Boost Your resistance to Dopamine
Boost Your resistance to Dopamine
1. The struggle these
days with most of us remains is that we want to do certain things like
exercise, study and other productive work but our brain wants to do things
which it likes like dopaminergic activities e.g. Play video games, reels etc.
2. The struggle is that
the part of your brain which generates motivation, is the part of the brain
that controls you.
3. Nucleus Accumbens is
the part of your brain that generates motivation using dopamine as a signal.
When we are motivated to do something and when we do it (engage in that
behavior or activity), the Nucleus Accumbens generates dopamine as a reward and
gives us pleasure.
4. The problem is that
you can’t directly affect this circuit, meaning that you can’t motivate
yourself to not be motivated by pleasurable things.
5. It’s the other part of
the brain that can work to reduce the power of Nucleus Accumbens.
6. When we want to do
something that generates pleasure it’s the other parts of the brain that can
help reduce its power on our actions. However, when the Nucleus Accumbens gets
the taste of that pleasurable activity like alcohol addicted takes a sip of
alcohol, then this Nucleus Accumbens cant be stopped even if other parts of the
brain are screaming that it’s bad for you.
7.
8. The more dopamine we
have this may be easy to engage in a sustained effort.
9. When we wake up, we
have ton of dopamine. When in the morning we engage in any task that release
dopamine e,g, video game etc. we get a tons of dopamine released from Nucleus
Accumbens because we have lot of it in the morning. Because this action
releases lot of dopamine, our brain would like to repeat doing this action
until a point dopamine gets depleted.
10. Once we are dopamine depleted, consider it
like a squeezed lemon, now when the lemon of dopamine is dry, to release
dopamine we need to get a powerful squeeze to release the remaining dopamine.
This powerful squeeze can only come from activities which are strongly
dopaminergic like games, play etc. or anything you love. This is intuitive,
when at the end of the day when your day is hectic and you are low on energy,
you can only do activities that you like and love.
11. So, when at the start of the day we do things
like games, play etc. This will squeeze a lot of dopamine out and we will not
have dopamine left for things which are low dopamine releasing.
12. Therefore, if you want to engage in sustained
effort with low dopaminergic activities you need to have a lot of dopamine
reserves. So never engage in high dopaminergic activities at the start of the
day. Don’t use your phone for reels, games or any pleasurable activity at the
start of the day. It would be difficult to work for other activities that are
less pleasurable later on.
13. Therefore, when we have high dopamine
reserves in the morning, and we engage in low dopaminergic activities we still
have a good amount of dopamine release after the completion of the activity and
that activity or behavior gets reinforced and our brain would continue to
working on the task.
14.The lesson is that do most productive task in the initial
hours of the day.
Amygdala, limbic system and how it affects dopaminergic
system or Nucleus Accumbens.
These two parts of the brain (amygdala and Nucleus
Accumbens) talk to each other a lot. Amygdala is the part of the brain which is
the fear system. So, if we have negative emotions then we become more
susceptible to dopamine signals. It’s a mechanism of our brain to reduce the
negative emotions. When we have negative emotions, our brain tells us to engage
in dopaminergic activities so that we feel more pleasure. As long as you have
negative pent-up emotions your vulnerability for dopaminergic signals is a lot.
Therefore, it’s very important to reduce negative emotions
in order to reduce the cravings for high dopaminergic activities and thus
people with negative emotions are likely to engage in things like drugs or
other pleasure-seeking behaviors which are powerful dopamine releasing
activities where the person ends up dopamine resistant and depleted. Things
like exercise, therapy, journaling can help reduce negative emotions and thus
reduce the vulnerability for dopamine.
Prefrontal cortex
Frontal lobes are the central command center, the big
brother of your brain. The part of the brain that tells you when you are
crying, to just stop crying and focus on the real work. This part of the brain
does value generations subconsciously. For example, you want to game and study,
this part of the brain does the value assessment between study and gaming, but research
has found that it does it subconsciously.
People might say yes, I know that study is valuable than
game, but hold on brother/sister, you are not getting it. When you have choice
between gaming and studying and you end up gaming your prefrontal cortex
subconsciously doing the values assessment and telling your Nucleus Accumbens
to do gaming.
However, when we have an exam next day suddenly the
subconscious value assessment gets changed and our prefrontal cortex says today
you must study.
Therefore, the trick is to bring this motivation, couple of
days or weeks prior by doing a conscious value assessment. A simple way is
“Play the tape through to the end”. Pick a pen and paper, don’t do
this in your head. Walk through the actions and write their
consequences on a paper. For example, if I wake up today tomorrow and day after
at 8am and start gaming for 4 hrs. What is going to happen and how I would feel
at the end of the day. On the contrary write about what if you study 4 hrs. in
the morning.
Even though this may not instantly change your value assessment,
but this will affect your subconscious thinking to some extent and when you
keep doing this exercise over and over again your subconscious value system
will start to change.
Hippocampus
Hippocampus has a strong influence on Nucleus Accumbens.
This is a memory center of our brain. There are some things hippocampus loves
and something it hates. Hippocampus loves novelty. When something is new for
you, it will give a string motivational boost. When you exercise, your
hippocampus will say, I know how you feel after exercise, better watch TV. So
how will you influence it now, you can do that by adding novelty to your
exercises like lets do Cardio today or Pilates or Yoga. Adding some novelty to
the mix then there are chances your hippocampus will positively impact Nucleus
Accumbens to release more dopamine. Gaming industry knows this very well, so
they add new stuff frequently.
Opioid Circuit
It contains MU receptors or Kappa receptors. Our brain is actually a
circuit. Opoid receptors are powerful influencer of our pleasure circuit, in
fact it’s clear that pain and pleasure are tightly linked.
For example when your exercising and there is some pain in
it and you overcome it then the pleasure from it really comes for example until
the 6th or 7th rep its very good and easy but 8th,
9th and 10th rep are slightly difficult and
that when you overcome them then you start feeling the pleasure after the
activity, on the contrary when you don’t feel any pain and difficulty you don’t
feel as much pleasure in it. However, the pain should not be so much that it
shuts your brain to stop doing the activity.
Trick is to add some pain to the mix to influence our
dopaminergic system.
To sum it up, Nucleus Accumbens generates motivations and
that’s what create a want. However, we don’t want our wants to control us
therefore what we want is to utilize other parts of the brain like hippocampus,
amygdala, prefrontal cortex, opioid receptors etc. to weaken the strength of
our Nucleus Accumbens or weaken this ability of Nucleus Accumbens to affect our
behavior.
Lastly, we need to be very careful of our dopamine
reserves, you need lot of reserves of dopamine to create a sustained behavior
and activities that are less pleasurable. So if we have lot of dopamine we will
get a good amount of dopamine release even from productive tasks that are less
pleasurable and there are chances that when the dopamine gets released after
less pleasurable tasks we tend to engage in the activities on a more sustained
basis.
(Inspired by a talk from a Harvard Trained Pschiatrist, Dr Kanojia).
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