How Your Thoughts Control Your Dopamine
The subjective wedge to harness dopamine for more motivation.
Most people, most of the time, forget one thing — how we think about something matters.
A set of thoughts and interpretations appear in our minds, and we immediately take them for granted. If someone flicks you on the nose with a reminder, you might at once recognize your ability to veer off your beaten neural pathways.
Entertaining new thoughts and interpretations seem ephemeral. Yet this top-down process changes your biochemistry in important ways.
This creates a subjective wedge we can use to harness dopamine for more motivation. It lies at the foundation of many of the tools and strategies we’ll explore in the coming posts.
In the following, we’ll see how our subjective thoughts influence how much dopamine is released from different activities, and how we can use this knowledge to our advantage.
About The Huberman Notes
The Huberman Notes presents the best tools, practices, and protocols from The Huberman Lab Podcast.
Each episode of the podcast contains about two hours of dense information. It can feel like drinking from a firehose.
So these posts are written to be shorter and useful supplements to the podcast.
The Dopamine-series: The Molecule of Motivation
Dopamine is fundamental for how you feel and how motivated you are. Its double-edged nature makes it essential to understand, as it can make or break your life.
In this series, we’re investigating this fascinating molecule and learning how to harness its power to sustain long-term energy and motivation in pursuit of our goals.
Check out previous posts on dopamine:
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Dopamine & Anticipation
Imagine you’re sitting around, not doing much. You’re thinking about getting up or not.
In this state, your reward systems release dopamine at a low rate — about three or four times per second. You’re not highly motivated, nor depressed — you feel OK.
If you suddenly start anticipating something you’re excited about, your reward systems increase the rate of dopamine release about 30 or 40 times.
You experience a desire — a craving — to move in the direction of that thing you’re excited about.
We release dopamine in response to lots of things. For instance — sex has been found to increase dopamine levels by about 100%. Nicotine tops that and increases dopamine about 150% above baseline. Chocolate, exercise, and a multitude of other rewards stimulate dopamine release.
But, mostly in the anticipation of that thing.
This is key — just thinking about the thing you crave releases dopamine. About the same amount you would experience if you actually indulged in, or got that thing.
So, there’s a subjective aspect to how much dopamine we experience. And we can learn to harness it.
A Short Caveat:
There are nuances to this subjective control. Some substances release stupendous amounts of dopamine.
For instance, cocaine users experience about a thousandfold increase in dopamine. Yet, they cannot merely think about the drug and experience that dopaminergic influx.
But the thought of cocaine releases just enough dopamine to motivate the pursuit.
Here we glimpse the sinister nature of addiction. Things like cocaine and amphetamine are disastrous for most people because they rely so much on dopamine. The drugs create closed loops where people only crave that particular thing that can produce those massive amounts of dopamine.
Few things come close, so addicts lose their motivation for ordinary pleasures and goals.
Huberman frequently repeats a dictum on his podcast:
“Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure”
As you understand, this process has everything to do with dopamine.
We’ll explore dopamine and addiction further in a future post.
The Adderall Experiment
Let’s look at one experiment highlighting how powerful subjective interpretations can be.
We often think in mechanistic terms about effects in biology — eat X amount of Y, and get Z amount of dopamine. These things seem hardwired and not under our conscious control.
Yet, in a recent study, researchers demonstrated how much interplay there is between our cognition and our biology.
College students were given either a placebo or 200 mg of caffeine (about the same amount found in a medium-size cup of coffee). When taken in pill form, it will tend to make you feel more alert.
The 65 undergraduates were randomized into groups and told they were either getting caffeine or Adderall.
If you’re a college student, Adderall carries some distinct expectations. It’s known to be a much stronger stimulant than caffeine and to create a sort of ‘high’, and increase levels of focus and ability to do work.
The study participants who thought they had received Adderall reported different effects from those told they had received caffeine. They felt much more high and performed better on a working memory test.
In general, they reported many of the cognitive effects to be expected from Adderall — even though they only ingested caffeine.
So the students actually experienced heightened performance simply because they thought they were getting Adderall.
The study points to how our top-down cognitive processing — what we believe about something — is impacting even the most basic aspects of neurochemistry.
So — your expectations matter when it comes to dopamine.
The Subjective Wedge
Different things release different amounts of dopamine, depending on what you think about them.
How can we leverage this subjective aspect of dopamine release?
The answer lies in something we talked about in the first post — the Mesocorticolimbic Reward Pathway.
The cortical part is important: your prefrontal cortex is the area of your forebrain involved in thinking, planning, and assigning subjective experience to something.
This part of your brain serves as the “break” in your reward pathway. It’s what keeps you from being merely impulsive and pleasure-seeking. It’s also the part that allows you to alter your subjective conceptions and expectations.
The prefrontal cortex gives you profound abilities to harness the power of dopamine.
Things like exercise, studying, hard work, working through a challenge, etc., all require dopamine. And how much dopamine is released in response to these objectives is subjectively determined.
You can learn to increase dopamine in response to any activity, by encouraging yourself to think in certain ways and skillfully manage focus.
This dopamine-altering thought process was an important part of the transformation of David Goggins.
We’ll explore this in detail very soon, but first, we need to understand the dynamics of our dopamine baseline.
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Further Resources to Check Out:
The Huberman Lab Podcast: How to Increase Motivation & Drive
The Huberman Lab Podcast: Controlling Your Dopamine for Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction
The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity — and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race by Daniel Z. Lieberman & Michael E. Long
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke
If you want more practical tools and strategies to improve your life, you should also check out Templates for Thinking.
Most people never act on personal development strategies, so Templates for Thinking created a format that allows you to personalize what you learn through writing.
When you personalize these strategies, you can more easily act on them and reach your goals.
