If you’re struggling to maintain a consistent level of motivation it’s likely that some of your habits are working against your innate capacity for joyful drive and determination.
Dopamine addiction and motivation are deeply linked — and understanding how this system works can reveal why it feels so hard to stay focused on long-term goals.
Dopamine is often referred to as the brain’s motivation and reward molecule. It’s released when we receive or achieve something useful. It’s secreted into our bloodstream when we eat food, have sex, complete a sudoku, watch an engaging Insta reel, or ace a test. It’s the basis of any feeling of reward or achievement.
Dopamine feels good so that we’re motivated to seek out the same success-producing behaviours.
But dopamine isn’t just the chemical fireworks we get with a rewarding experience. Once a rewarding behaviour is learnt, dopamine levels surge in anticipation of that reward.
Yep, thinking about a reward feels better than getting the actual reward.
“Dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It’s about the happiness of pursuit of reward.”
Robert Sapolsky
Our biology evolved to support a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. For our ancestors, any form of reward would have required significant effort. They’d have got a big dopamine spike after they’d walked for many, many miles and discovered a fruit-laden bush. Or once they’d hunted down a wooly mammoth and began to feast. They’d have got a boost once they’d painstakingly constructed a place of shelter or bonded with another member of their tribe. All these tasks require time, patience, effort and a fair amount of personal risk too.
The activities that helped them to survive and thrive would have produced the greatest feelings of reward, and therefore the highest release of dopamine. You painstakingly crafted a spearhead out of fickle flint and then used it to protect your family from an invading lion? Great, here’s a massive dose of dopamine that feels amazing and ensures you’re motivated to carry on the hard-work of refining your tool-making skills. Your next spear is even better, and you defeat the next lion who’s even bigger and more ferocious than the last. Boom, more dopamine and more motivation to continue those behaviours that are helping you and your family thrive.
Once we connect the required work with the bounty it brings we’re naturally motivated to do it. If we’ve learnt that lifting weights, saving money in an ISA, or studying for an upcoming test, has gained us a PB in the gym, financial security or entrance to our dream University, we link the feelings of reward to the work required to get there.
Dopamine fuels motivation, productivity, and long-term goal achievement.
Recent research on dopamine and motivation shows that managing how and when dopamine is triggered is key to sustaining long-term focus.
Dopamine release is addictive – it’s supposed to be. It made our ancestors addicted to behaviours that helped them survive.
So if this is true, why do we find ourselves eating chocolate-covered Hobnobs when we declared moments ago that we were giving up sugar? Or firing up the next episode of House of Dragons instead of tackling the business plan we know could move us closer towards the financial freedom we desire?
If motivation is innate, why do we struggle to stay consistent with long-term goals and productivity?
Immediate gratification is anything that gives you a hit of dopamine that ordinarily should have taken time, effort and patience. They are shortcuts to rewards that our biology is engineered to work for.
Pornography is a an extreme but perfect example. Finding a partner is complex. The potential for rejection is scary. Self-work is hard. Learning how to share, make sacrifices and stay present takes willpower. Bonding, connection and love takes incredible self-awareness and compassion for another person.
Although the evolutionary reasons for sex is multifaceted, we can comfortably say that procreation and bonding are two of the key drivers.
If we’re able to simulate an aspect of sexual satisfaction by simply going online, why would we bother with the time, energy and potential for painful rejection that dating involves? Watching porn releases a staggering amount of dopamine. Unfortunately, it negates any of the actual work that nature intended. That work enables us to learn more about other people, ourselves and the world. That work evolves us.
Our biology is the same as our hunter-gatherer ancestors from 200,000 years ago. Yet we’ve started to live in one place in the last 10,000 years. And it’s only been around 100 years since processed foods have become commonplace. And just 20 years since almost everyone has mobile phones. Technology and its impact on our environment has evolved far faster than our biology can.
Our bodies and brains aren’t designed for the modern world we’ve created – as bizarre as that may feel.
Our ancestors couldn’t artificially hack their dopamine system like we do today with social media and processed foods. They had to work hard to gain advantages like food, security and partnerships. Our modern world is awash with endless stimulation that produces spikes of dopamine that is unimaginable for people just a few hundred years ago.
For example, foods containing 50% fat and 50% sugar simply don’t exist in nature. Many modern processed foods are engineered to hit what is known in the food industry as the ‘bliss point’. These foods are hugely dopamine spiking. Their super-concentrated ratio of half sugar and half fat is something our brains aren’t designed to cope with. Snacks like doughnuts and ice-cream represent a supernatural source of sustenance; tonnes of fat – which can be stored long-term for energy; and loads of sugar – for immediate energy release. It’s why it’s so hard to put that tub of Ben and Jerry’s down. Everything in your unconscious survival system is screaming at you to keep munching.
Rewards that would have taken immense time, effort and patience to achieve a few hundred years ago, can now be simulated in seconds. We’re able to get gigantic hits of dopamine by opening the fridge or picking up our smartphone.
We don’t need to do the work to get the reward anymore.
If you’re struggling to find the motivation to pursue goals that are deeply important to you, there’s a strong likelihood you’re overindulging in immediate gratification.
If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking.
Naval Ravikant
When you’re bored, anxious or experiencing discomfort, what activities do you tend to reach for? What activities would you deem as procrastination? What makes you feel good at the time but somewhat empty and shallow afterwards? What self-soothing behaviour doesn’t align with your goals?
These are motivation black holes. They are disintegrating the natural ebb and flow of a dopamine cycle that helps you stick to difficult work.
We only have a limited amount of dopamine each day. Our levels can be likened to a reservoir. The more we engage with immediate gratification, the more we’re releasing and therefore depleting our reservoir of motivation. By the time we come round to performing the necessary tasks to move towards our goals, we’re almost out of it. We splurged it all on YouTube and chocolate eclairs.
That’s why it’s so hard to drum up the motivation to focus on forming a business plan, writing the first chapter of your novel, or connecting deeply with your partner. If we’ve consistently been giving in to immediate gratification, we’re drawing on a puddle of dopamine rather than the lake we need.
We’ve got to give ourselves time and the right kind of mental and physical nourishment to refill our natural reserves.
How do we do this?
If you want to improve your finances so you can buy something valuable then a smart strategy is to limit your spending on unnecessary, small, everyday items. Making do with the wardrobe of clothes you already have rather than regularly buying new gear is a good place to start. Cutting back on takeaways and cooking at home more is another. The coffee you buy every morning on the way to work doesn’t seem like much but adds up over the weeks and months. The small debts we’ve become unconscious of eat away at the big saving we want to make to invest in something important to us. Unless you have unlimited abundance, cutting back on unnecessary spending is essential.
It’s the same with our levels of dopamine. We fritter it away on online activities that don’t bring us fulfilment, or watching shows that scratch an itch rather than give us the meaning we’re searching for. We gorge on foods that give us a rush of pleasure but then leave us sluggish and moody later on. We keep spending the currency of our potential progress on tasks that lead to nowhere.
If our dopamine levels – our drive and motivation – is like a reservoir, we need to recognise the habits that allow that potential drive to evaporate.
Here’s an example
The goal is to bring awareness to moods, times and activities that trigger immediate gratification and drain your dopamine reserves. It’s a simple tactic to limit a leaking reservoir of motivation.
I think this is a more helpful place to start than outlining your purpose (even though this will become an essential exercise) because it provides us with some of the mental training needed to actually sit down and focus on what a meaningful life looks like.
It’s also achievable, a really important element of any new habit. It’s not easy, but if we stick to this for two weeks we’ll begin to feel different. That small behavioural change will create little catalysts of improvements in other life-areas too.
The more we do this, the more dynamic we become. We’re more efficient, energised and clear-headed. We see increasing areas of small change we can make. We can begin to yoke our time, energy and attention to that which is meaningful to us.
—a life of freedom, fulfillment, and limitless potential.
