Blueprint For Dopamine Reprogramming
Avoid Mindlessly Scrolling And Reprogram Your Brain To Crave Work
Dopamine the neurochemical that causes you to self-distract, over eat and waste hours on TikTok but what if you could leverage your dopaminergic system to propel you forward such that it becomes your number one tool for hyper Focus? Well I'm going to show you how.
The once dreaded task hooked me. Then hours melted away, any impulse I had to do anything else was overruled by the thrill of Discovery and problem solving that it once seemed dull my brain had been re-sensitized to find the work rewarding. How did this happen? How had what was once so boring become so rewarding? Well it boiled down to dopamine. Dopamine has been called the molecule of more it's the reason that cocaine is so addictive and that scrolling social media is so compelling. It's also responsible for the high that we get from accomplishment it makes us want more of whatever we've done to produce dopamine in the first place and that brings us to the problem of dopamine detoxing. Scientifically, you can't really detox dopamine. It's a neurochemical we can't function without. Dopamine plays many roles but one of its key roles is that of a focusing mechanism. Stimuli are paid attention to because of the dopamine they produce so dopamine is the reward we get for engaging in certain activities. Now this is key, it's not stimulation that you want it's the dopamine that the stimulation squirts that you want. However, through over stimulation we can become desensitized to dopamine. When this happens dopamine is still signaling but fewer receptors receive the signal so rather than detoxing dopamine, we want to “re-sensitize” ourselves to it. Low sensitivity toward means you need lots of stimulation to capture your attention. High sensitivity to reward means you need less stimulation to capture your attention. Think of it like your ROI on dopamine. How much stimulation do you need to feel rewarded by dopamine and have your attention? Focus into the present moment. The less the better. Do you get a hit of dopamine while listening to a nice song, or watching a beautiful sunset? Or, do you need to play a video game and scroll TikTok while simultaneously gobbling down ice cream to get that same hit of dopamine. Now I used to fall more into the ladder Camp, I needed a lot of stimulation for my brain to get enough dopamine for the activity to feel rewarding, but I reset my reward sensitivity by setting on a mat with my eyes closed for 16 hours a day but I’ve since learned that such an approach is not needed. There are simpler ways to do it which I'm going to show you so you can reset your sensitivity in minutes instead of days of Silence like I went through. Through resensitizing we boost our impulse control which means we can delay gratification just imagine for a second what would happen to your productivity if you were as thrilled with writing a book or creating a product or whatever you have to do within your day job as you were with scrolling TikTok or checking your bank account after payday. Well this is what's possible when you calibrate your resensitivity to reward. There are a few steps
Step One. To master your dopaminergic system means to master the art of making the boring rewarding. First way to do this is to modify how we take breaks when we engage with work. Most people take dopamine fueled
breaks scrolling social media, checking email, reading the news, the critical mistake when taking breaks is doing something that's more stimulating than the work that you're breaking from.. Imagine trying to read a research paper after swiping through social media for an hour. Against instant and infinite novelty we didn't have, research paper is dull as all hell. Now the inverse, stare at a wall for 20 minutes. doing nothing. Not even meditating, suddenly that research paper is going to make you salivate. So take boring breaks that reset dopamine and heighten your reward sensitivity and make whatever you do before and between work as boring as possible. We want our work to feel as easy as scrolling through social media and that's a function of dropping the bar for what bores us to the floor and making the boring rewarding. So a 20 minute nap, walking stretching, mindfulness breath work, foam rolling, light exercise, all of these things are good things to do on a break. A favourite of mine all jokes aside is wall staring. I'll stop working and I’ll start staring at a wall for five or ten minutes and just let things simmer letting the snow globe of my attention just settle for a little bit because when on a break you want to starve your brain of dopamine so that it craves getting back to work because ultimately that dopamine seeking rat inside you one way or another is going to have its way. So you may as well have it suck you back into work rather than having it keep you stuck on the thing you're doing in the break.
Now the second thing we want to do is inhabiting the in-between. Just take a minute and think about what you did the last time you were waiting in a line, or sitting alone at lunch, while your friend ran to the bathroom, well you probably read your messages or scrolled through social media. That'll be my guess now this is not ideal we all have these in between moments every day, but we're so accustomed to reaching for our phones for that quick hit of dopamine that it's almost subconscious. Inhabiting the in-between means leveraging these moments by allowing ourselves to simply settle. Bring ourselves back to the present. In these moments, we cut out the unintentional information consumption which fractures our attention, further desensitizing our dopamine receptors making us less sensitive to reward. A few tips for this when you arrive early to a lunch meeting just sit quietly without your phone, when waiting in line pay attention to your breath, when commuting to work just drive ride or walk in silence. You will be forced to be present and tolerate those moments where you don't have much stimulation or engagement and this will make you more and more sensitive over time. Your Baseline for what's boring will shift and you'll cultivate a monk-like quality of mind which is highly conducive to profound levels of focus and flow.
Third thing we want to do is do everything one-thing at a time. You can heighten reward sensitivity by simply doing things once at a time with singular Focus. Now, as I’ve improved my focus and my access to flow there's certain things that become worse at and one of those things is multitasking. I've become way worse at multitasking. It's embarrassing in fact my team laughs at me because whenever I'm out on a walk with them, and I need to send a text, I literally stop talking mid-sentence reach out for my phone, then I end up not walking either and all of a sudden, I'm standing in silence texting while we were mid conversation. They're walking ahead of me. This is due to the interplay between the default modes Network the DMN and the task positive Network the TPN in the brain. When you're not engaged in a task, the default mode network is active. But when you're focused, the TPN the task positive Network takes over. In my texting example, what's happening to me is I'm rapidly shifting from the default mode Network of disengaged attention to the task positive network of engaged focused attention, and this is creating a tunnel for my awareness such that it becomes a tension which then makes me oblivious to my surroundings Hence, standing there not talking and not walking while sending the text. Now, while this rapid shifting from the default mode Network to the task positive network is kind of a burden for multitasking, like texting while walking it's a super powerful flow because the faster you can shift from the default mode Network to the task positive Network, the faster you can engage focus. And the higher your reward sensitivity, the easier it is to make this shift, and the faster you can make this shift. Because you get more by focusing neurochemistry, funnelled into the system in the form of dopamine.
IN CONCLUSION- So to train this ability, focus on one thing at a time, it's that simple. The next time you're eating, just eat. When working, just work. When you have a conversation, just Converse. Embrace Life as a series of singular activities rather than scattered efforts, to secrete dopamine through constant novelty seeking. So to master your dopaminergic system to propel you forward and access Peak Performance, take boring breaks, so that what's boring becomes rewarding. Inhabit the in between and do everything one-thing at a time.