How To Change Your Behavior | Andrew Huberman EP 765

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12Pursuit is very taxing. And the reason is it's like wandering in the desert, not knowing if there's water at all. That's really depleting. I mean, epinephrine is in the brain and it's chemical equivalent in the body is adrenaline. Those are the same thing. And if you're constantly in pursuit, right, you're just pursuing external goals, external goals, external goals. It will wear your nervous system down. You will be exhausted and one will eventually run aground. You'll become mentally depressed. The key is to figure out what are the rewards that you can acquire along the way internally. Remember, it's subjective.

0:47There can also be external rewards because many things have milestones, you know, a series A or a series B for a company, then the IPO later. Reaching a million users or doing this, yeah. We have engagements before we have weddings typically, right? There's a lot of buildup that provides these reward mechanisms. The key thing is that you can't just be all gas pedal all the time without rewarding yourself. However, the reward that dopamine is so powerful because it actually, as I mentioned before, it actually is the chemical substrate for epinephrine. It creates a reservoir of more energy. And again, I'm not talking about caloric energy or glycogen.

1:26It's mental energy. It's the desire to push on. It's the desire to keep going. So we need some consistent dopamine hits throughout the days or our months to give us more energy to pursue. That's right. But we don't want to be over-pursued because then we'll burn out. That's right. And so everyone has to find where that sweet spot is, that kind of, you know, on the freeway driving where it's really smooth and seamless, where you're not on the accelerator the whole time, where you're in a gear that's appropriate. But the key is always going to be practices. It's going to be just as early. We're talking about bringing stress levels up or down, depending on, you know, alertness levels up or down, depending on the kind of stress you're experiencing.

2:04Let's say you're a person that can very easily access this dopamine reward. So you're always excited. You know, people say, hey, let's do this. And your mantra is, let's go. And you just kind of go. What we call in science, very low activation energy. You just go. That's great. Those people do run the risk of burnout. Although there are these people that we occasionally encounter that just seem to have boundless energy for everything. And they tend to get a lot more done because they have a lot more internal reward. And you'll notice they're getting rewards from all the little things. And it's 100 % subjective.

2:34It's like hearing funny jokes all day long. You can just keep going. And sadly, the beginning of relationships when people fall in love, you know, it's a real thing, but it is associated with a big flood of dopamine in the system. It makes everything seem exciting and possible and new. And I think that we also know other people that they have a very hard time accessing this dopamine system and they either place it under the complete control of external things so they're miserable until they get the payoff or they haven't learned the skills of how to access it so how do we trick our mind to find rewards in subjective things that aren't actually physically coming to us i'll tell a brief anecdote about an experiment the experiment nonetheless was done where they looked at kids in schools.

3:22These are kids about nursery school age or maybe a little bit older. And they looked at what they did during recess. They found that some kids really liked to draw. And so these kids would naturally just orient towards the crayons and pens and draw. And then for a short while, they rewarded the kids for drawing. Those same kids, they would give them a gold star or a little sticker or something that was special and made them feel special. So they were giving them an external reward. Then they removed the reward. And what they found is those kids drew at a much lower frequency. They somehow lost the intrinsic pleasure of drawing.

3:55Huh. Because they were used to getting an extrinsic reward. Suddenly, they associated the drawing. They weren't conscious, but their nervous system said, oh, I guess I was doing it for the reward. Now there's less reward. And without going into a lot of details, there's a very solid scientific phenomenon called reward prediction error, which says that if you get less dopamine at the end than you anticipated, it's a letdown. If you get more at the end, then it feels great. Now, what this all translates to is learning how to attach internal rewards to the process of whatever it is that you want to do in order to get you to the thing you really want.

4:34How can I ensure that once I succeed, this was somebody who was doing very well in their pursuit of a goal and they were getting close and they said, how can I be sure that when I get to the win that I don't lose the ability to keep working because I really want this pay. I'm not satisfied. Right. And I said, well, there's two ways. One is make sure that that reward really bask in it, really appreciate what you've done and what's come to you. But take that feeling of being saturated with dopamine, the huge win, and attach it to the effort process that got you there. If you think that you sort of, let's say Super Bowl win, the party at the end is going to be great.

5:12Right. I have to imagine it's really going to be great. Champagne or this. It's going to be huge. But at that moment, the winners anyway, their system is flooded with dopamine. Flooded with dopamine. And there's an opportunity because dopamine is a signal to the brain that it should rewire so that in the future, it has a higher probability of getting back to that experience. Oh, wow. This is how animals learn how to find water and food. This is at the basis of so many reward pursuits. And so if you attach all that plasticity, all that brain rewiring to the celebration and only to the celebration, you actually can erase a lot of the valuable content that your brain, you know, skills that your brain acquired in route to that goal.

5:55So it's almost like that whole night after you celebrate and maybe the next few days really reflect on the years it took to get you there. That's right. We tend to so overemphasize the wins. It's the things of movies, right? I mean, there's some movies that are really good, like Rocky, the first Rocky, where he didn't actually win. He loses. But so many people associate that film with the striving process. The reward was really straining. His joy at the end of that was really called to, it was interesting, he called it to his family, to the process, right? It was really a movie that captured that in its best form.

6:31when it's just about the win, you lose this amazing opportunity to attach the dopamine to everything that came before it. Now, in addition to that, there's one other way to do it. Nobody likes this one, but it works, which is also when you get there, give away the gold star. Give it away. And really - So you don't fixate on the gold medal all the time. And really high performers. There are a few people whose names, unfortunately I can't mention, that I know who have done incredibly well in the Silicon Valley world. and some of them have given away a substantial portion of what they have. And everyone thought, oh, they want a simpler life and this and that.

7:06No, actually, they were just setting themselves up for the next big win. And they've gone on to do this two or three times now. Really? So they keep moving the carrot out in front of them, but they also are somehow intuitively understanding this process that what got them there was not the last one yard into the end zone. Was the 10 years of the journey. Necessary, but not sufficient, right? But everything that came up until then is so important. So when we have dopamine in our system and when we've taken control of that process, we want to make sure that we capture everything that led up to that.

7:41It's vitally important in these big kind of we're talking in these big milestones type of examples. But this can be done across the day. It can be, you know, I'm going to get to noon just really being the most reflective person I can with my child. and not just doing that as a sheer effort, like, I really don't want to do it, but doing it and thinking, this is going to be a lot of work. And when I get there, I'm going to take a couple minutes to just register everything that I managed to control, all the things I managed to not do that would have been destructive. Dopamine turns out to be, I would argue, one of the most, if not the most powerful neurochemicals in our system.

8:28I am so excited for you to finish the rest of your day strong. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Motivation Show.