E44 - Dopamine Stacking & Snacking

Julie and Jel Legg explore dopamine stacking—when multiple sources of dopamine stimulation are layered on top of each other. This can create an intense, pleasurable experience but also lead to a crash afterward, leaving individuals feeling unmotivated, overstimulated, or even emotionally flat.

They discuss how ADHD brains crave dopamine, and explore how dopamine stacking manifests in different areas of life, including social interactions, work, and family environments. They chat about dopamine ‘snacking’—engaging in small, spaced-out dopamine hits, which can help maintain motivation without burnout.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Dopamine stacking feels good but has a cost: Engaging in multiple dopamine-producing activities at once can be highly stimulating but often leads to a crash in motivation and mood afterward. People with ADHD often stack dopamine unintentionally due to dopamine deficiency and difficulty regulating pleasure and motivation.
The crash after the high: After intense dopamine stacking, the next day or even the next few hours can feel bland, unmotivating, or overwhelming, making it hard to focus or feel engaged.
Social and work implications: Dopamine stacking isn’t limited to personal entertainment; it can occur in social settings, leading to burnout after highly stimulating social events, or in work environments where overloading tasks can cause fatigue and mental exhaustion.
Self-awareness is key: Recognizing when dopamine stacking is happening allows individuals to pace themselves, spread out rewarding activities, and avoid the intense highs and lows.

LINKS

TRANSCRIPT

JULIE: I’m Julie Legg, author of The Missing Piece and diagnosed with ADHD at 52.

JEL: And I’m Jel Legg, diagnosed at 55.

JULIE: Welcome to ADHDifference. In this episode we’ll be chatting about dopamine stacking. Dopamine as we know, it’s a neurotransmitter that transfers information to/between cells and really, it’s complex. But really, it’s about keeping motivated and it’s a bit of a pleasure hormone as well. So that’s the dopamine side of things. And stacking is when we pile one lot of dopamine on top of another, on top of another. And so it has an interesting effect and we’re going to be talking about dopamine stacking – the upsides and the downsides of it. I guess what can happen is when you pile dopamine on top of it. And I’m meaning things like an energy drink while watching a movie, while scrolling through your phone. Individually they create dopamine but pile them on top of each other and it can feel wonderful. However, the downside is that you can actually have a crash as well or you might not appreciate what you’re doing because you’re multitasking your dopamine, if that makes sense. And the effect isn’t quite the same.

JEL: It’s a bit sort of like dopamine gluttony, isn’t it. Yeah. Yeah, eating too much all at the same time and then wondering why you feel a bit rubbish at the end, a bit sick or full. So yeah, we kind of think about dopamine stacking, sometimes we probably do it on purpose. Perhaps that need for dopamine is so big. Perhaps think about it like eating a meal. We’re so hungry we stuff all this food down really fast without waiting for it to… I think it’s about 20 minutes when the food hits your stomach and your brain gets the message that yeah, I’m doing good. This is fine. And so in those 20 minutes you stuff so much food down that yeah, yeah you’re now stuffed. But with dopamine perhaps we trying to get it so fast we stack all these things on top of each other. The big thing my understanding of this is that we then crash and burn. And we crash and burn quite hard. So again there’s that similarity with eating too much, you know. It’s not a good thing is it? Yeah. Whereas if we just take everything slowly and do things with a bit more forethought, we can still reach those dopamine levels. We can spread it over a long period of time. We don’t run the risk of yeah, what the analogy you could imagine.

JULIE: Yeah it’s interesting I think too because you know, with ADHD maybe some of that regulation is not quite there, that moderation. And so whether we’re doing it intentionally or unintentionally, often it’s only until we really understand our brains, and why we do what we do, that it kind of makes sense. But there’s lots of occasions where we’d have the highest of high days, just absolutely an amazing day. Retrospectively, it was jam-packed of so much dopamine, all on top of each other, it was going to be a success for that moment. And then the next day, I’m thinking about socializing [Yeah, yeah, yeah.] the next day it can just be really quite bland. And yeah this crash, almost overwhelm of too much dopamine.

JEL: Yeah, I mean we’ll go try and go through some examples where it can be socially, or in work, or in a family environment. There are lots of… we’ve been thinking about lots of different environments where this can happen. So correct me if I’m wrong Julie, but are we more likely to stack dopamine and then run into a brick wall if we’re unmedicated?

JULIE: Interesting. I think, neither of us are medicated, my understanding is ADHD stimulant medication brings up those dopamine levels to neurotypical levels and so that craving, or desire to seek dopamine is levelled out. So they’re probably not craving as much dopamine because they’re quite satisfied already. So I would say, I would say more unmedicated.

JEL: Yeah so that… yeah so pre-diagnosed, or post-diagnosed and for whatever reason not wanting to or can’t for various medical reasons take medication. So yeah, you mentioned socializing. We don’t socialize a great deal all the time and for a long… a great deal very often, and for a long time we’ve worked out lots of… we’ve spoken before about socializing we dislike and avoid. Going to a family barbecue, no. Boring situations. Things we struggle with. Just going for dinner with some people I think would be quite boring. So there’d have to be… people we do socialize with have to have lot of energy. And we can go out and socialize without drinking, and I’m particularly… I. I’ve always been very good at going out and not drinking if I’m driving because I just don’t drink and drive. And so yeah, I’ve got no problem with that, but it has to be something really exciting. Something really enjoyable. If it’s something that really suits us, whether we’re hosting or going out, and particularly if we’re hosting and we can have a drink, we will stack, stack. We will have a drink. We’ll have some nice food. We have some great conversation, lots of energy, and we will stack. We will chuck everything into that and be the best hosts and, mainly I think put forward all of our best energy, and all our most positivity, and give it our all. And that can last for a few hours and then the next day, if that was a fantastic social, a real buzz, we don’t ride on it the next day. We don’t think yeah yeah yeah we should do this more often, it’s really good. We are absolutely stuffed. [Exhausted.] Exhausted. And yeah, the next day’s just not a write off but it’s sort of, it doesn’t carry through. Yeah whereas we could… if we end up in a social situation which is not of our choosing, which is a lot less energetic, and doesn’t stack, and we don’t layer all those things, then we’ll come home and carry on and do something. Or the next day, life just carries on. So a small example there.

JULIE: Yeah and I think with this dopamine stacking, from how I understand it, is that by stacking more on top of more on top of more, you’re actually not really engaging with any particular thing well, if you know what I mean. So it might feel really good. Let’s say you’re going for a run and you’ve got your favourite music in your ears. Are you listening to the music as well as you could? Or are you enjoying the sensation of running as much as you could? It’s a blast. You finish the run but … and you may feel great but the next time you do it, that level of satisfaction might not be there. It needs to be louder music, or the run wasn’t feeling as, I don’t know, rewarding as it previously did. Which kind of is the pattern of some addictive-type behaviours. And I’m not saying that dopamine is addictive. I’m not saying that, but you do too much of a good thing and there will be some ramifications. And including impulsivity. And you know when you’re feeling on this ‘high on life’ and you’re loving everything, you’re more likely to struggle maybe moderating some of those impulsive-type behaviours.

JEL: Excuse me, another example I’m thinking of is work. My work approach and relationship to work has changed a lot over … it’s been about 22 years now since I’ve been in someone else’s environment. I’ve been working for myself 22 years, predominantly as a web developer and always from home. I never had offices. So I would suggest a way I used to stack was I would get more and more work. I’d get a dopamine hit from having my own business because the more orders you get, the more work you get, the more successful you are, the less chances you have to go back and work with other people in another environment. So it was a great motivator. So having a successful business is great. So that will give you a huge dopamine hit just knowing that you’re valued and wanted. So there’ll be 10-15 websites stacked up, and lots of small projects, and that meant 14-hour days for me, and sometimes 7 days a week. And quite often actually, but I would want to do everything else too. So for example, when working I would have the news feeding… I’m a bit of a news-hound, so the TV would be on with the news playing all day long. So I’m getting the hit of keeping up with current events, particularly some big ones that happened over the last 20 years. So there’s two things going on there. Then on top of that, I’d eat at the desk, so all the meals were had there. There’s a natural dopamine hit that comes from having a meal. As it went into the evening, then I think okay, so the day is over, there’s no more phone calls or clients, out comes the bottle of wine. So there’s a dopamine hit with the wine, whilst keeping working. And just rewinding back into the day, for a long time my son would be at home, and working home was great because I could be with my son. And so my son would have a computer, set up next to him. And he’d have the CD ROMs and it’d be you know, just a great age where he was learning and playing on the games, and so I was parenting. You know you’ve got all these things going on, stacking each one, which as far as I’m concerned were giving me a dopamine hit. I almost didn’t crash because I never had time to stop. But if I… when I slept, I slept like a log and would get up late because I’d be up till 2am in the morning, working. And it was just on and on and on. The crash… I was in my 30s-40s, 40s late-30s, so I was not the age I am now, so I could… my body was more resilient to these things. But over time it was a slow-motion car crash because eventually your health declines. It really does. You know, putting on weight and just not having the energy and, you know that you’re doing bad things to your body. So I think that was a form of stacking but it, in my case, it was going on for actually years.

JULIE: Yeah, and that kind of behaviour definitely would lead to this burnout, you know. The adrenaline that you just can’t keep up forever. At some point that’s going to come tumbling down, isn’t it.

JEL: Yeah I remember there would be days I’d just go and couldn’t move at all. Suddenly you hit a brick wall and you’re going lie in the bed in the middle of the day for two hours and you couldn’t move. And I would get told off, you know. You know, why are you lying there doing nothing? Because I can’t move. I just crashed and burned. But the big… the big crash and burn, which luckily, I never reached, unfortunately for those of us sort of a bit older is serious medical conditions. If I hadn’t have turned that around, some very bad things would have happened. Eventually it will catch up with you.

JULIE: So just like anything, the flip side of that, the upside of dopamine stacking is that, at the time, you can be really productive. You know, you can work all those hours, things are great on a working basis. On a social basis, you’re on an absolute social high, you’re loving every minute. So there is an upside to it but the down sides aren’t particularly pleasant. So I guess we come down to you know, given that ADHDers, particularly unmedicated, will crave this and seek dopamine top-ups just to usual levels. That’s going to continue. What do we do to avoid, what can we do to avoid dopamine stacking?

JEL: Okay, so as a… back to that example, so okay. So you’re hungry. I like this simile, this sort of simile with eating. So yeah, know you’re hungry. You want food, so Bam Bam Bam. But I learned some, you know a long time ago, that there’s an old-fashioned way of eating and that’s chew everything X number of times and eat it slowly, just giving your stomach that chance to say hey I’ve had enough. It’s so simple and it’s such an old well-known thing. It’s been around forever and it works and so what I try to do now with dopamine is ex… is try not to stack it all on top, and get the dopamine from each thing. Part of that is I suppose being a little bit wiser and older is understanding that dopamine may not be instant. For instance, if I have a job to do in the day, it may not… the result may not come straight away. But just take it bit by bit, and so the dopamine’s coming, just wait for it. Right so there’s the thing that’ll take all day, some jobs might take all week. But along the way what I do now is instead of having the television on, I got lots of little… the nature of my work is there’s lots of little moments that might last 30 seconds or 2 minutes when something’s happening or uploading that I can’t do anything while I’m waiting for that to happen. So boom, I go straight to a news headline, check in, has anything changed? Has the world blown up? No. Great. Back to the work. So it’s not stacking one on top of the other, in it’s sort of like going in and out of different things but controlling. Yeah. So I feel like I’m in touch with the world and still getting my news hit. It could be I go and watch a music video if it’s something I’m waiting for. Music… if I’m waiting for a video I’m rendering and it’s going to take 5 minutes I can’t do anything else, so I’ll go and do something to give me a dopamine hit.

JULIE: So to me that sounds like you’re doing it intuitively. It’s not like, ah I must plan this. But if you have to plan it that’s absolutely okay too. So you… you’re rolling with your dopamine rather than stacking it. [Yes, yes.] It’s intermittent. Some are going to be delayed dopamine rewards and others are instant but you kind of cruise along and get your little dopamine here and dopamine there. That’s awesome.

JEL: And I do think if someone, if you’re working in an environment where you’re in someone else’s office and you’re an employee in that space… and I would sort of reach out to managers and bosses who have people like us, ADHD, in that space. Okay so, I’ve always taken this view that any other person of a similar skill set to me should take as long as I take to achieve a job of a certain quality. And so if it takes me eight hours to do something, someone else reasonable should take eight hours too. If they take four, wow. If they take 12, a bit slow. So if that employee, that person sits there and they work away for half an hour, maybe pushing 40 minutes which funny enough is about how long a classroom is. They worked this out a long time ago, kids can’t concentrate for more about 40 minutes. There’s a reason classes don’t last 2 hours. And then they disappear and you come in, keep catching them on a YouTube video, or checking their Facebook or their social media, you’ve got to look at their output at the end of the day. Because the person with ADHD can be just as efficient even if they appear to always be doing something else. And then they get in trouble and then they get put down as “I was catching them slacking.” No. Look at the output. Yes. There’s a reason I say this is because when my entire life circumstances changed and we ended up together, Jules was fantastic. She was aware I was working 14-hour days but it was very clear, when she left to go to an office at 8:00 in the morning, the work working day started, she’ be home at about 4:30 and it was very clear that I was to stop work then because then you know, life. And there would be no working on the weekend. And I thought this is impossible. The amount of work I have. I cannot do this. It won’t work. But actually, what happened was I just got more efficient. And I got a dopamine hit from achieving as much as I could in that time. Took a little while to adjust to, but in time my business earned just as much money. I had to get more efficient and concentrate more because all this stacking I thought I was being Mr Superhero, fitting all this stuff in, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t… the perhaps the crash and burn was happening within it because I was not being nearly as efficient. Yeah, it didn’t mean my customers got ripped off because they were only paying me a certain amount of money which any reasonable person would charge. So if they were paying me for what a reasonable person would take 4 hours to do a job, and it took me 8 or 12 because I was stacking all these things and not really… well they didn’t lose out. I was the one losing out because I was not really enjoying each thing properly. Yeah. Compartmentalize. Here’s the job. Concentrate as much as you can. Short breaks. Get it done. Now move on. Now it’s the evening time. Now you can fully enjoy watching a film, or reading a book, or going for a walk.

JULIE: Yeah. So I think dopamine stacking, what to do about it, you know you’ve got to work it out yourself to be honest. There’s lots of suggestions out there and some strategies, and you’ve got to pick the one that works for you. But definitely avoiding this yo-yoing. Just like anything, whether it’s exercise or indulgence of anything particularly, try and avoid the yo-yoing. Try and set yourself on a scale that’s achievable, on a path that’s doable and if you need a reminder, it’s been said to set yourself reminders. Literally on a timer if you feel that you’re working for too long a straight without a break. And then, so put a timer on so you can have a break every hour, or every 35 minutes, or whatever it works out to be. And do something that just can release some dopamine there and then, some instant dopamine. Yeah. And then you’ve got this, yeah…

JEL: I keep coming back to this idea of, for me you know, maybe it’s just me but I keep coming back to this idea that dopamine for me and my brain feels like hunger for food. So at the end of any given day, I need to have had a certain amount of dopamine and I have to get it because my brain isn’t always producing enough of it. So it’s a bit like at the end of the given day I need to have eaten a certain amount of food. And there are going to be times when I’m hungry and I feel like I need… which is like needing dopamine. But that’s what the snacks are for. Taking that little snack ties you over sometimes too. So I’m stuck at work for a whole afternoon but tonight I’m going to go and have a game of squash with someone and that’s a real dopamine hit, lots of energy, and so on, yeah?

JULIE: I just thought. Oooo. Instead of dopamine stacking it should be dopamine snacking. Snacking, yeah. Yeah, I claim that one.

JEL: Well done. So, yeah, you get through the day snacking. You know, if there’s another 4 hours watching the clock before you go and have that game of squash and, you know, find something. And hopefully an environment where you can just take out two, three, four, five minutes to do something. And that may include just sort of getting out of your seat off the office and going for a quick blat round the block. But I’m really appealing to managers here to understand that this is what we need to do. And sometimes I think doing things one thing after another, small snacks, is better than necessarily than saying “Hey okay employee, I’m… there’s no way I’m going to let you go take a 5-minute hike around the block and come back ready to get back into work, but I’ll let you sit there with your headphones on listening to music while you’re working.” Which is stacking possibly, yeah and having a coffee. Stacking. Because as long as you’re sat in that seat, I know you’re being productive.” [I know that’s crazy isn’t it.] I do think this stacking, especially in the work environment’s, got a lot to do with productivity and it’s you really shouldn’t care what someone is up to or doing. This is what the diversity thing is, it doesn’t matter how they approach their work provided they still produce what your business needs at the end of a measurable period of time. And yeah, I’ve worked with a lot of people that have some very strange approaches to how they work but they were very valued, you know. Because they were just great engineers and they produced what the company needed. And we were all different. It’s almost like, and I’m talking a long time ago here, over 20 years ago I worked in an environment before the word diversity was even used or invented. Because engineers, I’m talking software engineers, electronic engineers, we’re a very strange bunch. We’re all very… we really are, and I can speak from working across a lot of companies around the world. We are an odd bunch. Yeah, and we always had some very diverse ways of working on a 24-hour clock with all sorts of strange environments. But it was almost just accepted as normal. I don’t think any of us would have survived 5 seconds in other businesses.

JULIE: One last thought on dopamine snacking and that is I think we need to be realistic about what our… what drives our urge for dopamine. And it is things of interest and generally that can be things that are new. Because new things are more exciting than routine old things. And so don’t be surprised if once upon a time you had so much joy and got a great dopamine ticket from listening to your favourite song, and then a month later that doesn’t do it for you. That’s okay you know, you haven’t lost your way. Maybe just need to do something new, find a new song, or a new hobby or something. Yeah so don’t be surprised if it wanes after a period of time. That’s just natural for us.

JEL: Yeah it’s interesting, this stacking thing. I know it’s a bit of a buzzword at the moment and it… when you look back on your life you realize that there are times or habits or spaces you… where you got into the whole stacking thing. And I don’t know whether as you get older you naturally move into a space where you just work out what works better for yourself, but I do think, thinking about stacking, I think it’s something I’m more likely to have always done when I was/had a lot more energy perhaps. Or ambition. Ambition. Because ambition is a precursor for really going for dopamine, isn’t it. If you have no ambition, that’s a whole chunk where you’re not going to get the dopamine hit. If you’re just happy to… and there’s nothing wrong with this but some people quite happy just to go… not have ambition and plod through the day and move forward. But as human creatures we all have something that we really look forward to enjoying or doing. Ah, there was another one we were going to mention which may more relevant and it again, it may be more relevant for someone listening in their 20s or 30s, is going on holiday. So you know, holidays are a great time of letting yourself loose aren’t they. Especially if you’ve got a really boring work routine. Excuse me. So you know, you’ve got two kind of, in my view, there’s two approaches to a holiday. There’s the idea of going and spending a week on a beach, Vanuatu or Spain or something, or wherever. That sounds glorious when you’re in New Zealand but let’s say Vanuatu, somewhere local, Fiji which is, whatever that’s our backyard almost in terms of holidays. So you spend a week on a beach just sunbathing, maybe pick a book up. Or you spend a week on a super adventure holiday you know, where you cram everything in. And we don’t do the beach holidays. No. No, the last adventure one we did I think we did the UK in 10 days. And we talking Ireland, not Ireland. We did Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, London, Southeast … all over [yeah] in 10 days. And that was stacking. That really was because you’re visiting everything, you’re seeing everything, you’re eating every different kind of food you can find. You’re drinking at every opportunity, you know. So you can’t come back from a stacked holiday like that and feel … And feel relaxed. You know, that’s the old thing you get to “How was your holiday?” I’m knackered. I need a holiday. Well that’s a stacked holiday really and I’m not saying only ADHD people do that. Other people do as well but we’re very much likely to do that.

JULIE: So thank you for listening. This has all been about dopamine stacking and, as it turns out, dopamine snacking as well. Thank you for listening.