Sugar and Dopamine

It’s almost Halloween! This also means it’s the start of candy and sweets season. From trick-or-treating candy to pies, gifted cookies, and holiday parties, most of us will have far easier and more consistent access to high-sugar items over the next few months than we do the rest of the year. For many families, this extra access to sweets is totally fine. The sweets are a fun part of the season and cause minimal issues. If that’s true for your family or some of your kids, there is no need to do or change anything. There is nothing wrong with kids having extra sweets sometimes. 

However, many of the neurodivergent kids I work with have a combination of sensitive systems and executive function challenges. For some kids with this combination of traits, frequent access to high-sugar foods can result in behaviors that are surprising, confusing, and stressful for families. This might look like kids hoarding candy, lying about their intake, repeatedly consuming sweets until they throw up, or taking sweets that are off-limits. 

So this month, I wanted to do a little bonus newsletter about sugar & dopamine. If this is an experience your family has had, I hope these tips help you understand what might be going on for your kid and how to support them through this season. 

Before jumping in, I want to be clear about who I am and am not talking about with these tips. If you have a child who can usually regulate themselves around sweets but occasionally eats a little too much or takes an extra piece of candy, I would consider not worrying much about this. I would still teach them about dopamine because it’s helpful knowledge for everyone, but there is no need to add extra rules and complexity unnecessarily. 

Another group that I’m not talking about here is kids with high trauma backgrounds. Food behaviors like hoarding, stealing, binging, or lying sometimes occur in kids with high trauma backgrounds. This pattern is different, and these are likely not the most appropriate strategies for these kids. The same is true for kids who exhibit these behaviors year-round. For these kids, I would recommend working with a psychologist to unpack these behaviors and get individualized support. 

First, let’s start with a little background on dopamine and sugar. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter made in our brain. Dopamine gives us feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. Exercising, meeting a goal, having a new experience, sex, or going out in the sun, all release dopamine. In our modern society, we also have many things invented by humans that give us extremely high amounts of dopamine. These include processed sugar, alcohol, gambling, video games, social media, and some drugs. Today, I’m focusing on highly processed sugars, but the pattern is similar to other highly dopaminergic things. 

Eating sugar releases dopamine, which all of our systems have a desire for. This is why most people have trouble eating just one cookie. The dopamine draws us in, and we can easily keep eating until we don’t feel well or regret how much we ate. While all systems have this desire for dopamine, this desire is stronger in people with highly sensitive systems. These systems react more strongly to dopamine and have greater difficulty following boundaries or making the choices they want to make around highly dopaminergic things.

For kids with highly sensitive systems, parents often notice new behaviors this time of year, like regularly hoarding candy, hiding wrappers, sneaking more, or repeatedly eating to the point of sickness. If this is your kid, you are not alone, and your kid isn’t bad! Your kid probably does not even understand why they do these things. It is also common for kids to feel regret, shame, or confusion afterward. It’s not that kids decide to break a rule or want to keep eating even after they start to feel sick. Instead, they have an urge to get dopamine, and sweet things being readily available makes it easy to act on this urge. As a result, it might be very difficult for them to control these impulses on their own. They may need help and support from adults with more developed self-control and self-regulation systems. 

If you have had these struggles in the past with your child, I would consider doing four things this season to help your child understand and build strategies for managing their relationship with dopamine. 

1.Explain Dopamine to Kids 

I like to explain dopamine using a cradle balance ball toy (or a video of one). If you pull the end ball back a bit, the one on the other side moves a little, but they all stay inside the boundaries of the frame. That's how our body system typically works. Say we eat fruit or a meal and dessert. A small amount of dopamine is released into our system, and it’s enjoyable, but it doesn’t create significant changes in our bodies. 

However, if we have tons of sugar, it's like pulling the end ball up as high as it goes and dropping it. The ball on the other side goes flying and ends up way outside the frame. When it comes back, it hits the other balls, and the first one flies again. Slowly, the balls settle down again and stay inside the frame, but it takes quite a while. This is similar to a big dopamine hit. The surge throws our system out of equilibrium, and it takes a while to stop the reaction and calm our body back to its normal baseline. 

Further complicating things, after a big dopamine hit, our dopamine levels drop below our baseline because our bodies are trying to compensate for having too much. So when our bodies crave more, they are actually not craving the spike. They are trying to get back to baseline. But during this moment, when our bodies try to get back to baseline, we experience a sugar craving. This often results in eating more high-sugar foods, creating a cycle of dopamine spikes and deficits. 

If you are looking for a book to help you teach your child about their brain, Wonderfully Wired Brains (affiliate link) is a great place to start. It teaches lots of brain basics, including information about dopamine, along with information about neurodivergence and neurodivergent people. 

2. Talk to them about their experience

After talking to kids about what dopamine does and how our body reacts to it, we can talk to them about their personal experiences with sugar and dopamine. 

I might start by saying something like, “Some people have extra sensitive systems. So when they are around things like Skittles (enter your kid's sugar of choice, but Skittles are common), they sometimes take more and more until they feel sick or eat more than they want. Have you ever felt like that?” Or, “Some people also end up taking candy when they are not supposed to or hiding candy because their urge to get dopamine is so strong. Has that ever happened to you?”

Offering kids a story similar to what you think might be going on with them can help them feel like they are not alone and be more comfortable sharing their experiences. 

3. Join their Team 

When helping your kids navigate their behaviors around sweets, it’s easy to get into a power struggle where you are making rules, and they are either following them or breaking them. However, the urge to seek dopamine is so strong that when access to these items is high, these types of rules often don’t set kids up for success. Instead, kids end up breaking the rules and then experience shame. 

It’s often more effective to join your child’s team. This means that instead of rules and punishments, you are working together to build understanding, skills, and strategies for managing their relationship with dopamine. For example, you can check in with your kid before going to an event where there will be candy, talk about what feels good and what feels too much, and discuss goals they would like to work towards. If your child engages in behaviors like hiding wrappers, this might also look like counting the wrappers together as part of a shame and judgment-free check-in. 

The goal here is to help your child understand what is going on in their body and have a partner helping them build lifelong skills for managing their relationship with highly dopaminergic things. 

4. Create a plan 

Lastly, I would create a proactive plan to set your family up for success this season, however, you define that. This is going to look different for each family each year. 

First, consider what you and your family are prepared to manage this year. You may have the time and mental energy to build dopamine management skills. In that case, you might focus more on conversations and less on limiting access.

However, if you don’t feel like you have the space to take on one more thing this year, that’s totally fair! In that case, focus more on strategies that limit access to sweets to reduce the need to engage with this issue constantly.  

Here are a few of my favorite strategies. They fall into two major categories: limiting access and limiting the dopamine impact of consumed sweets. 

• Limit access 

• Choose not to keep a lot of sweets in the house. 

• Do a candy buyback where your child can trade a portion of their candy for a game, book, or toy. 

• Participate in a community candy exchange. Many local community groups have programs where children can donate candy in exchange for something. Soldiers’ Angels has drop off points across the country where kids can donate candy to be shipped to troops. Many locations of Ronald McDonald House also accept candy donations. Contact your local chapter for dropoff details. 

• Buy Halloween candy on Halloween instead of in advance or give out small toys instead. 

• Be aware of foods that are particularly challenging for your child. For example, maybe they are ok having ice cream occasionally, so having that in the house works for them, but they really struggle not to eat all the peanut butter cups, so not keeping those in the house might be a good way to support them.

• Limit the dopamine impact of the sweets 

• Eat a meal and drink a glass of water before trick or treating or attending events where there is likely to be lots of access to sugar. 

• When kids ask for something sugary, consider having them pair it with something. Instead of, “No, you can’t have a chocolate.” try, “Sure, what longer-lasting energy do you want with that quick energy? Maybe some nuts or a piece of cheese?”

• Tweak food items to reduce sugar and/or increase other balancing ingredients. For example, add oats to cookies, add sparkling water to juice, or choose higher fiber desserts like those with pumpkin or berries. 

By proactively teaching kids about dopamine, having them reflect on their experience, partnering with them, and creating a plan, we can turn what is often a painful and shameful circle into a learning experience. Kids with highly sensitive systems will likely still have some of these struggles as adults. By helping them understand how their body works and try on strategies as kids, we can support them in becoming adults who can understand and have effective strategies to manage their relationship with dopamine.

And, as always, if you are looking for support on a specific topic and can’t find it, let us know here. My team and I are always looking for more ways to support this community :)