The Dopamine Curve: How Your Actions Today Shape Your Motivation Tomorrow
This might be the most important thing to understand about dopamine and motivation...
You’re scrolling on Instagram and see something captivating. Dopamine spikes your system.
The next picture is not that engaging.
But — it might have attracted your curiosity if you had seen that second picture first or at another time entirely.
Your judgment of that second picture was shaped by how much dopamine you got from the first. And this dynamic is not limited to your social media feeds.
It shapes every experience you have.
Understanding how this works is essential. It might be the most crucial thing to learn about dopamine. With this understanding, you’ll be able to diagnose your behaviors and see how you might be undermining your ability to stay motivated.
Let’s see how this works.
The Dynamics of Your Dopamine Baseline
Many people have heard of dopamine hits. Turns out it’s not a good metaphor.
Your body has a baseline level of dopamine circulating in your brain and body at all times. In the neuroscience literature, they call this a tonic dopamine release.
This baseline is important for how you feel in general and whether you’re in a good mood, feel motivated, etc.
Throughout your day, you experience peaks and fluctuations around this baseline. These peaks are known as phasic dopamine releases.
The Dopamine Drop
Let’s say you experience something that produces a huge peak of dopamine. Perhaps you found an aesthetically pleasing blow to beat your ultra-nemesis on Chess.com.
What happens after?
After a surge in dopamine, you experience a drop below your former baseline.
We’ve all felt this post-high-low, but we tend to forget. Your intuition lures you into thinking you’ll enjoy long-lasting bliss after a big peak in dopamine. You’re led to believe you’ll feel much better after some great event.
Not the case.
What happens instead is that your tonic baseline of dopamine drops.
How much? The drop is proportional to how high the peak was.
These peaks influence how much dopamine is available afterward.
In this post-high state of low dopamine, we feel energy-deprived and lack motivation.
Why Your Dopamine History Matters
How you feel right now — and how motivated you are — depends on whether or not you had higher or lower amounts of dopamine a few minutes ago.
This is a key insight and not easy to intuit from the simplistic language of “dopamine hits”.
If you recently experienced a dopamine peak, you’ll have less dopamine after.
We’ve seen how this works in our media feeds, but we can easily spot how it relates to everything else we experience. This dynamic is at play all the time.
The amount of dopamine you experience depends on your baseline level of dopamine when you arrive at that moment and your previous dopamine peaks.
That is a crucial insight.
And this is why your threshold for enjoyment increases when you repeatedly engage in something you enjoy. You need more and more—incidentally, the two main ingredients of unsustainability.
We fail to get excited about what would otherwise be satisfying events because of what we did or consumed prior to that moment.
Awareness of this dynamic is vital to maintaining a healthy and sustainable dopamine curve.
The Peak-to-Baseline Ratio
How satisfying, exciting, or pleasurable a given experience is, doesn’t just depend on the height of that peak, but on the height relative to the baseline.
So — if you increase the baseline and increase the peak, you’re not going to get more and more pleasure from things.
Thus, more dopamine is not always the best way to think about it. It’s about optimizing the peak-to-baseline ratio.
There are many ways to optimize this ratio. In a way, that is what this series is about. Even subtle fluctuations in dopamine shape our perception of life, what we’re capable of, and how we feel. So we want to guard and manage those fluctuations.
Understanding this process will put you in a better position to modulate and control your dopamine for optimal motivation and drive. With this in mind, there are more tools & how-to’s to come in future posts.
For now, we’ll get into one of the common traps many of us fall into. The deceptively innocent habit of layering pleasurable activities can undermine our baseline over time.
Let’s see how.
Be Careful About ‘Layering Dopamine’
Perhaps you’re one of these people; before a workout, you drink a small lagoon of energy drink and fracture your eardrums with your favorite pump music. Maybe you do a bit of flexing in the mirror. Perhaps you point in your own direction and whisper flattering remarks loudly (who hasn’t?).
Your fellow gym-goers can see adrenaline and dopamine coming out of your ears. You go on to push, pull, and punch heavy objects — on a continuous search for the biochemical cocktail we all know as the pump.
If you’ve been paying attention, you can see what’s wrong with this behavior.
None of us should be found whispering compliments and pointing to ourselves in public mirrors.
Nor is it advisable to layer together multiple pleasures to maximize the dopamine you get from an experience.
This layering of substances, activities, and things that produce huge dopamine spikes can create severe issues with motivation and energy. You feel the cost right after those experiences, and even a couple of days later.
Remember: The drop below baseline is proportional to how high the peak was.
Layering dopamine is a common habit that can create disproportionally high peaks we end up paying for.
You might intrinsically enjoy going to the gym. But if you continually add on layers of pleasure, you’ll eventually erode your ability to take pleasure in merely going to the gym. You’ll need more and more extra stuff, rewards, and treats to continue going to the gym.
There’s more to this dynamic of rewards and pleasures, which we’ll discuss in the next post.
But for now, keep in mind that layering dopaminergic activities should only be done occasionally — or your level of motivation, drive, and overall energy will take a serious hit.
In the next post, you’ll learn how David Goggins managed to tune his dopamine for sustained motivation.
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.
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, you’ll learn how to harness the power of this molecule to sustain long-term energy and motivation in pursuit of your goals.
Check out previous posts on dopamine: