Why Hitting Rock Bottom Actually Makes Your Brain Smarter: The Science of Dopamine Dips and Resilience

Your Setback Is Rewiring Your Brain for Success: Understanding Dopamine Dips, Plasticity, and Life Transitions

What this is: A neuroscience-backed exploration of why your worst moments might be creating your wisest self, with practical strategies for harnessing your brain’s natural rewiring process during life transitions.

What this isn’t: Toxic positivity dressed up as science, or a suggestion that suffering is “good for you.” This is about understanding what’s actually happening in your brain so you can work with it, not against it.

Read this if: You’re tired of fighting your feelings during a major transition and want to understand why discomfort might be your brain’s way of updating its operating system.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Dopamine dips increase neuroplasticity, making your brain more receptive to change precisely when you need it most
2. Setbacks create decision-making upgrades by forcing your brain to reassess outdated patterns and build better ones
3. The discomfort you’re feeling isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, signalling your brain is actively rewiring for your new reality
4. Resilience isn’t about avoiding low moments, it’s about leveraging the heightened learning state they create
5. Your capacity for growth is highest during transition, not despite the difficulty, but because of it

Introduction: When Everything Falls Apart, Your Brain Wakes Up

At some impossibly early hour this morning, I was watching a TED talk, as one does. This one:

It reminded me of something I must remember to discuss with my Camino de Santiago Crossroads and my Bruised but Unbroken retreat guests:

That when the marriage ends, the terrifying diagnosis arrives, the job disappears, or the person you thought you’d grow old with doesn’t, something remarkable happens beneath the surface of your grief. Whilst you’re navigating the practical chaos of dismantling one life and building another, your brain is doing something extraordinary. It’s becoming more plastic, more receptive, more capable of change than it’s been in years.

Not because suffering is noble or character-building (though it can be both). But because of something far more pragmatic: when dopamine drops, neuroplasticity increases.

This article will show you why the ground beneath your feet isn’t just crumbling, it’s being ploughed for something new. You’ll discover how your brain uses setbacks as opportunities for profound rewiring, why resilience is built in the valleys rather than on the peaks, and how to harness this natural process instead of fighting it.

Because understanding what’s happening in your brain doesn’t make the transition easier, exactly. But it does help it make sense.

Elena Kowalski’s Story: The Lawyer Who Lost Everything Except Her Brain’s Ability to Learn

Elena Kowalski had built her life like she’d built her legal cases: meticulously, logically, with contingency plans for the contingency plans. At forty-three, she was a partner at a respected firm, married for seventeen years, mother to two teenagers who tolerated her presence. Her life looked exactly like the vision board she’d made at twenty-five.

Then her husband left her for someone slightly younger. Not a cliché secretary, but worse: a fellow barrister who’d been their dinner party friend. The humiliation tasted metallic, like blood from biting your cheek too hard.

The morning after he moved out, Elena stood in her kitchen, staring at the place where the coffee machine used to stand, the one that he’d taken (the expensive one, naturally). The silence pressed against her eardrums. No familiar cough from the study.

She made instant coffee. It tasted like defeat.

For weeks, Elena moved through a fog that smelled faintly of his aftershave, still lingering in soft furnishings. She’d reach for her phone to text him something mundane, then remember. Each remembering felt like touching a hot stove, the same shock of pain, the same stupid surprise that yes, it still hurts.

But something else was happening too, something she couldn’t name yet.

Three months in, Elena noticed she was taking different routes to work. Not consciously at first. She’d simply end up on unfamiliar streets, noticing architecture she’d driven past for a decade without seeing: a blue door with a brass fox knocker, jasmine climbing a wall, releasing its scent even in February, an elderly man who walked his elderly dog at exactly 7:43 each morning.

She started saying yes to things. A sculpture class offered by a colleague. Why? She’d never shown interest in art. She went. The clay felt cool and surprisingly alive under her fingers, requiring a different kind of attention, a bodily knowing rather than intellectual mastery. She was terrible at it. So she went back.

One evening, opposing counsel invited her for a drink. Marcus was recently widowed, carried his grief differently than she carried hers, but recognised something in her face. They talked for three hours about nothing important: whether pigeons have personalities, the correct milk-to-tea ratio, why sad songs feel good. She laughed, a real laugh that surprised her own throat.

“You seem different,” her daughter observed one Sunday. Not warmly. Teenagers are suspicious of parental evolution.

Elena was different. The desperate, clutching quality had loosened. She noticed she was asking different questions in client meetings, making connections she’d have missed before. She’d always been technically excellent; now she was intuitive. Where had that come from?

At a storytelling circle during her Purpose Pivot Protocol course, Elena finally understood. The facilitator, Dr Margaretha Montagu, explained dopamine dips and neuroplasticity, how the brain becomes most receptive to new learning during periods of reduced reward. Elena felt something click into place, the way a key finds its groove.

“You’re not losing your mind,” Margaretha said, smiling at the group’s recognition. “You’re designing a new one.”

Elena’s marriage hadn’t just ended. Her brain’s old operating system had crashed, forcing an upgrade. The pain she’d been fighting? That was the installation process. The saying yes, the unexpected laughter, the new intuitions: those were features of her updated version, not bugs in her broken one.

Why Does Loss Make Your Brain More Susceptible to Change?

The Dopamine-Plasticity Connection Nobody Taught You

Your brain runs on predictions. It’s constantly guessing what’s about to happen based on what happened before, and when those predictions prove accurate, you get a small dopamine reward. This system works beautifully when life is stable. It’s efficient. It conserves energy. It keeps you alive.

But it also keeps you stuck.

When major change arrives, uninvited and unwelcome, your brain’s prediction system fails spectacularly. The dopamine baseline drops because nothing is unfolding as expected. You wake up and reach for a body that’s no longer beside you. You drive to a job that no longer exists. You plan a future with someone who’s no longer in it.

Here’s the counterintuitive gift: when dopamine drops, your brain increases its neuroplasticity, its capacity to form new neural connections and pathways. In neuroscience terms, you enter a heightened state of learning readiness. Your brain essentially says, “The old maps aren’t working. Time to redraw them.”

Dr Andrew Huberman’s research on dopamine and neural plasticity demonstrates that periods of reduced dopamine actually prime the brain for behaviour change. The discomfort you’re feeling isn’t just emotional; it’s neurobiological. Your brain is literally becoming more malleable, more capable of rewiring, more open to new patterns.

This is why people report profound personal growth after crisis. It’s not about positive thinking or finding silver linings. It’s about capitalised biological opportunity. Your brain is briefly, powerfully open to reconfiguration in ways it isn’t during stable periods.

How Setbacks Upgrade Your Decision-Making Architecture

For twenty years as a physician specialising in stress management, I’ve watched people make their best decisions from positions of necessity, because crisis forces a ruthless audit of what actually matters.

When you’re forced to rebuild, you can’t automatically recreate what was there before. You question it. You assess whether those patterns served you or simply served others, perpetuated through habit rather than because they have genuine value.

Setbacks increase what researchers call “cognitive flexibility,” your ability to shift thinking strategies based on changing conditions. In stable times, your brain defaults to established neural pathways. It’s efficient but not necessarily wise. During transitions, those defaults are disrupted, forcing your prefrontal cortex to engage more actively in choice-making.

This is how people leave twenty-year careers for entirely new fields. How they end friendships that were draining them. How they suddenly have boundaries they’ve never had before. The crisis didn’t give them permission; it gave them neurological access to alternatives they couldn’t fully consider before.

The Ripple Effect: How Your Growth Changes Your World

Here’s where personal transformation becomes unexpectedly generous.

When you become more resilient, more flexible, more authentically yourself, you don’t just change your own trajectory. You change the emotional weather around you. Your children watch you navigate difficulty and learn that endings aren’t fatal. Your friends see you set boundaries and consider their own. Your community benefits from whatever you create from your rebuilt foundation.

I’ve hosted transformational retreats on the Camino de Santiago for many years, watching guests arrive brittle with recent loss and leave somehow both softer and stronger. The change in one person shifts something in the group. Someone’s courage to speak their truth gives another person permission to speak theirs. One person’s willingness to try something new, despite fear, creates space for others to try too.

Your resilience is contagious.

The version of you that’s emerging from this transition, the one being forged in this heightened state of neuroplasticity, will influence every relationship, every project, every moment going forward. Not because you’ll be “fixed” or “healed” (what reductive concepts), but because you’ll be more genuinely yourself, operating from updated rather than inherited patterns.

This matters. Your community needs people who’ve walked through fire and learned something from the burning, not despite it.

Five Mistakes to Avoid When Your Brain Is Rewiring

1. Rushing Back to Baseline Comfort

The mistake: Desperately seeking to feel “normal” again as quickly as possible, viewing any discomfort as a problem to eliminate immediately.

Why it backfires: You’re interrupting your brain’s natural learning process. The discomfort signals heightened plasticity. Numbing it (through substances, frantic activity, or premature new relationships) closes the window of opportunity for meaningful rewiring.

Instead: Allow the discomfort whilst managing it skilfully. Think of it as post-workout soreness from your brain, indicating growth, not damage.

2. Isolating During Your Most Plastic Moments

The mistake: Withdrawing completely from social connections because you feel broken or don’t want to burden others.

Why it backfires: Your heightened neuroplasticity makes you more receptive to new relational patterns, but only if you’re actually relating to people. Isolation reinforces old neural pathways through rumination.

Instead: Selectively engage with people who meet you where you are. Quality over quantity. One honest conversation rewires more than a dozen superficial ones.

3. Treating Every Impulse as Wisdom

The mistake: Assuming that because you’re in a transformative period, every sudden urge (quit your job, move countries, end all your friendships) is profound insight requiring immediate action.

Why it backfires: Increased plasticity means your brain is more receptive to change, but not necessarily making better judgments about which changes serve you. You’re learning, not yet enlightened.

Instead: Notice without necessarily acting. Keep a record of new thoughts and revisit them after a few weeks. True wisdom deepens with reflection; impulse fades with time.

4. Comparing Your Rewiring to Someone Else’s

The mistake: Measuring your progress against others’ timelines or trajectories, feeling you should be “further along” or changing in particular ways.

Why it backfires: Your neural rewiring is shaped by your unique history, neurobiology, and circumstances. Someone else’s path is literally irrelevant to your brain’s learning process.

Instead: Track your own markers of change. Are you making different choices than you would have six months ago? Are you noticing things you previously missed? That’s progress, even if it looks nothing like anyone else’s.

5. Believing This Window Stays Open Forever

The mistake: Assuming you’ll always feel this open to change, so there’s no urgency in engaging intentionally with this period.

Why it backfires: Heightened plasticity is temporary. Your brain will eventually re-stabilise around new patterns, for better or worse. What you do during this window shapes what becomes your new default.

Instead: Treat this as a limited, valuable opportunity. Engage purposefully with your transformation. Seek experiences that challenge old patterns. Work with people (mentors, therapists, guides) who can help you consolidate new learning before the window closes.

Intention-Setting Exercise: Directing Your Neuroplasticity

Take five minutes with pen and paper. No devices.

Write by hand (the physical act engages different neural pathways):

1. One pattern I’m ready to leave behind: Name a specific behaviour, thought pattern, or relational dynamic that no longer serves the person you’re becoming.
2. One new capacity I want to build: Be specific. Not “be happier” but “trust my instincts about people” or “speak up when something doesn’t feel right.”
3. One small action this week that aligns with that new capacity: Something concrete you can actually do, no matter how small.
4. How I’ll know it’s working: What evidence will you notice in your life, your body, your relationships?

Speak it aloud to yourself. Hearing your own voice commit creates an additional neural encoding.

Return to this weekly. Notice what shifts.

Further Reading: Five Books on Neuroplasticity, Resilience, and Transformation

1. The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge

Why this one: Doidge makes the science of neuroplasticity accessible through compelling case studies. It’s essential reading for understanding that your brain’s capacity for change doesn’t diminish with age or circumstance; it simply requires different conditions to activate.

2. Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant

Why this one: A masterclass in building resilience after loss, backed by psychological research. Sandberg’s personal experience combined with Grant’s academic rigour, creates a book that’s both insight-giving and practical.

3. The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal

Why this one: McGonigal challenges the assumption that all stress is harmful, presenting research on how our beliefs about stress actually shape its impact on our bodies and brains. Liberating and science-based.

4. Dopamine Nation by Dr Anna Lembke

Why this one: Essential for understanding how dopamine works, why modern life depletes it, and how to work with your brain’s reward system rather than against it. Particularly relevant during transitions when dopamine naturally dips.

5. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Why this one: A classic for good reason. Frankl’s exploration of finding meaning in suffering remains profoundly relevant. It’s not about toxic positivity; it’s about the human capacity to choose one’s attitude in any circumstance.

P.S. For a practical, daily approach to navigating change, my book Embracing Change, in 10 Minutes a Day offers accessible exercises specifically designed for people in transition. It’s what I wish someone had handed me during my own difficult passages.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does this heightened plasticity window actually last?

Research suggests heightened neuroplasticity during stressful transitions typically lasts several weeks to several months, depending on the severity of the change and your engagement with the process. Personally, I found that it can last much, much longer. But it’s not infinite, which is why intentional engagement during this period matters. You’re not damaged; you’re temporarily extremely receptive to learning.

Can you force neuroplasticity without going through something terrible?

Yes, but it requires deliberate action: learning completely new skills, significantly altering your environment, engaging in challenging physical activities, or working with practices like meditation that increase present-moment awareness. However, the plasticity induced by crisis is particularly powerful because it’s both neurobiological and circumstantial; you genuinely need new patterns because the old ones no longer fit your reality.

Is there a difference between “good stress” that increases plasticity and “bad stress” that’s damaging?

Excellent question. Chronic, unrelenting stress without recovery periods is genuinely harmful, reducing hippocampal volume and impairing learning. But acute stress, challenge, discomfort with periods of rest and integration, creates beneficial plasticity. The key is the oscillation between stretch and recovery, not constant overwhelm.

Why do some people seem to grow from crisis whilst others get stuck?

Multiple factors: genetic predisposition, early attachment patterns, available support, previous experiences with successfully navigating difficulty, and crucially, the story they tell themselves about what’s happening. People who frame difficulty as potentially transformative (without denying its pain) tend to engage more actively with the learning opportunity. But it’s not a moral failing if you’re struggling; some circumstances are genuinely overwhelming, and survival is success enough.

What if I’m past my crisis but feel I missed the window for growth?

Neuroplasticity doesn’t disappear; it just becomes less automatic. You can still create conditions for change through novelty, challenge, and intentional practice. You might need to be more deliberate about it, but your brain remains capable of rewiring throughout life. That said, if you’re currently in transition, know that this moment holds particular power. Don’t waste the crisis; benefit from it.

Conclusion: The Next Chapter Writes Itself in Neural Pathways

“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” — Joseph Campbell

Your brain is doing exactly what it’s designed to do during upheaval: becoming receptive, flexible, ready to learn. The discomfort you’re feeling isn’t a malfunction. It’s your nervous system recalibrating for different terrain.

What you do during this window of heightened plasticity will literally shape your neural architecture going forward. The habits you build, the thoughts you practise, the people you spend time with, the stories you tell yourself about what’s happening, all of it is being encoded more deeply than it would be during stable times.

You’re not just getting through this. You’re being reconstructed and reassembled by it. The question isn’t whether you’ll change, change is already happening at the neural level. The question is whether you’ll participate consciously in directing that change toward something that actually serves the life you want to live now, not the one you planned before everything shifted.

Your brain is ready, able and willing. The question is: are you?

Walk Your Way to Neural Rewiring: Join Us on the Camino

There’s something about walking that reorganises not just your thoughts but your nervous system. For two decades, I’ve watched guests arrive at my five- and seven-day Crossroads Camino de Santiago retreats carrying the weight of transition, divorce, loss, health crises, career endings, and leave walking lighter, not because their circumstances changed, but because they did.

The combination of rhythmic walking, stunning landscapes in south-west France, deep rest, and our evening storytelling circles with the Friesian horses creates optimal conditions for the neuroplasticity your brain is already primed for. You’ll walk ancient paths that have held centuries of seekers, share authentic conversation with others navigating their own crossroads, and return home with clarity about your next chapter, not because someone told you what it should be, but because you finally had space to hear what you already knew.

The Camino doesn’t fix you. It gives your rewiring brain exactly what it needs: movement, beauty, connection, and space to integrate what’s actually happening. If you’re in that uncomfortable space between who you were and who you’re becoming, this might be exactly the container you need.

Learn more and reserve your room at a Crossroads Camino de Santiago Retreat.

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Reflection Question: What one old pattern has already started loosening its grip on you, even if you haven’t consciously chosen to change it? What might that tell you about where your brain is already rewiring?