It’s 2 a.m. Sunday night. You’re panicking. Despite your 28-day notice and Sheldon’s unwarranted advice, you decided to hold off starting your term paper until the infamous night before. Low and behold, you have a fair bit of work to do. Go figure, that’s probably why you had a month to get it done.
Alas, your dormant vigor awakens. You feel alive – it’s go time. Working for six hours straight alongside coffee, anxiety, and God’s grace, you manage to scrape together 20 pages of honest work. Against all odds, you were able to complete what should have taken a week in a sheer evening. Incredible! Now you might actually have a chance to finish tomorrow’s paper.
How is it that one can accomplish more work in a single night than in an entire month’s time? Moreover, why is motivation so fleeting? It’s the same reason why a drug addict will destroy his life chasing a high, or why a gamer can spend sixteen consecutive hours playing the same game – dopamine.
The Relationship Between Dopamine and Motivation
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for governing the brain’s reward system and the precursor of motivation (1, 2). It’s release and regulation has a drastic influence over our mood, memory, sleep, behavior, focus, cognition and pleasurable sensations (3).
But to say dopamine is simply the acquisition of a reward is not entirely correct. Interestingly, studies show that dopamine is connected more so to the pursuit of reward than the actual reward itself. That’s why it is so addictive – the more you feed it, the more you crave. Explained by psychologist Mercè Correa,
“It was believed that dopamine regulated pleasure and reward and that we release it when we obtain something that satisfies us, but in fact the latest scientific evidence shows that this neurotransmitter acts before that, it actually encourages us to act. In other words, dopamine is released in order to achieve something good or to avoid something evil” (4)
Take sexual arousal for instance. The pleasure is in the intimacy leading up to the climax, not just the climax itself. By maximizing the time of intercourse, one is naturally extending the release of dopamine. The same goes for motivation. By doing something (or someone) you find pleasurable, you are more motivated to perform.
Dopamine’s prominent role is to transform incentive information into cognitive motivation (5). There are 4 types of incentives motivated through dopamine:
- Emotional (fear, anger, love, happiness, etc.)
- Biological (instinctual, basic needs)
- Social (bias, pressure)
- Cognitive (logical)
Dopamine’s release inherently causes us to act. Of these incentives, motivation theory suggests that there are only two reasons people take action: to avoid pain, or to pursue something pleasurable (6). For motivation to thrive, there needs to be a source of arousal.
Going back to the term paper example, the stress of time was the arousal for dopamine’s release. Without it’s stress, there was no incentive to act and no integral pain to avoid. At least, not until the impending Sunday night’s doom.
In this state, the brain is endlessly searching for new sources of arousal – that’s how motivation grows. Not surprisingly, individuals with naturally high levels of arousal typically engage risk-seeking behaviors, such as gambling, drug use, stock-trading, or criminal activity. (7).
Such activities create a “high” in itself. Thus the question becomes: how can we use the addictive traits of dopamine to motivate us with productive tasks?
How To Regulate Your Motivation
Some people are just born unmotivated – I call bullshit.
Motivation can be nurtured through a set of defined rules, structure, and will power. It important to recognize that motivation is nothing more than a systemic release of dopamine. To effectively regulate your motivation, you must gauge how to attach arousal to your goal.
Here are 5 key principles to help.
1. Short-Term Goals
One of the reasons why New Year’s resolutions fail 95% of the time is because the goals are so big and far away, the brain has no incentive to reward itself. The solution to this is to simply break down your big goals into many small attainable ones.
Say you plan to lose 50 pounds over ten months. You will find yourself much more motivated trying to lose five pounds every month rather than the entire 50 over the course of ten. It’s easier to sustain rewards this way, and the urge to quit is much less intimidating.
2. Dopamine Detox
During a dopamine detox, the goal is to abstain from as much mental stimulation as possible, and perform only bare essential tasks. This includes drinking, sex, gaming, coffee, masturbation, social media, pleasurable foods, or any other activity you may typically enjoy doing.
The idea is to reset your brain’s neurochemical system through massive de-stimulation. Of course, this can be agonizing and you will likely find yourself in withdrawal. That’s because we use these little hits of dopamine to distract ourselves from our true emotions.
By eliminating all distractions, you are permitting yourself to come to terms with your emotional center. Once the withdrawal side effects have subsided, you will find it much easier to focus and the joys of life will be amplified.
3. Diet
It’s no secret that healthy foods lead to more productive and creative states of mind. When you are loaded with sugar or bloated with carbs, you are rewarding yourself with lethargy and laziness. This inhibits the flow of energy in the mind, and reinforces the craving for unhealthy foods.
Similar to the dopamine detox, the benefits of eating a well-balanced diet program your body to avoid the dopamine cravings that accompany poor food choices. You will preserve more dopamine hits for your work, and innately become more productive.
4. Purpose
Though you can have a great influence over your own motivation, there will be times when it is just not there. And it is in these times of hardship and struggle, that if you don’t have some connection to your work you deem meaningful, it will be nearly impossible to regain strength. A purpose is a center of stability, and something to fall back on when all other options fail.
5. Practice
Most importantly, you must practice the principles of discipline, structure, and willpower frequently if you want to sustain high levels of motivation. The brain is like a muscle, and the more you train it the more resilient it becomes. Put in the reps of willpower frequently, and you will notice how much more natural it is to stay motivated. The object is execution – not perfection.