Avoid burnout by refilling the dopamine well, a complete guide to essential amino acids, and life is a single player game.

As I balance a very demanding schedule, everything you are about to read is all research and principles I’ve made a more concerted effort to apply in my life over the last year. 

At a time where I’m usually working 7 days a week most weeks (and loving every minute of it), as an entrepreneur running a business that has entered a high growth phase, I’ve learned more about dopamine, and how a hard charging life and schedule has a definite tendency to deplete the proverbial dopamine well. 

It is this continual depletion of the dopamine well that leads to burnout, which is definitely not my goal, and I’m sure it’s the last thing many of you reading this want as well. 

So how do you live a busy, hard charging life, but continually ensure that your “well of dopamine” (which fuels that life) continues to refill so that it doesn’t lead to burnout?

That’s exactly what I’ve been working so hard at understanding and applying in the last year, which I’ve been able to do with growing success, and I’m going to share my research and thoughts with you on this. 

Ultimately, take it for what it’s worth to you, however, the following which you are about to read is based on research, and I am writing to you from a place of personal experience, and application. 

What is dopamine?

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter made in the brain. It plays a role as a “rewards center” and in many bodily functions, including memory, movement, motivation, mood, attention, and more. 

I’m going to to explain how dopamine works in the brain, how it can affect motivation positively and/or negatively, and how you, through better understanding of this endogenous neurotransmitter, can harness it to achieve healthier, longer term goals, and maintain more motivation and drive on a day to day basis. 

Think of dopamine pulses like a wave pool...



Dopamine is released in the brain in anticipation of a reward. It comes in peaks, and also in troughs. 

Think of it like a wave pool.

If you get a moderate pulse, or wave, of dopamine, the wave will crash in the “wave pool”, and the pool level will return to normal, or baseline in the case of your dopamine reserves. 

Now, if the waves keep coming and coming, some of them being very large, water will spill and splash out of the pool, and when the pool returns to normal, its water levels will be lower than baseline. 

This would be a trough, and this is what we ultimately want to avoid. 

When and Why Do We Pulse Dopamine 

As mentioned above, we pulse dopamine in anticipation of a reward. 

Let’s say you’re going to eat at one of your favorite restaurants, and you’re hungry. After you place your order for a dish you’ve had before, and know you like, (and remember, you’re hungry!) the anticipation builds, and dopamine is released. 

Let’s say you get the dish, and it doesn’t absolutely blow you away, but it’s as good as you remember it; there’s then another pulse of dopamine, and thus, your anticipation is essentially rewarded. Most likely, this isn’t such an intense set of waves in the dopamine wave pool that when your dopamine comes back down, it will return to baseline. 

Important to note, is that there is a gap between the initial pulse of dopamine in anticipation, and the dopamine pulse in response to the reward. We’ll call this the duration between desire and effect. More on this later. 

Let’s now use an example of someone using and abusing cocaine. Upon first use, it pulses a release of dopamine that skyrockets the user’s dopamine levels, which then causes a very sharp crash in the wave pool. 

So the individual takes another hit of cocaine, once again skyrocketing their dopamine, only to have yet another sharp crash in the dopamine wave pool. You can see how this repeated use can very quickly deplete your dopamine reserves, leaving the individual well below baseline. 

If these analogies are making some sense to you, you have a solid enough understanding of how dopamine works in the body, and it will make sense how this can be applied to understanding and maintaining motivation, and achieving healthier, longer term goals.

Dopamine and Motivation 

Let’s now apply what we’ve learned about dopamine, and when and why your body pulses it, to our everyday lives, so we can better leverage dopamine to help us maintain drive and motivation, resulting in us being better versions of ourselves, and to those around us. 

If you think about what burnout feels like, it’s an overall sense of exhaustion, a feeling of being depleted, and definitely lacking any motivation. 

Picture yourself getting excited about setting a goal. Let’s choose something that requires some dedication to health and fitness, like losing 10-20lbs, or running a marathon in the next year after barely running more than a mile in the last year, or competing in a tough obstacle course race.

And of course, this is on top of an already inundated, busy life. 

Upon the most initial of inspiration, and commitment to your goal, you get a “wave” of dopamine. 

But, unlike that quick reward you got when you went out to dinner and your meal was as good as you had hoped and expected, your big reward at the end is far off. 

Now, let’s also say that on a day-to-day basis, you’re working long hours on your career or business, maybe also balancing a busier and busier family life, and maybe some other factors, all while also trying to achieve your aforementioned long term health & fitness goal.

There are two issues here with respect to drive and motivation, and their relationship to dopamine. 

1. Your long term health & fitness goal has a big gap in the duration of desire and effect, meaning, there is no immediate reward after the initial wave of dopamine, making it easy to lose motivation.
2. Your daily life is very demanding of your dopamine reserves, making it difficult to keep them higher, and replenished day after day. 

Dopamine is your “rewards center”, and the release of it keeps you moving, and keeps you motivated. So, the key to motivation is to ensure you’re getting wins (rewards) along the way with your long term goal, to keep yourself motivated, and to ensure you’re doing the necessary things to keep your reserves high and replenished on a day-to-day basis. 

Ensuring You Are Replenishing the Dopamine Well

Here are some tips and things to be cognizant of, to keep replenishing those dopamine reserves:

1. Quality sleep. This may seem obvious, but it’s important to be cognizant of the fact that like so many other things in our body, we replenish our dopamine reserves while sleeping. As I’ve mentioned before, quality sleep matters, meaning as much time in Deep and REM cycles is key to restorative sleep. 
2. Be cognizant of over-stimulation. This can include stacking multiple stimulants on top of each other, combining lots of stimulating (dopamine inducing) activity, and so on. This is where self awareness comes into play. The ability to recognize that you may be taxing your dopamine reserves more than usual, or more than you should, is critical in keeping them high. If you recognize this, you can take extra measures to do what you can to replenish them (like utilizing these tactics). Furthermore, it’s also important to know that a natural byproduct of dipping deeper into the dopamine reserves is that you may not have enough for a day or two, and may lack some “get up and go” in your step, and that’s normal. The key to these days is to recognize this, and not try to force motivation through continued over stimulation. This will only compound the lack of motivation over time, and is what leads to “burnout”. 
3. Natural light exposure in the AM. Dopamine is an endogenous neurotransmitter, and all endogenous (produced within the body) chemicals and hormones work on a Circadian Rhythm. Your Circadian Rhythm is a 24 hour internal clock that your microbiome, organs (including your brain), I mean, pretty much everything, runs on. After a quality night’s sleep, the most important thing you can do to properly set your Circadian Rhythm, is to get your butt outside and get as much natural light exposure as possible. Go for a walk ideally. Make a habit of this, as soon as possible after you wake. However, a good goal is 30 total minutes of natural light exposure before noon. On super sunny days, it does require a bit less time, if it’s sunny, and you are short on time. 
4. Exercise regularly. As mentioned above, exercise is a positive reward system, as it’s healthy for you and you feel good after you do it, even if you don’t want to prior to doing it. Consistent exercise induces a positive, healthy, signal/cue cycle in your brain, and over time, will actually help increase your baseline levels of dopamine. 

Non Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR) or Yoga Nidra. This is probably your best “hack” for dopamine from a biohacking perspective, if you want to take control and actively replenish dopamine reserves in relatively short order. NSDR is a practice that isn’t quite meditation, and isn’t quite breathwork, and is unique to itself. In an NSDR session, you will enter an Alpha brain wave state. This is a state where your conscious and subconscious connect, and is a state in between awake and sleeping. In this state, serotonin is released, and dopamine levels are actively replenished. 30-60 minutes of NSDR is ideal for a demanding lifestyle, however, along with a demanding lifestyle,is less and less free time. Research has shown that as little as 10 minutes of NSDR can have dramatic effects on replenishing dopamine. Making a habit of carving out 10 minutes a day for NSDR can have profound long term benefits in avoiding burnout, and keeping drive and motivation high on a daily basis. Here’s a 10 minute NADR script I use from Dr. Andrew Huberman. Any YouTube search of NADR, or search of “Yoga Nidra” in your App Store, will yield plenty of results.

A peer review by the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) titled, International Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: Effects of essential amino acid supplementation on exercise and performance, presents an official, and collective stance on the benefits of EAAs after a critical review of the literature surrounding EAA supplementation. 

I found this paper’s findings to be really useful, as it’s not a cherry-picked study on EAAs meant to confirm one bias or another, but rather, a review of all the available literature and research (which is typically the type of research papers I rely upon) done on EAAs.

From this review of the available literature, the highly accredited ISSN presented 10 separate statements on the benefits of EAAs.

Before we dive into their official stance on EAAs, let’s do a quick rundown on EAAs and why they might be important.

Essential Amino Acids 101

Essential amino acids are the king molecules of your body's building blocks – they're absolutely crucial for good health, but unlike non-essential amino acids which your body can synthesize on its own, you must get essential amino acids from your diet and supplementation. 

Of the 20 amino acids needed for muscle protein synthesis (MPS) and other vital functions, 9 are considered essential for humans. With the consumption of these 9 essential amino acids that you must get through diet and supplementation, your body can then synthesize all other necessary amino acids for muscle protein synthesis.

The 9 essential amino acids are: 

• Histidine: Plays a role in growth, blood cell production, and tissue repair.
• Isoleucine: Supports muscle growth, wound healing, immunity, and blood sugar regulation.
• Leucine: Essential for energy production, muscle growth and repair, and hormone regulation.
• Lysine: Crucial for building muscle, bone health, hormone production, and recovery from injury.
• Methionine: Needed for protein synthesis, detoxification, and antioxidant function.
• Phenylalanine: Precursor to the neurotransmitter dopamine (wink wink), involved in mood, memory, and pain perception.
• Threonine: Important for healthy skin and teeth, collagen production, and immune function.
• Tryptophan: Precursor to the neurotransmitter serotonin, critical for mood, sleep, and appetite regulation.
• Valine: Supports muscle growth, energy production, and mental focus.

You can see all the critical roles EAAs play in the body, but it goes beyond muscle protein synthesis, as they help form your neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, etc, and are also used in peptide formation, many of which play critical anti-aging, healing, and disease preventive roles in the body. 
Now, let’s dive into the official positions on EAAs from the ISSN. I’ll add some further context to certain points when necessary:

1. Initial studies on EAAs’ effects on skeletal muscle highlight their primary role in stimulating muscle protein synthesis (MPS) and turnover. Protein turnover is critical for replacing degraded or damaged muscle proteins, laying the metabolic foundation for enhanced functional performance. 

Protein turnover in your muscle tissue is critical to avoid wasting or atrophy. Growing research is showing that EAA supplementation, even in the absence of muscle stimulation from exercise, can lead to protein turnover and the avoidance of muscle wasting. 

2. Supplementation with free-form EAAs leads to a quick rise in peripheral EAA concentrations, which in turn stimulates MPS. 

3. The safe upper limit of EAA intake (amount), without inborn metabolic disease, can easily accommodate additional supplementation. 

Essentially, even if consuming a diet rich in protein, additional EAA supplementation will still yield distinct benefits, and not overload the body with amino acids. I consume about 250-300g of protein per day, and also consume 20-30g additionally of EAAs. That said, if your diet is not rich in protein, or is plant based and thus naturally low in EAAs, there should be an even greater emphasis on EAA supplementation. 

4. At rest, stimulation of MPS occurs at relatively small dosages (1.5–3.0 g) and seems to plateau at around 15–18 g. 

If at rest and/or not exercising, you can stimulate muscle protein synthesis with only 1.5-3g of EAAs, and the research shows the rate of MPS increases with additional supplementation up to around 15-18g. 

5. The MPS stimulation by EAAs does not require non-essential amino acids. 

6. Free-form EAA ingestion stimulates MPS more than an equivalent amount of intact protein. 

This is the core reason I ingest a good amount of free form EAAs on top of aiming for 1g protein intake per 1lb of body weight. Furthermore, as mentioned above, EAAs play a critical role in neurotransmitter and peptide formation. 

7. Repeated EAA-induced MPS stimulation throughout the day does not diminish the anabolic effect of meal intake. 

Again, EAA consumption on top of normal protein intake does not take away from the protein synthesis from your meals, and vice versa, your meals do not take away from the additional muscle protein synthesis from EAA ingestion. 

8. Although direct comparisons of various formulas have yet to be investigated, aging requires a greater proportion of leucine to overcome the reduced muscle sensitivity known as “anabolic resistance.” 

Leucine is the most anabolic of all essential amino acids, meaning it induces muscle protein synthesis more effectively than any other amino acid. As you age, muscle has a tendency to deteriorate, so the need for additional Leucine (thus EAAs) actually increases with age to offset the propensity towards muscle loss. 

9. Without exercise, EAA supplementation can enhance functional outcomes in anabolic-resistant populations. 

As you age and become more anabolic resistant, and move less, and even if physically unable to exercise at all, supplementing with EAAs can still help stimulate muscle protein synthesis and protein turnover. 

10. EAA requirements rise in the face of caloric deficits. During caloric deficit, it’s essential to meet whole-body EAA requirements to preserve anabolic sensitivity in skeletal muscle.

EAAs can be very useful when dieting or running in a caloric deficit to help stave off muscle loss while trying to reduce body fat, and can help fuel and stimulate energy, and reduce appetite while in a caloric deficit. 

Who should supplement with EAAs?

✔️ Anyone trying to improve athletic or exercise performance and enhance recovery. 

✔️ Anyone who consumes a low protein diet

✔️ Anyone on a plant based diet (most EAA supplements are vegan approved)

✔️ Anyone who is older and susceptible to sarcopenia (age related muscle loss)

✔️ Those dieting, fasting, and/or running on a caloric deficit

I will consume EAAs 2-3 times per day. 

I will consume them upon waking with some spring water, trace ocean minerals, and vitamin c powder even if I do not exercise shortly after waking, as I then stay in a fasted state usually until 12 pm, and the EAAs help fuel my body and avoid muscle loss while staying in a fasted state. 

I then also consume 5-10g of EAAs before my workout, and another 10g throughout my workout. 

If in a big caloric deficit for the day, or in need of additional recovery from exercise, I will also consume 5g before bed from time to time. 

I use the Thorne Amino Complex which is vegan approved, uses all natural flavors, and contains the 9 essential amino acids in their perfect ratios for 99% bioavailability within the body.

Life is a single player game.

Let’s do a quick thought experiment together…

Think of something about yourself that you hold dear. 

I’ll use being a parent as our example, but if you’re not a parent, insert something else that’s personal about yourself that you hold dear. 

Would you rather be known as the best parent in the world inside your own household, but for whatever reason, the rest of the world knew you as the worst parent in the world?

Or…

Would you rather be known to the rest of the world as the best parent, but inside your own household, were actually the worst parent?

Your answer to this will tell you if you’re playing a single or a multiplayer game in life. 

The rub is, life is a single player game. 

When playing a single player game, your scorecard for life is internal. 

When playing a multiplayer game, your scorecard is social. 

The internal scorecard is the one that matters, and playing along with that scorecard will lead to more happiness. 

As long as your children and spouse know you as the best parent in the world, even if the rest of the world thinks the opposite, it doesn’t matter. 

Comparing yourself to others, envy, even jealousy, are all part of the multiplayer game, and score is kept there on the social scorecard. 

Strive to be a happier, healthier, better version of you, however, only because you’re keeping track on that internal scorecard.