Did you know, there’s a molecule in your brain that controls how motivated you feel about your future goals and desires You’ve probably heard about dopamine before, but do you know what the molecule is responsible for in your brain?
According to Dr. Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, our dopamine levels shape our perception of life, emotions, and how capable we perceive ourselves to be.
When our dopamine levels are low, we feel unmotivated and gain less pleasure from pursuits, feeling physically drained. When our dopamine levels are healthy, we feel motivated and driven. If you’ve been hitting a slump and running low on dopamine drive, getting your levels up doesn’t require a big lifestyle change.
Dr. Huberman shares how we can manage and improve our dopamine levels with easy-to-follow steps. But first:
What is dopamine?
According to Dr. Huberman, dopamine is a molecule in the brain and body linked to your sense of motivation. It also enhances your depth of focus and lowers your threshold for taking action toward specific goals.
Our bodies have a baseline of dopamine molecules that spike or drop based on what we do, what we ingest and how we think. Factors like genetics, behaviours, sleep, and nutrition all influence our baseline dopamine levels.
In order to sustain daily motivation and drive, it’s really important to maintain healthy levels of baseline dopamine. How do we do that? In a recent newsletter, Dr. Huberman breaks it down:
How to establish a healthy dopamine baseline
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Soak up the morning sun
Dr. Huberman says that getting direct sunlight in your first waking moments of the day (for about 10 – 30 minutes) is a great way to release dopamine and increase levels for certain dopamine receptors. After getting your dose of sun, if you’re feeling brave, take 1-3 minute cold shower, also known to increase baseline dopamine levels dramatically.
Eat foods that are rich in tyrosine
Eat more foods rich in tyrosine like red meat, hard fermented cheese and nuts. Tyrosine is an amino acid that forms a building block of dopamine. A rich intake of tyrosine will boost your body’s natural dopamine production. Just keep your caloric intake in consideration!
Dim the lights from 10pm-4am
This activates a brain region called the habenula and reduces the amount of dopamine circulating in your system, which is essential towards a healthy dopamine balance. If you need to view light during this period, make it as dim as you can.
Grab that coffee (or tea!)
Consuming between 100-400mg of caffeine, whether it’s tea, coffee or whatever you prefer, will spark an increase in dopamine and availability of dopamine receptions, making your body more sensitive to dopamine circulation. Don’t do this close to your resting period at night, try avoid caffeine from 2pm onwards.
Managing dopamine peaks
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We can’t fly too close to the sun! If you don’t manage a healthy balance of dopamine, your dopamine production levels will slowly start to diminish and will eventually lead to you deriving little to no satisfaction from what you do. Maintaining this is all about the mindset:
Celebrate your big wins, but not every win. “When you succeed in reaching a milestone, sometimes enjoy that; other times (at random), just keep going.” An even better thought habit is to associate ‘winning’ with the process of effort itself, instead of the results. This is called Random Intermittent reward timing as is the most powerful trick to staying motivated.
Associate ‘winning’ with the effort process itself. That’s the holy grail of dopamine management for success. It won’t make you dull or unhappy; it will make everything easier and more pleasurable, without the peaks and valleys of dopamine that external-reward-driven people experience, and you’ll obtain all the external rewards anyway.
Don’t bulk up on dopamine sources. When we take on many various sources of dopamine, it does increase dopamine and motivating but stacking all these dopamine-triggering sources without any balance will cause a crash, ultimately impacting our long term motivation and drive.
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