Leverage Dopamine to Overcome Procrastination & Optimize Effort
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I manager huberman and am a professor of neurobiology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing dopamine.

Dopamine is a topic that i've covered before on this podcast, and many people have heard of dopamine. Most people know that dopamine is involved in pleasure, to some extent, to another. And nowaday people are starting to appreciate the dopamine is also intimately involved with motivation, drive and pursuit.

Well, today you're going to learn that, indeed, dopamine e is responsible for all of those things. But you are also going to learn that dopa mean is critical for overcoming procrastination, for ensuring ongoing motivation, and indeed, for ensuring confidence. In fact, we are going to talk about the relationship between dopamine and motivation and confidence at the level of neurobiological circuitry.

And we are going to cover tools that will allow you to leverage your dopamine in order to have a maximum motivation to overcome sticking points, which include things like protesters ation, but also by understanding the neural circuits in the brain and body that release and used dopamine. But more importantly, by understanding water called dopamine dynamics, that is, what gives rise to big peaks in dopamine or troops in doping, or what's referred to as our baseline levels of dopamine, which turns out to be our baseline levels of motivation and feelings of well being by understanding how those things relate to one another. I assure you that by the end of today's episode, you will be in a far Better position to understand why you become a motivated, why you procrastinate, how to ensure motivation on an ongoing basis, and even how to leverage effort and the desire to become motivated as a way to do just that, to become more motivated.

Today's discussion is not about psychology, although I will center around practical everyday examples and offer many, many tools that you can implement if you choose. Today's discussion is really about pulling apart these things that we call motivation, reward, pleasure, procrastination, and understanding them in terms of their dopamine e dynamics. So whether you ve heard me or others talk about dopamine before, or whether not today is your first exposure to the topic of doping, today's episode is really designed to give you the biological and practical knowledge so that you can leverage your dopamine e circuitry and your dopamine levels, as well as tools to adjust dopamine circuitry and levels in order to optimize mental health, physical health and performance.

Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electorate drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of sault magnesium in peason, the so called electronic and no sugar.

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Again, that drink element element t dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga ea sessions and n sdr non sleep depressed protocols. I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens, and I started doing yoga ea about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations.

And they had a lot of different types of meditations to place, to bring your body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have few minutes to meditate, other times have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do.

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If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up dot com slashed huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Okay, let's talk about doping.

What is dopamine? Dopamine is what's called a neuromodulator, which simply refers to the fact that it's a chemical that modulate tes or changes the electrical activity of other cells. And the cells are referring to, or neurons. Neurons are just nerve cells.

So you have a brain in a spinal cord, and the neurons in your brain and spinal cord connected to one another, and they connect to different areas of the body, including basically every organ of your body. Every organ of your body communicates back to your brain and final cord through direct or indirect pathways. For instance, you have neurons in your gut that sends what sorts of neutrons you've eaten or drink, and then send neural signals, electrical signals, up to the brain.

And indeed, that whole process happens to be modulated by doping. Dopamine, as a neuromodulator, has the basic property of either ramping up, increasing or decreasing the activity of other neurons. And that's done by adJusting things like electrical potentials and things of that sort that we really won't go into this episode, but that I promise to get into in detail in a future.

Epo de, if you're interested in the biochemistry and bio physics of neons and things in that sort. So we have this neuromodulator doping, and we know that that neuromodulator can increase or decrease the activity of other neurons. So then we have to ask ourselves, where is dopamine released in the brain body? And what specific types of neurons is IT impacting? In other words, what specific types of functions does dopa have? So there are basically five circuits within the brain that use dopamine in as the primary or modulator.

And those five circuits engage different but related functions. I'm going to go through them one by one relatively quickly, giving you a little bit of nomenclature and some sense of what each of those circuits looks like and what IT does. The first circuit is the so called a negro striata pathway.

So in the back of the brain there is an area called substantial nyra, so named because the neurons, they are actually very dark, and they actually contain pigment. You'll be able to see this. If I were to slice up a brain, you would see two dark regions in the back.

That substantial niger, substantial nigga, contains in neurons that are chock blocker of dopamine. But they released that dopamine and a brain structure called the striatum. The riom is involved in a movement, both the initiation of movements and the suppression of movements, and so called go action and no go suppress action pathways, a topic for a future podcast.

The second brain circuit that uses and leverages dobbin to a great extent is this so called missions ic pathway. Now you'll also in a moment here about the misquote al pathway. So today i'm going to talk about these somewhat interchangeably at times, but where it's important for me to differentiate between them.

I will do that. Both of these pathways initiate from a set of neurons in the so called the ventures tegmental area, or V T A. I will use that acron va, the vt.

A functions in close partnership with a different brain structure called the nucleus a cumbers or N A. I don't think i'll call IT N A. Today will talk about vta eventual tegmental area, and i'll talk about nuclear, a comment for sake of today's discussion. You can lump those together if you want. Neurons in those areas project a bunch of different places.

But in the most olympic pathway, those neurons are projecting the areas of the brain, like the hyperfilm, which sits right up of the room of your mouth and is responsible for a lot of basic functions, things like maintaining your body temperature for libido, in the pursuit of sex, for hunger, for the generation of signals to the paternal gland that caused the release of hormones and other things into the bloodstream. So the connections, which I sometimes refer to as projections from the neurons in the vta and nuclear accommodate the hypothalamus, are basically using dopamine to moderate the output of a lot of different things that happen in this hyper Thomas that controls a lot of, we could call them primitive functions, but they're really basic functions for survival. Now the other pathway out of the vta and nuclear accused is to the cortex.

That's why it's called me so cortical pathway. So this is a very different pathway out of the vta and nuclear accused. And the one I just describe a moment ago, the pathway i'm talking about now, there is a critical pathway projects to the prefrontal cortex, which is a structure that many of you perhaps heard of. But even if you have, and it's important to know, this is an area that resides right behind your forehead and that in humans, compared to other species, is greatly expanded in terms of its size and complexity of function. So it's involved everything from planning and executing of action to making good or bad decisions, depending on context.

In fact, one of the primary functions of prefrontal cortex is to really understand context, whether or not, for instance, you are alone in your room where certain behaviors are appropriate, whether or not you are at work where other behaviors are appropriate, understanding what the context is and therefore what sorts of actions need to be generated and suppressed. In fact, guess on the huberman in lab podcast. And this is a guess who's episode hasn't area yet described.

This beautiful ly. He's a neurosurgeon. And he said, the way to think about the prefrontal cortex is it's basically in area of the brain that says, or no, not now, to other brain regions in order to suppress action. And we know this because people that have damage to the prefrontal cortex often can't suppress in their impulses.

So the pathway from V T, A in nuclear accumbens the prefrontal cortex is absolutely critical for today's discussion, because we are largely going to be discussing motivation, drive, pursuit, procrastination and all sorts of things that have to do with our feelings about context, whether we want to do something or not, whether not we feel we shore we shouldn't, whether not we feel we failed the last time or there is a high probability of success the next time, preferred til cortex as many, many things. But when thinking about dope means role in the preferences cortex, that is, when thinking about this is critical pathway. We really want to think about how dopa mine is activating or changing our propensity to do certain things and get us into action, or prevent us from doing certain things and prevent action.

So basically, you can think about the music cortical pathway as a circle IT that really govern all of the major choices that you're going to make in life about what to do and what not to do, told your goals and away from the things that you want to avoid. Now, the fourth dopamine pathway in the brain is this so called two borough in andivia pathway. And this is not when we are going to focus on too much today.

This is a pathway that relates to connections between the brain and your petite tory. Glad your petite tory gland being that gland that, as I mentioned a moment ago, is also receiving input from the hiper farmers and is releasing a bunch of hormones into your bloodstream. Things like lutanist ing hormones, folco stimulating hormones, things like mulana cotton hormones.

These are hormones that are impacting everything from the function of the over and females to the function of the testes and males. It's governing. Things like court is all released under stress firor ID hormone at meaning its regulating firor hormones release and on and on dope mean has a very powerful impact on the output of the patera ory.

So again, that's probably a topic for a future episode, but it's important in reviewing the different brain circuits that use dopamine as a module or that I mentioned that one, then there's a fifth one. And this fifth one is not often discussed and again won't be the main topic of today's discussion. But for thornis and for clarity, it's important that we mention IT.

This is the circuit within your retina, that is, the pie crust like lining of neural tissue, the back of your eye. Because, remember, your eyes is actually part of your brain that ve got excluded from your brain during development. Those two eyes that you see in the mirror and that you see another people, are actually two pieces of central nervous system.

And within the retina, which is the neural portion of the eye within the neo retna, dopamine is responsible for adapting to different light conditions so that you can see clearly both in the evening and when he gets darker, you can still see a bit. And in the morning when it's very bright, you don't really have to make adjustments to your visual system in order to see clearly your visual system does IT for you. And one of the ways that IT does that is through the ermolai dopamine.

So today we are not going to discuss the retina dopamine pathways or the tube in from debuted doing pathways. And we won't really talk so much about the negotiator pathway. I'll say one more thing about IT, then i'll leave that alone.

We are going to talk about the meza cortical pathway. We might touch on the is olympic pathway a little bit as well. So today, we're mostly going to talk about mezo cortical circuitry and function and dope me within the missing cortical circuit.

And the reason that we're doing that is that today's discussion is really about motivation, procrastination, goal setting in pursuit. It's very important. Understand that neither dupine nor the mezquites al circuit cares about any specific goal or pursuit.

This is a circuit that uses dopamine in in order to pursue anything. Now, of course, some people have a greater propensity to pursue things like work, or goals in athletics, or relationships, or a combination of those. Other people, unfortunately, have a greater propensity to pursue things like drugs of abuse.

What are drugs of abuse? Drugs of abuse tend to be drugs that increased levels of dopamine to the extent that other types of pursuits in life that are adapted for us, like work, relationship, school, eta, become irrelevant. In fact, the definition of addiction that I use, and that I believe really matches the new biology very well, is that addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring us pleasure.

Healthy functioning in the mezo cortical pathway, however, allows us to togo or switch back and forth between different types of pursuits of all the sorts that i've mentioned earlier. So if we can understand how that music critical pathway works, just a little bit in particular when dopa is released and when it's not released, what dopamine does when it's released to our sense of motivation and drive. And if we can understand a little bit about how our recent dopamine history, that is, whether or not there is dopamine in our system already, dict ates, whether not we are going to feel motivated in the next five, ten, fifteen minutes, hours, days in weeks, that is all very easy to understand.

I promise i'll explain IT to you in a simple way, but I want you to get a circuit into your mind. I want you to envision that there are these neurons and little nerve cells in the vta and nucleus. A comment those are on to make top, mean, they send their projections that we call actions like wires, and they can release dopamine into the prefrontal to cortex.

And now you already know, because you learned a few minutes ago, that the preto cortex then can ensure that certain behaviors take place and other behaviors do not take place. That or quieting that we talked about earlier. With that in mind, let's now take a look at how dopa is released.

And let's keep two things in mind. There are peaks in dopamine. That is, dopamine is released into the frontal cortex.

Where has these effects of activating or suppressing action? And we can think of those as peaks in dopa mean so um if I call IT a Spike, that means an increase and then a decrease. If I called a peak into increase and then a decrease, there can also be troughs in dopamine.

What do I mean by that? Well, we have peaks in dopamine, and that peak and dopamine can rise up and then go back to what we call baseline. Or there can be a trough IT can go below baseline.

So the two key things to understand about dopamine is that we have dopamine peaks that are triggered by certain behaviors, certain compounds, drugs or substances, food at seta, and that we have a dopamine in baseline are doomed. Baseline is our reservoirs of doping. It's how full or empty our dopamine pool is, and that dopamine pool is the pool of dopamine that we use in order to create those dopamine peaks.

And when those peaks come down, sometimes they go back to baseline and sometimes they go to lower than baseline, which we call the trough. If any of this seems confusing, I want you just to imagine a wave pool. This is an analogy, gy, that was given to me by one of our podcast guests, which is doctor called geek, who's an obesity specialists and works on number of things related to underground hormone function, including testosterone s.

And both men and women want to check out his episodes on hormonal health. They're fascinating and actionable, and he's a tremendous wealth of knowledge. And he has this analogy for how dopamine e works in our brain and body.

And the analogy is this notion of a wave pool. Never seen a wave pool. It's basically a concrete pool. And there are waves within IT.

okay? Do those waves can be of different heights, so they can be little ripples, and we can think of those as little mini peaks? Or they can be big waves, they can be really big crashing waves. If the height of those waves and the frequency of those waves is very, very large, some of that water, which here are using as an analogy to doping, can slash out of the wave pool and the baseline drops. However, if those pigs are small enough or they are seldom enough, well, then the baseline, that is, the water level in that pool, stays more or less constant.

I think this is an excEllent analogy for how dopamine works in the mesa tico pathway as IT relates to motivation and pursuit and all those sorts of things, because we really need to think about how the peaks in the baseline relate to one another. And this is very important. The peaks in the baseline are not independent of one another.

They relate to one another. So now you have in your mind a wave pool, and just understand that if you get a great, big, huge wave, maybe one of them crash out and some of that water will splice out, the baseline will go down a little bit. But if you get big peak after a big peak, after a big peak, pretend you're going to empty that pool, where as if you have smaller waves, were less frequent big waves, well, then the baseline will stay relatively constant.

So let's think about dopamine peaks and baseline ines. And let's remember that for every peak there's a trough. What do I mean by that? Well, when you have a wave, you also have the bottom of the wave.

When you have a mountain, you have the bottom of the mountain. When we think about dopamine peaks and dopamine baseline ines, we have to include that trough because that trap, that is, the level of dopamine in below line, really, dict ates. Whether not you are going to feel motivated to pursue something or not.

So i'm gonna you a visual in your mind. The visual in your mind is an increasing dopamine that triggered by your desire for something, and really could be your desire for anything if you're hungry and you are thinking about, I really want a sandwich. I really want to think, what sandwich would I want right now?

Really nice rose beef sandwich on sarto with a slice of swiss tomatoes. Slice a pickle. And I am describing the sandwich that I would want.

So if you're hungry and you're thinking about that dopamine starts rising. This is crucially important. understand. Dobin is not just released when we get the reward, when we get the thing that we're pursuing, dopamine is released in the anticipation of what we want.

That increase in dopamine in is by no happenstance, no mistake, relates also to our propensity and desire to move. Remember earlier I told you there's a separate circuit dopa mean that triggers movement and that when it's depleted is causing things like deficits of movement related to parkinson's or other movement disorders. Well, that's not pure coincidence.

That's because desire and the need to move in order to pursue and reach goals are one in the same process. So if I desire a sandwich where I desire a cup of coffee or I desire some water when i'm thirsty, there's an increase in dopamine that we could call a little mini peak and dopamine. But then here's the key thing.

Very soon after I realized my desire for something, that peak that was caused by the desire comes down and drops below baseline, below the level of dopa amee that I was priority, even thinking about the sandwich for the coffee or the glass of water. And it's that drop below baseline that trigger my desire to go out and find that sandwich, that coffee, that water or that blank insert. Whatever IT is that you happen to desire action or substance of any kind or person at seta.

So that drop low baseline is fundamental to the whole process in that drop low baseline was triggered by the proceeding peak. So let's say that I desire a sandwich. There's an increase in depine.

Then very quickly, IT comes down below baseline just a little bit. I'm in pursuit of the sandwich. I'm looking for where I can get that sandwich. I can order IT perhaps to be delivered. I can go out and find IT. Now is the stage in which I have to think about what are the different stimuli? Is the things in my environment that signal whether or not unlikely to get that sandwich or not?

So for incense, if I were to go to my phone in order food on an APP, or walked on the street and see the sign for a delhi, that's a cue that i'm likely to relieve that drop in doping and get not just back to baseline, but that i'll get a picture. And indeed, that's what happens if I find that delhi, I going to the delhi, they're open, they're making the sandwich that I want to make my sandwich and great I get that sandwich and that sandwich will have some degree of inherit reward to IT some degree of um my liking IT or not liking IT. So let's say I like IT not the best in watch i've ever had.

But all i'm doing is comparing my desire for that sandwich to the sandwich that I actually got an eight, and chances are it's going to relieve that craving, meaning IT will take that dopamine that had fAllen below baseline up up back to baseline. And if I like, the sandwich is going to indeed increase that dopamine again to another peak. Now if I love the sandwich, like it's the most delicious thing that i've taste in my entire life, well, then i'll get a big peak.

And dopamine when I consume that reward. However, chances are the sandwich is more less as I expected to be, which is pretty good. I lead IT and i'm fine.

What do I mean by fine? Well, there's a concept called reward prediction error. Reward prediction error says that the dope mean that IT is experience that is, that's released from the V, T, A.

And nuclear commons, is going to be of a certain value, and that value is going to be compared to the desire and expectation of what I thought I was going to get. So if you take what you actually got, minus what you expected, that reward prediction, err, so if the sandwiches, basically what I expected, get fine, develop comes down basically to a baseline level. That's pretty standard for me and is basically the baseline level I had before I ever thought about the sandwich at all.

If the sandwich completely surprises me, is completely amazing, just an amazing sandwich, well then the level of dopamine that I experiences when I consume that sandwich is going to be even greater, and it's going to be that minus what I expected. So there is a bigger reward prediction error in the direction of higher peak by consuming the sandwich. And then of course, there's the other possibility, which is the delis closed or the same way they make me as lousy doesn't takes good or something happened in the consuming of that swich that just makes a bad experience.

In which case, if we take that reward, experienced minus reward predicted from the initial craving, well, then it's going to be less than what I expected. And therefore, the baseline drops below where IT was prior to even desire the sandwich. okay.

So all of this might be a little bit complicated, but it's all very simple. Desire for things increases doping, but then our level of dopamine drops below baseline. And it's that drops below baseline that trigger the motivation to bring that dopamine level back up by going in pursuing the thing that you wanted in the first place.

Of course, as this is happening, you're not conscious of your dooming levels. You experience this as context dependent craving and pursuit because, remember, the prefrontal cortex is involved in context setting and craving and pursuit, because IT relates to action and movement, which is one of the general features of the dopamine in system. So you can start to see how this is a beautifully design system, and you can also see how it's a perfect system for desire and pursuit of anything, not just sandwiches, as i'm giving you in this somewhat trivial, but every day, and therefore, applicable example.

So just by understanding reward prediction, err, and especially by understanding that a craving trigger a peek in doping that makes you motivated, but then drops your level of dopamine below baseline, which makes you even more motivated. You are already halfway through the conceptual aspect of today's podcast, because if you can understand that, you will understand why, for instance, when you initially want something, you think you want something, IT puts you into motion. But then pretty quickly, you're starting to feel the pain of not having that.

And that is also contributing to your desire to pursue that thing. This is a subtle effect, but if you watch for IT, you'll start to see IT or experience IT within yourself. You're craving for things is not just about craving for those things per say. It's also a desire to relieve the pain of not having those things.

And if you can internalize that and start to develop an awareness around IT, you'll be in an amazing position to leverage all sorts of aspects of the dopamine system in order to increase your motivation, especially when things get really hard or when you have the propensity to procrastination is something that will get into a little bit later in the podcast, i'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a evita in mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

The reason I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic Greens once or usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for good health. Our god is very important, is populated by got microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health. And those probiotics and athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiota health. In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptations, ins, vitals and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And IT tastes s great.

If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman, and they'll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea, and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin d 3k two。 Again, that's athletic Greenstock comm slash huberman en to get the five three travel packs in the year supply of vitamin d three k two. Now i'd like to talk about the dynamics of dopamine release with a little bit more detail.

And this is something i've never covered on any social media post or on any podcast. I do this one, or is a guest another podcast, because on the face of IT, IT might seem a little too detail, like, why is he telling me all this isn't just enough to know that there are peaks and troops and based lines and doping. What turns out that if you can understand what that peak and trough are really about, in other words, what's really happening when we zoom in on that peak and trough, you'll be in an amazing position to overcome protestant ation and essentially pursue any goals in an ongoing basis.

So i'm very excited to share this information with you because I do think that he has tremendous actionable power. What i'm about to describe relates to a number of different findings that have been made mostly over the last five to ten years, although to be quite direct, mostly within the last five years. And IT has to do with the fact that the peak and trip and baseline that I talked about a moment ago, that associate craving, they look like a peek followed by a trap, followed by a return to baseline and maybe another peek if you get the reward or a drop below baseline, if you don't do, you don't like what you got.

But if we were to zoom in on that peak in the reward, in other words, really zoom in on the whole process and start thinking about the circuit tree, that is, the neurons in vta and nucleus accumbens. How IT relates to the frontal cortex in a bit more detail, what we discover is nothing short of amazing. What we discover is that whenever we're pursuing something, we are always looking for cues as to whether or not we are on the right path to achieve that thing.

And we are also setting a mindset or a context within our brains as to whether not we are confident or pessimistic, as to whether not we're going to achieve that thing. Now this is vitally important for anyone out there who finds IT hard to get motivated and stay motivated. It's also vitally important for anyone whose psychologically minded in anyway, you want to be psychologist, but psychologically minded in any way, and wonders, why is that that some people are just so motivated and other people have such trouble with motivation? Why is that that some people require perfect conditions in order to achieve things, and other people just seem to manage to pursue things no matter what.

IT also relates to the fact that some of us are very good at achieving our goals in one context and not so much in another. So here's what you need to understand. I'll stay with the example of the roast beef sandwich just because we already have that in mind.

But you can replace roast beef sandwich with essentially any goal, the q that we're going to likely get what we want. So for instance, the sign that there's a delhi on the corner or that I opened my phone and that there's an APP that represents a restaurant that sells the particular sandwich that I like, that you, as I mention me for increases doping. You see that right? OK。 And subconsciously, there's already a signal that initiated by that dobin that i'm on the right path.

Then as I mention, dupine drops below baseline that further contributing to my desire to go pursue that sandwich either with my thons on my phone through the APP, or with my feet and walking to the delhi, standing in line and so forth. Then, as I mentioned before, there is a peak in doping of varying height, depending on how satisfying I find the reward to be when I actually get that sandwich, get that goal. Now keep in mind there is some time delay between the q the APP the delhi is at and when I get my sandwich, that gap is going to be different for different things.

So in pursuing you know four year degree, it's going to be four years. If the diploma is your goal, if it's an exam studying for IT might be a week long and there will be many other signals in between that initial q that hey, the the reward likely lies down this path in this textbook in on, you know, this dating APP or at that delhi, there are many other cues. Those cues come in so consciously and involve everything from how long the line is at the delhi to, you know, whether not you seeing the types of people on a dating APP that you'd like to see, whether not responding to you, whether or not someone's texting you back or not, all of those cues are integrated and adJusting your baseline level of dopamine e all the time as you go to pursue that goal.

So what the doble mean system does is IT doesn't just compare the height of the peak at the beginning, right? I desire that to the reward that you got. We talked about reward prediction. That's the that's the kind of first grade version of reward prediction.

Er it's also taking into account all the things that happen between and all of that is serving as A Q for the eventual reward and all of that is fully into what we call reward prediction air. In other words, the dopamine in system is very good at subconsciously parsing what are the things that happen between wanting and getting and that's part of the learning that dopamine achieves. And indeed, there are specialized circuits from the vta and nuclear occupants that are involved in just the learning of how we achieve or don't achieve specific types of rewards that we desire.

So this is called reward contingent learning because it's learning the contingencies of what LED up to a reward or what didn't lead up to a reward at the same time. And in parallel, there's an ongoing release of dopamine in the background. And that ongoing release of dopamine that has nothing to do with learning is really just sort of a propeller that's driving us in the direction of whatever is that we're trying to pursue.

So I realized for some of you, this might seem like unnecessary or perhaps even in overwhelming amount of detail, but it's actually quite simple. Your brain is trying to figure out what happened prior to getting or not getting a reward, and it's comparing what you wanted compared to what you've got. At the same time, the dopamine in system initiates a motivation signal that takes you through that entire round of pursuit.

And those three things there is the stimulus, the desire that I want that that's the first thing leads to that peak, the peek drops a bit below baseline and IT triggers motivation. The motivation is the second thing. The motivation is dope released also, but from a separate set of draws within the circuit driving you forward.

And the entire time that is driving you forward, it's paying attention to what's there along the way, even if you don't realize IT consciously. And then there's the reward itself or the lack of reward itself. So those three components, the learning contingency, which has to do with the stimulus in the reward and everything that happens in between, and the propeller nature of the domain is, are referring to IT.

Those all combine into a total learning so that after you get the sandwich, or after you finish the exam, or after you go out on a date, or after you do anything that you desire to do, that system that originates in the V, T, A, in nucleus accused and goes up to your cortex. IT learned, I learned many things. I learned the contingency between stimulus and desire, motivation.

And whether not you succeeded or not. It's basically a score board for how you did, given what just happened. So actually, it's all very simple.

In fact, if you can understand even just half of what I just said, you are now in a far Better position to understand everything from addiction to motivation to procrastination and IT will make sense of all the tools that i'm going to talk about next, which will allow you to overcome procrastination points, to overcome deficits in motivation, and indeed, to reset your motivation in an ongoing way so that you can reach your goals. Okay, so let's take everything that I just told you and set IT aside. It's still important, but less is set to say you have to think about any of those details or names or anything.

Let's just think about addiction, because in biology and in psychology, Frankly, IT really often pays to think about the extremes first and then work out towards more typical circumstances. With that said, addiction, unfortunately, is very common nowadays. I just had a statistics, in fact, that there is an eighty eight zero percent increase in alcohol use disorder among women in the last thirty years.

I talked a little bit about this in the episode that I did about alcohol and health. Can I want to be very clear, i'm not somebody that is completely against alcohol for adults, provided they are not alcoholics. Turns out two drinks a week, probably fine healthwise.

Zero would be Better. If we're honest. Zero is Better than any alcohol, but two during the week is probably find past two during you start running in the problems. And yet, many, many people out there, male and female alike, suffer from alcohol use disorder, also called alcoholism. The same is also true for things like metheny, amine or cocaine or other types of subsistance addictions.

And the same is also true for a lot of behavioral, or what are sometimes called process addictions, things like sex addiction or video game addiction, or any type of behavior that, Frankly, is leveraging the dopamine in system, but that engages this progressive narrowing of the things that bring someone pleasure such that nothing else is really salient. Nothing else is really pulling them in, in the way that their video games, or sex, or pornography or alcohol, pick your substance or or you know, behavior that you see out there, or hopefully not, but that you might suffer from an addiction to. So what's happening in addiction? Well, addiction involves depine, among other things, often the opposite system eta.

But if we were, think about what's the stimulus in an addiction and what's the peak in dopamine e and then what happens after that peak IT all becomes very clear as to why addiction happens and why it's so pernicious ous. So for instant isted cocaine, cocaine causes dramatic increases in dopamine in very, very fast. So if somebody craves cocaine, what are they craving? They're craving that dopamine peak.

They're craving the increased level of alertness. They're in craving a number of things associated with the feeling of being under the influence of the drug. But the stimulus for simply becomes that line of cocaine or in the case of crack, that crack rock, they're gonna smoke i'm got forbid, their main lining IT.

They are shooting into vain. What happens is they sort smoke or inject cocaine. And dopamine levels almost immediately go up, up, up, up, up, up to a very high peak.

And so the the time gap between the stimulus and the dopamine is very, very short. So short, in fact, that there is really no other contingencies in between that the missing critical system has to learn. In fact, what does the system coin could learn? IT learns cocaine equals massive amount of dopamine, equals feeling euphoric and an energetic etta. And in doing that, IT reinforces the whole circuit so that that short, we can even say hyper short contingency is really what the system wants.

So much so that longer contingencies of, say, putting in the hard work of no generating a fitness program or a professional program for yourself, for a education program, which takes not just many days but many weeks in years, well, none of that is going to lead to piece in dobin that are as high as the peek and dooming associated with cocaine. So that tells us something critical. IT is both the duration between desire and effect.

And when I say effect, I mean the rewarding properties of dopamine that are experienced that's important of very short gaps. Teach the system to expect and want short gaps makes IT very hard to pursue things that take longer. So when we say it's the short, in this case, hyper short, distance or time between the stimulus and the dopamine, what we're really talking about, if we were to plot this out on a on a border, on a piece of paper, is the steepened ss of the rise of that peak.

It's very, very steep. The peak and doping is coming up very fast after the desire. And in addition to that, and this is very important, the higher the peek in dopa and the faster the rise to that peak, the further below baseline the dopamine drops after the drug wears off.

yes. So in the case of cocaine is a very fast and very large drive and dopamine followed by a steep drop and very deep trough in dopamine below baseline. You say, okay, so there's pleasure than there's lack of pleasure, uh, but it's worse than that because it's not just lack of pleasure.

If you recall what we talked about a little bit earlier, that drop below baseline triggers the desire and the pursuit for what? For more. And so this sets in motion a vicious loop where people start pursuing peaks in dopamine that can come very fast without much effort.

And that's one of the ways in which addiction start to take hold. There's a simple way to think about this and to remember if you want to avoid this whole thing. I mean, the first one is obvious, don't do cocaine, don't try IT, don't use IT acted to IT all sort of one in the same.

Frankly, I don't know many people that, despite opinion to the contrary, that use cocaine recreationally, that don't at some point run into either a financial, psychological, physical or some other problem. The other thing that's absolutely critical to keep in mind, and this was discussed in my colleague, doctor, on olympus book domination and on this podcast, excEllent books, by the way, highly recommended if you haven't read IT already. It's a fascinating exploration into doping as IT relates to addiction, not just drug addiction, but other types of addiction in the name of that, because doping nation will provide a link to IT in the showed captions.

The other thing that happens after those big fast increases in dupine caused by things like cocaine is afterwards, when IT quickly drops below baseline, IT takes a much longer time to get back to the original baseline, then IT did prior to using the drug. And worse still is that the peaks in dopamine that are created from more consumption of cocaine leads to progressively lower peaks and deeper crofts below baseline. So the whole system is shifting away from pleasure and more to pain and the desire for pursuit of the drug.

This is a terrible situation, and it's a terrible situation that's not just unique to cocaine. In fact, if we were to look at the averages, and again, these are averages of the height of the peaks in dopamine e that are created by different substances and the rates at which those peak take place, because remember, the time to peak is just as important as how high that peak goes. We see some pretty interesting member, so for instance and again, these are averages based on new imaging combined with um what I called pet scans, positive ona mission tomography combine with blood draws in a number of other data from both animal and human studies you find is that at baseline, just going to on a background of no drug taking of any kind, the neurons in the venture to mental nuclear siccus area are firing at a rate about three to four per second, releasing dopamine.

So that's your basic line of dopamine release. Your four brain is always seeing a little bit of dolph in from from that system. If you were then to anticipate food and you're relatively hungry, that would double.

okay. So this probably happened when you decide lunch today. If you were hungry, priority eating lunch IT doubles in the anticipation of the food.

And then depending on how much you enjoy that food, IT might triple or quite drupe. IT might be lower. Then IT was during the anticipations we talk about before.

So there's an approximate doubling under conditions of desire and consuming food. Let's take nicotine is the next example for people that use nickey, either smoking, raping, sniping or dipping all routes of nickey administration. I covered in our episode about there's about a one hundred and fifty percent increase in the rate of dopamine.

E neon. Firing cocaine is going to increase the rate of dopamine output into the provenal cortex by about a thousand percent OK. So what you're really talking about here is a ten fold increase in the amount of dopamine that's released into the preferences cortex, as measured by the rates of firing these dopamine neurons.

Method demon is going to be anywhere from a thousand percent, anywhere up to ten thousand percent. IT really varies is depending on the potency of the drug and a few other factors. And here's where profs that gets a little more interesting. Some of you are probably wondering about caffeine or about sex or about video games. Now there the numbers very tremendously, and it's really important.

Understand that across the board, not just for caffeine, sex, video games, but also for nick team, alcohol and other substances, and what we call motivated behaviors, some of which are part of a healthy life, like eating and reproduction, provided no age appropriate, context appropriate and species appropriate, consensual. Well, then we considered adaptive. It's not.

Well, then there not a man adaptive. Some people will sit down to play a video game. They really like video games.

And as y're sitting down, they will experience eight, five fold increase in the rate of dopamine, an output from the nucleus accomplices, other people, it's going to be a tenfold increase for other people like me who don't like video games very much. I don't have mean against them. I don't dislike them, but IT doesn't do much for me.

IT might not cause any increase whatsoever. IT might even cause a decrease in dobin. So there's a lot of individual variability for sex. IT turns out to be arrange. So the typical range that cited in the literature is anywhere from a four to five fold increase in the rate of dopamine in neuron firing. However, there are certain individuals for which that number is doubled.

Caffeine is a little bit of a special circumstances because caffeine has the property of not just causing the release of dopamine, but increasing in the amount of dopamine receptors over time. And there aren't a lot of excEllent measurements of the amount of dopamine released as a function of caffeine intake in different populations of humans. It's mostly animal studies.

But what we think based on the the stall, based on the overall picture of the literature is that it's an approximate doubling of the dopamine signaling that's coming out of the V T A nuclear a comments to prevent to cortex when we anticipate and when we drink our coffee. Again, I really want to be clear that for all of these things, these are relative levels, and they are distributions. If we were to plot them out on paper, you would see that these are not bar grasses, are overlapping curves to some extansion of some people are going to achieve more doping release or less dopamine release from one behavior or substance.

However, it's very clear that cocaine, meth, m fet ine, even heroine for that matter, are weigh out on the right hand side of the curve, causing enormous increases in dopamine e very quickly. And the other things that we described have, again, a distribution that is more left word shifted on this imaginary plot that i'm creating a lot of individual variability. However, it's fascinating.

The dopamine e is the single molecule that's causing the craving and pursuit and experience of all of these substances and behaviors. And the learning of all of that craving, pursuit and actual experience is what predicts whether not we will reengage reuse that substance or not, reengage in our behavior or not, and how frequently we will do that. So that's addiction. But if you understand how the height of those peaks and dopamine and the rate to reach those peaks and the troughs that result in how long the troops take to get back to baseline, if you understand or a little or all of that, you're really in a terrific position to understand how to leverage the dopamine in system for the pursuit of healthy goals and behaviors.

I should mention one thing about recovery from addiction, which is that the reset of all that dopamine circuitry from unhealthy to healthy, often involves, depending on the addiction, thirty days of complete abstinence, that thirty days of complete inevitably involves a lot of pain and discomfort and craving, anxiety, insomnia, eta, that relates to the big dough, and dooming that inevitably occurs. Now, of course, there are some addictions, such as severe alcohol addiction, and in some cases, opa addiction, that immediate and sustained accidents cannot be used as the tool. Somebody really needs to work with an addiction specialist, and sometimes there needs to be a tapering off of the substance for other addictions.

IT can be and cold turkey. And then, of course, there are other addictions, particular food and sex, but sometimes even things like video games, for which the desired outcome is not necessarily to eliminate the behavior completely, but to set some constraints around the behavior so that it's not occurring to the exclusion of other pleasurable things in life and adaptive things in life. And for that, there is the requirement for what I called the binding behaviors.

We'll get back to binding behaviors later, a binding behaviors, our behaviors in which people bind their behavior around a particular substance use or around a particular behavioral addiction, like sex video games at seta in space and or time in space, meaning they might only engage in those particular behaviors in certain places in certain times when it's context appropriate. There are numerous examples of binding behaviors in space and time and IT all has to do with clamping or directing when the engagement with the dopamine releasing behavior is going to occur. So what's happening when people decided to go called turkey, or they use these binding behaviors, well, what's happening is that people are engaging the specific circuitry within the prefrontal cortex that, as I mentioned at the beginning of the epo de, are important for context setting.

So in the case is a binding behaviors. The proof onto cortex is essentially getting trained up to understand that, okay, certain things like food, or perhaps sex, or perhaps video games, they are okay if they are donor, consumed in appropriate amount, or in particular, context. That requires the context setting, goal directed behavior that the prefrontal cortex is responsible.

okay. So for the last ten or fifteen minutes, we've been talking a lot about addiction. And actually, this is not an episode about addiction. However, if you understand a little bit about the dopamine dynamics in an addiction, you can leverage that knowledge towards healthy adaptive goal pursuit and achieving your goals.

So let's think about that in the context of what generates doping peaks, what generates desire to pursue goals, what causes are read out of whether or not we achieve the goal or not. In other words, what allows us to learn how to pursue goals of different kinds, not just get good at achieving one kind of goal, but really understand and get really, really good at setting goals and pursuing goals of different kinds that are adaptive in different areas of life. Because we all are going to have to pursue goals in school work, relationships, fitness, mental health and on and on in order to be our best cells.

That's clear. Well, all of that is possible using the same basic set of doping circuits. And the same basic dynamics of doping. So for instance, if we are going to feel motivated at all, that is, if we are going to wake up in the morning or have any period of time during our day in which we feel like we are capable of pursuing goals, we are going to have to have a healthy level of baseline doping.

In other words, we are going to have to have enough dopamine in the wave pool, enough water in the wave pool, that is, before we can generate any waves or peaks in dopamine, let alone troops in the rest. So how do we achieve a healthy baseline level of doping? Well, there we can really look to some foundational practices, practices that proves you've heard about on this podcast before, that to some of you might seem a little mundane e, although some of them are a bit more sophisticated, maybe an esoteric.

The good news is that we can all control these things, and they don't require purchasing anything, but they do require some degree of regular upkeep and effort. Those things include what I call the very basics. Now the very basics um put in the context of today's discussion are the things that put water in the wave pool.

Those are going to be getting sufficient amount of quality. Sleepy tonight, something that we've done several episodes on and have online two kids force. You can see the master, your sleep episode, the perfect or sleep episode, the light and health.

If you want to skip all that and just get right to the tools, we have a sleep tool kit or it's actually called the tool kit for sleep that you can access a huberman lab dot com, completely zero cost. You just go there and download that tool kit. Getting sufficiency be tonight literally restores your dopamine e reserves.

IT allows dopamine to be present and for you to have a level of baseline doping that will allow you to even consider your goals in any kind of meaningful, a reasonable way. Second, there are practices that are supported by the scientific literature to increase your baseline level of depine that are independent of sleep, but are similar to sleep. And I like to refer to these as a non sleep deep pressed.

This is not meditation. There is actually very little evidence that meditation of the traditional kind of you sitting eyes closed there, I sent focusing on your a third day center, which is the area behind your forehead. There is very little evidence that that increases levels of dopy.

There is a place for meditation in the context of today's discussion, but all repeat meditation itself is a focusing exercise. IT is not known to increase doomy. However, non sleepy breast called n sdr very similar, although different to what sometimes called yoga nedra, which is where you lie.

There you do a sort of body scans, some long X L breathing s very similar. You can find a link to a zero cost n sdr on youtube. It's a ten minute long one.

There are also twenty and thirty minute once out there. Also on youtube provide link to the ten minute one. Those have been shown to increase the amount of dopamine in in your dopamine in reserves by up to sixty five percent, which is a remarkable number.

So quality sleep, non sleeve deep breast, A K organza. Very powerful ways to keep your baseline level of dopamine at a sufficient level. In addition to that, nutrition no doubt plays a role in your baseline level of dopamine because terracing the mino acid is the rate limiting eni for the synthesis of dopamine.

Terracing is present in varying levels in different foods. You can look those up online. You to simply put in a search for um tyra y levels in different foods, everything from particular cheeses like palma's on cheese as high levels of tyre cine, certain meat, certain nuts, certain vegetables, without getting into details and specifics, you can find those there.

But you need proper nutrition and therefore nutrient, in particular terraces, in order to have sufficient levels of baseline dopa. The third thing on the list, and again, these are things that we come back to almost every episode, but I don't think they can be repeated enough because these are really things that we need to focus on. Every twenty four hours might be able to skip a day here, there if you get sick or you're traveling or you have some major life event.

But really every twenty four hours, we need to re up our sleep. We need to review our nutrition. Even if you're fasting, you're reusing your nutrients from stored sources within your body. The third thing is sunlight, morning sunlight in particular, of on extensive episodes about this.

Check out the epo de on lighting your health, if you want all the details, but you want to try to view sunlight as early in the day as possible, five dependents on a clear day minimum, ten to twenty minutes on a cloudy day minimum, twenty or thirty minutes on a very overcast day minimum without sun glasses, don't stare at the sun. Please don't damage your eyes. Look off slightly off from the sun, but yes, you want to face sd towards the sun.

And on those cloudy days, that especially important to do why? Well, viewing morning sunlight increases. Court is all early in the day, which is excEllent, because you want, court is all elevated early in the day. You want to lower later in the day. And because of the relationship between the cells in your eye that sent sunlight, specifically morning sunlight, believe or not, that happens, and signal to hypotheses and the relationship between the hypothetical mas and the patuit ti and other underground organs, IT sets in motion, a dopamine related cascade in nero delatour, dopamine and hormones, that legal states of well being, elevated mood, alertness at seta throughout the day, and also helps you sleep at night. But today they, we're talking about dob me.

So yes, believer, not that morning sunlight exposure does increase your levels of dopamine, not just court, as all and forth on the list is going to be movement exercise of varying kinds be resistance training could be part of vascular training that does increase levels of dopamine. Here were not talking about achieving pegs in doping that could be accomplished, setting a personal record, A P, R, or through springs or heavy lifts, or learning some new dynamic movement. What we're really talking about here is getting into a regular exercise program of, if not every day, at least five days a week, a mixture, cardiovascular and resistance exercise that we also know is known to elevate and maintain an elevated level of baseline doping.

So it's not just about the euphorbia you feel during or after exercise, it's also about the baseline level of dopamine that's achieved through regular movement and engaging in movement. And if you're asking, how could that be? Well, you already know the answer.

The circuits in the brain and body that generate movement, not just goal seeking, but movement itself. As I mentioned earlier, that negotiator pathway ke. And yes, that circuit is separate from the vta nuclear accused to cortical circuit. That means a critical circuit that we mainly been focusing on today. But they interact.

And so by engaging in regular movement, you ensure that you're maintaining elevated levels of baseline dopamine, which is what you want if you're going to be able to engage in any kind of motivator pursuit behavior of any kind. So those are the fundamentals that will set the level of baseline domine in your system. A couple of key points.

Yes, there is variation based on both genetics and circumstances. Baseline levels of doping, someone's going through a particular hard time or if somebody inherited a gene in the dog mine sentences pathway that simply affords them higher levels of baseline dopamine. We likely know these people, they seem hyper motivated all the time, not just based on prayer success, but they just seem have a lot of energy and a lot of go drive.

You know, you talk about activation energy. Some of you may know what that term means, others, if you want. Having low activation energy is great. I mean, the amount of energy that IT takes to get into action, to pursue adaptive and meaningful healthy goals, some people see to have lower activation energy and higher levels of dopamine are probably associated with that.

Some of us have lower levels of baseline open mean, regardless, everyone needs to engage in the foundational things that I just mentioned a few moments ago, every twenty four hours, or at least strive to. There is no escaping that. Now there are things that can increase once baseline level dopa in further.

And some of those get us into the realm of supplements and prescription drugs. But for now, I just want to mention a few of them that are purely behavioral in nature or zero cost and that have been shown in the research literatur to increase baseline levels of doping for long periods of time. And this is important because if any of you are out there listening to this thing about peaks and troops and baselines, you might be asking away, what's the difference between a baseline and a peak really? Because if, for instance, you get a big peak, well, that's a peak in the baseline.

Ines, how do you distinguish between peak and baseline and and all? There's a trough. And let's say that trough less an hour, is that our long trough your baseline? Or you know where's your set point? How do you establish your set point? And more importantly, how do you raise your set point? Ah well, if you're not already asking that question, I just asked IT for you.

I defined an increase in your baseline level and dopamine to be anything that increases doping for more than one hour. Know when we think about cocaine and fatima, pornography, sex, caffeine, things of that sort, regardless of how long one engages in a about of those behaviors or substances, the increases in dopa are going to be relatively short lived on the order of minutes to an hour, sometimes longer. No, I didn't say that's how long you're engaging in the behaviors.

I said that's how long those increases in dopamine in are going to occur, even if you were to continually engage in those behaviors. And remember, with continual engagement in a dopamine in spiking behavior, behavior that increases dopamine peaks, the height of those peaks, remember, gets lower and lower and lower, especially in a short amount of time, and then drops below baseline. There are tools and techniques that you can use to elevate your baseline level of dopamine for long periods of time.

And here again, this is done in addition to the basic tools that I mentioned a few moments ago, the simplest st, one for which there are excEllent data. And here are referred to data published in the european journal physiology. I'll provide a link to this, is that exposure of your body up to the neck to cold water and IT doesn't have to be super cold, by the way, to cold water has been shown to increase baseline levels of doping.

And the other so called cataclases es, which include npa and een. But for sake of today's discussion, dopamine in particular for not just one but at leads to and probably as long as four or five hours, they're been some additional scientific studies after the paper I just mentioned. And it's really remarkable.

You can accomplish this, the number of different ways you could get into a cold shower in the morning. And I do recommend doing this in the morning. And in that case, it's okay to get the water on your head.

In fact, I recommended a, you could get into a ice bath, you could get into a cold plant in these circumstances are not suggesting this for sake of increasing metabolism or fat loss. The whole discussion around, uh, deliberate cold and metabolic and fat loss has become a little bit controversial. So we won't go there now, most of because we're focused on the clear ability of deliberate cold exposure to increase dopamine for long parts of time.

A K, your doing baseline the ways to do this very depending on the temperature. So for instance, there are data pointing to the fact that if you want to get a long lasting increase in your baseline dopamine, you could take a very cold shower or cold plunge or ice bath for a very brief period of time, anywhere from thirty seconds to two minutes, maybe three minutes, but probably thirty seconds to two minutes. Now you might ask, what is very cold here are to be careful, because I don't want to recommend anything that's going to cause anyone have a heart attack.

We're going to shock or anything of that sort. It's going to vary by person depending on your level of cold tolerance. What I recommend is if you are going for the short exposure, long dopamine release approach, that is thirty seconds to two minutes that you start warmer than you think you need to and then you ease into IT over a few days.

But we're really talking about ranges and temperature from anywhere from about thirty seven degrees far in height to about fifty five degrees for in height. Again, be careful, approach IT with caution and ease into IT. I do recommend doing this early in the day, and I should mention not after strength or hypertrophy training, because within the six hours after strength or hypertrophy training, this deliberate cold exposure are especially emerging up to the neck, can suppress the strength and hypertrophy apt that the training is designed to accomplish.

Ah so that's one approach. The other approach that supported by the literature to increase baseline levels of dopamine for very long periods of time, in fact, this is the original approach, is to get into warmer water, so not warm, but warmer, so sixty degree far and height water up to the neck, and to stay there for about forty five to sixty minutes. The reason I don't think most people will do that, or that most people would prefer a shorter, colder exposure protocol, is that most people don't have forty five to sixty minutes each morning to get into water and sit there.

And in that study, they actually had them sitting in long chairs, basically in the shower, in of a pool, up to their neck for a full sixty minutes, and then measuring document released and so forth. So there are bunch of doing ways to do this. I should ever size. I don't think you need to be super precise about the temperature and even the duration. What I recommend is find a template that's uncomfortable ly called to you, meaning that you feel agitated, you want to get out, but that you're confident you can safely stay in.

And again, I can't give a simple prescriptive to everybody, but this is known to increase baseline levels of dopa significantly, in fact, double them or more for a long periods of time, meaning hours up to four, maybe even six hours into the day, which is one of the reasons I suggest doing this early in the day, I happened to get into a cold plunger, takes a cold shower. First thing in the morning, I do go outside in at my sun like first. Sometimes, sometimes I do the cold first.

IT really depends on my circumstances and how i'm feeling that day. I don't think that really matters which one you do first, but you want to try and get both of those in early in the day because you really want the cat to coal means in court as is all elevated early in the day because that's deliberate cold exposure. We already talked about exercise.

So if you're doing your exercise early in the day, there's no reason why IT couldn't be done in concert with this deliberate cold exposure. I recommend doing the deliberate called exposure first for the reasons we talk about a few minutes to ago. And then, of course, there are compounds, both prescription and over the counter compounds, that can indeed raise your baseline levels of doping for an hour or more.

And when I say an hour or more, IT really depends on individual variation in terms of how quickly you meet abilities. Dupine and IT depends on individual variation in how you manage or total different dosages of drugs and different types of drugs. So typical drugs, and here i'm talking about legal prescription drugs for increasing doping or like riddle and at all models and r model also tap into the system.

And I did the entire epo de about adhd, which is the typical context in which you hear about this prescription drugs. But assuming it's prescribed by a doctor for either clinical reasons like adhd or for other reasons, all of those compounds do significantly increase baseline levels of dopamine for many, many hours. That's absolutely clear, and it's one of the major reasons why those drugs are so effective in the increasing motivation and attention.

Then there are compounds that are sold over the counter, things like a mino acids, such as altera acy itself. That's a very commonly sold and used to mino acid. It's present in a lot of so called free workout formulas, I as many of you know, and a fan of single ingredient supplements, for the most part, aside from foundational supplements like A G one, which give you many, many micrometres ents and all together because there would be nearly impossible to consume each of those as individual um ingredients and get the right amount, IT said.

But for all other supplements, i'm a big believer in parsing what you need and what's most effective for you in single ingredient formulations and the typical ways in which people work to elevate their baseline levels of doping with supplements are using either l terraces, which is, I mentioned earlier, is the right limitation and zine for dopy, or by using what's called mico peans, which is actually very similar to l dopa, which is the treatment for parkinsons. Experience actually comes from the velvet outside coating of a certain bean and not sounds really as a tack, but that's actually where it's found in nature and is really ninety nine percent. Although pa, and I confess, having tried my appearance, having examined the scientific literature, appears there is some evidence that IT can increase doping, especially in that tuber infront bula pathway, because I can tap into some of the hormone related functions of the petite I IT, does increase alertness and mood, might even increase libido motivation at sea, but the effects of the appeals tend to be very much of the increasing the peak dopamine and then very quickly dropping that peak in otherwise the peak drop phenomenon, not for increasing baseline levels of dopamine.

Now it's likely different for people with parkinson's who are taking prescription drugs that are similar to the universe. So if people are parkinsons, often times they are proscribed things like l dopa is in the pathway to dopamine synthesis, or they are prescribed things like promo cyp team, which will indeed increase the open mine. And I do realize that some people use us prescription drugs recreationally, which I don't recommend.

Those drugs can be used to increase baseline levels of dopamine, but more typically, they cause pigs in, dolph in and troops in dopamine, which is why I do not recommend them. They are not going to allow you to accomplish what you want if your goal is more motivation a, in fact, they are likely to do the opposite. Give you a big peek in alert tss, and then a crash that can include depressive symptoms and just not feeling very good.

L tyre scene, however, has been examined in the scientific literature and at reasonably low dosages, has been shown to increase circulating in available levels of dopamine both in the brain and body, and lead to increase cognitive performance and in some cases, physical output. I'll provide links to a few these studies, but the two that um I really passed most finally for sake of this episode really just focus on taking alt racy under conditions where your baseline levels of doping are reduced due to stress and under conditions where there's no stress and people are trying to increase their baseline levels of dopamine for sake of improving cognitive function. The first paper is entitled effective tyre cy on cognitive function and blood pressure under stress.

I'll provide a link to this in the showed te captions. And it's one of many papers really dating back to the early nineties, expLoring how relatively high, Frankly, relatively high dosages of altera acy taken under conditions of stress, allow people to rescue some of their cognitive function in terms of working memory tasks and other kind of cognitive task, visual pursuit asks and so on. The second paper is entitled to racy improves working memory in a multi tasking environment.

And the second paper, perhaps more interesting, because IT involves expLoring the use of terraces and supplementation, taking tire sy about an hour before a cognitive task, or set of cognitive task that involve a lot of multitask and working memory. Working memory, for those of you that don't know, is your ability to maintain small batches of information in your mind for relatives, short periods of time. So for instance, if I tell you my phone number or the phone number where I grew up four hundred 201， if you can remember that, chances are you'll remember IT for thirty seconds, sixty seconds, but that you won't remember IT tomorrow because there is really no reason to a lot of the tasks that we do throughout the day involve working memory.

Working memory is very subject to interference from other tasks that we happen to be doing, like looking at our phone or having a conversation or trying to navigate through a city, involves a lot of attention. And this study shows the tyre acy improves working memory, especially in the contact of multitasking and having a lot of conflicting goals. And they did a number really nice um experiments here.

Again, it's a small study, not that many subjects, but it's one of several papers. In fact, this is the paper that and a set in motion that domino of other papers expLoring the efficacy of alternating y for cognitive performance. They looked at working memory task, of course, but also auditory visual tasks, and they involve some interference of visual cues and things that sort.

And they saw some really interesting effects, basically, when we need to attend to multiple things at the same time. L tyring can help us do that, at least as IT relates to memory. When I say l tyring, what I really mean is having your baseline levels of dopamine e elevated can really help navigate multitasking environments, especially as IT relates to working memory.

This is true. Other conditions of stress and other conditions of. Not stressful. Okay, you might say, well, isn't multitask is stressful itself? Yes, I can be.

But when we talk about under distance stress, we're talking about people who are sleep deprived were talking about people that are under other kinds of psychological or YSL stress. Altieri en can help that context as well. So as I mentioned before, in these studies, they use very high dosages of alternating y so high that actually don't recommend them.

They did measure stress hormones. They did measure blood pressure and things of that sort. But I want to caution you, I do not recommend, I will say again, I do not recommend following the dosages that were used in these two studies, because they are exceedingly high.

They used one hundred milligrams per kilogram of body weight of tyre cine one hour prior to this cognitive task. Now I weight about two hundred and twenty pounds on a little bit lighter than that. So that's one hundred kilograms approximately translated from this study. That would mean that had I participated in the study and I wasn't in the placement group but I was in the uh altera acy group, I would have been given ten thousand milligrams of alter racy, which is ten grams of alt terracing. I do not recommend that.

In fact, the error paper showing that as well as five hundred milligrams, but perhaps up to one gram, that is one thousand milligrams or fifteen hundred milligrams a gram in a half of the tyre scene, taken thirty to sixty minutes before a cognitive physical task can increase baseline levels of dopamine for extended periods of time, and thereby improve performance on those mental or physical task. So if you are, somebody is interest in trying all terracing, please know that the increases in baseline levels of doping can be substantial. They are long lasting, which qualifies them as baseline increases, as post to peaks.

And I would say you should also start with the lowest possible dose. So for most people, two hundred and fifty to five hundred, milgram is going to be a reasonable starting those depending on your body. Wait, smaller people start with two hundred fifty, larger, maybe five hundred.

Keeping on whether not you're combining IT in or with any other stimulants. And keep in mind that again, the bigger the peak and dopamine, the bigger the tall in dopamine afterwards. So pay attention to whether that you experience a crash that same day or the next day.

But chances are if you're using a relatively low level of altera sine, so anywhere from two hundred fifty, maybe five hundred milligrams or a thousand milligrams of altera acy prior to cognitive physical work and taking early in the day, by the way, because this connect is a bit of a stimulus that you're going to achieve these long lasting increases in baseline dopamine. But please also keep in mind that I always, always suggest that you engage in the proper behaviors and you disengage from the improper behaviors as a first line of offence on any health goal. So now you know how to set your baseline levels of doping at the highest possible level.

You, of course, want to guard that baseline level of dupine very carefully. So for instance, you want to avoid any kind of behaviors or substances that are going to peak your baseline level of dopamine very high or very sharply. Or if you do engage in those types of behaviors, they maybe that you are well aware that your baseline level of dopamine will drop far below what IT was after that peak has falling.

You will be essentially in the quote, quote trough. If, however, you find yourself in that tough, you now have the knowledge to understand that that trough will resolve. If you wait enough time, that baseline level of dope that you act prior to the peak will come back.

You will feel Better. However, most people don't know that. And as a consequence, when they feel that low, that is, they feel kind of a motivated, maybe a little bit depressed, maybe a lot a motivated or a lot depressed following some coding 扣 peak experience。

What the end of doing is thinking about what caused that peak experience and then go back and try to reengage in the behavior and trying to regenerate that peak experience. But you now know that, that is a terrible strategy. In fact, that strategy will only lead to diminished peaks from the same experience.

IT will lead to, in many cases, pursuing more and more intense experiences to try to recapitalize reate, that big peak, which won't work. Or even worse, people start stacking and combining different dopamine in increasing behaviors in order to try and obtain something like that initial peak, when in fact, all they need to do, all you need to do, simply wait. Because the way that the dopamine circuitry is arranged is that it's not just about pleasure, as you know, it's about motivation, desire, pursuit and pleasure.

And IT also has everything to do with pain and discomfort. Now when people hear the word pain, they often think, oh, pain. Okay, so A A physical pain or intense emotional pain. But today we're going to talk about pain a little bit differently. We're going to talk about the pain associated with the truth in doping that occurs after a big peak, doping as a period in which pain and effort go hand in hand.

And I return to this in the moment, but I want you to just note that in your mind, kind of remark that in your mind, because what we're about to talk about is how to leverage that pain and to use effort as a way to not just get out of the trough more quickly, but actually to get back to a higher level of baseline as you exit that trough. Meanwhile, I really want to harp on this one point that I made a moment ago, which is that after some big experience, so IT could be a vacation or a night out party, or the birth of a new child. All of these are well known phenomenon that lead to troops or deficits in dopamine afterwards, which can cause a sort of post part of depression.

Post partum depression is a phrase Normally used to describe, literally, post part and post birth of a child depression. And that has many causes, not just related to dopa amine baselines, although IT dos involve dopamine baselines, but IT has hormonal aspects and other aspects as well. But post part of depression is also used to describe any time that our baseline dopamine has gone down way, way below what IT was prior to some recent peak.

Or exciting, exhilarating win or behaviour. A couple of things that one can do in order to get out of that trough more quickly. The first one is simply to wait with the understanding that you will get out.

I know that sounds very simpler, stic, and maybe a little bit brutal, but I think most people don't realize this. They don't realize that the dopamine circuitry does take time to replay nisshin. IT has everything to do with restoring both the synthesis of doping as well as what's called the reddy released able pool of dopamine.

So doable in is package in these little spiral things that we call vesicles. Those vesicles are released from the ends of nerves. So in this case, we're talking about the nerves that originate again in bta and nuclear ecumenical and send their low wires up to the profondo cortex.

And that's where dopamine is released. And that readily releasable pool of dopamine takes time to replenish, and that can take several days in order to replenish. Just knowing that can help you through that process.

And of course, then IT raises the question, is there anything that you can do to accelerate that process? And indeed, there is. And indeed, this is what I consider not just something to get you out of a trench of kind of lower mood and motivation, but actually what represents the holy grail of motivation.

Today i'm going to talk about this pain effort process as a very powerful way to get out of sticking points, but more importantly, to get into a mode where effort and reward can actually accelerate your progress along any path to any goal and in a way that you can do IT repeatedly. And this is not simply taking mechanisms from biology and painting names on them, rather, this is leveraging mechanisms in biology that are well defined in the animal and human literature, that have parallels to the addiction and addiction recovery literature. But there have been shown in specific circumstances to really allow people to engage in motivational pursuit in a variety context.

School relationships work at set a in an ongoing way and in a way that never depletes their baseline of dope into the point where they have to do a lot of extra work to get that back. And in a way that allows them to be really motivated in a variety of context, in an adaptive ways. So what were really talking about here is regardless of your genetics, regardless of who your parents are, which obviously you couldn't select, being able to leverage your dopamine system in order to be maximum motivated when you want to be.

And indeed, to avoid procrastination, i'd like to tell you about a classic experiment that i've described once before in this podcast. But Frankly, this experiment is so crucial, I don't think I can be described enough. This was an experiment that was done at stanford many years ago and involved children, but it's actually been repeated in adults.

The experiment involved observing a classroom of Young children. So these were kids about kindergarden a little bit older and observing which activities kids like to do in their free time. So they're structure time where they had to these are little kids, so they play blocks or they had to i'm seeing or they had to write or they're do what they could or have supose draw.

They are probably not writing significant process at that age, but then they had free time where they could do whatever they wanted. And what the researchers did was observed the children who, selected by their own choice to draw pictures. So there were some tables out with friends and markers and paper at that, and there were some kids that would just naturally go to that activity every day, because they like that activity.

And they measured how much of the free time these children elected to use their free time drawing, doing these different arts projects. And then what they did was they started introducing rewards to these children. They started putting a gold star, or in some cases, as a silver star, on their pieces of artwork, telling them what a good job they did. And the kids really liked that.

In fact, who wouldn't? right? They're not only doing an activity that they like, but they are also getting a reward for IT.

So you can probably see where this is all going, what they were doing, what they were increasing the amount of do you mean that these children experience and again, in parallel, experiments done with adults, if you take adult to enjoy a particular activity, you'd let them do activity and then you start rewarding them for that activity, especially when you surprise them with a reward for an activity they already like. They report that being a much more pleasurable experience than had they just done. The activity.

Then what they did with these children, and in the experiments with adults done later on, was they cease giving them the reward, and then they observe what percentage of their free time they spend doing that activity drawing. And what they observed was, you guessed, IT a drop in the total amount of time that the children elected to do this activity that initially they were doing quite a lot. In other words, their total satisfaction or desire or motivation to engage in this activity drop below what IT was a prior to ever receiving a reward.

And again, this has been repeated in a variety context, in different populations, different cultures, different countries, men, women, boys, girls, lots of different background. So what this tells us is everything you already know, which is that reward prediction error is not just about the desire to do something and you Carrying IT out. And it's being pretty good, amazing or not good.

Okay, I always like to joke that nervous system sort of code things in the three bins. We can think about this in terms of food or any type of experience. IT can either be Young. Yes, I really like that yet. I really don't like that or meet is kind of so so what the scenario LED to where rewards were received for an activity that people already like to do and then removed, was that an activity that at one point was a Young becomes a man? And that all reflects a drop in baseline dopamine.

why? Because the activity that the children or adults like, combined with the gold star or the monetary reward or praise that children and adults seem to like, compounded to create a bigger peak on dopamine and their for a bigger trough in dopamine. And if you're already wondering whether not their desire to engage in that activity eventually came back, IT did indeed.

So essentially what I described all matches precisely with dopamine reward prediction air, in the fact that peaks in dopamine give rise to subsequent troops in dopa mine, that, if one waited long enough, allow baseline level of dopamine to return to Normal. And of course, the amplitude of that dopamine, e. Peek, has been varied by giving more money or less money in different scenarios, nearly all the different derivation of the experiments that you could imagine that map onto the dynamics of dopamine released that we ve been talking about during this episode all played out exactly as one would have predicted based on the neural circuitry and the dynamics of dopamine.

I recommend that you leverage this knowledge to make sure that any activities that you enjoy to do, whether or not you enjoy a little or a lot, but especially if you enjoyed a lot, that you guard and protect by making sure that you don't start layer in or attaching reward or other sources of dopamine releasing behaviors or substances to that specific behavior. Or if you do that, you don't do IT terribly often. Now, how often is terribly often, will get to that in a moment.

But let me give you an example from my life, just as an example. But you will likely have, and you'll know people that will have different examples. I love to exercise.

I know to some people this might seem foreign, but I love to exercise. I love to do resistance straining. I love to run.

I am not one of those people that doesn't like the experience of exercising, but likes the feeling afterwards. Quote on quote, I hear that a lot. I don't like to exercise, but I love the way I feel afterwards.

I love physical training and I love the way I feel afterwards. But I mostly love the feeling, daring. I don't know why am wired that way.

I can't say that i'm somebody who likes to do hard things across the board. There are plenty of difficult things in life that I dread or that i'm sort of man about. But for me, hard exercise, intense exercise of a particular kind, resistance training and running in particular, both give me a yum.

Yes, I love this kind of feeling. And yes, IT persists for me quite a long while afterwards, both for sake of the way that IT changes in my neural chemistry, but also my sense of satisfaction. But I just simply love IT. Now years ago, I discovered that if I drink a cup of black coffee or an american or a double espresso, so or some year, but mai, that my workouts can be quite a bit more intense, I can run further.

And then I also discovered that if I were to take a pre work out energy drink, or I took a three hundred milligrams of alpha gpc and five hundred million ants of finale laming, and perhaps even five hundred milligrams of a tyros y and perhaps did that alongside the caffeine in the year, ba mote, then, yes, absolutely. I really like those workouts. I could be like a laser in terms of focus.

I could exert even more effort, put on some music, and I could achieve Better performance. And then I also discovered that I could export that protocol of caffeine by moto, very supplements to my cognitive works. When I was study a writing papers are writing grants are in the laboratory, when I was doing experiments with my hands, in those days when, you know, cutting brain tissue, staining IT and working really long hours.

And I discovered that all of those things, all of those behaviors, compounded with my love of exercise and my love of doing science, and gave me these big peaks in what, to me, felt like even important experiences. They felt unlike anything else. They were just so, so peek in their nature, which was great.

And IT didn't deed enhance my performance. However, while they did not create a dependency for those different substances, caffeine supplements at sea, what I noticed was that in the days and sometimes weekends afterwards, even though for much of my career, I confess i've worked weekends as well, but I would notice that i'd experience a real trough and energy. I just would not feel that good.

And then if I kept up those behaviors consistently, and I was consistently adding in these other, let's just call them what they are, dopamine e releasing or stimulating behaviors and substances that my enthusiasm for physical training, or running, or for doing experiments actually started to diminish. And this was really disturbing to me at the time, because I started to think, okay, maybe i'm burnt out. Maybe I have a real burn out, which, by the way, doesn't exist, folks.

You your dreams don't burn out. There is something called a dreamer insufficiency syndrome. You can overstimulate your system by way of too much a drinnan epa and nor ean effort.

But that's a separate thing. There's no such thing as a dream al burn out per say. But I didn't know that, so I thought causing really burned out when, in fact, it's now obvious to me what I was doing.

I was combining too many dupine releasing or stimulating behaviors and substances for things that I already enjoying doing as behaviours, namely exercise in doing experiments. Anything relate to the science, actually. So what this means is not to avoid taking things or doing things that amplify the amount of dopamine, but to be very cautious about how often one does that and how many different dopamine stimulating behaviors are compounds.

One stacks, especially in terms of taking those things, are stacking those things in and around behaviors that you already really enjoy doing. I was essentially just creating another version of the kids in nursery school at first grade with the gold star experiment. I was basically just doing the exact same thing.

And when I realized that, and I changed my relationship to those compounds, I didn't eliminate them all together. But I started realizing, for instance, that I didn't need to double up on urban monte and coffee every workout. Sometimes I would do one, sometimes I would do the other.

Frankly, I always do one or the other. It's rare that I ever do any kind of physical training without some caffeine first. And I do my physical training typically in the early part of the day.

So that's fine. Doesn't fear with my sleep. I might do hike without caffeine. But but I mean, a way, trainer i'm going to run.

I tend to drink coffee before hander, have your romantic verify occasionally, meaning about once every third, sometimes every other, but usually about every third work out. I'll take three hundred milligrams of alpa gpc, maybe occasionally, maybe every third or fourth workout. And these are resistance workout, mind you, not running.

I'll take five hundred milligrams of altera acy or more, typically five hundred milligrams of finances. And very, very rarely, maybe once every two or three months, I might stack all of those things together prior to a workout. But of course, i'm always mindful to also include workouts or runs or bouts of cognitive work.

So that could be grant writing proving for a podcast set where I don't do anything prior, maybe just my caffeine, because I have a baseline level of caffeine that I use each day to function. Like many people, there's a baseline level of caffeine that just allows us to function if we're a perpetual user of caffeine. I talked a lot about this on the episode caffeine, but the key here is be cautious.

I would say be very cautious about stacking in layering in too many dopamine peak inducing behaviors, all that wants on a regular basis. The key point here is if you are somebody that can engage in these intrinsically joyful activities for you, these activities that you're really motivated to do with them, not is skiing or playing music, dancing, eat a without the need to layer in additional dopamine e releasing mechanisms or compounds or activities. Well, then I highly recommend you do that, because then you are essentially making yourself one of those fortunate few that does not require additional stimulus, and therefore can hold on to that pleasure, can hold on to that intrinsic pleasure and motivation to engage age in these behaviors over time, which, Frankly, there is no replacement for.

There is no pill or bottler portion or motivational speech or podcast or book that can replace intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is perhaps the holy grail of all human endeavors and behaviors, because IT encompasses so much of what brought us to this point in our species evolution, and also what brings each and every one of us closer and closer to our goals. And if it's happening with enjoyment, without the needs, a layer in additional tools, well, then you have really tapped into the source.

And when I say the source, I don't mean in any kind of mystical way. I think it's quite clear by now that when we hear about chi from eastern medicine or we talk about motivation, drive and pursuit in the western neurobiological languages that relates to doping, or we hear about the source may be in my pocket episode with um the one and only rick rubin, incredibly productive music producer whose as an just an unbelievable track record in terms of creative endeavors and he talks about the source. We're really talking about the same thing, which is this.

Set of circuits within us that allow us to identify what we want and then lean into effort and then to do that in a persistent way that allows us to reach our goals. And if we can do that with an intrinsic sense of pleasure, well, that is nothing short of magic. But of course, it's not magic, it's science.

And of course, most people are not concerned about trying to protect the things they already enjoy in order to make sure that they can continue to do those things and enjoy them. Most people are thinking about how they can engage and pursue things that are less than pleasure for to them, or how they can continue to engage in motivated behaviors when the going gets tough. Or, and this is a big one, I hear this over and over again as a request to cover on this podcast how people can overcome procris.

What we're going to talk about now is how the dynamics of dopamine released that you already are aware of, plus in additional dynamic that we haven't quite talked about, can allow you to leverage chopine in a way that really will bring you to the holy grail of motivation and drive, which is when effort starts to become the reward itself. In other words, when friction becomes the reward. I know that sounds crazy to some of you, but when friction becomes the reward, you can pass from an idea and a goal, no matter how daunting, to successful completion of that goal, while experiencing what essentially will feel like pleasure the entire time.

Now that doesn't mean IT will be blessed the entire time, but what is very possible is to leverage the dynamics of both dopamine pegs and dopamine trifles in order to not just maintain your baseline level of doping, but to also pull yourself out of any kind of or other kind of overthinking trenches very quickly and get back into a mode of pursuit. So how do we make effort? The reward? You may have heard about this in the context of so called growth mindset.

Growth mindset is the incredible discovery and research papers from my colleague, doctor carl, dwell in the psychology department at stanford. And there are others, such as David eager at the universe of texas, Austin, who have leverage the so called growth mindset as a tool that Young people and adults can use in order to get Better at anything. And the basic control of growth mindset is to adopt the mindset that if you can't do something, if you can't do IT well, that you can't do IT or can't do IT well yet, it's that word yet that's really key.

And there are a number different tools and techniques that people used to adopt growth mindset, but IT all starts with that relationship to not being able to do IT yet. Now that all sounds pretty straightforward when you tell you yourself. But when we are in a performance context, when we expect ourselves to be able to motivator, when we expect ourselves to be able to perform and we can't, that often sets up a downward spiral of motivation because we are so used to being attached to the relationship between desire, motivation and outcomes.

Reward, prediction, air. We want something, we want that a in class. We want to learn how to dance, and we want to be able to do this physical scale of another kind, or learn a language, or get the mate we desire, or make the relationship work, or make the business work on and on, and then we get the outcome that we don't want in our confidence, for lack of a Better word, drops over time.

Often times that leads to situations where we are not motivated. We are a motivated IT can even lead to situations where we are downright depressed. There is also circumstances where people, myself included, of course, procrastinated know we should do something.

But but somehow we can't get motivated. We know we put in the effort will get there, but we can't do IT either because we don't like the activity. We're just not feeling great. Now we could be quoted, quote, not feeling great, not feeling motivates because our dopamine e baseline is low. And so I absolutely encourage everybody to take a look at themselves anytime they're in A A motivated state.

Take a look at the landscape of their life, not just at that moment but in the preceding days and weeks, and ask whether or not you've been tending to those foundational things that we talk about earlier, whether not you are uh, engaging any other of the tools that we talked about earlier to see if you can get into a motivated state. However, if all of those boxes are checked, answer yes, i'm doing all those things. I'm just not motivator and just whatever reason, I just procrastinating.

Don't know, I don't want to do IT or am not feeling motivated. Well, then there's a very potent set of tools that you can leverage to overcome states of lack of motivation, overcome procrastination and indeed can help you deal with things like over thinking as IT relates to procrastination in lack of motivation as well. So the way this works is the following.

If you recall, a peak in dopamine is followed by a trough in dopamine. That trough in doping is experienced as pain or wanting or craving. That pain that i'm referring to is actually a craving or a wanting, and it's a craving your wanting for a specific state that you would like to achieve that is different than the one that you're in.

You want to get out of that trough. And as you are called for earlier in the episode, that trough is the stimulus for the ongoing release of dopamine that provides the propeller the motivation to go forward and seek some goal. And so when we are not motivated, when we are in a so called a motivated state, or when we are procrastinating her, when we just sort of can't seem to getting gear, the keys are getting out of that pain drove is one of two things I already told earlier.

You can just wait, can wait till your motivation comes back. And a lot of people do wait. In fact, they procrastinate.

They start doing other things that are less painful than the state that they happen to be in when they are you trying to get clear to go workout because I realized not everyone wants to do that or to study or to have a hard conversations, whatever is. And what do they do? They start engaging in activities that we, and indeed they would not consider pleasurable activities.

They start for incense, cleaning the house. So seemingly out of nowhere, they started engaging in these activities that Normally are not intrinsically pleasure for for them. They're not highly motivated to do them as a replacement for doing the very thing that they want to go, need to do or ought to do and that they're procrastinating to do what they are essentially doing here is a mild type of addiction replacement.

In other words, rather than be in the painful state and wait for IT to pass, they're doing things that give them some sense of accomplishment, a sensibly to give them the sense that they are completing things. And perhaps I know I don't know, because i'm not in the psychology of of knowing what other people are thinking, perhaps in order to generate the momentum, in order to get engaged enough or motivated enough to study or work out of whatever activity is that they're trying to avoid through procrastination. Now what's interesting about this dynamic is, first of all, it's extremely common.

And second of all, a lot of people who use this as a tactics so that they get very close to the deadline to complete something, and then they go into a sort of suda panic and then use anxiety as a way to leverage their mental and physical resources to complete that thing. Now, how do I know the contour of this so well? How do I understand the inner dynamics of IT? Well, part that relates to my work is a neurobiology and reading the papers that all mention to you in a moment.

But IT also relates to the fact that I am somebody who waits quite a while right up until this or last minute possible, to complete something for activities that I don't want to do, something i've been working on my whole life. In any case, I am very familiar with the procrastination process. So how can we overcome procrastination? Well, IT turns out their findings from within the addiction literature that turned out to be very powerful towards leveraging our way out of procrastination and IT has to do with this.

You already know because i've told you probably a dozen times now that the depth of the trough after a doping peak is proportional to how high that peak was and how steep IT was, how quickly that peak occurred. IT turns out that not only is the depth of the trough proportional to that, but the rate at which you get out of that trough is proportional to how steep that trough is. Let me explain this for you in as clear terms as I possibly can imagine.

You're in an a motivated state. You're just not feeling motivates. You're procrastinating. You may think, okay, the thing to do here is something i'll clean the house. I'll take some bills, i'll do something or or just wait.

Those approaches, as we talked about before, generally don't work, at least don't work quickly. Or they lead you write up to the deadline and then the deadline that forces you to get something done or you just don't get IT done and you don't succeed in your goal. That happens a lot as well.

However, if you were to take that state of being unmotivated of 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. So what do I mean? You want to put yourself in a state that's worse than or harder than the state that you're in, or do something to put more painful.

And here I want to be very clear. I'll say this three times, but i'm going to say IT for the first time now when I says more painful, I do not mean doing any kind of tissue damaging or psychologically damaging behavior or anything of that sort that's going to render you injured or not. Well, even in the short term, that's not what i'm referring to.

okay. Let's just get that one out of the way. What i'm referring to is the fact that, for instance, if you're feeling a motivated but you find yourself cleaning the house as a way to procrastination, can say cleaning the house is harder than sitting down and doing nothing.

But actually in that moment or in those moments, that's not the case or else you wouldn't be doing IT. The reality is that the dopamine in system works according to what feels hard or easy in the moment. In other words, if you're feeling and motivated, you need to do something and put yourself into a state that's harder then the state you're in so far instance, if you are sitting around feeling a motivator or you find yourself.

Tending to task that are irrelevant to the goal that you really should be focused on. You need to put your body and mind into a state of discomfort quickly. And the way to do that is to either engage in some tendentious activity, meaning, and activity not related to your goal, that puts your body into a very different state.

So here again, all default to the obvious one, which is something like cold shower or cold emersion, which not only increases dopamine in long term or over several hours rather, but for most people, is experience ed as pain. That pain causes a rebound out of that dopamine trough faster than IT would occur if you had just stayed in that a motivated state and waited for IT to go away or done something like cleaning up that, for whatever reason, felt like IT required less friction. When I say friction, I mean olympic frc, your limbic system is always in this dialogue with your forebrain.

And limit friction goes two ways. Limit friction can be, you're tired and you don't want to do something. And so you have to, quote, quote, motivate to do IT, energize yourself to do IT. Or olympic friction can be that your nervous and scared and anxious to do something.

And after you common yourself in order to lean forward into action, in order to do that thing, despite the anxiety, I realize this can be a little bit confusing as a concept, so I want to go into a bit more detail. Let's imagine that you or somebody else does not like to exercise. You don't want exercising and you're trying to get your minimum of five days per week exercise and you're just not motivated to do IT.

There are a couple of different techniques to doing this, assuming you've taken care of all the baseline stuff, all the foundation of stuff we talked about earlier and you're just not getting in gear and you find yourself checking your phone or maybe you're tending to some tasks, obviously, those things are not so easier for you, meaning they cause less olympic friction. Then engaging and exercise. The typical advice would be just exercise for one minute OK, just get one minute of extra five minutes, and then use the successful completion of that one or five minutes as a milestone that allows you to then move to the next milestone.

And indeed, that approach can work. And its exact what i'm describing here when I say that you're in a state of lack of motivation or procrastination or both, and you need to put yourself into a more painful, not less painful states. So what do you do? You push up against that friction and you exercise for a short while, and then that pops you out of that trough.

That's possible. But for a lot of people, even that won't be possible because they just can't get motivator. They do that one hundred or five years. And there just like OK, i'm still in the trap. I am not actually feeling that great in those circumstances.

IT makes sense to do something that's ten genial to the whole path that you're trying to pursue this goal that you're trying to pursue that is believing or not much worse than just being a motivated? And when I say worse, I don't mean picking some task that Normally you don't like to do, but now you're willing to do. I mean literally thinking about what would be worse than being in this state again, without causing yourself tissue or psychological damage.

What would be worse? Well, cold water would be worse for many people, very cold water. So the key is to figure out something that, for lack of a Better way, to put IT really socks, really socks, and yet is safe.

And by doing that, you step in the trough, you steep in the slope of the trough, which we know brings you back to your baseline level of dopamine more quickly. Now, for some people, that will be deliberate cold exposure through cold shower ice bath. And I have to tell you that if you're clinging as I say this, well, then there you go.

You now have a tool that, you know, you crying even when you just think about, and therefore represents a great tool for you. So if i'm procrastinating ating to do something I really need to do, should I just simply wait for that procrastination evaporate? no.

Will IT eventually evaporate? Maybe will a deadline eventually surface that will trigger me into an anxious or activated state that will allow me to complete what needs to be done. Maybe, hopefully, but Better would be to get out of that a motivated state, that state programs, inc.

quickly. And to do so, you need to leverage something that's painful. So for instance, I heard a beautiful lecture recently done by doctor on alumni at stanford school of medicine discussing dopamine and some of the things in her book and some newer findings as well.

And somebody in the audience asked her the question, does meditation increase dopy? now? Earlier, we talk about how non sleep deep pressed in yoga edra has been shown in the scientific literature to increase, dooming.

But I also mentioned earlier that classic forms of meditation, whether eyes open, your eyes closed, so called open monitoring or close monitoring, meditation, sitting there are lying there. And focusing does not increase dopamine levels per sue. However, for most people, especially people who find IT hard to meditate or who don't do that practice, very often, meditation is effortful. Getting into meditation in staying in meditation is effortful.

So if you find yourself in a status of procrastination, often times a brief five to ten minute meditation, where you absolutely do not allow yourself to do anything besides close your eyes, focus on your breath, and when your mind just get back to your breath, is not only extremely difficult and extremely frustrating unless you're a well practice meditator. But it's often difficult and frustrating not just to do, but to get into that practice and not just to get into that practice, but to the maintain that practice for that mere five to ten minutes because it's just not a natural state for us to be in and we have to force ourselves. So IT is effortful.

In fact, IT qualifies as a basically available almost anywhere, any time type of effort for activity that if you dislike IT, perhaps even as much as some people dislike deliberate cold exposure within perfect, you now have an additional tool in your kit that you can use anytime you are feeling a motivated and procrastinating. Now there are numerous examples I could give, and hopefully there are numerous examples that you're thinking about. The key is to have a short list of about five different effortful A K A painful activities that you can employ any you're feeling a motivated or in a state of procrastination, keeping in mind that the goal is not what you accomplish inside of that activity.

Although IT is important that you actually engage in that activity, actually have to make myself meditate in that five to ten minute more bought of effort to full or painful activity. But it's not about achieving an outcome. It's about forcing your body and mind into a deeper state of pain and discomfort. In other words, taking yourself from that trough that you're already in and deepening and deepening that trough because in deepening and deepening that trough, we know that the return from that true to Normal and even elevated levels of baseline doping, is going to be faster and more robust.

And in doing that, you will quickly find yourself back into a motivated state, because not only does IT teach you that doing hard things is possible, that sort of more of a subjective cognitive learning, but IT actually taps into the very neurochemical system that allows you to then feel motivated and capable to pursue the larger goal, which is the thing you're really concerned about, after all. So as is often the case, perhaps always the case, on this podcast, we covered a lot of material. We covered dopamine.

And what IT is. We talk about the circuitry and the different kinds of circuitry, focusing mainly on this mission critical pathway that is so vitally important to motivation for any goals. Talk about the relationship between peaks and troughs and baseline ines and the foundational tools that allow us to set and maintain a healthy baseline level of doping as well as ways to protect that baseline lever of doping.

And we talked about how to get ourselves out of states of procrastination and a motivation by not just waiting out those troops in doping, but actually making those troops and dopamine steeper, by engaging in things that are effortful and things that we really don't want to do in those moments, provided that those things are safe, we can get out of those dopamine in troops more quickly and back to our dopamine baseline, or even above baseline. And we talked about what I review you as the holy grail of motivation, which is to be able to learn, to attach reward to the effort process itself, and to do so by not just understanding, but also learning to subjectively recognize and thematically experience release of these different stressful chemicals within our body. I realize this was a lot of information, and yet throughout i've tried to highlight tools that you can use, that range from behavioral to nutritional supplementation tools, cognitive tools.

And keep in mind that all of these different segments of the podcast is always our time stamps. So if you feel they need to go back and listen to any of these in order to get clear understanding, we've made that easy to do so. So to simply look for the time stamps in the showing te captions, if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our youtube channel.

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