How does the dopamine reward system work?
Your internal “Reward System” is a collection of brain structures that regulate your behavior by making you feel good when you achieve a goal. Everything necessary for the survival of our species - eating, mating, sleeping, and physical perseverance - is rewarded by a flood of neurochemicals that make us feel good. This is a very generous biological design and at the same time necessary for our survival.
All animals seek pleasure and avoid pain. Therefore, nature created an internal reward system that reinforced lifestyle habits necessary to survive. Dopamine floods your body and mind with a rush of satisfaction and reward anytime you succeed at achieving something biologically necessary for your survival. In a modern world we still get the same rush of dopamine when it comes to primal things like dating or salivating over a meal - but it becomes less automatic when trying to achieve goals that are not part of our primal instincts. We have evolved to have hard work, sweat and perseverance trigger the release of dopamine. Unfortunatlely, in a modern world these achievements are not viewed biologically as a matter of life or death and do not automatically release dopamine. Luckily, you can use your large prefrontal cortex and the ‘executive function’ to trigger the release of dopamine…
Stop viewing perseverance as drudgery but as an opportunity to neurochemically boost your confidence and make you feel good. When framed correctly, the process of perseverance becomes a hedonic experience. This is an explanatory style that makes certain people keep pushing and others to quit. As Henry Ford said, “There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.”
The next time you feel unmotivated to exercise or work harder towards a goal remember the “Pleasure Principle” and the equation that SWEAT = BLISS. Laziness and lack of follow through is seductive because it’s easy and requires no effort. But, over time the habit of complacency leaves your dopamine depleted and you become dissatisfied and depressed.
Low levels of dopamine make you apathetic. If you do not accomplish something everyday your dopamine reserves will diminish. Humans are designed to work hard and to be rewarded for their efforts biologically. Being uninspired and lacking self-motivation is a downward spiral that can snowball out of control. It’s so easy to become bitter, cynical and hopeless when your dopamine reserves are low. But you have the power to turn this around by consciously looking at everything you achieve—from flossing your teeth, to taking out the trash—as a way to tap your dopamine reserves. Look at every thing you do in the day as a chance to create a sense of reward and deliver a rush of dopamine
According to Kaptuchuk, neuroimaging has revealed examples of patients with Parkinson’s disease who are given a placebo—but told that that it is a drug that will help their symptoms—can create a spike of their dopamine levels. Findings such as these reconfirm that creating a system of belief and an expectation of efficacy can cause changes in your brain chemistry. Through conditioning techniques your brain can “learn” to trigger biological changes that reduce pain and suffering. If you believe that persevering to achieve a goal will produce more dopamine, odds are it will.
To produce more dopamine, get in the habit of setting deadlines and completing goals in a timely manner. Create a daily schedule that includes self-imposed deadlines and stick to it! Use timers, calendars and peer pressure to keep you on track and condition yourself.
Having a checklist of things that you want to accomplish every morning and literally checking them off your list will systematically release a hit of dopamine. One of the most important reasons to define an action as a ‘goal’ is that it needs to be viewed as something with a beginning, middle and end. When you accomplish the goal you will get the dopamine-based sense of contentment and satisfaction that always accompanies the act of persevering and getting the job done.
The key to overcoming large obstacles or ‘mountains’ is to break them into doable doses and tackle them one ‘mole-hill’ at a time. An effective way to get the jackpot feeling of dopamine while you are in the process of tackling a major goal is to break the bigger challenge, which is a “Macro-Goal” into very tangible “Micro-Goals”, each of which gives you a small hit of dopamine.
- Christopher Bergland
Related
Dopamine did not evolve to surge all the time
If you haven’t learned to live with your unhappy chemicals, you might get into the habit of scrambling for another dopamine burst in any way possible. You seek the next promotion or the next party or the next donut or the next mountain or the next confrontation, depending on how your brain got wired. You create frustration, which means more unhappy chemicals and a more frantic quest to trigger happy chemicals.
Our mammalian limbic brains - Happiness and survival are intertwingled
Your happy chemicals evolved to ebb and flow. But if you attend to this feeling that something is wrong, it can preoccupy you. Your cortex will scan the environment for evidence that something is, in fact, wrong. And it will find evidence to confirm that feeling
Status is who we are - our mammalian origins
I’m tired of hearing people complain about how awful things are. Our mammal brains create frustration by comparing us to others. When you know this frustration is caused by your neural inheritance, you can get past it. Apes get frustrated with their social hierarchy. Even cows have social rivalries. This frustration will always be with us but it needn’t stop us from seeing the good in the world. Instead of condemning our mammal brain, we can just accept it as a survival engine that succeeded for 200 million years. You are here today because your ancestors’ brains figured out how to stay strong, compete for mates, and protect their offspring.
Finding fault with the world can become a habit because it raises your status. Getting outraged about the state of the world helps you feel superior to anyone in a position of power. This tempts people to see the world as much worse than it is. Sure, the world has frustrations and survival threats. It always has. Should no one be happy until the world is perfect? Does your refusal to be happy improve the world? People don’t like to think their unhappiness is caused by a longing for status. It’s easier to believe you’re unhappy with the world for the sake of others. You believe you cannot be happy until others raise their status, and you repeat the thought until it the neural pathway becomes a superhighway. Our neurochemistry runs largely on habit. It uses the neural pathways you have already created. If you believe you cannot be happy due to “our times” or “the people in power,” then to your brain that’s true. If those around you believe they are unhappy due to the state of the world, that reinforces the sense of truth. But you would not have been happier in the past. You would not have been free to choose your own sex partners, you would have watched children die, you’d risk random violence at every turn, and you would be in constant physical discomfort due to the lack of plumbing. Modern times are not the cause of unhappiness.
Feel-good hormones may explain why certain behaviors are compulsively repeated
Passion and performance; a link forged by dopamine and oxytocin
(Source: psychologytoday.com)
