Lacking Motivation? Science Has The Answer

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Our motivation is largely driven by dopamine, and the dopamine that’s most relevant to our brain is made right there, in our brain.

  • Importantly: it’s made when we anticipate that an activity will be rewarding—regardless of whether it actually will be.

    • If the activity turns out to be rewarding, we’ll get a bigger hit of dopamine later.

    • If the activity turns out not to be rewarding, we’ll keep getting a little hit, just enough to keep us trying.

      • This latter process is the mechanism by which social media keeps us trapped in scrolling, or we find ourselves endlessly flitting between TV channels.

• We cannot “detox” from dopamine, and if we could, we’d die, horribly and miserably.

  • What we can do, however, is be a little cleverer about how we go about getting our dopamine fix.

    • Check out today’s main feature for more on this!

• When it comes to personal healthcare, not knowing about one’s health status is half the problem. And, it can be tricky to remember everything we’re supposed to be doing!

  • Today’s sponsor, Together by Renee, are offering a totally free app that can:

    • Scan your prescriptions, appointment letters, etc to give you appropriate reminders to restock, attend an appointment, etc

    • Build a (private to you) personal health profile based on the above, and also…

    • Scan your face for some seconds and accurately tell you your blood pressure, blood oxygen, heart rate, heart rate variability, and more

    • It’ll also allow you to make a voice recording that it’ll scan for signs of depression or anxiety (amongst a lot of interesting metrics that it’ll share with you)

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Anxiety evolved to help us. What went wrong? A neuroscientist explains | Dr. Wendy Suzuki

Anxiety is a feature of evolution, not a bug. That doesn’t make it any more comfortable, though!

The good news is that we can harness it to our benefit—explains Dr. Wendy Suzuki, neuroscientist and author of “Good Anxiety”.

By tapping into what she calls the “six superpowers” of anxiety, we can redirect these uncomfortable feelings into positive outcomes:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Prefer text? Click here to read the transcript 🙂

🧠 MAIN FEATURE

The Science Of Motivation (And How To Use It To Your Advantage)

When we do something rewarding, our brain gets a little (or big!) spike of dopamine. Dopamine is popularly associated with pleasure—which is fair— but there’s more to it than this.

Dopamine is also responsible for motivation itself, as a prime mover before we do the thing that we find rewarding. If we eat a banana, and enjoy it, perhaps because our body needed the nutrients from it, our brain gets a hit of dopamine.

(and not because bananas contain dopamine; that dopamine is useful for the body, but can’t pass the blood-brain barrier to have an effect on the brain)

So where does the dopamine in our brain come from? That dopamine is made in the brain itself.

Key Important Fact: the brain produces dopamine when it expects an activity to be rewarding.

If you take nothing else away from today’s newsletter, let it be this!

It makes no difference if the activity is then not rewarding. And, it will keep on motivating you to do something it anticipated being rewarding, no matter how many times the activity disappoints, because it’ll remember the very dopamine that it created, as having been the reward.

To put this into an example:

• How often have you spent time aimlessly scrolling social media, flitting between the same three apps, or sifting through TV channels when “there’s nothing good on to watch”?

• And how often did you think afterwards “that was a good and rewarding use of my time; I’m glad I did that”?

In reality, whatever you felt like you were in search of, you were really in search of dopamine. And you didn’t find it, but your brain did make some, just enough to keep you going.

Don’t try to “dopamine detox”, though.

While taking a break from social media / doomscrolling the news / mindless TV-watching can be a great and healthful idea, you can’t actually “detox” from a substance your body makes inside itself.

Which is fortunate, because if you could, you’d die, horribly and miserably.

If you could “detox” completely from dopamine, you’d lose all motivation, and also other things that dopamine is responsible for, including motor control, language faculties, and critical task analysis (i.e. planning).

This doesn’t just mean that you’d not be able to plan a wedding; it also means:

• you wouldn’t be able to plan how to get a drink of water

• you wouldn’t have any motivation to get water even if you were literally dying of thirst

• you wouldn’t have the motor control to be able to physically drink it anyway

Read: Dopamine and Reward: The Anhedonia Hypothesis 30 years on

(this article is deep and covers a lot of ground, but is a fascinating read if you have time)

Do be clever about how you get your dopamine fix

Since we are hardwired to crave dopamine, and the only way to outright quash that craving is by inducing anhedonic depression, we have to leverage what we can’t change.

The trick is: question how much your motivation aligns with your goals (or doesn’t).

So if you feel like checking Facebook for the eleventieth time today, ask yourself: “am I really looking for new exciting events that surely happened in the past 60 seconds since I last checked, or am I just looking for dopamine?”

You might then realize: “Hmm, I’m actually just looking for dopamine, and I’m not going to find it there”

Then, pick something else to do that will actually be more rewarding. It helps if you make a sort of dopa-menu in advance, of things to pick from. You can keep this as a list on your phone, or printed and pinned up near your computer.

Examples might be: Working on that passion project of yours, or engaging in your preferred hobby. Or spending quality time with a loved one. Or doing housework (surprisingly not something we’re commonly motivated-by-default to do, but actually is rewarding when done). Or exercising (same deal). Or learning that language on Duolingo (all those bells and whistles the app has are very much intentional dopamine-triggers to make it addictive, but it’s not a terrible outcome to be addicted to learning!).

Basically… Let your brain’s tendency to get led astray work in your favor, by putting things in front of it that will lead you in good directions.

Things for your health and/or education are almost always great things to allow yourself the “ooh, shiny” reaction and pick them up, try something new, etc.

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

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Together comes with quite an array of powerful tools, but perhaps the most impressive is its face-based vitals feature:

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Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

🌏 AROUND THE WEB

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• Doctors need better guidance on treating ADHD in over 50s

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More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves – by Dr. Eric Kandel

We don't generally include author bios in these reviews, but it's worth mentioning that Dr. Kandel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine, for studies related to the topics in this book.

The premise in this book is as per the subtitle: what unusual brains tell us about ourselves. He assumes that the reader has a "usual" brain, but if you don't, then all is not lost, and in fact he probably talks about your brain in the book too.

Examining the brains of people with conditions ranging from autism to Alzheimer's, schizophrenia to Parkinson's, or even such common things as depression and anxiety and addiction, tells us a lot about what in our brain (anatomically and physiologically) is responsible for what, and how those things can be thrown out of balance.

By inference, that also tells us how to keep things from being thrown out of balance. Even if the genetic deck is stacked against you, there are still things that can be done to avoid actual disease. After all, famously, "genes load the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger".

Dr. Kandel writes in a clear and lucid fashion, such that even the lay reader can quite comfortably learn about such things as prion-folding and inhibitory neurons and repressed transcription factors and more.

Bottom line: if you'd like to understand more about what goes wrong and how and why and what it means for your so-far-so-good healthy brain, this is the book for that.

Click here to check out The Disordered Mind, and understand more!

Wishing you a peaceful Sunday,

The 10almonds Team