Leverage Dopamine to Overcome Procrastination & Optimize Effort

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing dopamine. Dopamine is a topic that I've covered before on this podcast, and many people have heard of dopamine. Most people know that dopamine is involved in of pleasure to some extent or another, and nowadays people are starting to appreciate that dopamine is also intimately involved with motivation, drive, and pursuit. Well, today you're going to learn that indeed, dopamine is responsible for all of those things. But you are also going to learn that dopamine is critical for overcoming procrastination, for ensuring ongoing motivation, and indeed, for ensuring confidence. In fact, we are going to talk about the relationship between dopamine and motivation and confidence at the level of neurobiological circuitry. And we are going to cover tools that will allow you to leverage your dopamine in order to have maximum motivation to overcome sticking points which include things like procrastination, but also by understanding the neural circuits in the brain and body that release and use dopamine, but more importantly, by understanding what are called dopamine dynamics. That is, what gives rise to big peaks in dopamine or troughs in dopamine, or what's referred to as our baseline level of dopamine, which turns out to be our baseline levels of motivation and feelings of well being. By understanding how those things relate to one another. I assure you that by the end of today's episode, you will be in a far better position to understand why you become amotivated, why you procrastinate, how to ensure motivation on an ongoing basis, and even how to leverage effort and the desire to become motivated as a way to do just that, to become more motivated. Today's discussion is not about psychology, although I will center around practical, everyday examples and offer many, many tools that you can implement if you choose. Today's discussion is really about pulling apart these things that we call motivation, reward, pleasure, procrastination, and understanding them in terms of their dopamine dynamics. So whether you've heard me or others talk about dopamine before, or whether or not today is your first exposure to the topic of dopamine, today's episode is really designed to give you the biological and practical knowledge so that you can leverage your dopamine circuitry and your dopamine levels, as well as tools to adjust dopamine circuitry and levels in order to optimize mental health, physical health, and performance. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium, and potassium, the so called electrolytes, and no sugar. Now, salt, magnesium, and potassium are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrolytes need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in electrolyte concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits in cognitive and physical performance. Element contains a science backed electrolyte ratio of 1000 milligrams. That's 1 gram of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough electrolytes. And while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if I've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element. That's lmmnt.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkleemental slash Huberman today's episode is also brought to us by waking up. Waking up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, Nidra sessions, and NSDR nonsleep deep rest protocols. I started using the Waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditations since my teens and I started doing yoga Nidra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app turned out to be the waking up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states and that he liked it very much. So I gave the waking up app a try, and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states depending on which meditation I do. I also love that the waking up app has lots of different types of yoga Nidra sessions. For those of you who don't know, yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations, and there's excellent scientific data to show that yoga Nidra, and something similar to it called non sleep, deep rest, or NSTR, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even with just a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up app, you can go to wakingup.com huberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com huberman to access a free 30 day trial. Okay, let's talk about dopamine. What is dopamine? Dopamine is what's called a neuromodulator, which simply refers to the fact that it's a chemical that modulates or changes the electrical activity of other cells. And the cells I'm referring to are neurons. Neurons are just nerve cells. So you have a brain and a spinal cord, and the neurons in your brain and spinal cord connect to one another, and they connect to different areas of the body, including basically every organ of your body. And every organ of your body communicates back to your brain and spinal cord through direct or indirect pathways. For instance, you have neurons in your gut that sense what sorts of nutrients you've eaten or drank and then send neural signals, electrical signals, up to the brain. And indeed, that whole process happens to be modulated by dopamine. Dopamine, as a neuromodulator, has the basic property of either ramping up, increasing, or decreasing the activity of other neurons. And that's done by adjusting things like electrical potentials and things of that sort that we really won't go into this episode, but that I promise to get into in detail in a future episode if you're interested in the biochemistry and biophysics of neurons and things of that sort. So we have this neuromodulator, dopamine, and we know that that neuromodulator can increase or decrease the activity of other neurons. So then we have to ask ourselves, where is dopamine released in the brain and body, and what specific types of neurons is it impacting? In other words, what specific types of functions does dopamine have? So there are basically five circuits within the brain that use dopamine as the primary neuromodulator, and those five circuits engage different but related functions. So I'm going to go through them one by one, relatively quickly, giving you a little bit of nomenclature and some sense of what each of those circuits looks like and what it does. The first circuit is the so called nigrostrital pathway. So, in the back of the brain, there is an area called substantia niagara, so named because the neurons that are actually very dark, they actually contain pigment. You'd be able to see this. If I were to slice up a brain, you'd see two dark regions in the back that's substantia niagara. Substantial. Niagara contains neurons that are chock a block full of dopamine, but they release that dopamine in a brain structure called the striatum. The striatum is involved in movement, both the initiation of movements and the suppression of movements in so called go action and no go suppress action pathways, a topic for a future podcast. The second brain circuit that uses and leverages dopamine to a great extent is the so called mesolimbic pathway. Now, you'll also, in a moment, hear about the mesocortical pathway. So today I'm going to talk about these somewhat interchangeably at times, but where it's important for me to differentiate between them, I will do that. Both of these pathways initiate from a set of neurons in the so called ventral tegmental area, or VTA. I will use that acronym, VTA. The VTA functions in close partnership with a different brain structure called the nucleus accumbence, or na. I don't think I'll call it na. Today I'll talk about vtA, ventral tegmental area, and I'll talk about nucleus accumbens. For sake of today's discussion, you can lump those together if you want. Neurons in those areas project a bunch of different places. But in the mesolimbic pathway, those neurons are projecting to areas of the brain, like the hypothalamus, which sits right above the roof of your mouth and is responsible for a lot of basic functions, things like maintaining your body temperature for libido and the pursuit of sex, for hunger, for the generation of signals to the pituitary gland that cause the release of hormones and other things into the bloodstream. So the connections, which I sometimes refer to as projections from the neurons in the VTA and nucleus accumbens to the hypothalamus, are basically using dopamine to modulate the output of a lot of different things that happen in this hypothalamus that controls a lot of, we could call them primitive functions, but they're really basic functions for survival. Now, the other pathway out of the VTA and nucleus accumbens is to the cortex. That's why it's called mesocortical pathway. So this is a very different pathway out of the VTA and nucleus accumbens than the one I just described a moment ago. The pathway I'm talking about now, the mesocortical pathway, projects to the prefrontal cortex, which is a structure that many of you have perhaps heard of. But even if you haven't, it's important to know this is an area that resides right behind your forehead, and that in humans, compared to other species, is greatly expanded in terms of its size and complexity of function. So it's involved in