Lack of motivation plagues even the brightest
and most ambitious at times, especially when we have so many digital
distractions these days. But you can trick your brain into becoming more
motivated and it will hardly even notice. You simply need to know a little
about the neurology of motivation and procrastination.
As the compulsion for the bad habit grows, the
increased dopamine demand saps your motivation to engage in more positive but
less extreme dopamine-boosts. If you have ever gotten sucked into binge
watching a Netflix series over taking a walk on a sunny day, you know what I’m
talking about.
A key brain chemical, or neurotransmitter,
involved in motivation is dopamine. It also happens to be the key
neurotransmitter involved in bad habits and addiction, including digital
addictions to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. We need plenty of
dopamine to stay motivated and feel good about our accomplishments and
ourselves. Otherwise we lapse into procrastination.
Every time you check your Facebook (or smoke a
cigarette, gamble, take a drug, or engage in any other addiction), the pleasure
center of the brain, called the nucleus accumbens, is flooded with dopamine and
hence feelings of pleasure. Dopamine also encourages motivation to continue
that feel-good behavior.
This system doesn’t exist simply to sabotage us
with Netflix binge watching addictions. We are designed to find pleasure in
certain activities that ensure survival of our species, such as eating, love,
sex, and having fun (positivity is good for immune and brain health). However,
these rewarding pleasures require, to varying degrees, a certain amount of
work, attention, and time for modest releases of dopamine.
An addictive habit, however, can release two to
10 times the amount of dopamine a natural one does. In other words, jumping on
to Facebook is going to give you a quicker and easier dopamine “high” than,
say, building a fire so you can hang out with your tribe and cook that day’s
catch.
In an attempt to maintain balance, the brain’s
receptors lose tolerance to dopamine so that you get less of a high. However,
dopamine has also wired your brain to connect the stimulus with the feelings of
pleasure. As a result, compulsion builds with tolerance.
You also probably know that willing yourself
into better behavior often fails you and makes you feel even worse about
yourself — dopamine is tied to self-esteem and when yours is running low, so is
your sense of self-worth.
It’s not as hopeless as it sounds.
The key is to redirect your brain’s dopamine system with baby steps that
develop new pathways of communication so you think, feel, and behave
differently. This is called plasticity.
How? Pick a positive action small enough you
know you can accomplish it. Trouble sticking to an exercise routine? Commit to
one pushup a day. Wish you would work on that book? Write one paragraph, or even
one sentence a day. Want to meditate? Start with one minute, or maybe a few
minutes of reading.
The magic isn’t in how much you do, but through
the feeling of accomplishment. This sends rewarding dopamine boosts to the
areas of your brain that need it the most so positive plasticity can develop. After
you have been doing that one pushup or that one minute of meditation, increase
it to two, and so on. The goal is to feel a rewarding sense of accomplishment
and continue building on that in small, achievable ways.
Symptoms of low dopamine activity include lack
of motivation, struggles with procrastination, inability to find pleasure in
things you used to enjoy, fatigue, mood swings, memory deficits, addiction,
feelings of low self-worth, bouts of rage, and other symptoms.
Low dopamine can have its roots in chronic
health imbalances (gut, immune, hormonal, etc.) or in neurological imbalances,
such as brain development disorders, brain degeneration, brain injury,
or other brain-based mechanisms.
Ask my office – Southwest
Brain Performance Centers for functional neurology strategies to help you
improve your dopamine activity so you can get stuff done, enjoy life more, and
feel better about yourself. 
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