Enjoy your wins, but not all of them!
How to stay motivated in the long-run?
Close your eyes and perform this thought-experiment for a minute —
“Imagine your most favorite food. Now imagine you are eating it slowly and savoring each and every bite of it.”
If you had really imagined visually, the following might’ve happened:
- Secretion of Saliva
- An urge to eat that food item.
There might be a lot of other things that might’ve happened, but let’s focus on these two for a moment.
Secretion of Saliva → Pavlov’s experiment
Most of you might’ve known the famous “Pavlov’s experiment” from school textbooks. In layman’s terms, it’s as follows:
“A dog if shown food salivates (1 in fig). and it doesn’t salivate when we simply ring a bell (2 in fig). When it’s presented with food and the ringing bell at the same time, it salivates (3 in fig). After few repetitions of the setting in fig 3, the dog starts to salivate with just a ringing bell (without any food) (4 in fig)” — This phenomenon is called conditioning and the main reason behind this phenomenon is “anticipation”
Urge to eat food
If your imagination is strong enough and if it’s feasible, you will satisfy your craving (by either cooking or ordering)
The above thought experiment is rudimentary and its purpose is to connect some core-concepts involving “anticipation”, “craving” and this blog.
Our brain releases a lot of chemicals for various reasons, let’s look at few of them—
Dopamine — Beyond experiencing pleasure!
In this social media age, I believe most are familiar with dopamine and it’s effects. It’s the to-go molecule for influencers to market their products and hack our psychological system! Few of the most famous phrases I can associate with dopamine are — “it’s a reward molecule, it’s a pleasure molecule, intermittent dopamine detox is good for mental-being etc;”. While these are true to an extent, these convey only the popular beliefs on dopamine and lacks the core reasoning to understand why it works that way!
Following the previous thought experiment, if you actually made an effort to experience your favorite food (going out to buy, making it in kitchen or ordering online), kudos to you! “You just experienced dopamine acting on your body”
Dopamine gets released in anticipation/craving towards something and it makes us to be motivated and pursue that goal. Dopamine places us in “exteroception” mode i.e to move and experience the external senses. In short, dopamine is what makes one motivated to pursue something!
To be even more specific, dopamine is not just about the ability to experience pleasure, but it’s more about getting motivated to experience that pleasure. Researchers conducted an experiment where:
Rats which had dopamine → move to the end of the cage and get food.
Rats whose dopamine receptors were suppressed → won’t move to the end of the cage to get food. But when provided food in front of them, they eat.
So, it’s not experiencing pleasure (the latter part; eating food) but the motivation/drive to experience pleasure (the former part; moving across the cage) that needs dopamine. Additionally, we can experience pleasure without much dopamine release (but technically we might not be in a state to understand that we are actually experiencing pleasure i.e eating favorite food != savoring/experiencing the taste)
Serotonin — “Happy-go-lucky”, “here-and-now” molecule
If you are someone who usually gets satisfied with what you have, it’s because you have good levels of serotonin. This molecule usually puts us in “interoception” mode i.e you usually feel calm, grateful and start listening to more of your internal feelings/emotions.
As an example, drugs like marijuana releases serotonin (people consuming these usually will be in a calm state) and cocaine releases dopamine (people consuming these are usually in a hyper-active state)
There’s this “Dopamine-Serotonin tug” i.e Exteroception-Interoception tug that constantly happens → Pursuing for something that excites vs being satisfied for things that we already have.
It’s always important to be motivating (dopamine) but also to be grateful for what we have (serotonin), so that balance has to be achieved for a healthy life.
The Pain-Pleasure relationship
Dopamine is a double edged sword i.e it not only provides pleasure, but also creates the pain component! Extending our previous thought-experiment, the first bite of your favorite food might give a blissful feeling but what about 3rd bite! Do you feel the same level of excitement during the 10th bite? (most likely the answer would be a No!). Also, most of us usually start thinking about having a second chocolate (or a different flavored one) while having the first one. This is the pain component I’m referring to i.e anticipation and wanting more of something even though you are experiencing it and this activates the pain circuits.
Here’s an alternate example — “have you ever experienced the act of planning a trip and anticipating towards it to be more exciting than the actual trip itself! Do you think about having another trip while being in a trip!”
In short — Our pursuit towards seeking pleasure is to reduce the pain of craving!
Due to this inverse relationship (see-saw nature) of pleasure-pain,“enough will be never enough” i.e we go on pursuing something that initially gives us pleasure but after sometime we won’t get the same excitement i.e the pleasure component saturates because of pain circuits being activated and overdoing it will be counter-productive. In short, pain prevails pleasure over time.
From neuroscience perspective, anticipation releases a lot of dopamine and once the act is done (eg: eating the first few bites), there’ll be a crash of dopamine and we enter a phase called refractory period by the release of prolactin where we won’t be interested in doing it anymore for some period of time.
Coolidge effect to hack dopamine circuits
So, the key blocker above was — anticipation is unable to release enough dopamine in short duration. What if one is unable to anticipate at the first place; will that release dopamine?
Answering the above question is the famous Coolidge effect studied by researchers in the 60s.
Inducing novelty → Effect of prolactin (↓) → Refractory period (↓) → Individual will continue to pursue dopamine-stimulating activity in short duration.
Variants of Coolidge (and other psychological effects) are being used in our social-media systems (eg: an unexpected reel in Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok, Snap) which makes us to use them continuously i.e a constant loop of dopamine hits us which loosely translates to addiction towards something.
Now, the question is — Can we somehow use this effect to our advantage?
Intermittent reinforcement and intermittent reward-schedule
Imagine you are studying for your exams. If you receive reward after completing a portion of the syllabus, you are basically practicing “intermittent reinforcement”. This is a strong dopamine reward schedule to pursue something i.e
we are getting something during the process of pursuit → that motivates us even more to pursue it.
Now, does this mean that one has to enjoy every little thing (equally)?
If you start enjoying every one of your wins (with equal rewards), your dopamine system will quickly reach high threshold i.e there’ll be a huge crash of dopamine after each win and you will crave even more for the next one i.e big increases in dopamine leads to bigger crashes in dopamine which takes even more effort to reach the initial state. In other terms, the reward you receive for n-th win won’t make you feel the same as the (n+1)-th win even if it’s the same reward.
So, the crucial idea is to minimize this dopamine crash so the recovery is easier. One way to achieve this is by not celebrating every win. This places you in a better position to enjoy the wins in a sustainable way. Now, add the novelty part to this celebrating mechanism i.e reward sporadically and not in a predictable way. Also add novel (and unequal) ways to celebrate. That’s the intermittent reward-schedule i.e
Celebrate few of your wins where you don’t know which ones you will celebrate and how you will celebrate!!
I believe a variation of this mechanism (depending on personal preference) will be helpful to drive one towards long-run motivation. The key ingredients is to have novelty, sporadicity, unequal celebrations and to make sure you don’t suffer from huge crashes!
Above all, appreciate serotonin a bit more — be mindful, grateful and show some gratitude for what you have as you don’t have to chase every single item from your to-do list.
End notes
- The thought-experiment I’ve explained might not be scientifically accurate, please share your views if I’m mistaken somewhere! Happy to learn :)
- The content from this blog has been borrowed from “Huberman’s Podcast 12 — How to increase motivation and drive; [Youtube link]”.