Leverage Dopamine to Overcome Procrastination & Optimize Effort

Huberman Lab

Scicomm Media

Science, Health & Fitness, Life Sciences

4.8 • 26.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2023

⏱️ 119 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, I explain how dopamine dynamics — meaning changes and interactions between our baseline and peak levels of dopamine drive our cravings and sense of motivation. I also explain how to leverage dopamine dynamics to overcome procrastination. I cover behavioral, cognitive, nutrition-based and supplementation-based tools to optimize baseline and peak dopamine levels to ensure a persistently motivated state. I also discuss how to boost motivation when you are in a rut, why you might not want to stack behaviors/substances that spike dopamine and how to build and maintain a “growth mindset” for pursuing goals of any kind. Dopamine is an incredibly powerful neuromodulator involved in basic functions (e.g., hunger, romantic attraction, etc.) and feats of cognitive and physical performance; by understanding the dynamics of dopamine, listeners ought to be better positioned to overcome procrastination, maintain motivation, and improve confidence. For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1 (Athletic Greens): https://athleticgreens.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman WHOOP: https://join.whoop.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman InsideTracker: https://www.insidetracker.com/huberman Supplements from Momentous https://www.livemomentous.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Dopamine (00:02:32) Sponsors: Helix Sleep, WHOOP, ROKA, Momentous (00:06:27) Dopamine Brain Circuits (00:14:53) Goals & Addiction (00:17:13) Dopamine Dynamics, “Wave Pool” analogy (00:20:28) Craving, Motivation, Pursuit & Reward Prediction Error (00:28:26) Sponsor: AG1 (Athletic Greens) (00:29:40) Feedback Cues & Reward Contingent Learning, “Scoreboard” (00:37:40) Addiction; Pleasure & Pain Imbalance (00:44:55) Dopamine Release & Addictive Substances/Behaviors (00:50:43) Addiction Recovery, Binding Behaviors (00:53:25) Tools: Maintain Baseline Dopamine Levels (01:02:08) Sponsor: InsideTracker (01:03:26) Tool: Deliberate Cold Exposure & Dopamine (01:09:38) Prescriptions & Supplementation: L-Tyrosine, Mucuna Pruriens (01:18:58) Dopamine Trough Recovery, Postpartum Depression (01:23:31) Dopamine Dynamics, “Dopamine Stacking”; Intrinsic Motivation (01:38:10) Making Effort the Reward, Growth Mindset (01:41:49) Tool: Overcome Procrastination (01:52:16) Tool: Meditation & Procrastination (01:57:01) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous, Neural Network Newsletter, Social Media Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac Disclaimer

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
0:08.7	I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and
0:12.3	Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing dopamine.
0:17.1	Dopamine is a topic that I've covered before on this podcast and many people have heard of dopamine.
0:22.5	Most people know that dopamine is involved in pleasure to some extent or another and nowadays
0:27.7	people are starting to appreciate that dopamine is also intimately involved with motivation, drive and pursuit.
0:35.2	Well today you're going to learn that indeed dopamine is responsible for all of those things
0:39.8	but you are also going to learn that dopamine is critical for overcoming procrastination,
0:45.4	for ensuring ongoing motivation, and
0:48.5	indeed for ensuring confidence. In fact, we are going to talk about the relationship between dopamine and
0:54.2	motivation and confidence at the level of neurobiological circuitry and we are going to cover tools that will allow you to leverage your dopamine
1:01.4	in order to have a maximum motivation to overcome sticking points which include things like procrastination,
1:07.9	but also by understanding the neural circuits in the brain and body that release and use dopamine,
1:13.6	but more importantly by understanding what are called dopamine dynamics.
1:17.4	That is what gives rise to big peaks in dopamine or
1:21.4	troughs in dopamine or what's referred to as our baseline level of dopamine which turns out to be our baseline levels of
1:28.3	motivation and feelings of well-being by understanding how those things relate to one another.
1:32.5	I assure you that by the end of today's episode you will be in a far better position to understand why you become
1:40.1	a-motivated, why you procrastinate, how to ensure motivation on an ongoing basis, and even how to leverage effort and the desire to become
1:48.8	motivated as a way to do just that to become more motivated. Today's discussion is not about psychology,
1:54.5	although I will center around practical everyday examples and offer many many tools that you can implement if you choose.
2:01.0	Today's discussion is really about pulling apart these things that we call motivation, reward, pleasure,
	...

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