Essentials: How to Increase Motivation & Drive

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we're going to talk about an extremely important topic that's central to our daily life, and that's motivation. We're going to talk about pleasure and reward. What underlies our sense of pleasure or reward? We're going to talk about addictions as well. We're going to talk about the neurochemistry of drive and mindset. But for now, let's just talk about the neuroscience of motivation and reward of pleasure and pain, because those are central to what we think of as emotions, whether or not we feel good, whether or not we feel we're on track in life, whether or not we feel we're falling behind. So motivation is fundamental to our daily life. It's what allows us to get out of bed in the morning. It's what allows us to pursue long-term goals or short-term goals. Motivation and the chemistry of motivation is tightly wound in with the neurochemistry of movement. In fact, the same single molecule, dopamine, is responsible for our sense of motivation and for movement. It's a fascinating molecule, and it lies at the center of so many great things in life, and it lies at the center of so many terrible aspects of life, namely addiction and certain forms of mental disease. So if ever there was a double-edged blade in the world of neuroscience, it's dopamine. There's a fundamental relationship between dopamine released in your brain and your desire to exert effort. And you can actually control the schedule of dopamine release, but it requires the appropriate knowledge. This is one of those cases where understanding the way the dopamine system works will allow you to leverage it to your benefit. Let's get a few basic facts on the table. Dopamine was discovered in the late 1950s, and it was discovered as the precursor, meaning the thing from which epinephrine or adrenaline is made. Epinephrine is the same thing as adrenaline, except in the brain we call it epinephrine. Epinephrine allows us to get into action. It stimulates changes in the blood vessels, in the heart, in the organs and tissues of the body that bias us for movement. Dopamine was initially thought to be just the building block for epinephrine. However, dopamine does a lot of things on its own. It's not always converted to epinephrine. Dopamine is released from several sites in the brain and body, but perhaps the most important one for today's discussion about motivation and reward is something that's sometimes just called the reward pathway. For the aficionados, it's sometimes called the mesolimbic reward pathway, but it's fundamentally important to your desire to engage in action, and it's fundamentally important for people getting addicted to substances or behaviors. So how does this work? Well, you've got a structure in the deep part of your brain called the VTA. The VTA or ventral tegmental area contains neurons that send what we call axons, little wires that spit out dopamine at a different structure called the nucleus accumbens. And those two structures, VTA and nucleus accumbens, form really the core machinery of the reward pathway and the pathway that controls your motivation for anything. You can think of them like an accelerator. They bias you for action. However, within the reward pathway, there's also a break. The break or restriction on that dopamine, which controls when it's released and how much it's released is the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the neural real estate right behind your forehead. You hear about it for decision making, executive function, for planning, et cetera. And indeed, it's responsible for a lot of those. It's this really unique real estate that we were all endowed with as humans. Other animals don't have much of it. We have a lot of it. And that prefrontal cortex acts as a break on the dopamine system. And that brings us to the important feature of motivation, which is that motivation is a two-part process, which is about balancing pleasure and pain. So when you're just sitting around, not doing much of anything, this reward pathway is releasing dopamine at a rate of about three or four times per second. It's kind of firing at a low level. If suddenly you get excited about something, you anticipate something, not receive an award, but you get excited in an anticipatory way, then the rate of firing, the rate of activity in this reward pathway suddenly increases to like 30 or 40 times. And it has the effect of creating a sense of action or desire to move in the direction of the thing that you're craving. In fact, it's fair to say that dopamine is responsible for wanting and for craving. And that's distinctly different from the way that you hear it talked about normally, which is that it's involved in pleasure. So yes, dopamine is released in response to sex, it's released in response to food, it's released in response to a lot of things, but it's mostly released in anticipation and craving for a particular thing. It has the effect of narrowing our focus for the thing that we crave. And that thing could be as simple as a cup of coffee, it could be as important as a big board meeting, it could be a big final exam, it could be the person that we're excited to meet or see. Dopamine doesn't care about what you're craving, it just releases at a particular rate. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. As somebody who's been involved in research science for almost three decades and in health and fitness for equally as long, I'm constantly looking for the best tools to improve my mental health, physical health and performance. 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If we just take a step back and we look at the scientific data on how much the dopamine firing increases in response to different things, you get a pretty interesting window into how your brain works and why you might be motivated or not motivated. Let's say you're hungry or you're looking forward to a cup of coffee or you're going to see your partner. Well, your dopamine neurons are firing at a low rate until you start thinking about the thing that you want or the thing that you're looking forward to. When you eat that food, the amount of dopamine that's released in this reward pathway goes up about 50% above baseline. Sex, which is fundamental to our species continuation and reproduction, sex does release dopamine and it increases dopamine levels about 100%. So it basically doubles them. Nicotine increases the amount of dopamine about 150% above baseline. Cocaine and amphetamine increase the amount of dopamine that's released a thousandfold within about 10 seconds of consuming the drug. However, just thinking about food, about sex, about nicotine, if you like nicotine, or cocaine or amphetamine, can increase the amount of dopamine that's released to the same degree as actually consuming the drug. Now it depends, in some cases, for instance, the cocaine user, the addict that wants cocaine, can't just think about cocaine and increase the amount that's released about a thousandfold. It's actually much lower, but it's just enough to put them on the motivation track to crave that particular thing. Now there are reasons why you would have brain circuitry like this. I mean, brain circuitry like this didn't evolve to get you addicted. Brain circuitry like this evolved in order to motivate behaviors toward particular goals. Water when you're thirsty, sex in order to reproduce. These things and these brain areas and neurons were part of the evolutionary history that led to the continuation of our species. Things like cocaine and amphetamine are disastrous for most people because they release so much dopamine and they create these closed loops where people then only crave the particular thing, cocaine and amphetamine, that leads to those massive amounts of dopamine release. Most things don't release that level of dopamine. Now, nowadays there's a ton of interest in social media and in video games. And there have been some measurements of the amount of dopamine released. Video games, especially video games that have a very high update speed where there's novel territory all the time. Novelty is a big stimulus of dopamine. Those can release dopamine somewhere between nicotine and cocaine. So very high levels of dopamine release. Social media is an interesting one because the amount of dopamine that's released in response to logging on to social media initially could be quite high, but it seems like likely that there's a taper in the amount of dopamine, but, and yet people still get addicted. So why? Why is it that we can get addicted to things that fail to elicit the same massive amount of pleasure that they initially did? Being addicted to something isn't just about the fact that it feels so good that you want to do it over and over again, and that's because of this pleasure-pain balance that underlies motivation. So let's look a little bit closer at the pleasure-pain balance because therein lies the tools for you to be able to control motivation toward healthy things and avoid motivated behaviors towards things that are destructive for you. There are a lot of reasons why people try novel behaviors, whether or not those are drugs or whether or not those are adventure thrill-seeking things or they take a new class. As you'll notice, I'm not placing any judgment or value on these different behaviors. Although I think it's fair to point out that for most people, addictive drugs like cocaine and amphetamine are very destructive. Actually, we know that about 15% to 20% of people have a genetic bias towards addiction, that, you know, you sometimes hear that the first time that you use a drug, you can become addicted to it. That's actually not been shown to be true for most things and most people, but for some people that actually is true. But in any case, the way that addiction works and the way that motivation works generally in the non-addictive setting is that when you anticipate something, a little bit of dopamine is released. And then when you reach that thing, you engage in that thing, the amount of dopamine goes up even further. But as you repeatedly pursue a behavior and you repeatedly engage with a particular thing, let's say you love running or you love chocolate. As you eat a piece of chocolate, believe it or not, it tastes good. And then there's a shift away from activation of dopamine. And there are other chemicals that are released that trigger a low level sense of pain. Now you might not feel as physical pain, but the craving that you feel is both one part dopamine and one part the mirror image of dopamine, which is the pain or the craving for yet another piece of chocolate. And this is a very important and subtle feature of the dopamine system that's not often discussed. People always talk about just as pleasure. You love social media, so it gives you dopamine, and so you engage in that. You like chocolate, it releases dopamine, so you do that. But for every bit of dopamine that's released, there's another circuit in the brain that creates, you can think of it as kind of like a downward deflection in pleasure. So you engage in something you really want, and there's an increase in pleasure. And then there's a, without you doing anything, there's a mirror image of that, which is a downward deflection in pleasure, which we're calling pain. So for every bit of pleasure, there is a mirror image experience of pain. And they overlap in time very closely, so it's sometimes hard to sense this, but try it. The next time you eat something really delicious, you'll take a bite, it tastes delicious. And part of the experience is to want more of that thing. This is true for any pleasureful experience. Now, the diabolical part about dopamine is that because it didn't evolve in order to get you to indulge in more and more and more of something, what happens is that initially, you experience an increase in pleasure, and you also experience this increase in pain shortly after or woven in with the pleasure that makes you want more of that thing. But with each subsequent time that you encounter that thing, the experience of dopamine release and pleasure is diminished a little bit. And the diabolical thing is that the pain response is increased a little bit. And this is best observed in the context of drug-seeking behavior. The first time someone decides to take cocaine or amphetamine, they will experience a huge dopamine release and they will feel likely very good. However, the next time they take it, it won't feel quite as good and it won't feel even as good the third time or the next time. But the amount of pain, the amount of craving that they experience for the drug will increase over time. So much of our pursuit of pleasure is simply to reduce the pain of craving. So the next time you experience something you really like, I don't want to take you out of that experience, but it's really important that you notice this, that if there's something you really enjoy, part of that enjoyment is about the anticipation and wanting of more of that thing. And that's the pain system in action. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, 8 Sleep. 8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night. Now, one of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to ensure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. 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