002 • How to hack your dopamine levels for productivity

The neurotransmitter dopamine is the primary suspect for controlling how you approach completing tasks and focusing on your work.

Perhaps you feel lazy. Or perhaps you feel pumped and ready to work.

Regardless, it’s the fluctuating levels of dopamine in your body controlling your motivation in the present moment.

The molecule creates a sense of craving for something, jolting you into motion towards obtaining whatever this something might be.

Understanding this system and being able to take advantage of it has massive potential for hacking how much work you can get done. Control your dopamine responses to different activities and you start to become addicted to doing productive work.

I’m going to tell you how to leverage dopamine to achieve just this…

Note: Huberman Lab has an excellent podcast episode on harnessing the neuroscience of dopamine, which inspired this issue of Fundamentalised. You can listen to the episode here.

What causes a dopamine surge in your body?

There are two main categories:

• Receival of a reward

• Prediction of a reward

Reward receival can be from many things that you experience every day. It’s well known that substances such as cocaine and nicotine cause a large spike in dopamine. Your dopamine can also be spiked by seeing positively stimulating content on social media, in video games and on television.

Dopamine increase from reward prediction occurs any of the times you anticipate experiencing a dopamine release from the above substances and activities, as well as any others you might engage in.

The problems the dopamine system causes

Modern life has made stimulants capable of very large dopamine release very accessible to many people.

Want a quick dopamine hit? Scroll Instagram, watch Netflix, play COD.

This is where the foundations of addiction can occur, as we are constantly stimulated to chase dopamine through these means.

The peaks of dopamine received reduce in size every time you repeat the stimulating activity. Dopamine levels actually plummet to below baseline levels once stimulation ends too, leading to a drained and demotivated feeling.

How can we stay motivated to do productive work (which can be difficult, and produces a small dopamine hit in comparison) in the midst of all of this?

How do we recover and manipulate our dopamine?

Well, we can wait.

Once stimulation ceases, your dopamine levels eventually overcome the slump and return to baseline. The problem is this can take a significant amount of time, especially if the initial spike of dopamine was more extreme.

What if we can’t afford to wait for our dopamine levels to recover?

There is an alternative available, based on this principle:

"If you were to take that state of being unmotivated, procrastinating, and actually do something that’s harder than being in that a motivated state, in other words, doing something that’s more effortful, even painful, you can rebound yourself out of that dopamine trough much more quickly."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

In short, if you make your experience uncomfortable, it doesn’t take long before you appreciate normality as a comfortable state to be in again.

Many ways exist to induce this discomfort, like doing something cognitively demanding, but one of the best ways is some kind of deliberate cold exposure, like a cold shower.

This elevates baseline dopamine levels for a substantial period - longer than other tested methods. One alternative is meditation, as many of the inexperienced find mindfulness uncomfortably difficult.

Once your you have restored your baseline dopamine levels by doing something uncomfortable, you can make progress on your work once again. As well as this, you can use the power of movement through exercise to maintain these baseline levels of dopamine. After all, the neurotransmitter’s base role in your system is to stimulate physical movement.

You can also harness the power of rewarding yourself when you do something productive, like giving yourself the evening off to do something relaxing and restoring (something like reading, not scrolling socials). This means you raise your dopamine levels when you complete productive work, motivating you to do more.

This understanding of the motivation and reward system gives you a great perspective from which to adjust your lifestyle in order to prioritise raising your dopamine levels. Become addicted to productive work, rather than procrastination.

Now stop reading and put the knowledge into action.

Thank you for your time.