There are a lot of articles about the addictive nature of social media and the tiny dopamine reward one receives for whatever engagement methods the site in question provides. There’s far less available on how to break free of this, and I think my life experiences have left me with some wisdom, strength, and hope in this area.
First, some background. I caught Lyme some time in 2006 or 2007, then got bit again and properly diagnosed in 2008. The treatment to eliminate the disease was thirty months of oral antibiotics, which cleared the slow moving Lyme bacteria, but at the price of having a functional microbiome. Seventeen years after the first infection, I have improve a lot due to my own efforts, but I’m saddled with something akin to narcolepsy type 2.
This isn’t the movie trope narcolepsy, that’s type 1. I don’t fall over by the side of the road like the guy in My Own Private Idaho, when I feel it coming I’ve got between two to five minutes to find a nice safe place to recline for a while.
OK, so how I went about correcting things was by applying mindfulness to my condition, keeping a detailed log book when things were bad, wearing a fitness monitor with sleep functions, and lots of reading in the area of neurogastroenterology. Our digestive tract has about as many neurons as a cat’s brain. A very, very naughty cat that gets on the counter to knock off any small items left there. You know the type.
There are two things I found in reading the various papers about gut neurons that were key to improving.
Our serotonin supply is made in the gut, and 90% of it is used there.
Dopamine is a powerful anti-inflammatory for the gut.
It would have been extraordinarily handy if any of a number of so called medical professionals had not patronized me, or labeled me a drug seeker, had simply shared those two little facts with me instead.
They had given me Paxil, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, because I had digestive trouble. Once I knew the digestion connection I found that simply adding a 200mg time release 5-HTP tablet to my morning regimen freed me of the antidepressant.
Since I had trouble staying awake, I finally got Modafinil. This didn’t do much for my sleep cycle, but it did immediately quash any gut inflammation symptoms. This is a nasty drug — I quit it cold turkey the day I first noticed symptoms of tardive dyskinesia. But knowing that there was a dopamine angle, it was easy to find that L-tyrosine is a precursor for it, in the same way 5-HTP is for serotonin.
The daily recommended intake for tyrosine is 33mg per kilogram of body weight, so roughly six grams for a guy my size. I’ve found that in addition to what I eat I need another six to twelve grams a day to tamp down any trouble.
When I feel OK, I just go about my business. When things go wrong, I have to notice first, and that can take a bit. This remains true despite mindfulness and the sleep monitor — I have found I’m not a good judge of my overall condition, I need some outside metrics.
I wear a Garmin Fenix 6s except when I’m in the shower and one of the metrics it collects is “Body Battery”. I had COVID last month, got really run down, and spent two weeks dragging along before I realized what was wrong. I started back on L-tyrosine on the 14th, and the results were instantaneous.
The Garmin is a great fitness tool, but it consistently misses about a third of the time I’m asleep. I did not go four days without sleep at the start of the month, that’s just the machine mistaking restlessness for wakefulness. But as with the Body Battery, as soon as the L-tyrosine kicked in things settled down.
OK, so there you have it — a couple of knobs you can twist to adjust things, but what does this have to do with disinformation?
One of the things I noticed during that two week period was that I was doom scrolling constantly. I’ve got a busy Substack, I use Inoreader for news, and there are a social media sites where I keep work related profiles. I’d be in bed, exhausted, unable to sleep, and just scrolling and clicking. HUNTING FOR DOPAMINE.
People who are addicted to social media’s disinformation flows — things that cause them to be concerned or angry — have an additional problem in terms of excess cortisol. There’s a strong obsessive thinking component to this, and I have no great wisdom in this area. Hopefully those who want to quit can get enough of “feeling normal sans constant stimulus” with adjustments to dopamine and serotonin production.
The morning after restarting L-tyrosine I deleted three apps from my iPad and I feel no loss of connection, no urge to reinstall them. Inoreader remains but that’s normal for me — long form reading while laying down is fine.
L-tyrosine is a cheap, complication free alternative to drugs that influence your dopamine levels. The brand I usually get is $11 for sixty 500mg capsules. If you suspect serotonin troubles, you can get forty five 100mg 5-HTP capsules for the same price.
So there you have it. Realizing you have a problem is the first step. Once you’ve done that and developed the will to address the issue, there are a pair of safe, inexpensive supplements that can ease your transition back to reality.
