Leverage Dopamine to Overcome Procrastination & Optimize Effort
Date: 2023-03-27 | Duration: 01:58:49
Transcript
0:00 Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing dopamine. Dopamine is a topic that I’ve covered before on this podcast, and many people have heard of dopamine. Most people know that dopamine is involved in pleasure to some extent or another, and nowadays people are starting to appreciate that dopamine is also
0:30 intimately involved with motivation, drive, and pursuit. Today you’re going to learn that indeed dopamine is responsible for all of those things, but you are also going to learn that dopamine is critical for overcoming procrastination, for ensuring ongoing motivation, and indeed for ensuring confidence. In fact, we are going to talk about the relationship between dopamine and motivation and confidence at the level of neurobiological circuitry, and we are going to cover tools that will allow you to leverage
1:00 your dopamine in order to have maximum motivation to overcome sticking points, which include things like procrastination. But also, by understanding the neural circuits in the brain and body that release and use dopamine—but more importantly, by understanding what are called dopamine dynamics, that is, what gives rise to peaks in dopamine or troughs in dopamine, or what’s referred to as our baseline level of dopamine, which turns out to be our baseline levels of motivation and feelings of well-being—by understanding
1:30 how those things relate to one another, I assure you that by the end of today’s episode, you will be in a far better position to understand why you become unmotivated, why you procrastinate, how to ensure motivation on an ongoing basis, and even how to leverage effort and the desire to become motivated as a way to do just that—to become more motivated. Today’s discussion is not about psychology, although I will center around practical everyday examples and offer many, many tools that you can implement
2:00 if you choose. Today’s discussion is really about pulling apart these things that we call motivation, reward, pleasure, and procrastination, and understanding them in terms of their dopamine dynamics. So whether you’ve heard me or others talk about dopamine before, or whether or not today is your first exposure to the topic of dopamine, today’s episode is really designed to give you the biological and practical knowledge so that you can leverage your dopamine circuitry and your dopamine levels, as well as tools to adjust dopamine circuitry and levels in order to optimize mental health, physical health,
2:30 and performance. Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I’d like to thank the sponsors of today’s podcast. Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are the absolute highest quality. I’ve talked many times before on this and other podcasts about the critical role that sleep plays in allowing you to
3:00 be awake and alert and have a good elevated mood throughout the day. Sleep is just fundamental to our mental health, physical health, and performance, and there’s no replacing great sleep. A key thing we all need in order to get excellent sleep is to have an ideal sleep environment. Helix mattresses are designed for your unique sleep needs in order to ensure that you get the best possible night’s sleep. So if you go to the Helix site and you take their very brief two or three-minute quiz, it will ask you questions such as: Do you sleep on your side, your back, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold
3:30 throughout the night? And they will match you to a mattress that’s specific to your sleep needs. I matched to the Dusk mattress; that’s the one that works for me. And since sleeping on the Dusk mattress now for well over two years, I’ve been sleeping better than I ever have before. So if you go to their site, you take the quiz, and you figure out what’s the ideal mattress for you. Just go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they’ll match you to a customized mattress, and you’ll get up to $350 off any mattress order and two free pillows. Again, if interested, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman for up
4:00 to $350 off and two free pillows. Today’s episode is also brought to us by Whoop. Whoop is a fitness wearable device that tracks your daily activity and sleep, but also goes beyond that by providing real-time feedback on how to adjust your physical training and sleep schedule and other activities throughout your day in order to optimize your health. I’ve been working with Whoop on their scientific advisory council to help advance Whoop’s technology and mission of unlocking human performance, not just for athletes but for everybody. As a Whoop user, I’ve
4:30 experienced the health benefits of their technology firsthand. For instance, it tells me, of course, whether or not I had a good night’s sleep or a poor night’s sleep by giving me a sleep score. It tells me the percentage of rapid eye movement sleep to slow-wave sleep. But Whoop also tells me, for instance, whether or not certain activities during my daytime, such as naps or training, or training of a certain amount of intensity, how that’s impacting my sleep and vice versa. If you’re interested in trying Whoop, you can go to join.whoop.com/huberman. Again, that’s join.whoop.com/huberman today, and you’ll get your first
5:00 month free. Today’s episode is also brought to us by Roka. Roka makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are uniquely tailored to the needs of athletes and everyday people. The company was founded by two All-American swimmers from Stanford, and everything about Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses was designed with the biology of the visual system in mind. I’ve spent a lifetime working on the biology of the visual system, and I can tell you that your visual system has to contend with an enormous number of challenges in order for you to be able to see clearly. Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses are designed such that when
5:30 you go from one environment to the next, like a brightly lit environment to a less brightly lit environment, you don’t notice that transition; you always see with perfect clarity. Another terrific thing about Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses is that many of the performance glasses out there that are designed for sport make people look like cyborgs, which, if you want that, they do have those options—the “cyborg options,” as I call them. But they also have many options where the aesthetic is more of the sort that you would wear to dinner or to work or anywhere that you happen to be. If you’d like to try Roka eyeglasses or sunglasses, go to Roka—
6:00 that’s R-O-K-A dot com—and enter the code Huberman to save 20% off your first order. Again, that’s Roka, R-O-K-A.com, and enter the code Huberman at checkout. The Huberman Lab podcast is now partnered with Momentous supplements. To find the supplements we discussed on the Huberman Lab podcast, you can go to livemomentous.com/huberman, and I should just mention that the library of those supplements is constantly expanding. Again, that’s livemomentous.com/huberman. Okay, let’s talk about dopamine. What is dopamine? Dopamine
6:30 is what’s called a neuromodulator, which simply refers to the fact that it’s a chemical that modulates or changes the electrical activity of other cells. And the cells I’m referring to are neurons. Neurons are just nerve cells. So you have a brain and a spinal cord, and the neurons in your brain and spinal cord connect to one another, and they connect to different areas of the body, including basically every organ of your body. And every organ of your body communicates back to your brain and spinal cord
7:00 through direct or indirect pathways. For instance, you have neurons in your gut that sense what sorts of nutrients you’ve eaten or drank and then send neural signals, electrical signals, up to the brain, and indeed that whole process happens to be modulated by dopamine. Dopamine as a neuromodulator has the basic property of either ramping up, increasing, or decreasing the activity of other neurons. And that’s done by adjusting things like electrical potentials and things of that sort that we really won’t go into this episode, but
7:30 that I promise to get into in detail in a future episode if you’re interested in the biochemistry and biophysics of neurons and things of that sort. So we have this neuromodulator dopamine, and we know that that neuromodulator can increase or decrease the activity of other neurons. So then we have to ask ourselves: Where is dopamine released in the brain and body, and what specific types of neurons is it impacting? In other words, what specific types of functions does dopamine have? So there are basically five circuits within the brain that use
8:00 dopamine as the primary neuromodulator, and those five circuits engage different but related functions. So I’m going to go through them one by one relatively quickly, giving you a little bit of nomenclature and some sense of what each of those circuits looks like and what it does. The first circuit is the so-called nigrostriatal pathway. In the back of the brain, there’s an area called the substantia nigra, so named because the neurons are actually very dark—they actually contain pigment. You’d be able to see this if I were to slice up a
8:30 brain; you’d see two dark regions in the back. That substantia nigra contains neurons that are chock-a-block full of dopamine, but they release that dopamine in a brain structure called the striatum. The striatum is involved in movement, both the initiation of movements and the suppression of movements in so-called “go” action and “no-go” suppress action pathways—a topic for a future podcast. The second brain circuit that uses and leverages dopamine to a great extent is the so-called mesolimbic pathway. Now, you’ll also in a moment hear about the
9:00 mesocortical pathway. Today I’m going to talk about these somewhat interchangeably at times, but where it’s important for me to differentiate between them, I will do that. Both of these pathways initiate from a set of neurons in the so-called ventral tegmental area, or VTA. I will use that acronym VTA. The VTA functions in close partnership with a different brain structure called the nucleus accumbens. For sake of today’s discussion, you can lump those together if you want. Neurons in those areas project to a bunch of different places, but in the mesolimbic pathway, those neurons are projecting to areas of the brain like the hypothalamus, which sits right above the roof of your mouth and is responsible for a lot of basic functions—things like maintaining your body temperature, for libido and the pursuit of sex, for hunger, for the generation of signals to the pituitary gland that cause the release of
10:00 hormones and other things into the bloodstream. So the connections, which I sometimes refer to as projections, from the neurons in the VTA and nucleus accumbens to the hypothalamus are basically using dopamine to modulate the output of a lot of different things that happen in this hypothalamus that controls a lot of—we could call them primitive functions, but they’re really basic functions for survival. Now, the other pathway out of the VTA and nucleus accumbens is to the cortex; that’s why it’s called the mesoc