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Welcome to Rooted and Wild.
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What if ADHD isn't just about focus, but about dopamine safety and regulation?
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In this episode, we explore ADHD through a nervous system informed lens, unpacking how dopamine, stress, physiology, nutrition, and somatic patterns intersect.
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My guest is Luis Mojica, a somatic therapist, trauma nutritionist, and founder of Holistic Life Navigation, an educational platform focused on nervous system regulation and trauma recovery.
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His work blends Whole Food Nutrition, Somatic Experiencing, and Self-Inquiry to help people find safety, energy, and clarity from within.
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Luis offers online education, retreats, trauma-informed group support, and a weekly podcast, while maintaining a widely followed YouTube channel sharing insights on stress, embodiment, and healing.
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He is also the author of Food Therapy, Conscious Eating to Navigate Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma.
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Luis, welcome to Rudism Wild.
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Thank you.
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So, you know, when you brought up this topic to me, you know, ADHD and dopamine in relation to like nutrition and somatics, I was like, well, this is an interesting thing, you know.
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I think I think that ADHD and nutrition is not often a topic combined.
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So what's your what's your perspective?
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Well, like a lot of things I learned as a nutritionist as later on in my adult years, ADHD can be incredibly treated with nutrition, proper nutrition, depending on the person's experience and situation.
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I think when I was nine or 10, that's when I was diagnosed with ADHD and Tourette syndrome and nervous ticks, which I still believe is a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, because it's actually there's more research showing people that uh increased levels of adrenaline and hypersensitivity and hyperactivity to the brain throughout development can result in what we know as ADHD.
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And one of the reasons is that there's a slight amount of brain inflammation when you develop in that constant stress response.
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And that brain inflammation can end up compromising your ability to take in dopamine.
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So a lot of people with ADHD, there's a correlation to having lower than normal dopamine levels, which is super important to understand.
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Because when you talk about it as an issue with focus, like a lot of people do, like I can't focus, and my brain goes in all these directions.
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The reason the brain's going in all these directions is it's trying to excite itself because dopamine is an
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excitatory neurotransmitter.
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It rewards you, it makes you interested in something, it brings you pleasure and joy in doing a simple task like sweeping.
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So if you're low in dopamine, you don't find pleasure in most kind of basic everyday things.
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You need a lot to stimulate pleasure.
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So I also believe a lot of people who are addicted to substances probably have ADHD or some level of this brain inflammation and dopamine issue because they're looking for something to stimulate more dopamine.
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Stimulants will release store dopamine in the brain tissues.
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So then you have this sudden moment of joy and reward and bliss.
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And so I say all that because as I started studying nutrition and then practicing and then kind of testing it all myself, my ADHD symptoms were incredibly improving.
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I'm still a very tangential person because my brain moves in many directions.
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But in terms of being able to sleep, in terms of not having anxiety, but especially not having shutdown, because one thing we don't talk about enough with ADHD is the collapse response that comes out of it.
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Because the amount of overwhelm a body will experience with low dopamine, it's it's beyond the like normal uh levels that an average person that hasn't have dopamine will experience.
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Because every task feels like a massive undertaking because you lack that dopamine.
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When something feels like we call it inescapable attack or inescapable threat, when you haven't paid the bills and you have 20 emails, when there's laundry on the floor, and you have those low dopamine levels, you literally feel like you're about to be attacked, and the body will go into an involuntary shutdown mode known as collapse.
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And in that, we experience depression, lack of motivation, you name it.
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So all that comes from low dopamine, and dopamine is produced in your gut.
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So you have to have a healthy gut microbiome and have the right nutrition to even make this neurotransmitter.
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So interesting.
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What are what are some things that you recommend for optimal gut health as it relates to dopamine and ADHD?
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Yeah, so one of my favorite things is uh beans in general, because of the soluble fiber.
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Soluble fiber is a prebiotic.
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So it's food for your gut bacteria, your native gut bacteria.
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So a lot of people listening have heard of a probiotic.
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That's where you go by the capsule that has a specific strain of bacteria that hopefully will take into your gut and then you'll populate it.
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But prebiotics are food.
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So they feed your native bacteria, which I think are way, it's way more effective for most people, unless you're on an antibiotic.
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So if you have low, if we think of the gut microbiome, a term some people might have heard, it just means the amount of bacteria, pathogens, fungi, all these little creatures that live in your gut.
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And the microbiome, you want to think of like a compost heap, it creates new things.
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It synthesizes nutrients, it synthesizes neurotransmitters.
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And it does that with amino acids.
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And amino acids are connected to protein.
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So if you're eating a diet rich in many different whole food fibers, so root vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds, beans, green leafy vegetables, having lots of plant fibers, fibers only found in plant foods, you're going to be feeding your microbiome every day, which is going to increase the amount of neurotransmitters your body can make if it has adequate protein.
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What do you feel about probiotics?
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Because you mentioned the prebiotics, and what about adding uh probiotics or fermented foods to your diet as well?
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And I'm personally fascinated in the topic because I studied fermentation through Harvard and love all things like probiotic, but sometimes it can be too much, depending on the person.
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Yeah.
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Well, I I rarely recommend a probiotic for an individual unless they're actually on antibiotic, because I don't see them as effective as having, let's say, a supplemental capsule of a probiotic versus a whole food probiotic like sauerkraut.
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I agree.
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So right?
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So if you have sauerkraut or kombucha, but I prefer sauerkraut because kombucha has sugar in it and it can have caffeine for some people.
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But if you have sauerkraut, you have the prebiotic of the vegetable fiber, the cabbage, with the probiotic of the bacteria.
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So you have this incredible delivery system where you're feeding the bacteria that's already in that jar and you're also feeding the bacteria in your body, and it comes from a whole food.
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So it comes from nature.
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So it's diverse, it's bioavailable, it has way more of the balance your gut would have.
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So when someone says to me, I want to repopulate my gut health or I want to help my digestion or increase my microbiome, I always say have a diverse amount of plant
fibers, especially beans every day, and have one or two fork pools of sauerkraut with your meals.
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And that usually does the trick for most people.
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I completely agree with that statement.
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I I absolutely think like follow the way it's been done for millennia, you know.
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Fermented foods were the way of preservation, right?
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And yet nowadays we we don't get enough of that.
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So when we think about dopamine as kind of the catalyst essentially for ADHD, break that down a bit more because I think for sometimes people think about dopamine more in the negative sense, you know, like, oh, it's a dopamine hit, you know, it's bad.
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What is your perspective on that?
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So there's a couple things here.
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In the modern day, dopamine gets a bad rep because we're inundated with it.
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So before we had screens, even just like 30 years ago, we didn't nearly get as much dopamine as we're getting now.
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So I think most people, whether they actually have ADHD diagnoses or not, they are having the symptoms of ADHD because they're so burnt out from excess dopamine that their stores are completely depleted.
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And when you have a high amount of dopamine, because you're getting all these hits, like you said, your baseline for what you need to feel good and focused and feel rewarded goes higher, higher, higher.
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That's how addiction works.
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So if I'm scrolling every day, whereas I never scrolled 10 years ago, every day I'm getting dopamine hit.
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Dopamine hit literally means a chemical is releasing from your brain into your bloodstream.
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It's incredible.
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So a chemical is being released whenever I have that dopamine hit.
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And if it's, let's say it's 80 points, I'm just giving you arbitrary numbers.
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My body is then saying, okay, our baseline was 10 points to get through the morning.
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Now we need 80 to get through the morning.
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And this is when we get addicted to things that create those dopamine hits.
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So dopamine hits are a good word because dopamine hits we want to avoid.
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And that is what we get from what's known as passive dopamine, meaning I'm sitting back doing nothing physically, but receiving a lot of excitement.
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And this happens with screen culture.
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On a computer, a television, uh, a smartphone, when you're just sitting still, essentially in a freeze response
because the body's tense, not doing anything, you're even barely breathing, but you're taking in a lot of information that's really exciting, you're getting this massive release of dopamine without any output.
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Whereas we have active dopamine, let's say hiking, for example, hiking will create active dopamine 20, 30 minutes into the hike.
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Exercising will create active dopamine 20, 30 minutes into exercise.
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You know, I want to paint a picture of this beautiful tree.
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Maybe once I finally get the shape, it could take me hours to get, I get the dopamine, what we're calling a dopamine hit.
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So it's a much longer road to get the dopamine produced while I'm doing something active, before it's not giving it to me by design, but I have to kind of go out and find it.
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It's slower, it's more of a curve up and down or like a nice soft hill up and down versus a spike.
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And I'm physically doing something to achieve it.
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So in a culture of getting lots of passive dopamine, dopamine is a negative thing because it affects our brain, it affects our personalities, it creates addictions.
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But if we're looking at dopamine from just enjoying life to finishing a task that takes eight hours or eight years to complete, it's this slow drip, and it's sustainable because we're not dumping all those stores out with some kind of hit from passive dopamine.
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That's so true.
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That's good.
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I like that.
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And so when we look at ADHD, you know, a lot of people have that.
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And sometimes, though, I think there's a difference between being ADHD and just also living in this society where we're distracted all the time by everything, you know, the notifications on our phone, the TV, the, you know, the billboards we're driving past, just left and right, there's always trying to grab our attention.
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I think that a lot of people are like, I have ADHD.
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And I think, no, it's just your lifestyle.
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You know, there's a lifestyle component that you've allowed to have this ADHD.
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Well, it's kind of like I was saying, I think in the modern era, like you said, people are being so overstimulated that their symptoms are just like having ADHD.
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What I've found from myself and from a lot of people I've worked with who are diagnosed with ADHD and actually have uh a neurodivergence in their brain of certain chemicals, chemistry, inflammation, gut health, all these things that come together that create this.
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We can treat it with medications, we can treat it with food, we can get off the internet.
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It's gonna get way better, but it never fully goes away for us.
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It's just managed.
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Whereas someone that doesn't have ADHD who's just completely hopped up on dopamine, after two or three weeks of taking a break from the dopamine hits, they'll come back to a pretty normal baseline.
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So it never fully goes, in my experience at least, it never fully goes away.
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It's not reversible that I've seen anywhere, but it's very treatable and the symptoms come down drastically.
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Now, what I find very important and inconvenient for a lot of people with ADHD is when you really, if you really want to treat it, yes, you have to do the nutritional piece, but you have to also design your life so that it fascinates you.
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Because people with ADHD have a very low threshold for boredom.
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And not like in a shady way, but like physically, we can't handle boredom.
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It actually is like torture.
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Whereas someone else can get through a boring situation because they have the dopamine to get them through, we don't make it the same way, we don't uptake it the same way.
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So you have to actually create a lifestyle that interests you.
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And this is why there's a lot of theories that some of the most innovative people historically had ADHD, because they had to do something new.
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They had to diverge from the normal.
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So I think we're tasked, burdened, and and gifted with this task of having to create a whole new way of living that isn't following a mainstream idea or a neurotypical idea.
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And until we do that, we probably uh require lots of stimulants to get through the day, even when you're eating well.
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Yeah, no, it's true.
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You know, it's interesting too, because I I think that I'll just I'll highlight the education system real quick.
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And and actually most forms of learning that we've employed in this world, and it's almost always sitting down, still facing forward, look listening to a teacher and or diving into a book.
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And yet I'd say that for most people on the planet, whether they have ADHD or not, that's not the best route to learn.
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Uh we learn the best by embodiment, which means we're working with our hands, we're moving, we're engaging with others, and we're experiencing it.
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Yet the entire system is almost rigged to be counterproductive towards people.
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And so then they go,
Well, I have all these little kids, you know, like they have ADHD.
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And I'm like, no, they're just kids.
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They're just kids.
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They need to move, you know, and well, let's put them on Ritalin.
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You know, like, no, they have they need to move their bodies and and and engage with it.
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They're actually highly intelligent and highly capable individuals, but the way they learn is not the way we've just cookie-cuttered it all.
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What's your take on that?
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I couldn't agree more.
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I think those responses you're talking about, they're environmental responses.
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So there's not something inherently wrong with the child or their brain.
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They're having a healthy response to an environment shift because all of our human history has been I can move.
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I chop wood with my dad in the morning, I learn how to harvest, I sow, I help with the farm.
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Like we weren't in school.
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The school's even a new invention, the way we think of it today.
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School before was life.
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You know, you lived and you helped.
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There's this great book I'm reading called Hunt, Gather, Parent.
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And it's all about this.
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Um, I believe she's a doctor or psychologist who went to different indigenous tribes and learned from them how they parent, uh, opposed to how the West or compared to the West or Europe's way of parenting.
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And it's exactly what you said.
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They really believe in teaching the child through life experience.
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They say as as soon as that child can look around when they're a few days old, we have them with us while we're working so they can see what we do.
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And then we let them do it as soon as they can pick something up.
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Whereas with our kids, we give them a tablet and we say, go watch a movie while I clean the house.
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So it's the same thing school does sit here and look at this book versus let's learn how to cook or move or talk to each other.
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So I do think the loss of the tactile learning and relational experience, um, it's prioritizing a part of the brain, not the whole body.
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And I think it is too overwhelming for most people, but kids especially.
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Yeah.
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You you obviously have accomplished an awful lot, even though you've had ADHD.
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You know, you've even
written a book, you have a podcast, you have a business, you know, that you're doing nutrition, somatic, you know, work, you know, you do workshops, you travel, you speak.
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That's very accomplished for someone who has ADHD.
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And I know you've given us some nuggets of gold here that of steps that you've taken to really hone in and maximize your yourself through proper dopamine balance and lifestyle.
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But what are some things that you do daily to keep yourself focused and able to accomplish your goals?
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A couple things.
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So one of the big, big life changers for me was just recently, about three years ago, I was vegan for almost 20 years and I started eating animal protein again, which I don't think anyone has to do.
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But I have learned just from my work, amino acids, they are the building blocks of neurotransmitters.
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L-tyrosine is the amino acid that will turn into L-dopa, which makes L dopamine.
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So if you don't have enough amino acids, you literally don't have the building blocks to make these very important neurotransmitters.
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So if you're like me and you're already very low in dopamine, you have a hard time making it or taking it in, you need to make sure you have the right foundation that can create a lot of it.
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And so if you have a quarter of a cup of chicken, for example, you know, you're getting a massive amount.
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I think I I could be wrong here, but I think half a cup of chicken gives you all you need to make the dopamine you need for a day.
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It's a very small amount.
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No carbohydrates attached to that.
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But if you have two to three cups of quinoa, which is probably what you need to have the same amount of bell tyrosine, you're getting a ton of carbohydrates, which is then kicking up your glucose, adrenaline, all these other things.
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So someone who's vegan, like I was for a long time, we're getting our amino acids bound to carbohydrates.
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And because of hormones, because of aging, different circumstances, carbs will either turn to sugar and glucose and will be stored as fat, create adrenaline, or they'll be burned efficiently.
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And my body stopped using them efficiently around age 34 or 35.
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And so when I stopped eating as many carbs and started having animal protein, I felt a brain clarity I don't think I've ever had in my life.
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And it was amazingly powerful, especially because I follow a bean-based diet.
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So I had this good microbiome health from the beans and the vegetables.
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And I have all these amino acids from the chicken and the eggs and the fish that I primarily eat.
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And to me, together, having those as my meals, low sugar, not using my smartphone all the time, it allowed my brain to just be nourished in a way where I can deeply dive into a project like a class, a retreat, a book, and put out a lot of content and not feel burned out by it or overwhelmed and stuck and frozen by it, which I had earlier in my life.
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I mean, if you would have seen me in my 20s, I was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day and having 12 cups of coffee.
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That's how I was getting through the day.
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So I once I at one point I did need to stimulate in order to function.
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And then I started learning with nutrition and somatics, I could actually nurture myself to function.
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Yeah.
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Thanks for sharing that.
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Because that's it's very interesting to me on a personal level.
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I mean, I have my body does not produce dopamine.
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So I take L tyrosine.
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Uh and every day.
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Every day.
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And it's it's interesting because you know, I don't want to take the L tyrosine, you know what I'm saying?
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Like as a as a supplement.
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I agree with you that our diets can have it, but for some reason I eat pretty healthy diet, you know, and I do all the things, but it still was low.
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And so I take the L tyrosine.
00:19:20.480 --> 00:19:38.000
And I I think a lot of people don't know about that component, you know, that that we you know, and and they're like struggling with depression, and they're like, I need to be on antidepressants, or I have ADHD, and so I need to have ADHD medication, and yet we can sometimes it can just be a deficiency in something.
00:19:38.319 --> 00:19:40.400
It's I think that's exactly the way to look at it.
00:19:40.640 --> 00:19:49.359
When you have any kind of mental, quote, mental illness or mental health issue or emotional imbalances, that's your brain's way of showing you a symptom of deficiency.
00:19:49.519 --> 00:19:51.279
Just like if you had a rash on your skin.
00:19:51.359 --> 00:19:54.000
It's the it's it's the brain's way of showing deficiency.
00:19:54.160 --> 00:20:03.039
And I recently learned, um, based on what you're saying about yourself, that it let's say you make plenty of dopamine and your microbiome is functioning really well.
00:20:03.200 --> 00:20:07.599
If your vagus nerve is too inflamed, the dopamine can travel up to your brain from your gut.
00:20:07.759 --> 00:20:21.519
And that's where somatics comes in because as
you start settling your system more, not calming down necessarily, but coming out of trauma response and orienting to the room and updating and having a parasympathetic response more often than a sympathetic one.
00:20:21.680 --> 00:20:26.640
So more peace than stress, the inflammation of your vagus nerve will also start coming down.
00:20:26.880 --> 00:20:33.119
And so that could be, you know, it's like the straw your brain sucks up to transport those those neurotransmitters.
00:20:33.200 --> 00:20:35.440
So that can be a reason for a lot of us too.
00:20:35.759 --> 00:20:36.400
Yeah.
00:20:36.960 --> 00:20:43.839
One thing I I love about what you're saying, and it's something that I've often said to people, is we we live in a society where we want a quick fix now.
00:20:44.240 --> 00:20:47.039
And it it's like, I have this, so I want this now.
00:20:47.200 --> 00:20:53.759
I need to take this medication or inject myself with this, you know, and really it's about common sense lifestyle.
00:20:54.160 --> 00:20:56.720
It's doing what the body needs.
00:20:56.880 --> 00:21:10.160
And we need prebiotics, probiotics, we need anti-inflammation, we need to do somatic work, we need to really focus on, but it's not like this activity that I'm gonna go out and do this activity, it's a lifestyle.
00:21:10.480 --> 00:21:11.039
That's right.
00:21:11.680 --> 00:21:18.720
That's one of the big reasons why I tell my clients like one of the best things you can do is make your own food.
00:21:19.359 --> 00:21:22.319
You know, whole food-based, make your own food.
00:21:22.880 --> 00:21:33.359
Because not only do you appreciate the food more because you made it, it's a bit more sacred, you know, but you're also working right and left brain when you're working with both hands.
00:21:33.519 --> 00:21:42.720
It helps you regulate, then you're eating the food with this level of gratitude and appreciation for the labor, you know, that you did, and the body enjoys it more.
00:21:42.799 --> 00:21:56.799
So you do have a little bit more of that dopamine, and you know, depending on what you're eating and what you're feeding yourself, uh that just that simple act of making a meal can be very healing for your for the body, mind, and the spirit.
00:21:57.039 --> 00:21:59.519
So I'm a huge proponent of that.
00:21:59.920 --> 00:22:06.160
I'm so glad you said that because that's a really great example of the comparison between passive and active dopamine as well.
00:22:06.400 --> 00:22:09.200
Getting a microwave meal, that's passive dopamine.
00:22:09.440 --> 00:22:10.960
It's really quick, it's processed.
00:22:11.119 --> 00:22:21.279
Processed food stimulates dopamine, but slowly making food, going to the grocery store, cutting it, smelling it while it's cooking, it's all these slow steps of more of that reward system.
00:22:21.440 --> 00:22:26.880
So we get a lot of passive dopamine hits from the food that we we binge or we eat very quickly, that's processed.
00:22:27.039 --> 00:22:32.720
But to actually have to process it yourself, make it yourself, it's a much slower, more active dopamine in a healthier way.
00:22:33.279 --> 00:22:33.839
So true.
00:22:34.000 --> 00:22:34.480
So true.
00:22:34.640 --> 00:22:45.759
Now you have a book that which we mentioned earlier that you that you wrote, and uh it's called Food Therapy: Conscious Eating to Navigate Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma.
00:22:46.400 --> 00:22:50.640
And this book is launching in April 2026.
00:22:51.359 --> 00:22:58.559
So uh you are offering people to be able to pre-order it, and then they can also access some materials of yours.
00:22:58.720 --> 00:22:59.519
What are those?
00:23:00.000 --> 00:23:04.319
Yes, I'm doing a two-month program in, I believe it starts in May.
00:23:04.480 --> 00:23:10.880
And the program will have four 90-minute sessions with me live where I'm going to walk you through the four sections of the book.
00:23:11.039 --> 00:23:15.599
I'm gonna teach you the practices, kind of break some things down, answer questions live.
00:23:15.680 --> 00:23:18.240
And anyone that pre-orders the book gets it for free.
00:23:18.400 --> 00:23:23.039
It's a$150 program, and the book to pre-order is like$17 right now.
00:23:23.119 --> 00:23:25.200
There's a discount, so it's it's a pretty good deal.
00:23:25.279 --> 00:23:28.319
Um, but you can go to my website or any book retailer to get it.
00:23:28.640 --> 00:23:29.039
Love that.
00:23:29.200 --> 00:23:32.640
And we include the link to pre-order his book in the description box.
00:23:32.720 --> 00:23:34.319
So for those listening, check that out.
00:23:34.480 --> 00:23:42.240
Luis, I have loved this conversation and all the other conversations we've had as well, and uh really appreciate your wisdom and your insights.
00:23:42.559 --> 00:23:44.799
You too, you feel like a sibling on this journey.
00:23:44.960 --> 00:23:45.519
Thank you so much.
00:23:45.680 --> 00:23:47.599
Yeah, very much so, likewise.
00:23:47.839 --> 00:23:51.759
Thank you, and thank you for all who have joined us, and we'll see you next time.