4 Simple Habits That Helped Me Take Control of My Motivation.
Picture this :
It’s 6 PM—too early to call it a day, but too late to still feel energized.
Your body feels sluggish, and your mind is foggy.
Motivation is running low, and your willpower and dopamine reserves are depleted.
Yet, this is precisely when you need to push through. Get up, prep your bag, and head to the gym.
Why?
Because you said you would
Because you have to show up for yourself
Because no one else is going to.
now the reality of it is that the number one thing preventing you from going to the gym and getting in shape is likely the lack of motivation.
A survey found that 38% of respondents cited lack of motivation as the main barrier to implementing healthy changes in their diet and physical activity.
Maybe you feel stuck in your current situation. You’ve been trying to adopt fitness as a lifestyle, but your job, relationships, and clear lack of motivation keep getting in the way.
On top of that, you have everyone out there talking about dopamine and the reason you don’t feel motivated is because you need to do detox, eliminate dopamine, or try a dopamine fast but all of this sounds foreign to you.
That being said when you come home, you consciously or unconsciously indulge in distractions like TV, video games, or food to "relax" because you simply feel exhausted.
In this article, I’ll break down these concepts and give you 4 actionable habits to help you rebalance your dopamine and regain control over your motivation system
Your motivation is out of balance.
Most people prioritize things that are mandatory, those that society established as necessary.
But when it comes to their own lives and personal choices, they often struggle to prioritize their goals.
The trap begins when they gradually stop engaging in activities that help regulate their motivation and replace it with distractions to ease the discomfort of their daily life :
They stop playing sports they love.
They stop caring about what they eat.
They stop reading books they enjoy.
They stop going out with friends.
They stop prioritizing their health.
The issue is that motivation works as a system. If you understand how it functions, you can control it. Yet, most people spend their lives wondering why they don’t feel motivated.
There are two kinds of motivation: short-term and long-term. In this article, we'll focus exclusively on short-term motivation.
Short-term motivation is driven by dopamine—it’s the one you hear about most often.
The type of motivation which is anchored in the present or near future. It’s what pushes you to
go to the gym for the first few days,
excites you about buying the new iPhone
makes you crave that doughnut
triggers procrastination.
it’s also the one that you need to fix in order to get in shape.
Fundamentally, getting in shape is just repeating a series of simple behaviours over and over until you see the results. The real problem are the fluctuations in your motivation system.
And while it may feel like your motivation is out of your control, you have far more influence over it than you think.
The challenge is that you can’t act on it directly, you’ll need to use other systems to regulate it.
How dopamine works
When you engage in an action and the outcome is positive, you receive a reward, reinforcing the behavior. A specific part of your brain incentivizes you to do more of this.
Your brain has its own ‘reward currency,’ and that is dopamine. It acts as a neurotransmitter, meaning it carries information between neurons in your brain.
Dopamine isn’t just about pleasure*; it’s a motivator***.** It triggers drive and energy that mobilizes your body to produce a certain action.
Without dopamine available, there’s no activation.
For example, if you start feeling hungry, your brain releases dopamine to drive you to the fridge to get food.
If the experience is pleasurable—like eating a delicious ice cream sandwich—your brain rewards you with a high peak in dopamine.
Now, there’s a rule in biology called Homeostasis, which is the tendency of biological systems to maintain equilibrium as much as possible.
That’s why after any peak in dopamine, there’s an equal drop that follows.
And something major to understand here, is the fact that the opposite of pleasure is pain. Both signals come from the same place. The same brain mechanisms handle both.
So, whenever you experience pain, discomfort, or a desire for something you want but don’t have, an equal pleasure response can be triggered by the same system if you engage in the right action.
If you’re on a restrictive diet, like Keto, and you can’t eat carbs because you want to lose weight.
Well, at some point if you usually enjoy carbs, you will start to crave a plate of pasta.
Deprived of it, your brain will accumulate frustration, transforming it into a form of mental pain to drive you towards eating that plate of pasta.
Even just thinking about eating the pasta releases dopamine, making it pleasurable—that’s why cravings are so strong.
The worst part is that, this motivation system pushing you toward that craving is the very same system most people rely on to get in shape.
Most people accept this as a given and don’t realize they can control it but if you’re willing to take ownership over it you’ll take back control.
Now the secret is that you can actually use other brain areas to regulate this dopamine response but you have to train them to do it.
You want to be able to decrease the power whenever the pursuit of dopamine isn’t serving your long term goal, like lowering the volume of the response that we’ve just explained by involving other brain areas into the equation.
And here’s how to do it through the practice of 4 different habits that you can start to implement right now.
4 habits to take back control over your motivation.
Stay away from your phone when you wake up
The worst thing you can do is deplete your dopamine levels early in the day.
The problem is that most technologies are designed to use your dopamine as efficiently as possible and to get you to not stop using them.
For example, the infinite scroll of social media is specifically designed to keep you hooked, making you scroll for hours.
This floods your brain with too much dopamine, and you only have so much of it. Think of it like a stamina bar that you start the day with—it’s limited.
Most people spend 90% of their dopamine reserves within the first few hours of waking. They snooze three times, stay in bed, check Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
They get up, they watch a Netflix episode while drinking coffee or watch a youtube video while eating breakfast.
Then, they go to work, check emails, open a new tab, and start adding random stuff to their Amazon cart.
By 5 PM, they’re completely depleted and can’t bring themselves to go to the gym or take care of their nutrition.
When it comes to dopamine, technology is not your friend. I highly recommend staying away from your phone for at least the first hour after waking up.
You need to let your brain wake up naturally and start using dopamine for what it was designed for, rather than draining it all on technologies.
To be honest it’s not even a fair fight because those companies are spending millions of dollars on ads, user interface and design for it to be as appealing as possible.
Personally, if there’s one habit that has tripled my productivity and energy levels, it’s staying away from my phone.
(I don’t pick it up for the first four hours of my day, and it has completely changed the way I function)
Redesign your goal
If you’ve tried going to the gym or dieting in the past but it didn’t work, you can change the approach while keeping the same direction.
This can trick your brain into thinking it’s a new and possibly more exciting goal than the last one. Even if, the goals stays fundamentally the same.
For example, if your goal is to lose weight and you’ve been trying to run three times a week but didn’t follow through for more than two weeks, change the activity without changing the desired outcome.
Instead of running, which you may dislike, you could replace it with going to the gym.
[And if you want to learn how to adopt fitness as a lifestyle and gain all the tools necessary to transform your physique sustainably and autonomously, check this out]
The goal remains the same, yet the new approach can be exciting enough for your dopamine system to engage with it.
If this technique works, it’s important not to abuse it as you need to stick to one activity to make progress.
If you switch activities every two weeks just for novelty, you’ll lack the consistency needed to reach your goals.
Stop avoiding negative emotions.
There is a profound relationship between the part of your brain that regulates dopamine and the part that manages your emotions.
Negative emotions trigger the need for dopamine. Again, your body dislikes being out of balance, especially when it comes to feeling pain, so it does its best to trigger the release of dopamine.
As dopamine temporarily shuts off negative emotions.
This is why you start craving food, have more buying impulses, or seek stimulation when you’re feeling down.
This is the fundamental problem with emotional eating—you feel bad, so you crave savory food, and that food temporarily frees you from feeling bad for a few minutes.
But at the same time you’re reinforcing the attraction for this type of food because you’re using it to ease the discomfort and in your brain it will become a coping mechanism that needs to be used whenever negative emotions arise.
If you want to regain control over your motivation system, you must process your negative emotions rather than let them build up.
Otherwise, this will destroy your chances of rebalancing your dopamine levels as your brain will constantly try to self-regulate with what is known to work to numb the pain.
One effective tool I’ve been using with my clients for a long time is journaling. Journaling is very useful for becoming more aware of your negative emotions and increasing emotional awareness, which is the first step toward processing them.
The habit linked to this would be to journal for 10 minutes each day, not shying away from exploring negative emotions when they arise and writing them down to become more aware of them.
Expand your thinking timeline.
For everything you do, your brain assesses the potential value of the task and the amount of effort required to achieve it.
For most people, this assessment happens subconsciously, meaning it’s not part of their active thought process—they don’t have direct access to it.
The thing is that, this assessment determines the amount of dopamine your brain will trigger to engage in that task.
For example, if you want to lose weight and are about to go to the gym, your brain will evaluate the value of going to the gym versus the effort needed to get there.
It’s likely to tell your dopamine center, “This sounds cool and all, but we won’t see immediate results worth the effort, so don’t waste your energy on it.”
The same thing happens when you crave a doughnut—your brain sees it as low effort but the reward is certain.
But this thinking is short-sighted. You need to expand the horizon of decision meaning you need to start consciously evaluating the value of one behavior according to your goal, not your current state of mind.
For that, you need to use your goal to expand the timeline and kind of stretch your thinking from short term to medium term.
Instead of thinking about immediate pleasure, ask yourself this question : “is this behavior going to help me reach my goal ?”
Is eating the doughnut going to help me get in shape ?
Through repetition, this will teach your brain that the goal isn’t immediate pleasure and comfort but getting in shape.
I can promise you that your life will completely change if you start to conscientize your decisions according to your main goal.
By default, your brain will always choose the path of least resistance to conserve energy, but it’s your job to show it that you can achieve more by expanding your time horizon.
Anyway I hope this helps, trust the process.
References Understanding the Science of Motivation - Harvard University The Brain Circuits Underlying Motivation - Harvard Universityhttps://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/the-brain-circuits-underlying-motivation-an-interactive-graphic/The Definitive Guide to Dopamine Fasting 2.0 - The Hot Silicon Valley Trend - Dr Cameron S.https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dopamine-fasting-new-silicon-valley-trend-dr-cameron-sepah/
Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction - Dr Hubermanhttps://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/controlling-your-dopamine-for-motivation-focus-and-satisfaction#:~:text=less electrically active.-,Andrew Huberman%3A,or even thousands of cells.Psychiatrist Debunks Dopamine Fasting | Dr. K Explains - HealthyGamer GGhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK-s2qBU40A&t=875sToo tired to be healthy? You’re not alone, survey finds. - Niha Masihhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/05/17/too-tired-exercise-yougov-poll/#:~:text=For 38 percent of people,among age groups as well.Dopamine Nation - A.Lembke