Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction | Episode 39

This is really important: Dopamine is a currency, and it's the way that you track pleasure; it's the way that you track success; it's the way that you track whether or not you are doing well or doing poorly ... If your dopamine is too low, you will not feel motivated. If your dopamine is really high, you will feel motivated. And if your dopamine is somewhere in the middle, how you feel depends on whether or not you had higher dopamine a few minutes ago or lower dopamine ... Your experience of life and your level of motivation and drive depends on how much dopamine you have relative to your recent experience.

Energy drinks, pre-workout drinks, drugs of various kinds that people take to study and pay attention—we talked about some of these for the ADHD episode; things like adderall, ritalin, armodafinil, modafinil—taken repeatedly over time, will reduce the level of satisfaction and joy that you get from the activities you engage in while under the influence of those compounds.

Cold water exposure led to very rapid increases in norepinephrine and epinephrine, which is also just called adrenaline. It also led to increases in dopamine. And these increases in dopamine were very significant. They kicked in around 10 or 15 minutes after submersion into the cold water—and I should mention the head wasn't below water; it was just up to the neck. And the dopamine release continued to rise and rise and rise and eventually reach 250% above baseline.

The level of dopamine is the primary determinant of how motivated we are, how excited we are, how outward-facing we are, and how willing we are to lean into life and pursue things.

If you want to maintain motivation for school, exercise, relationships, or pursuits of any duration and kind, the key thing is to make sure that the peak in dopamine, if it's very high, doesn't occur too often, and if something does occur very often, that you vary how much dopamine you experience with each engagement in that activity.

Many drugs and, indeed, many supplements that increase dopamine will actually make it harder for you to sustain dopamine release over long periods of time and to achieve those peaks that most of us are craving when we are in pursuit of things.

Regular ingestion of caffeine, whether or it's through coffee or otherwise, increases upregulation of certain dopamine receptors. So, caffeine actually makes you able to experience more of dopamine's effects.

Don't spike dopamine prior to engaging in effort, and don't spike dopamine after engaging in effort; learn to spike your dopamine from effort itself.

If you remember nothing else from this episode, please remember this: That when you experience something or you crave something really desirable, really exciting to you, very pleasurable, what happens afterwards is your baseline level of dopamine drops.

If I were to just put a really simple message around dopamine, it would be: There's a molecule in your brain and body that, when released, tends to make you look outside yourself, pursue things outside yourself, and to crave things outside yourself.

Layering together multiple things, substances and activities, that lead to big increases in dopamine actually can create pretty severe issues with motivation and energy right after those experiences and even a couple days later.

I think a lot of ADHD does go misdiagnosed because of this depletion in dopamine that occurs because of overindulgence in other activities and the drop in baseline.

Because of the way that dopamine relates to our perception of time, working hard at something for sake of a reward that comes afterward can make the hard work much more challenging and make us much less likely to lean into hard work in the future.

Hearing something that reinforces one's prior beliefs actually can evoke dopamine release.