If You Are Feeling Lazy and Unmotivated, LISTEN TO THIS CLOSELY! | Andrew Huberman

when you think about dollar euro bitcoin ethereum you think about wins and losses in sport in life in relationship and anything something in your brain and body has to keep track of that did you win did you lose what's a letdown what's a celebration and i think one of the most important findings in the last few years in neuroscience is that while the molecule dopamine is associated with reward it's more about motivation and craving when i say the common currency is dopamine what i mean is the molecule dopamine when secreted in the brain makes us pursue things build things create things makes us want new things that we don't currently already have it's a way of tabulating where we are in our life are we doing well or are we doing poorly and that happens on very short time scales like you wake up feeling good or do you wake up feeling kind of low or on long time scales if you're halfway through a long degree or you're halfway through your life how are you doing how do you gauge that well it has everything to do with how much dopamine you were releasing in the previous days and weeks and years what's cool is that once you make these processes conscious once you understand a little bit about how dopamine is released and how it changes our perspective and our behavior then you can actually work with it this example the person that's not motivated that can't get off the couch that's doesn't want to do anything well this is the problem they are effectively the rat with no dopamine but they can still achieve some sense of pleasure by consuming excess calories by consuming social media and look i'm not judging i do this stuff too right scrolling social media if you've ever scrolled social media and you're like i don't even know why i'm doing this it doesn't really feel that good and i can remember a time where you'd see something it's just so cool or you see something online i remember this when ted talks first came out i was like this is amazing these are some at least some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights and then now that they're like a gazillion ted talks i remember spending a winter in my office at when i was a junior professor cleaning my office finally and binging ted talks in the background thinking this is a good use of my time pretty soon they all sucked to me i was like this isn't good so what you need to do is stop watching ted talks for a while wait and then they become interesting again and that's this pain pleasure balance and so for people that aren't feeling motivated the problem is they're not motivated but they're getting just enough or excess sustenance so they're getting the little mild hits of opioid it becomes an opioid system and if you think about the opioid drugs as opposed to dopamine dopaminergic drugs dopaminergic drugs make people rabid for everything you know drugs of abuse like cocaine amphetamine make people incredibly outward directed right they hardly notice anything except what they want more of one more more it's very it's bad because those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward it's very circular the only the drug can give that much dopamine nothing they could pursue would give them as much dopamine as the drug itself so there's that and then there's the kind of opioid like effects of constantly indulging oneself with social media or with video games or with uh with food or with anything to the point where it no longer evokes the motivation and craving and this is really the new evolution of the understanding of dopamine and neuro in neuroscience which is that dopamine itself is not the reward it's the build up to the reward and the reward has more of a kind of opioid bliss-like property which itself is not bad if it's endogenous released from within but when we can just sit there like the like the rat with no dopamine gorging ourselves with pleasures so to speak what you end up with is somebody that feels really unmotivated and those pleasures no longer work to tickle those feel-good circuits and so there's no reason for them to go out and pursue anything and that's a pretty dark picture so the the keys are to pursue rewards but understand that the pursuit is actually the reward if you want to have repeated wins okay you the celebration has to be less than the pursuit and that's hard for some people to do if you can start to identify the craving as its own internally released drug this thing dopamine that is a source of motivation then what you realize is that capturing the reward is wonderful but attaching dopamine to the reward is actually a little bit dangerous celebrating the wind more than the pursuit it actually sets you up for failure in the future and so this gets us right into something called dopamine reward prediction error and reward prediction error is basically if you expect something to be really great and then it's not quite that great your dopamine baseline lowers and now understanding what we know about dopamine that means that not only did you you feel as if you lost because it wasn't as much a celebration as you thought it would be but it also means that you're starting from a lower place meaning you are less motivated anytime you have a bunch of dopamine and you're in pursuit pursuit pursuit after you achieve a win now this could be a business win a relationship a win of any kind but inevitably there's going to be a tipping back of the scale on the pain side and that pain side is always going to go a little bit higher than the dopamine side so this is what you would feel if you pursued a goal like building a big company here it comes here comes the big sale and then there's the what now you're the kind of letdown now if you wait if you simply wait and stop pursuing dopamine for a short while the scale starts to reset the problem is a lot of people immediately roll right into the next pursuit and then what happens is that scale starts to get stuck on the pain side a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more and pretty soon no amount of seeking will allow you to experience that craving and motivation so what what does this mean in terms of an actual tool well first of all if people can do what you do they're going to be in a much better position in life doesn't matter if it's school sport relationship any domain of life if you can start to register ah that craving and that friction and that desire that almost kind of low level of agitation sometimes high level of agitation that is that i'm trying to impose my will on the world in a benevolent way we hope that's dopamine it's working with its close cousin which is epinephrine which is adrenaline they are very close cousins in fact dopamine manufactures epinephrine a lot of people don't know this but adrenaline is actually made from the molecule dopamine okay so those two are hanging out together it's like crave work crave work craving work craving work craving work and then you get the win and some people allow the big peak in dopamine to be associated with the win and smart people learn to adjust their celebration internally right this is all internal you could throw the biggest party in the world but as long as you're kind of laid back and looking at this not letting yourself get manic crazy you won't necessarily crash as hard and pretty soon your system will reset so you take the day you clean up the dishes you relax you go what now i'm feeling a little low well rather than going out and spiking your dopamine again just wait understand that the scale will reset again give yourself a few days where you're going to feel a little kind of underwhelmed things aren't going to be as interesting it's going to be hard to trigger that big release because you just had the peak well if you adjust that you relax you understand there's always a little bit of a postpartum depression we sometimes hear about postpartum depression that's a clinical thing but there's always that kind of today's not as exciting as the previous days what what am i going to do with my life but then if you let it start ratcheting up again then what you realize is your capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator not just seeking dopamine rewards that is infinite and i i can say with with great certainty that this is how you were able to build a big company and sell it how you've been able to build a successful podcast and sell it how you constantly seeking because seeking is the reward and i think for most people we think of the reward as the finish line and so the key is to get to the finish line step into the end zone but no end zone dance it's just like yep and i'm gonna go do it again that's really the key that's that's the key to doing it over and over and when i see big athletes or academics or anyone or musicians and they rise and crash it's clear they've lost the touch with the motivation evoked dopamine

Channel: Be Inspired

Views: 2,884,410

Keywords: be inspired, be inspired channel, be inspired video, feeling lazy and unmotivated, feeling lazy, andrew huberman, andrew huberman lazy, lazy und unmotivated, never be lazy again, be inspired lazy

Id: _tCHhqdFMyQ

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021