Leverage Dopamine to Overcome Procrastination Optimize Effort | Huberman Lab Podcast - 2023

Title : Leverage Dopamine to Overcome Procrastination Optimize Effort | Huberman Lab Podcast Author(s): Andrew Huberman Link(s) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-TW2Chpz4k

This episode is about motivation, drive, pursruit, procrastination, and how they all relate to each other.

Dopamine and the meso-cortical circuit does not care about any specific goal or pursuit. This circuit uses dopamine to pursue anything.

(Addiciton definition: Progressive narrowing of the things that bring us pleasure).

As an analogy on how dopamine works, imagine a wave pool. The waves can be small ripples or large crashing waves. If the amplitude and frequency of the waves is very high, some of the water (dopamine) can get out of the pool, and the baseline drops. If the peaks are small and seldom enough, the baseline is more or less constant. And remember, for every peak, there is a trough.

Dopamine is released in anticipation of what we want, not just when we get the reward/what we are pursuing. This increase in dopamine relates to our propensity and desire to move. That is, desire and the need to move to reach goals are the same process.

After the increase in dopamine, it goes down, and goes a bit below baseline.

Reward prediction errorm (simpler version): The dopamine experienced is related to the difference between what you got and what you expected to get.

Understanding that:

• Craving triggers a peak in dopamine.
• This dopamine drops below baseline making you more motivated (#DOUBT I don't think I fully understood this).

Pain of not having something (triggered after the desire to want something) also contributes to the desire to pursuit that things.

Fully understanding the peaks and troughs will put you in an amazing position to overcome procrastination and potentially pursue any goal in an ongoing basis.

When we pursue something, we are looking for cues to whether or not we are on the right path to achieve that thing. We also set a mindset in our brains as to whether or not we are confident or pessimistic as to whether or not we are going to achieve that thing. To understand this, recall the dopamine release process:

1. You desire something \(X\) (e.g. ice cream).
2. You get a cue that you are likely to get \(X\) (e.g. seeing an ice-cream shop). This increases dopamine levels.
3. Dopamine drops below baseline, further contributing to your desire to pursue \(X\).
4. You get \(X\), and there is a peak that depends on the expected satisfaction and the actual satisfaction from it.

There is a time delay between step 2 and 4. This gap depends on \(X\). There will be many other cues during this time delay, and they adjust the dopamine levels accordingly. The dopamine system is very good at subconsciously parsing what happened between wanting and getting - there are specialized circuits that are involved in learning how we achieve/don't achieve specific types of rewards we desire (Called Reward-Contingent Learning). In the background, there is a background release of dopamine that is like a propeller that drives us in the direction of what we want to pursue.

Summary: Your brain is trying to figure out what happened prior to getting/not getting the reward, and compares what you wanted to what you got. At the same time, also a motivation signal is instantiated that takes you through the entire round of pursuit. The 3 things - stimulus/desire/I want that, motivation (drives you forward, pays attention to what is there along the way even if you don't recognize it), the reward itself. These combine such that after you get \(X\) the dopamine system learns the contingency between stimulus, desire, motivation, etc. Like a scoreboard for how you did given what just happened.

Drugs cause a dramatic increase in dopamine. The time gap between the stimulus and the dopamine is very short - so short that there are no contingencies that the meso-cortical system has to learn. It instead "learns" drugs give a mssive amount of dopamine, and a massive feeling of euphoria etc. This reinforces the system to want this short contingency, so that longer contingencies like putting hard work into e.g. fitness, will not lead to peaks in dopamine that are as high as those peaks from drugs. Hence the duration between desire and effect (rewarding properties of dopamine) matter - shorter gaps teach the system to expect and want short gaps, and makes it hard to pursue things that take longer gaps. The higher the peak and the faster the rise, the further below baseline the dopamine drops afterwards. This drop below baseline triggers the desire/pursuit for more, starting a vicious loop where people chase these peaks which come with low effort.

Some numbers:

• Baseline/background: Neurons at the relevant areas fire at a rate around 2-4 /second.
• Anticipating food doubles this on average.
• Depending on how much you enjoyed the food, it may trip of quadruple, or lower than the anticipation based on expectations vs. true feeling.
• Nicotine use is around 150% increase in rate of dopamine neuron firing.
• Cocaine is around 1000% increase.
• Method is around 1000-10000%.
• For caffeine, sex, video-games the numbers vary, from 5-10 times increase to even a decrease.
• Typical range for is 4-5x increase in rate, for some people that is doubled.
• Based on animal data, caffeine approximate doubles between when we anticipate and get the coffee.

Dopamine is the single molecule that causes the craving, pursuit and experiences of all these substances, behaviours. The learning process predicts whether we will re-engage in the substance/behaviour and how frequently we will do that.

Reset of dopamine circuitry often involves 30 days of complete abstinence - but not for alcoholism, opioid addiction, so consult a professional before going cold turkey. For other addictions like food, sex, video games, the desired outcome is to set constraints rather than stopping. For this, binding behaviours are a requirement - where you bind a behaviour in space (doing it only in certain places when it is context appropriate) and/or time (in certain times).

To feel motivated at all, (feeling of capable of doing goals), we need enough baseline dopamine levels. Some practices for this include:

• Getting sufficient sleep.
• Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR). This is not meditation (there is little evidence meditation increases dopamine, rather it is a focus exercise). NSDR increases dopamine by around 65%.
• Proper nutrition, speicifically thyrosene.
• Morning sunlight, 5-10 minutes on a sunny day minimum, 20-30 minutes if its very cloudy. This increases cortisol in the morning of the day which is what you want.
• Movement/exercise of any kind (not for the dopamine peaks from a PR etc).

Whats the difference between a baseline and a peak?

• Something is defined (by Huberman) to increase your baseline dopamine if the increase in dopamine occurs for more than 1 hour (not the behaviour).

Exposure up to neck with cold water increases dopamine levels for up to 4-5 hours. E.g. cold shower in the morning - 30s-2min of cold water depending on your exposure, 30-50 degrees F. Not after strength/hypertrophy training.

Another substitute for the above cold shower is 45-60 minutes, be in warm (~60 degrees F) water for around 45-60 minutes.

Activities you like combined with some reward (like money, gold stars for a child) lead to higher peaks and troughs, taking the rewards away does reduce the activities. If you have an activity that you enjoy a lot, guard and protect by not attaching/extremely limited other sources of dopamine releasing behaviours/substances to that action. Huberman's personal experience involved mixing caffeine, music etc. with his workouts, and he noticed his enthusiasm for work, workout etc. was diminishing. That is, combining too many dopamine releasing behaviours into things he already enjoys is not good.

Key point: Be careful about doing many dopamine releasing beheaviours at once when already doing something you find pleasurable.

Nothing can replace intrinsic motivation. It is the holy grail of all human endevaours and behaviours. Chi, the source, etc. is the set of circuits within us that allow us to identify what we want, and then lean into effort, and do that in a persistent way to reach our goals. Doing this with instrinsic motivation is like magic.

But how can one engage with things that are less than pleasureful/engage in motivated behaviours when the going gets tough/how people can overcome procrastination? The holy grail is when you make the friction the reward. When this happens, you can pass from the idea and a goal to successful completion of that goal while experiencing what will feel like pleasure the entire time.

This involves leveraging the dopamine peaks and troughs to maintain baseline levels of dopamine, and pull yourself out of procrastination and overthinking trenches quickly and get back to a mode of pursuit.

To make effort the reward: (the growth mindset) adopt the mindset that if you can't do something, that you can't do it YET.

Assuming the baseline dopamine levels are normal, the following can help with procrastination/overthinking:

• The trough is craving to the state that you would like to achieve. To get out of this pain trough some people procrastinate like cleaning the house - this is a mild form of addiction replacement. Rather than being in a painful state and wait for it to pass, do something that gives a sense of accomplishment, and hope to generate momentum to get motivated enough to do the activity which they want to avoid. This is often done close to a deadline, induced anxiety is used to leverage mental and physical resources to complete the goal.
• To overcome procrastination, note that the depth of the trough depends on the peak amplitude and how fast it reached its maximum. The rate at which you get out of the trough depends on how steep it is. If you are in an amotivated state, you may wait, or do something like cleaning. These do not work that well. Instead, if take the unmotivated/procrastinated state, and do something that is harder than being in that state specific in that moment (i.e. more effortful/painful) you can rebound out of the trough more quickly. More painful does not mean psychologically or physically painful activities. E.g. engage in some tangential activity (not related your goal).

When we receive rewards for something, we tend to associate less pleasure with the actual activity that evoked the reward.

Growth mindset - the striving to be better, "I'm not there yet", striving itself is the endgoal and focusing on the effort itself - result in people performing very well. To cultivate growth mindset, one must access rewards from the effort and doing, instead of as a reward like some ice-cream after a workout. You need to say, "this effort is great, pleasureful" even if you are in physical pain, and evoke dopamine release from the friction and challenge you happen to be in.

Stop layering other sources of dopamine (e.g. caffeine) to get to the starting line and continue on, rather subjectively start to attach the feeling of friction and effort to an internally generated reward system. You can tell yourself the effort part is the good part, "I know its painful, I know it doesn't feel good, but I'm focused on this and I'm going to start to access the rewards" - when repeated over and over again you will find the reward i.e. dopamine release inside the effort. Also, this becomes reflexive for all types of effort. When focusing on the trophy, grade, win etc. as the reward, you undermine the entire process. In the moments of the most intense friction, tell yourself "This is very painful, and because its painful, it will evoke an increase in dopamine release later" but also tell yourself "I am doing this by choice, because I love it". This sounds like you are lying to yourself, but you are lying to yourself in the context of a truth since you want it to feel better and pleasureful.

The ability to access pleasure from effort aspect of the dopaminergic circuitry is without doubt the most powerful aspect of dopamine in our biology of dopamine.

Do not spike dopamine prior to engaging with effort.

Do not spike dopamine after engaging with effort.

Learn to spike dopamine from effort itself.

Imagine you don't like exercise. The typical advice is then to start by exercising for 1 or 5 minutes and use the success to move to the next milestone - this approach can work. This may not work for many people, and a tangential activity that is much worse than being amotivated is the way to go. That is, an activity that just sucks. This steepens the trough that brings you back to the baseline quicker.

Most people find it hard to meditate, they will find it (don't do anything for 5-10 minutes besides closing eyes, breathing) extremely difficult, hence it is a great example for the effortful tangential activity. You need to actually engage in that acitivity. It's not about achieving the outcome of that activity, but forcing the body to be in a deeper state of pain and discomfort.