Rewiring Your Brain to Utilize Dopamine | Andrew Huberman EP 345

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1:13Pursuit is very taxing. And the reason is that there's a biochemical reason for this 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 you will, one will eventually run aground. You become mentally depressed. The key is to figure out what are the rewards that you can acquire along the way internally.

1:49Remember it's subjective. There 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. That we have engagements before we have weddings typically, right? There's a lot of buildup that fortunately, you know, provides these reward mechanisms. So 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 is the chemical substrate for epinephrine it creates a reservoir of more energy and again i'm not talking about caloric energy or glycogen my dinner it's it's it's mental energy it's the 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 you know we're talking now in terms of sort of um neuroscience lens on these things but the key is always going to be practices it's going to be just as earlier 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 let'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 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 it'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 with a big flood of dopamine in the system 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 and then sometimes they're even miserable then or they really just don't 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 so um i'll tell a brief anecdote about an experiment that's really important this was done many years ago in a psychology department but the experiment nonetheless was done where they looked at kids in schools these are kids about nursery school age or maybe a little bit older and they looked at what they did during recess and they they found that some kids really like 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.

5:05So 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. 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 once again, 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.

6:09Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

6:59Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

7:16Thank you.