The common currency in today’s society is dopamine. Neuroscience researchers have made a crucial discovery in recent years linking the neurotransmitter dopamine to the experience of rewards. It’s more about motivation, and craving.
The molecule dopamine in the brain makes us pursue, build, and create things. It makes us want new things that we don’t currently already have. It’s a way of organizing where we are in our life.
Your self-evaluation depends on your dopamine release over recent days and weeks. Once you understand a little bit about how dopamine is released, and how it changes our perspective and our behavior then you can actually work with this un-motivation.
Those who can’t get off the couch that do not do anything are the rat with no dopamine. They can still achieve some sense of pleasure by consuming excess calories by consuming social media.
Can you remember a time when you would see something cool online and consumed too much of it? Binging a certain show while cleaning an office or your room can be entertaining for a little bit. Pretty soon, it will get tiring and all together you will stop watching the show until it becomes interesting again.
The ‘pleasure balance’ is a phenomenon whereby individuals who lack motivation may not actually be lacking in drive. It is rather experiencing a sufficient or excessive level of satisfaction from their current sustenance.
Individuals are getting the little mild hits of opiate, and it becomes an opioid system. For example the drug abuse of cocaine, can make people hardly notice anything except for when they want more.
Those drugs trigger a lot of dopamine release, that they eventually become the reward.
Overindulgence with social media, video games, food or with anything to the point can numb motivation and cravings, like opioids. This is really the new evolution of the understanding of dopamine and neuroscience, which is that dopamine itself is not the reward. It’s the build up to the reward.
The reward has more of a opioid bliss, which itself is not bad if it’s released from within. When we sit there like a rat with no dopamine and constantly gorging ourselves with pleasures; it is equivalent to somebody who feels really unmotivated.
Those pleasures no longer work to enhance those feel good circuits, therefore there’s no reason for them to go out and do something. The keys are to pursue rewards but understand that the pursuit is actually the reward. If you want to have repeated wins, then the celebration has to be less than the pursuit.
If you can start to identify the craving as it’s own, you will internally release this dopamine that is a source of motivation. What you then realize is that capturing the reward is amazing.
Attaching dopamine to the reward can be little bit dangerous. Celebrating the win more than the pursuit can set you up for failure in the future.
When you anticipate something great and it falls short, your dopamine baseline drops, as per current understanding. Not only did you feel as if you lost, since it wasn’t as much of celebration as predicted. This also means that you’re starting from a lower place, meaning you are less motivated.
At times, a business victory may lead to a subsequent increase in pain and challenges. That pain side is always gonna go a little bit higher than the dopamine side. Now, if you simply wait and stop pursuing dopamine for a short while the scale starts to reset.
The problem is a lot of people immediately start the next pursuit. What happens is that the scale starts to get stuck on the pain side a little bit more. Pretty soon no amount of seeking will allow you to experience that craving and motivation.
The feeling of craving, desire, and agitation – whether low or high – that comes with trying to exert your will on the world in a positive manner is caused by dopamine and its close relative, epinephrine (adrenaline).
The close relationship between dopamine and adrenaline means that the molecule dopamine produces adrenaline, leading to the two chemicals working together. As a result, it can feel like we’re craving work, and then finally achieving a victory.
Some people allow the big peak and dopamine to be associated with the win. Smart people learn to adjust their celebration internally. Even if you throw the biggest party in the world, the key is to remain laid back, then the win isn’t as impressive as the journey.
In other words, you won’t necessarily crash as hard and pretty soon your system will reset. Rather than going out and spiking your dopamine again, just wait and understand that the scale will reset again.
Give yourself a few days, where you’re gonna feel a little kind of underwhelmed. Things wont be as interesting. It’s gonna be hard to trigger that big release because you just had the peak.
For most people, we think of the reward as the finish line. The first key is to get to the finish line, to step into the end zone, but no end-zone dance. The second key to doing it over and over again.
