Thread by @dustychipura

there's a lot of big talk about dopamine and ADHD, especially on TikTok. I wanna talk about some of the common misconceptions that I see about the role of dopamine in #ADHD - WITH THE CAVEAT THAT - I am not a scientist or a doctor, so if I get things wrong, someone plz correct me

First off, let's start out with what dopamine is. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter or "chemical messenger", one of several implicated in ADHD. It's associated with a feeling of anticipation of pleasure or reward. It does various things in the role of movement, learning etc

Here are some common misconceptions or not-quite-right things I've heard on ND tiktok and twitter about dopamine:

#1. Anything that feels good is because of dopamine and dopamine causes things that feel good

The role that dopamine plays in pleasure and how things feel good is a lot more complex than simply "things that feel good = dopamine in the brain".

I saw a coach on twitter saying that skin picking causes dopamine in the brain and that's why we do it, but I couldn't find a single article verifying this. I can see how it would *seem* to make sense because anticipation of a reward/thinking about the skin being picked etc, but

I think it's kind of intense to make that claim if the science isn't there to back it up. There could be a lot of reasons that people with ADHD excoriate (skin-pick, or hair-pull), but I don't know of any decisive literature about why. It's enough to know that many of us do it.

#2. People with ADHD are "dopamine deficient".

I 100% am guilty of promoting this idea, and a lot of the articles out there on the internet seem to reinforce this idea, but I think it's important to understand that it's more complex than that. From what I understand

(and again, brain scientists who know their shit are welcome to correct me, amateur researchers not so much since I'm also an amateur researcher), we think that people with ADHD have faster reuptake or more dopamine transporters. So, it's not that we don't HAVE dopamine

its that our dopamine gets used up faster, sort of like "poor gas mileage". the # of dopamine transporters is higher. So to really split hairs, we don't get to really USE our dopamine because it's removed so quickly, but people with ADHD don't actually *manufacture* less dopamine

which means we actually need more than other people, not that we have less than other people.

At the end of the day, we can agree that a dopamine level issue is at play with ADHD, but to oversimply it is a bit ethically ambiguous I think, because it leads to stuff like....

#3 You can "eat" for dopamine

This one pisses me off because I think there are some really insidious connections between the supplements and "natural health" industries, being anti-medication, and diet culture. Usually when people are really interested in "eating for dopamine"

its a slippery slope into being anti-pharmaceuticals, and I find that the mindset is often correlated with a lot of shame and blame around lifestyle choices (which aren't actually simple 'choices' when you have ADHD). Like, putting the onus on someone to 'eat better'

'eat healthier', 'exercise more', 'journal more', 'meditate more'.

Like OK yes all of those things will absolutely help with ADHD management and mental health in general. AND... if they were so easy to "just do", we would be doing them already!!!

we can do things like eat in a more organized fashion, exercise, meditate etc but there needs to be a nuanced view around how much more challenging these things are with ADHD.

anyway, that was a little tangent but I see a lot of these same mindsets from people really obsessed with the idea that they can "eat away" their ADHD or manage it through diet alone. So, the myth here is that you directly influence your ADHD through the TYPES of food you eat.

WE DO NOT HAVE RESEARCH OR LITERATURE TO SHOW THAT A FOOD YOU EAT HAS A DIRECT IMPACT ON YOUR LEVELS OF DOPAMINE!!!! (except maybe velvet beans, there's some interest research on that one but too early to say definitively)

we know what foods are the "building blocks" of dopamine

but to my knowledge it's not conclusive that eating more of these foods = having more dopamine, again - things in the brain are endlessly more complex than that. Your brain is an organ and will benefit from a range of healthy foods.

but trying to select for certain *specific* healthy foods is kind of a crapshoot. Like, yes, eat more protein and fats. But no, there's no one or two magic foods or supplements. In fact, many studies show that a popular supplement for ADHD, L-tyrosine, has NOT been conclusively

shown to do much for ADHD symptoms. If you find it helps you and works for you.. awesome! We will likely never know if that's due to the placebo effect (which is real) or anything scientific in the near future. But people pedalling L-tyrosine like it's a "natural alternative"

to ADHD or telling people to "eat for dopamine" is pseudoscience.

ANYWAY - long story short... yes, dopamine levels play a role in your ADHD symptoms. It's a lot more complex than boiling it down to a dopamine deficiency though, and as a coach, I want to make sure I'm conveying that nuance to my clients and not being overly reductive

which i TOTALLY HAVE BEEN GUILTY OF in the past, because this stuff IS hard to put into a nutshell.. which is WHY WE ARENT SCIENTISTS!

at the end of the day, we can know that we have symptoms and we can know what kinds of things help those symptoms without needing

a SUPER SPECIFIC scientific explanation, because often doctors and scientists don't even have those! What will work in the treatment and management of symptoms is different for everyone and is going to be inextricably linked to your experiences, lifestyle, culture, physiology.