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Dopamine is critical for motivation, drive, and pursuit. It is responsible for overcoming procrastination and ensuring ongoing motivation and confidence. Understanding dopamine dynamics, including peaks, troughs, and baseline levels, can help optimize mental health, physical health, and performance.
There are five brain circuits that utilize dopamine as the primary neuromodulator. These circuits have different functions and impact areas such as movement, basic functions, decision-making, and motivation. The mesocortical circuit, connected to the prefrontal cortex, plays a significant role in motivation, pursuit, context, and decision-making.
Dopamine release is associated with desire for a reward, followed by a drop below baseline, triggering motivation and pursuit. The reward itself can either match, exceed, or fall short of expectations, resulting in reward prediction error. Understanding these dynamics can help understand motivation and craving in addiction, as well as overcoming procrastination and setting effective goals.
Addiction involves intense increases in dopamine levels and steep drops below baseline. Drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine cause rapid and large peaks in dopamine, leading to cravings and a progressive narrowing of pleasurable experiences. Understanding addiction and the neuroscience behind it can shed light on the importance of recovery, including abstinence and binding behaviors.
In order to feel motivated and pursue goals, it is essential to have a healthy baseline level of dopamine. This can be achieved through practices such as getting sufficient sleep each night, practicing non-sleep deep rest techniques like yoga nidra, ensuring proper nutrition with foods rich in tyrosine, and getting exposure to morning sunlight. Regular exercise, both cardiovascular and resistance training, also helps in maintaining an elevated level of baseline dopamine.
Deliberate cold exposure, such as cold showers or ice baths, can significantly increase baseline levels of dopamine for a few hours. Taking supplements like L-tyrosine, a precursor to dopamine, can also elevate baseline dopamine levels, leading to improved cognitive performance and physical output. However, it is important to start with lower doses and be mindful of individual tolerance and combine them with proper behaviors and not to rely solely on supplements for motivation.
Effort can become the reward itself by leveraging the dynamics of dopamine release. When in a procrastination or unmotivated state, engaging in other activities that provide a sense of accomplishment can help overcome the state of procrastination. This is because the pain or wanting experienced in the dopamine trough can be alleviated by completing other tasks, leading to motivation to pursue the original goal. Understanding this dynamic and replacing addictive behaviors with small accomplishments can help overcome procrastination and make effort more rewarding.
The podcast explores the concept of peaks and troughs in dopamine levels. It highlights how engaging in certain behaviors or substances that elevate dopamine significantly results in a subsequent drop below baseline levels. Many people are unaware of this phenomenon, leading them to seek ways to recreate the peak experiences. However, the podcast emphasizes that this strategy is ineffective and leads to diminished peaks and potentially pursuing more intense experiences. Instead, it is important to understand that waiting for the dopamine trough to resolve naturally will allow the baseline levels to return, leading to a better state.
The podcast discusses the power of effort and discomfort in overcoming the dopamine trough. It explains that engaging in activities that are more effortful or painful than the state of being unmotivated can accelerate the recovery process. This could include engaging in tangential activities or deliberately exposing oneself to discomfort, such as cold showers or meditation. By steepening the trough and embracing the temporary discomfort, individuals can rebound more quickly to their baseline dopamine levels and regain motivation to pursue their goals.
In this episode, I explain how dopamine dynamics — meaning changes and interactions between our baseline and peak levels of dopamine drive our cravings and sense of motivation. I also explain how to leverage dopamine dynamics to overcome procrastination. I cover behavioral, cognitive, nutrition-based and supplementation-based tools to optimize baseline and peak dopamine levels to ensure a persistently motivated state. I also discuss how to boost motivation when you are in a rut, why you might not want to stack behaviors/substances that spike dopamine and how to build and maintain a “growth mindset” for pursuing goals of any kind. Dopamine is an incredibly powerful neuromodulator involved in basic functions (e.g., hunger, romantic attraction, etc.) and feats of cognitive and physical performance; by understanding the dynamics of dopamine, listeners ought to be better positioned to overcome procrastination, maintain motivation, and improve confidence.
For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com.
AG1: https://athleticgreens.com/huberman
LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/hubermanlab
Waking Up: https://wakingup.com/huberman
Momentous: https://livemomentous.com/huberman
(00:00:00) Dopamine
(00:02:48) Sponsors: LMNT & Waking Up
(00:06:27) Dopamine Brain Circuits
(00:14:53) Goals & Addiction
(00:17:13) Dopamine Dynamics, “Wave Pool” analogy
(00:20:28) Craving, Motivation, Pursuit & Reward Prediction Error
(00:24:46) Sponsor: AG1 (Athletic Greens)
(00:29:40) Feedback Cues & Reward Contingent Learning, “Scoreboard”
(00:37:40) Addiction; Pleasure & Pain Imbalance
(00:44:55) Dopamine Release & Addictive Substances/Behaviors
(00:50:43) Addiction Recovery, Binding Behaviors
(00:53:25) Tools: Maintain Baseline Dopamine Levels
(01:03:26) Tool: Deliberate Cold Exposure & Dopamine
(01:09:38) Prescriptions & Supplementation: L-Tyrosine, Mucuna Pruriens
(01:18:58) Dopamine Trough Recovery, Postpartum Depression
(01:23:31) Dopamine Dynamics, “Dopamine Stacking”; Intrinsic Motivation
(01:38:10) Making Effort the Reward, Growth Mindset
(01:41:49) Tool: Overcome Procrastination
(01:52:16) Tool: Meditation & Procrastination
(01:57:01) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous, Neural Network Newsletter, Social Media
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