Relearning Pleasure: Healing the Dopamine Hangover

Have you noticed that we live in a culture that never stops reaching for the next hit of excitement, novelty or ‘success’? Most of us scroll, sip, snack, message, click, win, shop or -insert vices here- until we get a quick jolt of validation. It’s constant. That’s why so many of us now exist in a strange, tense space between feeling overstimulated and undernourished. Our brains are flooded, but our bodies feel empty.

There’s a quiet but distinctive crash that comes after too much doing and not enough being. It’s the dopamine hangover, the aftermath of living on quick bursts of mini-rewards with no time for real replenishment and soul connection.

You might feel it as a wired-but-tired exhaustion, a low hum of anxiety beneath all surface activity. Or it could feel like a familiar but unwanted restlessness that shows up the second you try to slow down. Your mind might say, “I just need a break,” but the moment you get one, your body panics. It doesn’t know what to do with stillness anymore. It needs to fill the perceived gap.

This is what happens when the brain’s reward pathways get overstimulated on a regular basis.

The job of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that drives motivation and seeking behaviors, seems to be becoming less about genuine pleasure and more about constant pursuit. Each new “hit” (an email alert, a ‘like’ on your new post, the next achievement, the little red notifications you get to erase with a click) gives a quick spark, but the baseline gets lower over time. It takes more and more to feel the same satisfaction. And on top of this numbing effect, the stress hormone cortisol stays elevated, perhaps somehow trying to compensate, but keeping us just a tad more wired and on edge.

The brain’s pleasure system is eventually burning out, succumbing to an imbalance that is subtle but invasive, and is literally rewiring our brains and how we experience our lives. We’re losing sensitivity to subtle joy, like the warmth of a beam of sunlight, the comfort of silence, the depth of a slow breath, or the nuance and emotion in a loved one’s words. Underneath our skin, our nervous systems are chasing excitement, even as they beg for calm.

The awkward part of healing

When you start to break that cycle, there’s often a confusing middle phase. You might expect peace, but instead you feel flat. Things that once gave you energy don’t hit the same way. You may even wonder if you’re broken and unable to feel fully the way you once did.

You’re not. That emptiness is actually the nervous system recalibrating. It’s the in-between state where your dopamine system starts to rest and reset, your cortisol levels drop because you are feeling moments of safety again, and your brain begins learning how to register satisfaction again. The brain is rebuilding and fortifying its communication pathways— restoring sensitivity after years or even a lifetime of numbing.

This is the tender, awkward phase where healing starts to happen beneath the surface. The nervous system blueprint is being rewritten so that it’s possible to find pleasure in presence again, not just in pursuit.

Relearning how to feel

Once we stop constantly chasing stimulation, there’s space to rediscover what genuine pleasure feels like again. This exploration phase can feel slow and subtle, and that’s a good thing. Because pleasure isn’t always loud or dramatic. It’s often sensory and layered, or needs to build over time and with experience. It can exist in the smallest of moments like when you feel your shoulders drop when you exhale deeply, or the way your eyes and heart center soften when you notice something unexpectedly beautiful. 

You can also consciously restore pleasure circuitry by engaging intentionally and mindfully in things that you once loved, or always have been interested in. This kind of pleasure doesn’t flood your system. It restores it. And like most valuable things that can change how you live your life, it’s a practice.

In my new DailyOM course, Neuroscience Techniques to End Dopamine Addiction and Cortisol Burnout, I teach students how to understand how the brain’s reward circuits can be retrained through gentle, consistent nervous system practices. But knowledge is only the beginning.

The deeper work is learning how to embody it. To live it. That’s what we explore together inside the CNTRD Practice Membership space. We work together on designing and nourishing a new nervous system blueprint that can rest, receive, and feel fully alive again.

Pleasure as medicine

Pleasure, when it’s authentic, is a sign that the nervous system is healing. It means the body trusts again. It means the brain is registering safety and possibility, not just threat.

Relearning pleasure is not about indulgence; it’s about capacity. It’s how we rebuild the bandwidth to experience joy, intimacy, connection, and creativity. It’s how we get ourselves unstuck. When we start noticing small cues of delight again… a color, a taste, a sound, a breath… we’re literally rewriting the architecture of our brains to notice more of that.

This is what it means to heal from dopamine burnout: to return to a baseline where peace feels satisfying again.

And it’s also the conversation I’ll be diving deeper into in my upcoming new podcast launch (I’ll be announcing it here, so stay tuned). We’ll be learning to understand what pleasure really is and what it means to our health, our relationships, our creativity, our lives… and we’ll reclaim pleasure not as escape, but as medicine for the nervous system and soul.

Stay tuned for our Podcast launch announcement

An invitation

If you’re ready to start this journey, I invite you to begin gently. Take the DailyOM course or sign up for personalized support and guidance by joining the CNTRD Practice.

But before you go:

Take a few slow breaths right now. Let your eyes soften and rest on something you find beautiful— light on the wall, the movement of a plant, a texture, a sleeping pet...

Notice what happens inside you.

That small flicker of warmth or ease is your system remembering.

That is healing.

That is pleasure returning home.

---

Jessica Crow is the author of The Power of Guided Meditation and founder of CNTRD Wellness. She teaches nervous system blueprints through meditation, Yoga Nidra/ Conscious Sleep, and neurosomatic practices, guiding both individuals and professionals toward regulation, resilience, and authentic joy.

Jessica leads the CNTRD Practice Membership, an online space for nervous system resets and long-term regulation skills, and trains facilitators in Yoga Nidra and Meditation practices,