Huberman Lab - Motivation and Drive

These are notes from Andrew Huberman’s podcast on How to Increase Motivation & Drive

- Dopamine

• The evolutionary purpose of dopamine is to motivate you to do what serves your genes.
• Dopamine is responsible for both motivation and movement towards it.
• Adrenaline/epinephrine creates a bias for action.
• Motivation -> balancing pleasure and pain.
• When we become excited about something in an anticipatory way -> Dopamine increases -> creating a desire to move in the direction of the thing we are craving.
• By anticipating it narrows down our focus towards that particular thing (making it the most important thing).

- Pain

• By repeated action towards a certain thing, after you get achieve it, there is a low-level sense of pain (manifesting as craving to do it again).
• Over time the pleasure you derive from it decreases, and the craving (pain) keeps increasing.
• Dopamine isn’t as much about pleasure, as much as it about motivation & desire to pursue more in order to reduce the amount of pain.

Missing a lover, craving your favourite food, can’t access your drug. The craving you have in these situations manifests itself as physical pain.

The cycle of desensitization mimics other addictions:

bingeing→ cravings→ numbed pleasure response→ cravings→ bingeing escalates→ further decline in dopamine, opioids and their receptors→ further desensitization…

Desire

• Desire ∝ how pleasureful it is to indulge in it.
• Desire ∝ how much pain you experience when you don’t have it.

Serotonin

• Serotonin - molecule of bliss & contentment for what you already have.
• Dopamine - makes you strive for things which you don’t have.
• Marijuana/ Opiods hit the serotonin system, which makes people lethargic -> content with where they are.
• Balance between serotonin & dopamine is required to experience life properly. Being in the here & now, and also making progress towards things you don’t have.

Procrastination

Two types

• enjoy stress when the deadline is close -> have heightened sense of focus. Have bias for action. Leverage internal stress.
• genuinely don’t have enough dopamine release -> can take help of supplements

Prolactin

• Prolactin -> causes lethargy, lack of desire to move. lack of desire to pursue more of whatever released the dopamine.
• Vitamin B6 and Zinc are fairly potent prolactin inhibitor.
• Refactory period is shorter if novelty (newer mates), are brought in. (Coolidge effect)

Dopamine scheduling

• After achieving some major feat, the prolactin level drops. We often ask ourselves the question of What next?. (Post-Satisfaction “Lows”)
• When on a long-term goal, don’t celebrate early and allow that offset to kick-in. Extend the arc of dopamine release.

Occasionally remove rewards from your milestones. Blunt your reward response for some of the intermediate goals to avoid the crash.

Reward prediction error

• If we thing something might happen, and it doesn’t happen there is a big crash in dopamine levels. (Almost like a punishment)
• The single most effective thing to increase dopamine levels is surprise.

Impact of screen time

• Exposure to light/screen time between 10pm - 4am, reduces our capacity to release dopamine.

Resource

Found more resources while deep diving into dopamine.

• Your brain on porn
• How to increase dopamine
• Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A battle for your time
• Dopamine Fasting 2.0