Dopamine is a neuromodulator that sets both your baseline drive and the peaks of enjoyment you feel, and understanding it is the first step to keeping your motivation high instead of letting social media, casinos, and processed food drain it.
On this Physical Friday I sit down with wellness coach Zach Fagerberg to start a three-part series on dopamine. In part one he explains the baseline, the peak, and the inevitable crash below baseline that creates craving — and why easy, effortless hits are a recipe for burnout. This is the foundation for using dopamine to your advantage.
Listen now: press play in the player above and follow along.
Zach Fagerberg explains that dopamine is a neuromodulator, not just a neurotransmitter, which means it does not just pass a signal from one nerve to the next — it influences many nerves in an area at once. That is why it touches so much of what we pursue in life. You have a baseline level of dopamine at any given time that determines how much drive and seeking you feel, and you get peaks on top of that baseline. The height of a peak determines how much you enjoy and perceive liking an experience.
Your baseline is the steady level of dopamine in your system that sets how much motivation and drive you feel day to day — someone with a low baseline can seem to have no spark, while someone with a high baseline brings energy to everything. A peak is a spike on top of that baseline that creates the enjoyment of a specific experience. Zach Fagerberg points out that dopamine is finite and takes time to replenish, so every peak is followed by a dip below your previous baseline. That dip is where craving lives.
Because the craving does not happen during the peak — it happens in the crash afterward. Zach Fagerberg explains that after any peak, dopamine falls below the baseline you started at, and that drop below baseline is exactly where you feel the urge to seek the experience again. It is not an endless up-and-up system. Understanding that the reward is always paired with a reciprocal dip is the first key insight, because it reframes constant peak-seeking as something that comes with a built-in cost.
Social media delivers easy dopamine release with little to no effort, which Zach Fagerberg calls a recipe for disaster. Over the long term, dopamine does not just affect the moment — it rewires what you seek and how. Your system starts asking why it would lift a pinky when scrolling delivers all the dopamine it wants, yet peak after peak after peak taps the finite resource faster than it can replenish, and you end up with a significant drop below baseline. That can show up as burnout, the doldrums, or not getting excited about anything.
It can feel like burnout — tired of everything, not excited about anything you used to enjoy. Zach Fagerberg shares that for him it has also shown up as bouts of depression, tied to not supporting a strong baseline. The common thread is a flatness or lack of drive that makes even good things feel like a grind. The important point is that how you arrived at a low baseline matters, because the path in shapes the path out. There is no single one-size-fits-all fix to reset it.
Zach Fagerberg's big encouragement is awareness. Once you understand how good modern structures — social media, Las Vegas casinos, processed foods — have gotten at exploiting your dopamine system for profit, you get to decide whether, how, and how often you engage. You do not have to go cold turkey; he uses social media for business. The move is putting your foot down so the situation does not just creep in without your say-so. A practical start is writing down the activities you do mindlessly that feel good briefly but leave you worse off afterward.
I have always been fascinated by how dopamine quietly runs so much of what we do — why we keep scrolling past the point of good sense, how casinos engineer their floors, how exercise changes how we feel. Zach Fagerberg has been studying dopamine seriously, and I wanted him to lay the foundation so we could build a whole series around using it to our advantage instead of being a slave to whoever is manufacturing it for us. We get into the core mechanics in the episode, so press play in the player above.
Here is the framework Zach Fagerberg lays out in part one. We go deeper in the episode.
I unpack each of these in the episode. Press play in the player above.
Think about leaving a Las Vegas casino — the lights, the noise, the flashing, the constant stimulation, and then that almost collapse of, glad that is over, the moment you step out. Every one of those lights is effortless dopamine, and the comedown is the dip below baseline in real time, and they do not let you off the hook, because the fountains and lights are already pulling you toward the next one. I get into why that design works on us in the episode, so press play in the player above.
I asked Zach Fagerberg whether the answer is just a set number of minutes per day, and his answer is more useful than a rule. If something has already lowered your baseline, you cut it back until you feel your drive and motivation returning — that moment when a thing you had gone numb to suddenly has a little fire again. It takes self-awareness, but that is what growth is. He explains how to read that signal in the episode, so press play in the player above.
Dopamine quietly decides how much drive you bring to everything, and the easy, effortless hits are the ones quietly draining your tank.
Before next week, write down a couple of the things you do mindlessly that feel good for a while and not so good after. It will make part two land harder. Press play in the player above.
Physical Friday is my weekly fitness series for fishing guides, anglers, hunters, and outdoorsmen — the training, nutrition, and mindset to stay in the game for life. Watch and listen to every Physical Friday episode from Tom Rowland.
dopamine · baseline dopamine · neuromodulator · Zach Fagerberg · social media · Las Vegas casinos · processed food · burnout · motivation · Ray Cash Care · Physical Friday · Tom Rowland Podcast
I'm Tom Rowland, a professional fishing guide based in the Florida Keys, host of the Tom Rowland Podcast, and the longtime host of the Saltwater Experience television show. On the podcast's Physical Friday series I share the training, nutrition, and mindset that keep fishing guides, anglers, hunters, and outdoorsmen strong enough to do the things they love — hunting, fishing, hiking, and more — for life.
Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 700 with Zach Fagerberg, a Physical Friday short episode on understanding dopamine.
Tom Rowland: What's going on, everybody? It's Physical Friday, and today we're going to be talking about something that's pretty important to your performance in virtually every area of your life, and that's dopamine. Zach Fagerberg is here to talk about dopamine and how we can actually use dopamine to influence both our successes and our failures, and just make sure that we're staying on track by using this super, super powerful compound that's within our body. Zach, what's up?
Zach Fagerberg: What's up, Tom? It's good to be here, man.
Tom Rowland: Thanks. I'm glad you're here. So you are pretty interested in dopamine. Dopamine is something that I also am interested in. I know, just on a very base level, how it affects pretty much everything we do, from the way that it influences us to continue to use social media even past the point where we might otherwise decide it was not a good idea, to how the casinos use it, to how exercise can affect our dopamine levels. And if you are getting a hit of dopamine, you are probably pretty likely to continue on down whatever that path is. I'm very interested in what you've come up with on dopamine and why you're studying dopamine. So what do you have for us today?
Zach Fagerberg: Yeah, man. Let's jump in. I love a couple of your points there, and we can definitely get to them as we have the conversation about dopamine. But let's start with your comment of a hit of dopamine. I think that it's important for people to understand how dopamine actually gets released into our system, and the fact that there are these releases, but there's also a baseline level of dopamine in all of our systems at any given time. And that baseline level of dopamine is super important to determining how much drive and external seeking we feel in this given moment. If that baseline level is lower, that's going to be someone that you might interact with and you say, man, where's their... what's going on with them? They just don't seem to have any kick right now. Versus, you know, it was funny, I was watching one of your episodes with Ray Cash Care.
Tom Rowland: Yeah. He's got some.
Zach Fagerberg: You look at that dude. He understands how to keep this dopamine system at a high baseline. Important to understand about dopamine is that it's what we call a neuromodulator, not just a neurotransmitter. So it doesn't just communicate from one nerve to the next. It actually impacts many nerves in a given area, and that's where it has this ability to impact, as you said, so much of, if not all of, what we are pursuing in this life. So if we take a step into looking at the peaks and the baseline levels of dopamine, it's important to understand that the peak, as you said, is what determines how much enjoyment we get out of the situation and, realistically, how much we perceive liking that experience. From there, it's also important to understand we don't just get the peaks.
Zach Fagerberg: Dopamine is a finite resource in our system that takes time to replenish. And so after any peak, you are naturally going to experience a fall off of that dopamine in your system that's actually going to go below the baseline that you were at prior to that peak taking place.
Tom Rowland: Okay.
Zach Fagerberg: This is the first key understanding, right, that it's not just an up and up and up system. That drop down back below baseline is actually where we experience the craving, or the urge to seek that situation again. It's not actually during that peak reward phase.
Tom Rowland: Right. Okay.
Zach Fagerberg: So for me, this started to be one of the places where light bulbs started to go off, because I love seeking dopamine and these big hits, if you will. Just like I think all of us do. It's wired into us. But maybe it's not so much about just nonstop seeking the peaks, because we have to understand that that's going to come with a reciprocal situation in the drop below baseline.
Tom Rowland: Okay. So what do you suggest? How do we maintain that baseline, I guess, is the question?
Zach Fagerberg: That's a really great question, and I think that's where we can talk about different scenarios that might have led you to that low baseline, because there are varying ways that we can get to that low baseline point. And how we got there determines how we might approach letting that baseline reset to a place where we start to feel more drive and energy to seek all things, not just this one thing that we've been honing in on.
Tom Rowland: Right. So when you talk about how it's important that we understand how we got there, what are some examples of how people get there?
Zach Fagerberg: It's a great question, Tom, and I would come back to something you've already alluded to here, and that's social media. This is a great example, of many that exist in our society today, of ease of dopamine release with little to no effort. That is a equation for disaster in maintaining our baseline levels of dopamine, because one of the cool parts about dopamine is that it not only has this short term effect in how we're experiencing the situation, it actually can change over the long term what we seek and how we seek it to get that dopamine release. And so we really start to hone our dopamine system to say, why would I lift a pinky if I can sit here and scroll and get all the dopamine that I'm looking for? The only problem with that is peak after peak after peak on a very consistent basis starts to tap out this resource of dopamine at a rate that doesn't allow the system to replenish it. And this, in this example, is what leads us to starting to experience a very significant drop below our baseline levels of dopamine.
Tom Rowland: And that would be what some people might call burnout, or what some people would just call the doldrums, or just being tired of everything and not getting excited about anything.
Zach Fagerberg: I think I've experienced it a couple of different ways, and that's definitely one of them, the burnout example. I think that in my personal life I've also experienced bouts of depression, and, yeah, this is definitely related to dopamine baselines having been not used, or using situations that don't support keeping a strong baseline level of dopamine. And that definitely opens the door to a situation like that coming into the mental space.
Tom Rowland: Okay, and so just to kind of close this out for this particular episode, as far as how we can adjust our behavior, or pitfalls to watch out for, obviously too much social media. I mean, you don't have to be on social media very often to know that you can start down a path, and the next thing you know it's a couple hours later and you've just continued on down this path, and then you don't feel so good afterwards. That's kind of one of the places where I'm sure that we could adjust our behavior. You could see similar behavior. I think if you've ever been to Las Vegas and you go into one of these casinos, and there are so many lights and flashing and noise and everything going on around you, and when you walk out of that you're just kind of like, oh wow, like it's over, that's amazing, and you kind of really come down. And I would imagine that every one of those lights and flashing is just this ease of dopamine. You're just getting excited, and then when you walk out of there, you just almost collapse. Right? It's just, whew, glad that's over. But they don't let you off the hook, because as soon as you walk out of that casino there's all the lights and flashing and waterfalls and fountains and everything trying to lead you into the next one. So if you were to give us some guidelines on how we could kind of adjust our behavior, or things to watch out for, what would you say?
Zach Fagerberg: I think that the Vegas example, the social media example, even things like processed foods. I think once we start to understand how good society has gotten at developing structures like this that abuse our dopamine system for their profit, then it starts to allow us to be more in power of deciding whether or not we want to interact with that situation, how we want to interact with that situation, and the frequency at which we want to interact with that situation. So I think that would really be my big encouragement, a takeaway, is really sit down and look at your life and ask yourself, where am I just kind of nonchalantly letting these very well prepared dopamine-extracting situations creep in without my say so? Put your foot down. And I'm not saying you have to go cold turkey on any of it. Like, I use social media for business purposes, but you're the one in control, not just letting the situation roll with itself without having a say in it.
Tom Rowland: So maybe a certain amount of time per day on social media, or some sort of guideline to where you keep yourself in check?
Zach Fagerberg: I think that the important thing is, especially coming back to if we've identified that this situation has negatively impacted our baseline level of dopamine, we need to either remove it or limit it in reference to monitoring that feeling of motivation and drive coming back. I don't know that I would sit here and say, well, if you're on social media this many hours a day, cut it back to this. Cut it back to the point that you feel like you're experiencing that change in your baseline level of dopamine resetting, and you'll experience that through, oh, wait a second, that thing that I've just kind of been monotonous about, I've all of a sudden got a little fire for it again. I think that takes some self awareness, but that's what growth is about. It's identifying these areas, being self aware of how it's affecting your system, and applying the knowledge that we're talking about.
Tom Rowland: Nice. Okay, so we're gonna stop there for today, because there's a lot of things to get into about dopamine, and you've got a lot of other things that we're gonna talk about in this little series that we're gonna do on dopamine. So if you are listening to this and it's of interest to you, what we've begun talking about with dopamine, then definitely come back next week, because we're gonna have Zach back to talk and go a little deeper on dopamine, and we can find out exactly what's going on and exactly how we can orient our life to where we can use dopamine to our advantage, rather than being a slave to someone creating dopamine for you, I guess. So, Zach, we'll see you next week, and for everybody else, pay attention to the dopamine, and maybe even write down what are these activities that you're doing mindlessly for a while that obviously make you feel good for a little while, but then maybe not so good afterwards. If you just write a couple of those things down, then maybe what Zach has to say next week will have more profound meaning. Alright, so that's Physical Friday for this week.
Zach Fagerberg: We'll see you next week.
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