The Dopamine Reset Protocol

9 science-backed ways to rebuild motivation, energy, and focus without quitting life and moving to a monastery

Have you ever felt that bad days tend to lead to more bad days.

There’s nothing worse than stacking bad day after bad day. One night of bad sleep, a stressful event, or even the wrong food can snowball into a vicious cycle: you feel drained, you get demotivated, and that low mood makes you sink even deeper.

Sure, everyone has the occasional off day. But when it drags on, when you’re stuck in that fog for weeks, the real problem isn’t “laziness.” It’s deeper: your dopamine system is fried. And unless you fix the root causes, diet, nutrients, inflammation, mitochondria, gut health, environment, you’ll stay in that rut no matter how hard you try to push through.

I’ve been there myself, trying all the wrong “fixes”: overeating (usually junk food), alcohol, doom scrolling, and they only made things worse. Over time, I found that what actually works is resetting dopamine naturally through specific categories of practices.

In this article, I’m not going to tell you to “just stop doom scrolling” or “go live with monks and hum all day.” I’m going to give you 9 unique, science-backed categories that reset dopamine, so you can go from flat and foggy back to motivated and clear-headed.

And some of these methods are so counterintuitive, like eating big batches of specific nutrient-dense foods, using specific mushrooms, or even strategic doses of mitochondrial boosters, that you’ll never look at dopamine “hacks” the same way again.

I’m starting the article off with a TLDR for those who want to get the to-go “blueprint” and then I’m diving deeper into each so you can understand what can contribute to low dopamine and which part might be best for you to focus on.

Let’s get into it!