitted that I had a problem and started going to therapy and started doing the work, I got myself to a better spot. It was like, oh, I can't believe I can overcome this. I can't believe I can do this. Like I knew I could at a certain point, but.

Once you actually change your habits and see the rewards of changing those habits, the feeling is great.

Andy Y West (22:50)
Yeah, and it always is the hard stuff. It's always the challenge that we take on. Very rarely do we get that sort of transformation that you experience through ease and through just sitting around and waiting for it to happen. So I commend you for going and finding strategies to improve your life because that's hard to do, especially when you're not feeling great. It's hard to trust people and it's hard to look for new strategies when your life is already so difficult.

Travis White (23:18)
And why do you think picking the challenging route is hard for people to do?

Andy Y West (23:24)
No, that's a really good question. Why is it hard? I think we've been conditioned to just not do hard, you know, and everything that we're sold these days is to make our life easier. So I think we're just used to wanting ease and everything that we do at work is designed in for productivity, you know, to make things faster and easier and take all of these shortcuts. And well, really there is a chemical in the brain called glutamate that monitors fatigue.

So it acts in opposition to dopamine. So when we have a lot of this glutamate, we get more fatigue. Like it's designed to slow us down when we've, well not designed, but you know, however you want to think about it. It slows us down when we're overexerted, but it can go a little bit oversaturated in the body when we've had a lot of trauma or when we've had a lot of difficulty or too much fatigue or a number of things can just make

too much glutamate build up and the body really struggles to clear that out. so people who have come from a really difficult or traumatic or very stressful fight or flight type of background, they have more glutamate on average than everyone else. So it makes sense that those people are going to turn to finding other sources of dopamine to try and balance that out. So when we weigh up any situation that we might or might not want to do,

Glutamate represents our con, as in our we don't want to do it, and dopamine represents our pro. And so it's only when there's more dopamine and less glutamate in that balance that we go towards it. You know, the pro and con system or the for and against system. So if there is too much glutamate in the system, we just go into, I guess, a freeze state and we just don't move forward.

You know, some of those days, if you were to put a million dollars in front of me and said, get out of bed, this is yours, I couldn't. You know, I just did not know how to access the dopamine to do it. But now I know how to do it. But at that time, I just didn't know how to do it because I just had nothing.

Travis White (25:30)
Yeah, if you could kind of sit down with your, you know, that person you were, like when you were suffering from all this stuff, you know, think about the time you're your lowest, like what would you tell that person? Like not what you know today.

Andy Y West (25:43)
Yeah,

that's a beautiful question actually because that's kind of what I wanted to write the book about, what I wish I knew four years ago. So I would say every small step that is a challenge is a success. You know, we think, I tried to get out of bed, but only my arm moved slightly closer to the edge. Guess what? You just made a move that was hard. That is a success. So reward that and then do another one.

just add onto the small successes. Never, ever call it failure because when we call it failure, we feel like we're going backwards, but dopamine is the molecule of advancing and of moving forward and seeking and wanting. So we need to encourage more dopamine by recognising that every tiny, difficult step is a step forward. And that's also part of growth mindset as well. And in studies, they've

proven that people who do deliberately challenge the brain get brain growth. They get synapse enhancement in the brain. And people who don't do that and don't challenge themselves and just look for ease all of the time actually shrink the brain. So just to know that even though it's hard, every small step is growing the brain and advancing us towards something better really helped me to know that.

Travis White (27:08)
very well said. You remind me of my therapist always tells me, know, celebrate the small stuff. Like don't just skip over it because it is important.

Andy Y West (27:18)
Mm.

It's so important.

Travis White (27:24)
Another kind of question that goes along with what I just asked, after all that you've been through, how do you define happiness now?

Andy Y West (27:33)
Well, now I feel like I've kind of got a mission. And before I didn't really have a mission, or my mission was just about me, you know, about my own ego or my own instantaneous pleasures. But now I feel like I've learned something so important that I've already found that it's helping people. So I just basically want to share that. And the message isn't about myself anymore. I remember when I was writing the book, which took me over a year to write, and I was doing it six

hours plus a day for six days a week. I just wanted to make sure that if I accidentally die before this is written, that it gets out there. So I was telling my friends and family, know, here's the passwords, please publish this if I don't make it because I just want this stuff out there in the world. And I also researched it to make sure or to basically find out why it worked. And what I learned was really astounding and it's stuff that they're not even teaching people in therapy.

Doctors aren't even telling people it's the order of what we do that makes the difference. Like if you wake up and have all those, you know, if you drink your coffee, eat high amount of sugar, scroll, go to Netflix and whatever, and then go to the gym, that gym's gonna feel terrible because your dopamine starts really high and then you drop it. That's the wrong way around to do it. That it's gonna feel like punishment. You're gonna hate going to the gym. So we're much better off just to have some water, go there in the morning.

get the hard stuff out of the way, and then just the relief at the end of the hard stuff raises dopamine, like just stopping raises dopamine. And they're not telling us this sort of stuff. And it's proven, there's a number of scientific studies that have proven that the order of what we do things not only raises dopamine, but it even puts us out of fight or flight. It puts us back into the parasympathetic nervous system.

which is the dopamine side of our brain system. yeah, it's not just, guess what? Gym bro says do this, so we all gotta do this. know, cold plunge, we have to do this. No, there's science behind this and the order of it is so important. If I could just remind people, if you're having a hard day, make it harder. Go do something really hard and that will build up some dopamine. It won't instantly feel like it. To be honest, it takes a while like building up a muscle at the gym.

to see the effects, takes repetitions. But for me, I went from one brain cell to probably like 80 % of my functioning within just, within probably a week and a half to two weeks. I don't really remember the timeframe because it was so gradual. I just went, hold on, I'm fine. Like it didn't feel like a sudden shift. I just went, wait, I can do things. I feel okay, like I'm functioning today. And then it just got better and better from there.

Travis White (30:17)
That's crazy. it just, I don't know, even to recognize that so quickly. Like your things are changing and shifting like a week, week and a half. It doesn't seem like that much time, but in retrospect, when you're going through some of that stuff and through the dark times, a week, week and a half can also drag on very long.

Andy Y West (30:40)
that's true. Honestly, and it was hard every time. It's still hard, but at least now I know how to embrace hard. I remind myself, yes, it's hard and that's why it works. And yes, it's hard, but I do hard things because I know that it's actually harder to struggle through anhedonic depression. It's harder to not do it in the long run. So although right now I don't want to get out of bed and I don't want to go for my run.

the alternative is much worse. So I just learned from trial and error that I just have to do it if I want to have any kind of mental health.

Travis White (31:15)
Yeah, makes sense. It's... I'm just thinking of myself. Because it seems so easy for me sometimes to... Like if I'm not subconsciously thinking about, you know... Like when I'm having, maybe I'm getting really anxious if I don't kind of sit and think, okay well, how am going to handle the situation? It's really easy for me to fall back.

Andy Y West (31:38)
Mm-hmm.

Travis White (31:39)
into my old habits if I don't take the right steps to keep moving forward and keep pushing myself through that hard.

Andy Y West (31:46)
Me too, me too. I will start to, if I don't do my hard things on purpose, I will start to fall back. And I can't have that now. I can't handle that because I know how bad it feels. And I know it almost killed me. So I just will, I will not allow myself to go back there. And sometimes if I feel like, I should have been up 10 minutes ago. Why am I still in bed? Not a failure. Take a deep breath. Move on. You know, don't count it as a failure.

Just move one hand slightly closer to the bed. Do any little step, go, yep, success. Do it again, success. And just keep doing it, you know? So don't count any of those things as failure, but just as a chance to take a nice deep breath, relax the body and try again.

Travis White (32:31)
Sometimes that's the best thing we can do is just try again.

Andy Y West (32:35)
Yes. And that's how

we learned as a small child. We forget that it took us thousands of attempts to pick up a ball. It took us thousands of attempts to learn to crawl across the floor or to stand up, you know, but we did it because we wanted to move forward. And now I think people, we don't have a reward sitting in front of us like that ball on the other side of the room.

you know, or that thing that we want to crawl towards. Where are our rewards if all day we're getting them just randomly, like random hits of sugar, random hits of porn or Netflix or scrolling, you know. That's why a dopamine detox, people think it's pseudoscience, but it's not pseudoscience. It is deliberately lowering our dopamine in the morning so that then it can rise. So there's plenty of proof that these sort of things raise our dopamine. So.

Yeah, and we need to have some kind of reward there for us. So don't have the coffee straight away and don't have the sugar. Even I would recommend people cut back on sugar as much as possible because then when we want to use sugar as a reward, it works. It actually does boost our dopamine and it boosts our energy and we can go do more things.

So when I reward my hard work, which I do, if I find something really challenging, at the end I will reward it with sugar because then my whole body goes, we like hard work, we wanna do it again. Because a dopamine reward to any animal with a dopamine system, which is just about all of them, giving a reward makes us repeat that. So if we want a dog to sit, when the dog sits, we instantly afterwards reward it with food.

and then it does the sit again. That's the only reason it does the sit again. But if we're giving the animal all sorts of rewards all the time, just randomly, it doesn't know what to repeat. So it just does anything and random things. And it all over the place, know, anxious animal doesn't understand how to get its dopamine. And there were studies done with pigeons where they were given random treats at random times.

And the pigeons would do whatever they were doing right before the treat. So if they were scratching and they got a treat, they would keep scratching. If one was flapping its wing and it got a treat, it would keep flapping. And so this, this behaviour of the pigeons looked insane. Like they were doing the most crazy random things, trying to get dopamine. And that's basically how we have conditioned our, all of our likes and dislikes just based on did dopamine rise or did it fall?

That's the reason we like and dislike stuff. there are certain things that just intrinsically trigger dopamine. But many of the things that we like or dislike is because it was rewarded straight away with a dopamine rise.

Travis White (35:24)
Interesting. I like the story with the pigeons. Yeah, it is.

Andy Y West (35:25)
Mmm.

Yeah, it's amazing. And I've seen it with my

own dogs. So I've taught my dog to sniff out money. So just in case I'm walking in the park and it finds some money, it's never actually happened. It's never actually happened yet, but I did teach her that. So now if there's money on the ground, she alerts and sniffs at it and looks at me and sniffs at it, know, and alerts.

Travis White (35:39)
That's awesome. That's really cool. ⁓

and

Andy Y West (35:51)
But it only works at home because it hasn't really been money on the ground. But I taught her that by when she went towards the money and sniffed at it, I rewarded that. So she just wants to do it again because she likes the dopamine reward.

Travis White (36:04)
Yeah, and my dog, I've been able to teach my dog quite a bit because he is the most food driven dog I think I've ever met and it makes it really, really easy to train them when they're that way.

Andy Y West (36:11)
Mine are too.

Mmm. It really is. Yeah, because it's dopamine. It's only dopamine. So dopamine can come from anything that feels good or is pleasurable, even the ending of pain, because when we're in pain and then the pain ends, dopamine goes up because it was down, you know. So just relief can give us dopamine. So as long as we know that everything we're driven towards is only us wanting dopamine, you know, it makes life quite simple.

Travis White (36:19)
Okay.

Andy Y West (36:42)
Because then we can be the author of where we get that and how we get that. We're no longer controlled by any random urge, you know, or whim. We can decide what we want to do, or when we do it, and what our reward will be.

Travis White (36:58)
And before you went on the journey of learning about dopamine, was there ever like a time where you just were losing hope that anything was going to get better?

Andy Y West (37:12)
Yeah, I lost hope so many times during that difficult time. But I still would experience days where I was okay. And so I knew there was still something that was working. I just couldn't understand what it was. Like there was still just random things that would happen where I would have an all right day. So I thought, okay, I've still got brain function.

I've still got some sort of glimmer of hope. I just don't understand what is happening. And I didn't know it was really, it was about dopamine and I didn't know how to deliberately drop and raise my own dopamine at that stage. And I was waking up and scrolling, you know, I was scrolling still in bed. Worst thing you can do for dopamine because of course it's designed to addict us. All of our scrolling, all of our phones are designed to addict us. So if we wake up and look at it straight away,

We've pushed our dopamine up. How are you gonna beat that now? You're going to have a dopamine drop. So then as soon as you have to walk out the door to work or go to school or whatever, dopamine starts to drop and that's gonna feel bad. So don't look at the phone. Like when I was writing the book, I wouldn't look at my phone in the first half of the day. I would pretty much use my first half of the day as a dopamine detox and then allow myself to have my rewards after that. And that reminds me,

We have to still have rewards. We can't just do the hard stuff and expect that we'll function as a human because we are designed or we run on dopamine rewards. So some people who just wake up and they just do militant study or militant running or whatever they do, know, cleaning, very, very strict on themselves, very harsh on themselves. They're not running on dopamine, they're running on glutamate. So they're running on fear.

you know, what would the neighbors think or what would my parents say if I didn't have everything spotless, you know? So there's two different ways to wreck your dopamine system. One is spiking your dopamine all the time randomly. And the other is not having any dopamine and just running on fear and just doing everything out of fear of other people's judgment, for example. There still needs to be a reward of some kind at the end of the day. You know, we would have evolved in communities where we all had to

work or gather or whatever we had to do to earn and to find our food. And then we would have come together and celebrated and had play and dancing and music at the end of that to actually enjoy what we, the work that we put in. So we have to enjoy stuff. And if we enjoy it at the end of the day, it just works better because then we can rest and then we can start fresh the next day and do it better.

Travis White (39:53)
You have my mind spinning now of how the things that I could do that are hard in the mornings because I'm that person who I wake up and I instantly like check my phone. But now you have me thinking like, maybe I need to get outside and like walk around for 10 minutes. Just.

Andy Y West (40:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, that would be perfect.

That's a great idea actually, because we know that sunlight early in the day is really good for dopamine as well. So we can still have that checking of the phone. But if we just do something hard first, not only will it be more rewarding when we do look at the phone, but we've gained a little rise in dopamine. It's like fuel in the tank and then we can do it again. So it's just reordering our day. doesn't have to be.

You don't have to go out and suddenly hit the gym for three hours and change your whole life. Just reorder it. Just save those rewards for after something hard. And we will find that I found I used to be such a sugar fiend. I was such a sweet tooth and I still love sugar, but that's why I use it as my reward now. So if I really want sugar, yes, I can have it. I just have to work for it. And I found that when I started doing that, I didn't even crave sugar anymore.

It just went away. I knew that I could have my sugar. I didn't have to say, no, no, you can't have your sugar, know, bad. It's like, no, I can moderate. I could have things in moderation as long as I put in effort first and my life actually just, it just rolls better now.

Travis White (41:23)
I love hearing that. I love hearing that you're just coming above above it all and pushing forward.

Andy Y West (41:30)
Yeah, and I just think

it's so achievable. And like if we had healthy levels of dopamine in society, so many mental health problems are tied to dopamine. So many of them. And so many addictions, in fact, all addictions, all addictions are tied to dopamine. So there I even found out ways to break addictions. Interestingly, when we're addicted to something, we get a spike in dopamine just from

thinking about the thing. So if I think I want drugs or I want a drink, that expectation spikes my dopamine, then I think it again. I want a drink. It spikes my dopamine. So the addiction is actually the thought after thought after thought. It's not necessarily getting the thing because there were studies done with cocaine addicts. When they think about their drug, they actually get a higher spike in dopamine.

than when they were injected with that drug in a lab. So it's the thought that is addictive because that is the spike of dopamine from the expectation. So if you want to break an addiction, when we first have the thought, we need to drop our dopamine on purpose. So we need to have in the back of our mind a tricky way to drop dopamine. That's probably for me a push up or two because I hate them, but I can do them and I will do them.

So when I first have the addictive thought, I drop my dopamine, do a couple of pushups. I also eat hot chili sauce on a spoon. I like a little bit of chili sauce, but I have like half a teaspoon of hot chili sauce and just eat it straight away. It just drops my dopamine. And in the past, in biblical times, people used to whip themselves when they had a sinful thought. And so that was only a tricky way for them to drop their dopamine to break an addiction. That's all it was. It's not punishing the self.

It's just interrupting the addictive thought. So don't think of this as punishing yourself because I never punished myself. I just gently guide my dopamine system to do something else. And a different thing with intrusive thoughts. Same thing when we have like a negative intrusive thought that we decided, look, I don't want to have this thought. So I'm not talking about denial, but there are some sort of repetitive thoughts. It's like, look,

This is not a healthy thought. I've already had this thought and it might be a worst case scenario thought, know, are the bad things going to happen? What I do now, which works really well, is I choose its opposite. It's, it's a optimistic opposite. So instead of, for example, AI is going to kill us all. What about the optimistic opposite? What about if AI teaches us how to solve world problems, hunger, know, poverty, environmental problems?

And what if we use that in a positive way? So I just have in the back of my mind, the antidote. So every time I think the negative thought, I straight away put the positive thought in. So instead of my dopamine dropping, I allow it to rise. Because who am I to say what's going to happen with AI? I don't know the future, none of us do. And if anyone thinks they know the future, they're just deluding themselves because we really don't. So why not choose optimism and insert that thought?

Travis White (44:44)
Yeah, very true. And you reminded me of something when you were talking about the overcoming addiction. So I've been a really big, you know, soda pop drinker, like for a long time. And I told my wife that like, I used as a vice, I don't drink soda anymore. I completely got rid of it. But.

Andy Y West (44:53)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Travis White (45:10)
for the longest time I used it as a vice and the way you just explained it it totally makes sense now because just the thought of it like was giving me that dopamine that I was wanting

Andy Y West (45:19)
Yeah, we can control dopamine with our own minds and we do every day and that is why mindset works. It's not just some hippie, you know, happy stories, think, mindset, happy, I'll just think happy thoughts and I'll be super happy. It's actually dopamine driven, you know? So if we use those wisely, if we know how to use them, we're gonna have a much better day.

Travis White (45:22)
Yeah.

You just made like that light bulb go off in my head. was like, makes sense now. Like it makes sense why I was just craving it.

Andy Y West (45:50)
Yeah. And if you're having a

really difficult day, you've had some hard struggles, you're fatigued, you're not feeling great, of course we want to raise our dopamine. And the easiest way is the soda pop or the candy or whatever. It's the quickest, easiest way. And we've just learned that, oh, I'll get a dopamine spike from this so I'll temporarily feel better. But what that's actually doing is rewarding the low mood. We're rewarding it and it's going to repeat.

because we've just given it dopamine. So next time you want dopamine, you'll go, well, I guess I better have a low mood and then I'll get some dopamine.

Travis White (46:29)
Yeah, you're not actually challenging yourself for the reward. It's just, yeah. Good stuff. So to anybody that's like struggling with like chronic fatigue or, you know, any depression or any type of mental illness, like what is any advice that you'd give to those people?

Andy Y West (46:48)
Know that you can raise your dopamine on your own. Know that you don't have to be reliant on doctors or the system. Like of course doctors, yes, they have their place. They're amazing. I have utmost respect for the medical profession. They did not help me on this issue one little bit, but of course the medical system has saved my life a bunch of times. I'd be nowhere without it. But in terms of mental health,

You are the one in control of your mind and your body and your life and you can turn it around. Don't wait for someone to come and save you because they don't know how. They don't know this stuff. They've got little snippets, but they don't understand how it all fits together. And it took me like a year to pull these studies and this information from all these different branches of like neuroscience and biology and psychology. And I found that I could relate to all of it.

And I found that it just meshed together in this one kind of theory and then it worked. And then I tried it out a bunch of times and it just worked, but still they're not teaching this stuff in school yet. So yeah, just know that you can do it. It's going to be the hardest thing you probably ever do, but I mean, death is harder or just rot like doom scrolling and bed rotting and brain rotting is much harder. So just take the step and you'll eventually get there.

Travis White (48:11)
stuff. Is there anything that you can think of that you want to bring up that we have not discussed?

Andy Y West (48:16)
What were we thinking about? here's one, porn. Now, I don't judge people if they want to use porn. However, because it's such an instantaneous dopamine hit, it's really bad for the brain because it's so easy to access now and it's such a large rise in dopamine, similar to what a drug would be. it's just basically, we're just rewarding our use of porn.

And like a drug, the tolerance changes. So then people look for more and more extreme porn. so unfortunately, there are a massive amount of people addicted to porn now. And it can also be overcome in the same way. When you think of having that urge to go and use that, find some way to drop your dopamine that is a safe, non-self-harming way to drop your dopamine. Do some pushups, eat chili sauce, go for a run.

You know, have a stone cold shower or a cold plunge. If you've got that sort of money, I don't. I just have a cold shower. But yeah, and don't think that porn use is normal. We didn't evolve with this kind of dopamine spike. It's only going to get worse. So just if if you're someone who's addicted to whatever it might be and it's impacting your life, just start turning it around now and you'll be glad that you did.

Travis White (49:30)
And it's like you've said throughout the whole conversation is just pushing through the heart and challenging yourself.

Andy Y West (49:36)
Yeah, embrace the hard. Like

every day there's things that I don't want to do. And then I remember, no, I do hard things because they grow my brain. You know, I just have to remind myself, do the hard thing, go towards it, you know, don't run from it. And it's really been a life-changing thing.

Travis White (49:56)
Andy, where can people find you?

Andy Y West (49:58)
So I'm at dopaminemountain.com and you can buy my book there, but also you can see that if you're needing the book and you can't afford to buy it, email me and I'll send people a free copy of either book. So I've also got another book there called Anedonia Wastelands. And that's just a very, like very short read of if you're in depression or anhedonia of how to break out of that really quickly. Most of that we've just discussed here, but there's

There's other things in there as well that we can do to break out of that quickly. So doesn't have as many studies in it. It's only got a handful of studies, but it's more of a quick start guide to show people the difficult task of breaking out of that, which is the sort of in a nutshell how I did that. Also, I'm on Instagram and Facebook under the same handles.

Travis White (50:49)
Andy, thank you so much for coming on and having a conversation with us today.

Andy Y West (50:54)
Thanks, Travis. It's been great.

Travis White (50:55)
Like you've, you've definitely taught me a thing or two that I had no idea you taught me more about dopamine than I've ever known.

Andy Y West (51:03)
Yeah, it's one of those things that people know little bits about it. Everyone knows a different part of the puzzle, but it's really hard to know. Well, I don't know everything about it. Surely I can't wait to learn more, but just how it functions in my life. Now I understand that from my own perspective and I think a lot of people can relate.

Travis White (51:06)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I only knew the bit like don't be mean brings us happiness and that's pretty much all I knew like I didn't know about any of the reward system, which I think is really really cool.

Andy Y West (51:31)
Mm.

Travis White (51:33)
Well, thank you to all of our listeners and I hope you get as much out of this as I did. Thanks for listening. You can find us on Instagram and YouTube at OvercomePod. The best thing you can do for us right now is to follow us, share our stuff, like our stuff and all that stuff. I always say stuff like too many times I gotta change that up. Thanks again and until next time.

Andy Y West (52:05)
Sorry I lost you for a sec.