Dopamine

Listened to an interesting podcast on Dopamine by Andrew Huberman. I always enjoy his content because he is completely driven by science, not by personal opinion. He is truly objective as far as I can tell.

Dopamine is often misunderstood. It is not necessarily associated with good feelings after you pursue an activity. It is more related to motivation to engage in certain behaviours.

Rewards

Scientists did an experiment where they observed children of kindergarten age, and later reproduced this in adults. The children were monitored during school days, where they had blocks of structured time and free time. During structured time their activities were managed. They had to sing or write, for example. Then they had blocks of free time where they could do whatever activity they liked.

They observed what activity the children liked to do in their free time, and then started to reward these children for their work. For example, if the children liked to draw in their free time, the researches started giving them gold stars and other praise for their work.

Then the researches removed the reward for the activity, and interestingly, the children and adults started showing less interest and enjoyment in the activity because they were lacking the reward.Note that this is the activity that they liked to do in their free time prior to the experiment.

This all has to do with the nature of dopamine, dopamine baselines and peaks.

Huberman explains this with a metaphor of a pool. In the pool you have waves, and the waves have peaks and troughs. At the peaks, your dopamine is high, but they are inevitably followed by troughs: dips in dopamine, which lead to low energy and low motivation.

Then there is the baseline of dopamine: the amount of water in the pool. The baseline is the relative point to which the peaks and throughs are determined.

So it is important that you don’t reward yourself for activities that you are doing. Don’t reward yourself too much when you achieve a fitness or study goal. You will feel good after the event, but you will end up in a through. Being in the trough means feeling demotivated, leading to procrastination.

Getting Out Of The Trough

The good news is that the system will reset itself after experiencing highs or lows due to rewards.Getting out of the trough happens automatically, but you can influence the rate at which you climb out of it.

Let’s say you are not motivated to study. You’ll need to do something which is more painful. Something that’s even harder to do. Whatever feels harder to do in the moment than the activity that you should be doing. Do something that makes you feel uncomfortable.

Tactics

  • exercise for 1 minute
  • do something that really sucks
    • cold water
    • anything that makes you cringe
  • leverage something that’s painful

The Holy Grail Of Motivation

The holy grail of motivation: not needing any external reward, but enjoying the activity itself that is leading you towards your goal. For example, enjoying running training in pursuit of a marathon goal. Enjoying coding and doing coding exercises in pursuit of becoming a software engineer.

I feel very fortunate that I succeeded at turning my passion into my career. The journey itself is fun. I enjoy coding, and that activity is taking me closer towards the goal of becoming a good software engineer and the ability to contribute to open source.

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https://hubermanlab.com/leverage-dopamine-to-overcome-procrastination-and-optimize-effort/

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