I’ve spent more time listening to the Huberman Lab podcast than any other podcast in the last year or so. It’s such a wealth of scientifically proven information that’s going to help you improve your life. One of the more recent episodes I found really interesting and relevant — It involved the concepts around the motivation and reward systems in the body. This system is governed by a molecule called dopamine. Dopamine creates a sense of craving something, motivating you to go and obtain what you are craving.
I need not say how pivotal a good understanding and implementation of this knowledge surrounding the dopamine system has the potential to be. If we learned how to control our motivation we would be able to choose when we produce our best work, rather than being slave to our fluctuating emotions and motivations. I am going to outline some of the science that Dr. Huberman covered in his recent podcast episode, giving you tips and advice for improving your own control over your motivation.
When dopamine is released (or why social media is addictive)
Dopamine surges in your body when you receive or predict the receival of a reward. This spike in dopamine creates a positive association to your action, meaning that you are more likely to repeat it. This is how social media is addictive — it shows content that rewards you at random intervals (more addictive than at regular intervals), meaning you are incentivised to keep using the platform to continue receiving dopamine hits.
What stimulates dopamine release?
The release of dopamine is stimulated from near anything that has an effect upon us in our lives. Unfortunately there are methods that stimulate the release of dopamine to extremely high levels through little effort (think drugs, video games, social media). You can hopefully see how this is a problem — if we can induce such high levels of dopamine very easily, it’s hard to feel motivated for an activity that we anticipate may not provide us with any stimulation remotely close to these highs.
The problem with the dopamine system
The perceived problem with this system is that once your dopamine levels have spiked, they enter a refractory period. Your dopamine levels actually drop from the peak to a level below that of before you received the reward that created the initial spike. Furthermore, if you repeatedly engage in the activity that caused a spike in your dopamine previously, the following peaks won’t be as high as they were that first time. This can lead to you feeling drained and demotivated, because the levels of dopamine in your system are going to plummet once you stop trying to spike them — you will not have the dopamine left to motivate yourself to pursue normal activities.
So how do we recover our dopamine levels?
Huberman notes that one potential method for this is simply to wait. By ceasing stimulating the release of dopamine, eventually the system will overcome the refractory period and restore baseline dopamine levels. The problem is that this can take a long period of time, dependent upon how much you have abused your dopamine system and for how long. Luckily there is an alternative to waiting that will rebound you out of the dopamine trough much quicker, and it’s based on this idea (quoted from the podcast episode):
‘If you were to take that state of being unmotivated, procrastinating, and actually do something that’s harder than being in that a motivated state, in other words, doing something that’s more effortful, even painful, you can rebound yourself out of that dopamine trough much more quickly.’
In short, if you make your experience uncomfortable then it doesn’t take long before you perceive normality as a comfortable state to be in once again. There are many ways to introduce this discomfort, but the one most strongly supported by the literature in Huberman’s opinion is deliberate cold exposure. A cold shower in the morning elevates baseline dopamine levels, keeping them there for a substantial period of time. Another example is performing meditation — it is uncomfortable to sit for 10 minutes and focus solely on your breath, therefore your dopamine rebounds closer to baseline once you have the freedom to get up and act again.
You can also maintain elevated levels of baseline dopamine through regular exercise, which uses movement as the driver to increase motivation. There are also supplements that can be taken that increase baseline dopamine levels, including the amino acid l-tyrosine. Despite this, Huberman preaches, as he does in all podcast episodes that discuss supplements, that behavioural optimisation should be attempted before turning to supplementation in the context of improving our wellbeing. This is because often supplements are expensive, or they can have unwanted effects on other systems of the body.
Conclusion
I hope that this article has inspired you to think more about the activities that you engage in to improve your motivation to achieve goals that you set. Even if you don’t actively attempt to increase your baseline dopamine levels, I believe that awareness around how the system works will subconsciously affect your behaviours to a certain extent, and you will now likely be more mindful to your states of craving, motivation and effort. Thank you to Dr. Andrew Huberman for a fantastic podcast in general (especially this episode, where I got most of the information for this article from), and thank you for reading.