Dopamine plays a central role in your mental stability for a variety of reasons. It influences your emotions, motivates you to work and maintain relationships, and incentivizes you with a reward that is essentially just 'feeling good'. Having a deficiency or an excess of dopamine can wreak havoc on your mental state and reflect in your relationships and work, which is why it's important to recognize the signs of a dopamine imbalance. If you feel like you've been struggling with concentration, willpower, motivation to start new projects, or even feel like you haven't been yourself lately, you might want to see if dopamine has played a role in it.

Dopamine and Depression

When someone brings up dopamine related disorders, the first thing you might think of is depression. It's an incredibly problematic issue that is much deeper than just 'being sad'. People who have depression can have a persistent feeling of sadness, but what's much more common is a complete loss of interest in things and activities they once enjoyed. People with depression oftentimes experience cognitive symptoms like difficulty with thinking and memory problems, as well as other issues like the lack of any desire to eat and problems with sleeping.

There are many different types of depression, but that's a topic for another day. Let's take a look at some of the factors that can cause depression:

• Brain chemistry: A pathophysiological imbalance of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine can often lead to depression.
• Genetics: People who have a first-degree relatives with depression are three times as likely to develop depression than someone who doesn't.
• Stressful life events: Emotionally difficult experiences like death of a loved one, loss of an important relationship, trauma, even burnout can trigger episodes of depression.
• Medical conditions: Having a painful daily life caused by chronic diseases can often lead to depression.
• Medication: Many pharmaceutical drugs can cause depression as a side effect. Even substance use, like alcohol and recreational drugs can lead to depression. This is notably exacerbated if substances are abused during someone's formative years.

As you may have noticed, all of these factors have one thing in common- Dopamine is affected one way or another in every scenario. Let's take a deeper look into how exactly dopamine and its levels can contribute to depressive symptoms:

Anhedonia

One of the key features of depression is anhedonia. It's a reduced ability to experience pleasure, which is why it has been linked to the dysfunction of the reward system, more specifically the Dopamine system. Your body rewards you with dopamine when you perform activities like achieving a goal, eating food, and even socializing. That makes you feel good, but a person who has anhedonia has a reduced sensitivity to dopamine. This means that they'd need a far higher dose of dopamine just to feel the same sense of reward, which their body would typically be unable to provide. Because of this, activities that used to be enjoyable aren't as appealing anymore. If there's no 'feel-good' mechanism present, most people wouldn't be incentivized to perform them, which is why they tend to be socially withdrawn, eat less, and generally be disengaged.

Executive Dysfunction

Executive dysfunction is an impairment or inefficacy of the executive functions, and it's a common symptom of depression. In layman's terms, executive dysfunction simply means a condition where a person is unable to manage their own thoughts, emotions, and actions. There are three main executive functions:

• Working memory: It's memory that involves anything you are currently doing. Having a conversation with someone, taking notes of something, and even reading involves your working memory. It's a small amount of information that is held in your mind and used in the execution of cognitive tasks. This information is not stored long-term.
• Cognitive flexibility: It's your brain's ability to shift from one topic to another. The better your cognitive flexibility, the better you are at adapting to changes around you. Cognitive flexibility is linked with creative problem-solving.
• Inhibition control: Being able to manage direct your thoughts, emotions, and actions is inhibition control. It's subdivided into behavioral and interference control. Behavioral control is essentially impulse control. This helps you stop yourself from doing things you don't believe you should do. Interference control is your ability to stay focused on something without getting distracted. These distractions can be external factors or even your own thoughts, but interference control helps you focus on the task at hand.

Those were the three main executive functions, but we also have higher-level executive functions which are vital for your daily life:

• Planning: Being able to lay out a series of actions that you believe will help you achieve your goal.
• Reasoning: Being able to apply critical thinking skills. Reasoning is the main way any person can simplify complicated things for themselves, or even build on things you already know about.
• Problem-solving: Being able to resolve issues in front of you using all three main executive functions as well as planning and reasoning.

So what does executive dysfunction look like? It's quite common, and you might even recognize going through some of the symptoms at some point or the other in your life:

• Being easily distracted when you should be focused on something
• Hyper-fixating on something specific
• Inability to plan or carry out a task
• Inability to begin a task that might be difficult or is just plain uninteresting
• Problems with impulse control
• Frequently switching tasks leading to forgetfulness
• Inability to put your thoughts into words even though you understand it in your head

So how is dopamine related to executive dysfunction? All of your executive functions are controlled at the prefrontal cortex, and dopamine is the critical neurotransmitter required for its functioning. That means disruptions to dopamine levels or even dopamine receptor sensitivity in your prefrontal cortex can cause your cognitive processes controlled by this area to go haywire, leading to executive dysfunction.

Affective Flattening

One of the stereotypical symptoms people think of when you mention depression is a monotonous low mood. This reduced or even absent expression of affect is known as 'affective flattening'. Basically, someone suffering from depression would lack expression in their verbal and nonverbal behaviors. They won't smile, cry, laugh, or show any sort of emotion regardless of the situation. Another form of this blunted affect, which is a reduced emotional display as opposed to a complete lack of one. An imbalance of all three key neurotransmitters (serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine) can trigger affective flattening.

Reduced Motivation

Dopamine deficiency often leads to a lack of motivation, even to the point where you can't bring yourself to eat or get out of bed. This also happens to be an indicator of depression. You won't feel the urge to begin tasks that you need to work on because your brain's reward system isn't functioning the way it's supposed to. Even if completing tasks would net you significant real-life rewards, you wouldn't be able to bring yourself to attain that goal simply because of your lowered dopamine availability causing you not to care enough to begin.

This lack of drive can affect things like starting/completing work-related tasks, maintaining your relationships, and even taking care of yourself. Being unable to carry out these tasks can worsen your depressive state, and often put you in a loop.

Interaction With Other Neurotransmitters

Dopamine works in conjunction with the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine, among others. A dopamine imbalance causes issues with these other neurotransmitters, which will then further aggravate depression-related symptoms. Norepinephrine has influence over a person's alertness and arousal, while serotonin deals with mood stabilization. When dopaminergic function is impacted, these issues are compounded, leading to exacerbated depression symptoms.

Dopamine Deficiency Induced by Chronic Stress

Stress leads to the production of cortisol, a steroid hormone which helps regulate your body's response to aforementioned stress. It's an extremely essential hormone when it comes to dealing with acute stress periods, but the long-term presence of cortisol in your body can lead to a myriad of health issues, with one of the main ones being depression. This is why chronic stress is considered a precursor to depression. Chronic stress leads to a constant high level of cortisol, which impairs the synthesis and release of dopamine, as well as dopamine receptors having lowered sensitivity. The lowered level of dopamine impairs the reward system, which can then lead to further depressive symptoms.

Treatment of Dopamine Deficiency in Depression

There are multiple ways to correct low dopamine levels for someone with depression, but it's important to first see a psychiatrist so that you can get their informed opinion on what the best course of action would be. That being said, managing dopamine levels is easier when you're informed, so here are some of the ways you can treat dopamine deficiency:

Non-Pharmacological Methods

This is what most psychiatrists would prefer to begin your treatment with. It has no real side-effects, but it might not necessarily work for everyone. Here are the non-pharmacological approaches:

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: It helps reduce avoidance behaviors while increasing goal-directed activity, as well as encouraging you to engage in rewarding activities, which will naturally stimulate dopamine release. CBT specifically focuses on the thoughts and feelings on behavior.
• Behavioral Activation Therapy: This focuses on helping a depressed person increase activities that can reduce their depression. Essentially, deliberately engaging in certain behaviors can 'activate' a positive emotional state.
• Exercise: It has been proven that exercise can enhance dopamine receptor sensitivity, boost dopamine synthesis, and also promotes the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor which supports dopamine neurons.
• Diet and Nutrition: Dopamine production is enhanced by certain foods. Tyrosine rich foods like eggs, nuts, and cheese help massively as tyrosine is a precursor to dopamine. Foods rich in antioxidants are also recommended as it protects dopamine-producing neurons from oxidative damage. Even your gut health impacts dopamine production, which is why probiotic-foods like yogurt and fermented vegetables are recommended.
• Sleep Regulation: Sleep deprivation leads to higher cortisol levels, which in turn leads to reduced dopamine receptor sensitivity. Restoring healthy sleep patterns will help reduce cortisol levels, which will help restore dopamine sensitivity and over time, reduce depressive symptoms.

Pharmacological Methods

Treating dopamine deficiency is difficult, and oftentimes non-pharmacological methods aren't enough to restore healthy dopamine levels. Prescription medication helps deal with specific symptoms and address the root cause of the issue. There are the main groups of medication you might be prescribed to treat dopamine deficiencies in the context of depression:

• Dopamine Agonists: It works by stimulating dopamine receptors to mimic dopamine activity. It is used in combination with certain antidepressants in order to provide stronger treatment results.
• Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors: The breakdown of dopamine is prevented when using MAOI drugs by inhibiting monoamine oxidase enzymes. It's used in treatment-resistant depression.
• Atypical Antipsychotics: They work as partial dopamine receptor agonists which modulates dopamine activity in key brain regions. However, this group of medication is only used if traditional antidepressants don't bring about an adequate response in the patient.
• Norepinephrine and Dopamine Reuptake Inhibitors: This is a type of antidepressant which increases the amount of dopamine and norepinephrine in your brain. It's often prescribed to treat anhedonia, lack of motivation, and low energy, which happen to be symptoms that don't respond to serotonin-focused antidepressants.
• Stimulants: Misuse of stimulants can actually lead to dopamine imbalances and depression. However, in patients that haven't responded to other augmentation strategies, psychostimulants can improve mood, energy, and concentration.

Of course there are other medications used to treat depression, but these ones are used specifically in the context of dopamine deficiency.

Behavioral and Lifestyle Interventions

Certain lifestyles and behaviors can lead to dopamine deficiency. That's why the following methods are recommended interventions in people suffering from low dopamine levels:

• Activities centered around goals: Your brain rewards you with dopamine for progressing and achieving tasks. By setting achievable milestones, picking up new hobbies, and even learning new skills, you will be able to raise your dopamine levels.
• Meditation and mindfulness: Research has shown that meditation can help increase dopamine levels in the brain. It also helps counteract overstimulation which can harm dopamine production and levels.
• Social connection: Having a positive social interaction can stimulate dopamine release, which is why it's vital to put effort into maintaining a social circle that you can build supportive relationships with. Even going out and having positive interactions with complete strangers can help.

Dopamine's Role in Anxiety Disorders 1200

Anxiety disorders are characterized as unmanageable and significant feelings of fear and anxiety, to the point that a person's ability to function in social, occupational, and personal scenarios is significantly impacted. Dysfunction of neurotransmitters and their receptors can lead to anxiety, and there is evidence that dopamine plays an important role in the modulation of anxiety in the brain. Let's take a look at the links between dopamine and anxiety disorders:

Stress-Reward Balance

The reward system in your brain is driven by dopamine, but dopamine is also impacted by stress. Stress leads to the production of cortisol. In cases of acute stress, cortisol is quite helpful. It helps you focus, contributes to increased energy, lower fatigue, and generally helps push you in the direction you need to move in order to complete the task that is stressing you out. However, the long-term presence of cortisol in the body is detrimental to maintaining healthy dopamine levels. As we all know, anyone with an anxiety disorder is often stressed out when they come across a variety of different scenarios. It ends up leading to this:

• Stress-Induced Dopamine Dysfunction: Due to chronic stress, a person will have high levels of cortisol present in their body over a long period of time. In turn, these high cortisol levels decrease dopamine levels, especially in the reward-related pathways like the mesolimbic system. Without a working reward system, a person is more likely to feel a lack of motivation and pleasure, a common feature in anxiety disorders. As time goes on, the lack of dopamine causes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The patient isn't motivated to do anything because the reward system doesn't function, which was initially caused by high cortisol levels. However, the stress of deadlines and inability to do any tasks that previously contributed to their wellbeing leads to more stress, which in turn produces more cortisol.
• High Dopamine Stress Responses: In contrast, acute stress can cause spikes in dopamine levels. Sudden spikes of dopamine can increase alertness and trigger fear responses. For a person suffering from anxiety, acute stress situations can be triggered at any given moment. This hyperactivity in the amygdala, where stress-related responses are controlled, can contribute to hypervigilance and heightened anxiety. The patient feels as if they should be on guard for something, even though they logically can't see anything to trigger such a response.

Fear-Related Brain Circuits

Anxiety is based around perceived threats. It's an evolutionary characteristic that has helped humans survive for millennia. However, anxiety disorders occur when a person's brain perceives threats in situations where there are none. Their fear-related brain circuits are pumped in overdrive, sending fight-or-flight hormones into their bodies. Let's take a look at how key brain regions which process fear and anxiety are impacted by dopamine in anxiety disorders:

• Amygdala: The amygdala mainly controls fear, and is essential to humanity's survival over the centuries. It processes what see and hear and uses this input to learn what's dangerous. In anxiety disorders, the D1 and D2 dopamine receptors can be overactivated, which leads to an exaggerated fear response. That means a person suffering from anxiety may feel a disproportionate amount of fear for the situation they're in. Increased dopamine levels can also enhance fear learning in the amygdala, which in turn leads to heightened anxiety.
• Prefrontal Cortex: The prefrontal cortex controls emotional responses, and it also deals with fear extinction. That's the act of reducing learned fear. The difference between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex is that while the amygdala can learn what to be fearful of, the prefrontal cortex decides how to express that fear. In a healthy human brain, dopamine signaling in the prefrontal cortex helps dole out rational fear responses, while also suppressing overactive ones. In anxiety, there can be dopamine deficits in the prefrontal cortex, which leads to impaired fear response regulation. That's what causes overactive fear responses in anxiety.

Motivation in Anxiety Disorder

One of the key features of anxiety disorders is avoidance behaviors revolving around perceived threats or stressful situations. If something causes a person with anxiety disorder an unbearable amount of anxiety and stress, the easiest thing to do is avoid it. Dopamine and its reward pathways are what usually counteract avoidance behaviors, but people with anxiety disorders have atypical responses to dopamine in potentially high-stress scenarios:

• Patients with low dopamine levels in their mesolimbic pathways have reduced motivation to seek rewards or approach challenges. As such, these patients will tend to avoid any situation that can cause discomfort, perpetuating anxiety. Exposure therapy often puts patients with anxiety disorders in stressful scenarios just so they can see that it isn't as bad as their brain makes it out to be, and with time, their anxiety levels are reduced.
• Patients with high dopamine levels in the fear centers like the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex enhance fear-driven motivation. This can lead to compulsive behaviors or hypervigilance, which has been noted in obsessive compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder.

Balancing Dopamine To Reduce Anxiety Symptoms

Both low and high dopamine levels can trigger symptoms of anxiety. In a person already diagnosed with anxiety, dopamine fluctuations can aggravate anxiety symptoms. There are multiple ways to try and balance dopamine levels to reduce anxiety symptoms:

Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: It focuses on teaching the patient strategies to manage stress and reduce their fear responses. With application, this gives dopamine signaling in the fear-processing circuits a chance to normalize.
• Exposure Therapy: This form of therapy is centralized around the belief of desensitizing the brain to feared stimuli. You're rewiring your amygdala to not fear normal stimuli, which over time will reduce dopamine hyperactivity in that region.
• Reward-Based Therapy: Reinforcing positive behaviors will stimulate the brain's reward system, which will help counteract avoidance behaviors and anhedonia.

Lifestyle Modifications

• Limit Stimulants: Stimulants like caffeine and certain recreational drugs can overstimulate your dopamine receptors, which will exacerbate anxiety symptoms.
• Sleep Hygiene: Irregular sleep schedules and sleep deprivation can disrupt dopamine production. By maintaining a consistent, healthy sleep pattern, you will be able to better support normalized dopamine levels.
• Social Interaction: Positive social interactions is one of the many ways you can increase dopamine release. For a person with an anxiety disorder, social interaction can be fear-inducing. It is important to attempt it regardless, in combination with therapy.
• Exercise: Even the slightest bouts of physical activity can help ease anxiety and regulate emotions. Exercising can boost dopamine levels, enhance dopamine signaling, and have positive cumulative effects on dopamine levels in the long term.
• Nutrition and Diet: Tyrosine rich foods as well as foods containing antioxidants, probiotics, and Omega-3 fatty acids can all support dopamine balance normalization, which in turn will reduce symptoms of anxiety.
• Stress Management Techniques: Activities like meditation, deep breathing exercises, and yoga have shown to reduce high dopamine levels and anxiety symptoms.

Pharmacological Approach

• Dopamine Agonists: They stimulate dopamine receptors, which enhances dopamine signaling. By doing so, the patient's reward system becomes functional once again, which fixes any motivational deficits they had before. It also improves emotional regulation in treatment-resistant anxiety.
• Dopamine Modulators: It adjusts the dopamine activity without overstimulating the dopamine receptors. This class of drugs reduces the overactivation of fear circuits in the amygdala and balances emotional responses from the prefrontal cortex.
• Dopamine Reuptake Inhibitors: By preventing the reabsorption of dopamine into the neurons, there's more dopamine available in the synaptic cleft. This boosts the patient's resilience to stress, improves their mood, and reduces anhedonia.
• Serotonin-Dopamine Activity Modulators: This class of medication balances both dopamine and serotonin to help reduce symptoms of anxiety.

ADHD and Dopamine Deficiency

ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is a neurodevelopmental disorder which is characterized by executive dysfunction as well as symptoms like inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and emotional dysregulation. Dopamine is a key regulator of attention, focus, and motivation. So, low dopamine and ADHD are linked. Typically, people with ADHD have lower than average dopamine levels, which means dopamine-increasing behaviors are even more appealing to people with ADHD. This is why they tend to chase pleasurable reinforcement even if the time taken and consequences of their actions can't justify it. Their brains are starved for dopamine, so they keep on seeking out high-stimulation activities to trigger a release of this chemical messenger.

Dopamine's role in ADHD is much more complex, so let's try and gain an understanding of how dopamine affects attention and focus. We'll talk about how you would function with normal dopamine levels, and contrast it with what a person with dopamine levels typical for ADHD would function as:

Prioritizing Tasks

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder manifests in being unable to identify and focus on a relevant task while ignoring any distractions. As we've noted that ADHD tends to correlate with low dopamine, here's the role that dopamine plays in prioritizing tasks:

Focusing of relevant material

Dopamine is what helps you bring important tasks front and center of your attention while ignoring anything in the background. This mainly occurs in the prefrontal cortex, and allows you to plan out clear, task-relevant information. When a person has low dopamine levels, task-irrelevant information can feel prominent, which leads them to being easily distracted. This is one of the most prominent ADHD symptoms.

Enabling focus shifts

Being able to shift your focus between tasks while still being able to maintain concentration on your primary goal is because of dopamine. For a person with ADHD, their low dopamine levels causes them to have inflexible attention. This means they'll either have difficulty shifting focus, or have the inability to stay focused.

Dopamine-Reward Focused Attention

Dopamine is a main part of the brain's reward system. Attention and focus are tied into the reward system as well. In a neurotypical person, attention is incentivized through the rewards system. The mesolimbic pathway in the brain mediates reward-seeking behavior, doling out dopamine boosts when achieving goals. This anticipated reward helps people stay focused on the task at hand.

A person suffering from ADHD would have an underactive reward system. That means that any task that has delayed or intangible rewards, such as work projects, classwork, menial chores at home, and so on would not be motivating to do. This is why people with ADHD tend to procrastinate on tasks such as those. The low dopamine levels can also cause reward deficiency syndrome in people with ADHD, which means even typically rewarding tasks wouldn't have the same appeal to them as it would for a neurotypical person.

Cognitive Control and Working Memory

That small bit of information that you retain temporarily to carry out cognitive tasks is known as working memory. Cognitive control is the ability to flexibly adjust and regulate habitual actions or behaviors. The prefrontal cortex controls both of these executive functions, and it relies on dopamine to maintain it. Dopamine ensures that the prefrontal cortex has stabilized neural networks which can store working memory. Without this, you wouldn't be able to remember instructions or organize tasks, a critical aspect of goal-directed behavior.

In ADHD, dopamine deficiency in the prefrontal cortex causes a lowered capacity to maintain relevant working memory. This leads to a disorganized life, forgetfulness, and substantial difficulty in completing complex tasks.

Sustaining Attention Over Time

Many tasks become repetitive or uninteresting with time, but neurotypical people are still able to sustain their attention thanks to dopamine. It prevents mental fatigue by involving neural pathways that are associated with motivation and engagement. Combined with the reward system, you're able to see boring tasks to the finish line.

However, with insufficient dopamine in ADHD, these neural pathways are unable to stay nearly as active. This causes frequent shifts in focus, restlessness, and disengagement.

Task Switching

Task switching is a function of cognitive flexibility. It's the ability to shift your attention, focus, and effort from one task to another, while still being able to track your goals. This function is essential in dynamic environments. This can be as simple as helping your coworker with a task, and your boss asks you to do something else. You need to be able to switch tasks immediately without forgetting about what you need to do for your coworker later on. In a neurotypical person, dopamine maintains cognitive flexibility.

For a person with ADHD, dopamine dysfunction makes them suffer from reduced adaptability. They find it difficult to transition to new tasks, and oftentimes fixate on irrelevant information from previous tasks even if they do move on to the new issue.

Emotional Regulation

Your emotional state has a large impact on your attention and focus. Dopamine helps modulate emotional responses, allowing you to maintain a calm and focused mental state. This helps you maintain your attention, and prevents anxiety or frustration from getting in the way of your cognitive functions.

Someone with ADHD is more likely to be emotionally volatile because of their low dopamine levels. This can then lead to disrupted focus due to annoyance, boredom, or even stress.

Treatment Methods For Boosting Dopamine in ADHD

Since ADHD manifests with low dopamine levels, the typical form of treatment involves attempting to increase dopamine presence in your brain. It's done in the following ways:

Behavioral Therapies

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: CBT is one of the most effective forms of therapy for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ADHD. It focuses on helping you build a routine, manage your distractions, and set rewards for yourself for completing tasks. This will then indirectly increase dopamine through positive reinforcement.
• Reward-Based Therapy: This form of therapy is based around creating a system of immediate rewards for completing small tasks. The goal is to trigger dopamine release and motivate the individual, and slowly wean them off so that they only need their own inbuilt reward system to get the motivation to carry out tasks.

Lifestyle Changes

• Exercise: Being physically active is a great way to manage ADHD symptoms. Regular exercise increases dopamine release and receptor sensitivity, and it boosts overall brain function as well as reduces ADHD-related restlessness.
• Sleep: Poor sleep quality is a factor in dopamine deficiency, which then leads to exacerbated ADHD symptoms. Setting up a healthy sleep schedule will boost dopamine levels and help control any ADHD symptoms present.
• Diet: Dopamine production can be enhanced by incorporating foods rich in tyrosine, omega-3 fatty acids, and antioxidants into your diet.
• Stress Management Techniques: Yoga helps reduce hyperactivity and impulsivity, while meditation enhances attention regulation. Both of these techniques, as well as deep breathing exercises, are known to boost dopamine production.

Stimulant Medications

These are the most common types of medications prescribed for ADHD. They directly targe the dopamine system, almost instantly improving focus, attention, and impulse control. They're affective in the vast majority of individuals with ADHD. These medications increase the level of dopamine in your synapses by preventing their reuptake, and also promote the release of stored dopamine.

Non-Stimulant Medications

For the minority of individuals with ADHD who don't benefit from stimulant medication, non-stimulants are an alternative. These medications work by enhancing norepinephrine, which indirectly stabilizes dopamine activity. Non-stimulants are far less potent than stimulants, but they are still effective.

Treatment Options for Dopamine-Related Conditions

Dopamine imbalances end up reflecting in a vast variety of conditions. It affects your relationships, your will to function as a productive member of society, and can even lead to diagnoses like depression, ADHD, and anxiety disorders. Through this article, we've explored the many dopamine treatment options, so this time we'll sum up:

Always begin with lifestyle changes. More often than not, dopamine imbalances stem from a poor sleep cycle, a bad work environment, or constant stress. Fixing these situations can bring about positive change. That said, sometimes the issue isn't so easily resolved. The next step is to attempt therapy. Your therapist can give you deeper insight on things like executive dysfunction, why you seem easily distracted, and anything else. If they feel your problem is more serious and that therapy alone won't help you, they'll refer you to a psychiatrist.

Medication is always the last choice, and beginning medication doesn't mean you should give up on all the other treatment options. For the best results, you must continue therapy and apply positive lifestyle changes along with your medication. Remember that medication can cause many side effects, and you have no reason to feel shy about discussing it with your psychiatrist. Giving them clear insight about your worries and medical condition will help them figure out what the best medication for you might be.

Conclusion

Through this vast article, we've explored how dopamine deficiency and even excess can contribute to many mental health issues. Dopamine works in conjunction with other neurotransmitters to help you be a functional member of society. From being able to focus on tasks and see them through, to being able to regulate your emotions, this feel-good chemical is vital for your day-to-day life. That's why if you feel like you're suffering from a dopamine imbalance, do not hesitate to reach out to your medical provider. This is your first step to a better tomorrow, and now you have everything you need to know to stay informed. Good luck!

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