Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Cracking the Dopamine Code With Dr. Sydney Ceruto
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining me for episode 579 of Live Happy Now. What if understanding one tiny brain chemical could change the way you live, work, and feel? Well, this week’s guest is here to explain that it can. I’m your host, Paula Felps. And as we wrap up our Live Happy Summer Reading Program, I’m joined by Dr. Sydney Ceruto, author of The Dopamine Code: How to Rewire Your Brain for Happiness and Productivity.
Sydney is a cognitive and behavioral neuroscientist who explains why so many of us feel restless, stuck, or burned out, and how dopamine, the brain’s molecule of motivation, plays a powerful role in our daily satisfaction. Today she walks us through what dopamine really is, why it matters, and how understanding it can help us create healthier habits and a more fulfilling life. Let’s dig in.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:55] PF: Sydney, thank you so much for joining us as we wrap up our Summer Reading Program.
[0:01:00] Dr. SC: Oh, Paula, it’s such a pleasure to be on your show.
[0:01:03] PF: Honestly, this is such a great book to help us move through the rest of the summer and begin fall with more clarity. When our senior editor brought this to me, I was like, “Yes, this is absolutely the best way to wrap up this summer reading program.” Before we even get into the book, I would really love to have you tell us where your interest in neuroscience comes from, because you’ve done some amazing things.
[0:01:26] Dr. SC: Oh, thank you so much. Really, it started when I was getting my second master’s, where I was still personally struggling myself with the loss of my parents when I was 15 or 16. And I was an only child. That compounded that loss even more. And they were so young. It was really difficult time for me. And I got married early. Still married to the same man about 38 years now.
[0:01:58] PF: Congratulations.
[0:01:59] Dr. SC: But marrying him and his family helping me just wasn’t enough. I had gone in and out of different therapist’s office, coach’s office, psychiatrists, and nobody could really help me to calm down my fight, flight or freeze region of my brain. And I started on my master’s. This was during the second one as I mentioned. And neuroscience, something just popped up like in my Yale weekly newsletter. And I, of course, did a lot of due diligence in it. I went ahead and got a dual PhD in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience.
And I think why I am in this field is because – and again, I do not like to speak pejoratively about any other professional or any other doctor, but traditional methods are simply not as effective as a neuroscience-based plan. And when I started reading about neuroscience, I knew that this was going to be what actually really, really helped me to get back on a course of mental and physical well-being.
And sure enough, I leaned into the neuroscience very heavy, and it really helped me. I don’t want to say cure, because I don’t diagnose anyone, not because I’m not capable of it or licensed to do so. It just it’s too stigmatizing. Really understanding. That’s what neuroscience is, let’s say, in a broad sense. You can’t make changes if you don’t understand what’s happening. It’s more than just thoughts.
There’s trillions of neurons in our brain which is dictating what we do and what we don’t do, how we do something or if we are able to refrain from doing it. And, really, once I saw – and of course, it took much longer doing it to myself. I knew I had a practice. And that was like 26 years ago. And we’re still going strong.
[0:04:13] PF: And really with neuroscience, it’s like finally getting that owner’s manual for your brain. You start kind of finding out, “Oh, this is how things work and this is why I’m doing these things. And more importantly, this is how I correct that.”
[0:04:25] Dr. SC: See, I think you just hit the nail on the head. Most therapy and coaching is about the why, right? Why I’m like this? Why you’re like this? Why somebody struggles with confidence and another person struggles with anxiety? It’s all because this is neural pathways in our brain that we’ve used throughout our lives and the brain does not like to think. It is counterintuitive at best, and it likes to take shortcuts.
If you can understand the why you’re doing something from a neuroscience perspective, the how, how do we fix this, improve this, abolish this becomes so much easier than dealing with therapy. Because therapy really started out as what? A philosophy. Not a necessary science, like neuroscience is.
I have to tell you so many of my clients and patients, when we just get through some of their faulty thinking patterns in the very beginning as I start to get to know them deeply, I always get a response that I have no idea, but I just feel so far less anxious. And we’ve barely begun our work. It’s because I tell them what is going on. What region of the brain is causing you to feel these biological, emotional, physiological, evolutionarily speaking as well? It all plays into neuroscience. I think it’s a must. It’s a must know for anyone who really wants enduring change.
[0:06:08] PF: Absolutely. Can you talk about what dopamine is and why it’s so crucial for our well-being?
[0:06:15] Dr. SC: Dopamine is a neurochemical. And so much of what has been falsely driven out there on social media is that dopamine is the pleasure chemical.
[0:06:28] PF: Yeah. We see that on Tik Tok a lot, don’t we?
[0:06:31] Dr. SC: Exactly. So, this is really the impetus of the question and the beginning of this work and why I wrote the book to actually answer this. Dopamine actually isn’t the pleasure chemical we’ve all been force-fed to believe it is. It’s the molecule of motivation. And there’s a very big difference between pleasure and motivation. They’re not synonyms. It drives the wanting, the anticipating, the chasing, which as humans we love novelty. So you can see why dopamine is a pleasurable chemical in our brains, right?
Modern life floods our nervous system all day long. Every ping on your phone, every doom scroll on YouTube. And these quick hits give us a little bit of a spike in dopamine. The catch though is that your brain answers every spike with a dip. The more you chase, the flatter ordinary day-to-day quotidian life starts to feel. That flatness is what people refer to colloquially as stuck. That’s really what that flatness is, is being stuck. It isn’t laziness. It isn’t a character flaw. It’s not that you may have ADHD. It’s a reward system turned up so enormously high that, honestly, every day good things stop registering.
And right around the corner from that is burnout. And that depleted feeling is the same story over and over again on loop. The chasing has once again outrun the enjoying. The hopeful part and the whole point of this book is that once you understand the mechanism of how to actually fix this, it’s reversible. I mean, it’s actually simple.
Next time any listener feels that restless feeling that nothing is really enough feeling, the first place to start would be to name it for what it is. Is it an overstimulated reward system? Is it a personal failing, or is it not a personal failing? Naming it where it happens when it happens is the place, that sweet spot where change actually starts.
[0:09:08] PF: And that’s a hard situation for many people to name because we only know that I feel restless, I feel anxious. I don’t really know what is going on or what’s causing it. So, what are some of the little signposts that we can look for that we can give attention to that our brains really do need rewiring for some happiness and mental clarity?
[0:09:29] Dr. SC: Well, again, let’s say you have someone who has just accomplished a great task. It could be a marathon. It could be losing 10 lbs. It could be having a great speaking engagement and feeling really positive about it. The telltale sign would be that you are over that quicker than all the anticipation that led up to it.
If you are like the type that is very driven by that pursuing, the almost not knowing how it’s going to go, that sort of stimulus, that is something that would tell you right away, if you are on to the next task before you’ve even savored what you just accomplished, you are in trouble. That is a definite sign. Losing enjoyment from what you previously enjoyed is actually not so much a sign of depression, but it’s more of a depletion of dopamine or dopamine not signaling as a sister hormone to a specific neural pathway.
Again, if you start to see things change, if you are back in the race before you’ve even accepted a thank you, if you are constantly switching between who you want to be, what you want to do, what type of career you want to have, if you’re in and out of relationships once the butterfly stages sort of peter out, then this book is definitely for you.
[0:11:07] PF: And you mentioned the doom scrolling, but there are other ways that our dopamine’s been hijacked by overstimulation in today’s world. Can you talk about some of the other things that are contributing to this?
[0:11:17] Dr. SC: To the dopamine pandemic in a sense?
[0:11:21] PF: Yes. Yes. I love that. I love framing it that way.
[0:11:24] Dr. SC: Yeah. Because that’s how I look at it. What causes all of this is you do not have to wait anymore in life. Many, many years and decades ago, you would have to wait for mom to finish cooking dinner if you were hungry. And that meal, let’s say, was always at 6:00. Well, it’s not very good if you’re hungry come four. But what are you going to do? You don’t have to wait to find out if the question you have was properly answered or a debate you get into with someone else, because you could just Google the answer. The brain does not want to or feel it has to wait for anything. That constant dopamine hitting that we’re getting is truly – it’s requiring us to get more and more of the same neurochemical to start to feel anything.
Online dating. Again, we don’t have to wait to actually get dressed, do our hair and makeup if we’re a woman, or who’s ever doing their hair and makeup. And get a ride or take an Uber, and hope that somebody appealing shows up at the bar or restaurant. We now can just go on one of 20 apps.
[0:12:42] PF: And just start swiping. What does that impatience do to us physiologically? Because it sounds like everything we’re talking about, we’re going after this dopamine hit. We’re getting more and more impatient. What does that do to us?
[0:12:56] Dr. SC: Well, what that does is that, ultimately, it does not keep us in a career very long. It certainly doesn’t help in the day-to-day pedestrian type of life that ultimately once you get married brings. It certainly makes us very impatient when we do have to wait. Even if we’re being served somewhere, a fast food line in a crowded restaurant, we just do not want to wait. Nothing is made for us to wait.
So, because we’re not waiting for anything, constant hits of dopamine are, like I said, losing their potency in everyday life. And it’s really important to have a healthy amount of dopamine. And it’s also important to choose your dopamine hits wisely.
[0:13:57] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.
And now, let’s hear more from Dr. Sydney Ceruto.
[0:14:09] PF: Let’s dig into that, because we only know our social media hits. We only know the things that are served to us. How do we start choosing those hits? And what are some examples of other ones?
[0:14:21] Dr. SC: Well, there’s so many examples, but what I will is I’ll tell you a story about a patient I had. She was a judge. And this was over a decade ago. But I think this will explain to you and hopefully to all your listeners what dopamine really is in a nutshell using one example.
This woman, this judge, she was quite overweight. It was obvious to anyone’s eye that she was overweight and could stand to lose a good 35 lbs. Now, obviously, she has two grown kids. They’re both doing wonderful. She’s in a long-term healthy marriage. She’s happy. She is excelling. Obviously, she was a judge who was elected. So, her life, except for her weight, looks really good. So, she really wanted to work on some more private issues. But another very important goal was to be able to stick with an eating plan and a gym plan or exercise plan that she would not give up on. Right? Because I think most of us can say, “Okay, that’s it. I’m so sick. I’m never eating this much again. Monday starts the diet.”
Monday comes and, all of a sudden, we are starving ourselves, which actually is making us hold on to wait until we can no longer starve ourselves, and we relent to a hardwired pattern, which is survival. Eating survival. So what we did is we got her a trainer. And the first few times – and this may not happen for everyone, because if I had to spend, let’s say, 150 on a trainer, it would be difficult for me to be like, “Oh, screw the money.” I just won’t go. But she did. Many times, in the beginning she decided I’m not going to go. She would go and she would not get any dopamine hits at all. Sometimes she would actually drive there, call me, and then race home and get back into bed with her gym clothes.
[0:16:29] PF: No.
[0:16:30] Dr. SC: Yes. So, what’s happening here is the obvious. She’s getting zero dopamine from waking up, going to the gym, and ultimately becoming healthier. She’s only getting dopamine when she’s at home in bed procrastinating doing a workout or missing it entirely. Here’s a big misconception that I want to address. There is nothing we do or we don’t do without dopamine. Right there, that already kind of tells you that it’s not really the pleasure molecule.
She was getting dopamine. And again, remember the brain is counterintuitive. She was getting dopamine from staying home in bed under the covers and then trying to starve herself rather than going to the gym. Once we really stepped in gear, and I would actually go with her to the gym. Not right away, but within I’d say less than 2 weeks. I’m thinking like it was maybe 8 days where we started to see something incredible, which was her going to the gym, even on days she did not have the trainer and putting her clothes out the night before and becoming so excited to go because the dopamine shift had started.
Somebody said to her – and she had only lost maybe 5 lbs. at this point, but it had already started. Somebody said to her something like, “Wow, you look good. Did you change your hair?” Or they didn’t obviously notice the weight loss under the robe, but they noticed something, and that triggered the dopamine hits that come from going to the gym. She no longer was getting any dopamine by starving herself or dogging her gym activities, just going there and just doing a couple of things and thinking that’s enough.
When that dopamine started to hit the right neural pathway, then she never went back. And she has kept this weight off now. Like I said, it took her about eight months to lose it. She was at her goal weight. She looked phenomenal. And I recently saw her when I was back in New York maybe 2 years ago, and she looked phenomenal. It is that switch. When somebody is procrastinating a project for class or a speech for a Zoom meeting at work, they need to start learning how to get the dopamine going at the right times and to stop the procrastination. Because the procrastination, it’s not just – again, it’s something that we’re not doing, but we’re not doing it because wrongly we’re getting dopamine from procrastinating. Does that make sense?
[0:19:24] PF: It does. And it completely understands this mission statement you give in your book. It’s like a mission statement for dopamine. And it says dopamine doesn’t give contentment, it delivers possibility. And that story that you just shared shows how understanding the nature of dopamine and changing how we approach it will change the trajectory of our future.
[0:19:45] Dr. SC: Especially in today’s world of Millennial and Gen X, I think. My son is 28. Is he a Gen X or a Gen Z? I don’t –
[0:19:54] PF: He’s a Gen-Zer.
[0:19:55] Dr. SC: Okay, Gen-Zer. that generation and the younger millennials who are still single, which is basically the majority of the entire world, which is the strangest thing to me. So many lonely people, yet nobody can meet anyone.
[0:20:12] PF: But we can meet everybody on an app.
[0:20:13] Dr. SC: Yeah, I want my friend Malcolm Gladwell to write on this because I don’t even have the answers. But even with today’s milieu of online dating, you can ask a hundred people. And unless on that first date, out of those 100 people, they just met the love of their life, which is highly unlikely number-wise. But let’s just say that you’re online dating now. And, at first, you don’t really know if this person looks like what their pictures look like. And now you have all this anticipation. And then maybe you have a Zoom call before you go out on the date. So you can double check that this is the girl or the man that they claim to be.
Now think about it like this. Dopamine. Now we see that this man is handsome, and everything sort of checks out, and we’re getting ready for this date. The reason that we have those butterflies or we’ll pour a glass of wine, us women, as we’re doing our makeup and we’re all excited to be going out isn’t because we saw him, isn’t because we verified him. It’s because there’s a possibility of love. In today’s culture, we’re getting all of these hits of dopamine from literal strangers where there is an exponentially high potential that we’ll never see them again.
[0:21:38] PF: What is the alternative? How do we then start getting dopamine in healthy ways? How do we choose that? We can talk about the dopamine menu that you developed.
[0:21:49] Dr. SC: Yeah. Well, of course, the dopamine menu. It’s obviously one of my favorite tools in the entire book. It’s a really simple idea of redesigning your menu. Just like we have a menu in a restaurant, they have – maybe we’ll keep it simple. They have appetizers, entres, and desserts. In these three courses, you need to do a specific inventory of yourself because this is very personalized. Again, the work I do is extremely personalized. I only see three clients at any given time because we go so deep.
With this book and the workbook coming out in the fall, I make it super simple for you to have a concierge type dopamine menu. So let’s look at main courses. They are the deep, absorbing in a sense, activities that truly satisfy you. The ones that you look up from and realize 2 hours just flew by. Side dishes are relatively quick, clean boosts for when you’re in a slump, a walk, a favorite song, a few minutes outside.
Then we have desserts. And I refer to them as restorative desserts. They are real rest and genuine renewal. The things that fill your tank instead of draining it. So when you build that menu and actually use it, three things are going to happen at once. First, your reward system is going to steady because you’re feeding it real rewards instead of cheap spikes that lead to nothing. I mean, you get nothing out of it. In a sense, it’s like burning money. Maybe that dollar or that minute or two you were doom scrolling doesn’t mean a whole lot to you. But if you get in the habit of burning a dollar because a dollar can barely buy anything these days, then what do you think’s going to happen? You’re going to continue to keep burning money. You’re getting nothing out of it. This dopamine, these hits that we’ve been getting, they’re not true rewards.
Again, your reward system will steady because you’re feeding it genuine, real, wholesome, in a sense, rewards instead of cheap spikes and cheap thrills. Your mood lifts because you’re choosing things that genuinely satisfy you and your brain only. And your focus and productivity climb. Because a brain that’s well-regulated simply works better and more efficiently. The menu is so personal. And that’s really the whole point. My dopamine menu would not and should not look like yours.
[0:24:38] PF: And once someone has that, it’s like what a relief. Because we’re often times in this state where I don’t know what to do, and we go to default. We just, “Okay, I’m going to pick up my phone and scroll.” And then we end up an hour later going that wasted time. And so this, we now have a plan for when those moments strike. I think that is so life-changing because that’s half the battle right there.
[0:25:02] Dr. SC: I love what you said, Paula, about when you use the word default, because that literally sums up my whole practice. We all have a default. Just because we default to that setting, does that mean that’s good?
[0:25:16] PF: Usually not.
[0:25:17] Dr. SC: Right?
[0:25:17] PF: Because it’s not thought-out. It’s just what we’ve done. It’s what we’ve known, and it’s not intentional.
[0:25:23] Dr. SC: And that is exactly what I do. When you’re reading the book, and I say this, and I want all your readers to hear it, you’re going to backstep. We all do. The thing is though, if you build this menu and if you have it in front of you, your chances of backstepping lesson, okay, they don’t go away, because backstepping is part of growth, but you simply will never slide down the rabbit hole. And isn’t that the whole part of growth?
We know we’re going to take steps forward and then some back. But as long as we’re making one step forward more than we’re taking back, we’re ahead of the game. It’s only when we fall back into that rabbit hole that it becomes starting again from scratch and quite defeating.
[0:26:11] PF: Yeah. And the book is so good at telling us how we can keep taking that next step and keep this going, and explain so well why it’s important, and what’s going on in our brains when we do this. You’ve given us so much information in this book. You have so much more online, but what have you seen as the biggest obstacle for people to implement your practices? And how do you help them overcome that?
[0:26:33] Dr. SC: Well, what stops them and what people reading this book are going to have to recognize is that you have to want the change more than you don’t. You have to either hate what’s happening in a part of your life so much that you’re willing to change it even when change is scary. So you’re wanting and able to do something even if you have to do it scared. And that is really what change is all about.
And the problem that I see is that our brain is so smart that it is working. It’s five steps ahead of us at any given moment. So, you have to really want change and despise what’s happening in your current life more than you are willing to actually just continue down that path. That’s the first thing is you have to want change more than you are willing to stay with complacency.
If you really have that drive and you follow my instructions in this book, and you take that deep dive – and here’s the key, you keep yourself accountable. Give your brain a chance to start to feel the dopamine in the right way. It doesn’t just happen like this, like, “Okay, we’re not getting dopamine from the bad thing. So, right away, we’re getting dopamine from the good thing that –”
[0:28:04] PF: It’s not like flipping a switch.
[0:28:06] Dr. SC: It’s not. And that is the crucial period. Crucial that you stay with it. When you feel like, “I’m done with this. This isn’t working. Nothing works. I’m useless. I’m lazy. I have ADHD. Nothing’s working.” You have to stay with it. If you stay with it, I promise you, your life will change if you really do read this book and follow through, and read it more than once. That’s why it was so important to me to do the audible.
When I was doing the audible, there were times I paused and I said, “Wow, hello Sid, you need to get back to doing this.” So, it’s not like you get to this point and you never have to look at yourself again. It’s getting yourself to such a place that a slip means nothing.
[0:28:57] PF: It’s kind of like having any kind of healthy lifestyle, whether it’s eating or exercising. You’re going to slip up, but that doesn’t mean you just crater the whole program. It means you get back up and you say, “Okay, I’m going to eat better tomorrow, or I’m going to eat better at my next meal.”
[0:29:11] Dr. SC: Exactly. And not beat yourself up, though. See, there’s people that have such a negative inner voice that it’s even harder for them. That was me. And even I was able to get myself well, and mentally sound, and healthy, and strong. And I was able to do that on myself.
You know, imagine if I had somebody I pioneered this so there was nobody. But if I had someone like me helping me, these changes would not have taken so long, and I wouldn’t have had to suffer for as long as I did. But the dopamine code is at its core about understanding how your reward system actually works. And then deliberately rebuilding your relationship with it. So motivation, focus, fulfillment, genuine happiness come back online in your brain. It’s not about quitting dopamine. It’s about working with it instead of being run by it.
[0:30:10] PF: That’s so beautifully said. And I am excited for our listeners to discover this book. We are going to give away five free copies of the book and we’ll tell them –
[0:30:18] Dr. SC: Awesome.
[0:30:19] PF: Yeah. We’ll tell them how they can do that. Sydney, as I let you go, what is it that you really, really hope every reader takes away from the dopamine code?
[0:30:28] Dr. SC: I would say that true, genuine, and enduring happiness doesn’t come from more stimulation and certainly not from more chaos in our lives. It comes from engagement. It comes from connection, gratitude. It comes from growth, a commitment to yourself. And they all have this shared purpose. And that’s the part the dopamine economy out there can’t sell you. And it’s the part that actually lasts and the part that I talk about in the book.
[0:31:03] PF: That’s fantastic. Sydney. Thank you again for your time. Our listeners are going to find out where they can find you, where they can find out more about your lab and all the other great work that you’re doing. And again, thank you for wrapping up our summer reading program.
[0:31:17] Dr. SC: It’s been so wonderful being on your show.
[0:31:24] PF: That was Dr. Sydney Ceruto talking about her book, The Dopamine Code: How to Rewire Your Brain for Happiness and Productivity. Sydney wrapped up our all-new Live Happy Summer Reading Program. And I’d like to thank each of you for your participation and for reading along. If you’d like to learn more about Sydney and her MindLAB Neuroscience center, follow her on social media or register to win one of five free copies of The Dopamine Code, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this episode.
That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Felps reminding you to make every day a happy one.
[END]
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why dopamine isn’t the “pleasure chemical” but is the “molecule of motivation” that shapes everything from restlessness to burnout.
- How modern life overstimulates your reward system, making everyday joys feel flat and pushing you toward unhealthy dopamine defaults.
- How to build your own “dopamine menu” to help you shift from cheap dopamine spikes to meaningful, sustaining rewards.
Buy your copy of The Dopamine Code: How to Rewire Your Brain for Happiness and Productivity
Visit Sydney’s website
Keep up with all our weekly reads when you download our free Summer Reading Program Tracker!
Follow Sydney on social media:
- Instagram: @mindlab_neuroscience
- Facebook: @MindLABNeuroscience
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