Dopamine Reset? Look at Your Sleep Before Your Phone
When scientists scanned healthy men after one night without sleep, fewer of their dopamine receptors were free to work.
As a neurosurgeon, I get asked all the time about resetting your dopamine. The idea is that your receptors get worn down, and that’s why everything kind of feels flat.
Most people expect me to say put your phone down. I’d look at your sleep first, and by the end you’ll know one small thing to notice after your next short night.
So what does one bad night do?
Dopamine is a messenger, and receptors are the receivers that pick up its signal. Scientists can count the free ones in a living brain, using a faint tracer that sticks to them.
A team in New York scanned healthy men twice, after a normal night and after a night awake. The second time, about 5 percent fewer receptors were free to work in a reward area deep in the brain. The bigger the dip, the sleepier and less alert the men tended to feel.
A scan like that can be read two ways, because the tracer and dopamine compete for the same spots. A low reading might mean fewer free receptors, or it might mean extra dopamine was crowding the tracer out.
Wait, isn’t that just more dopamine?
That’s exactly what the same team thought after an earlier study, so they set out to test whether a sleepless night makes the brain release extra dopamine.
They gave the men a drug that raises dopamine, purely as a research tool, once rested and once after a night awake. If a tired brain were already making extra, the drug’s boost should have looked bigger, but it looked about the same. I like that they checked their own idea and changed their minds.
So the signal itself looked normal, and fewer receptors were free to catch it. Some may have been pulled inside the cells for a while, where dopamine can’t reach them. Nobody has yet scanned people after they catch up on sleep, so I can’t tell you whether sleeping in brings them back.
What about my phone?
A lot of people blame social media, sugar and screens for that flat feeling. So far, no scan study has shown phones or sugar do this to healthy people, but the scans of lost sleep did show it.
Researchers at Berkeley used scans that track blood flow, which can’t see dopamine itself. After a lost night, people’s reward network reacted more strongly, and junk food looked more tempting. That may be part of why a short night leaves you reaching for something sweet.
You may have read that staying up all night can lift your mood. In some people with depression it does, for a short while. Skipping sleep to feel better is a treatment doctors run for depression, under close watch, so please don’t try it at home.
- A night without sleep The men in the study stayed awake all night.
- Fewer receptors free to work Dopamine has fewer places to land in a reward area deep in the brain.
- Sleepier and less alert A bigger dip went with feeling sleepier.
- Look after your sleep first Then decide whether your phone needs a break too.
The next time someone asks me how to reset their dopamine, my first question back will be how they slept.
References
- Volkow ND, Tomasi D, Wang GJ, et al. Evidence that sleep deprivation downregulates dopamine D2R in ventral striatum in the human brain. J Neurosci, 2012;32(19):6711-7
- Volkow ND, Wang GJ, Telang F, et al. Sleep deprivation decreases binding of [11C]raclopride to dopamine D2/D3 receptors in the human brain. J Neurosci, 2008;28(34):8454-61
- Gujar N, Yoo SS, Hu P, Walker MP. Sleep deprivation amplifies reactivity of brain reward networks, biasing the appraisal of positive emotional experiences. J Neurosci, 2011;31(12):4466-74
- Greer SM, Goldstein AN, Walker MP. The impact of sleep deprivation on food desire in the human brain. Nat Commun, 2013;4:2259
- Boland EM, Rao H, Dinges DF, et al. Meta-analysis of the antidepressant effects of acute sleep deprivation. J Clin Psychiatry, 2017;78(8):e1020-e1034
Figure. Dopamine pathways, NIDA, derivative work by Quasihuman, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
