Improve Your Motivation: Interventions of the Body

There are 2 levels of intervention you can use when trying to increase your motivation: Your body, and your mind. This article will focus on interventions aimed at the body to enhance your motivation.  Many, but not all, of these strategies will have to do with ways to manage the dopamine flowing inside of your body – how much is in your body, when it is released, etc.

Dopamine is the gas in your engine of motivation.

You can think of dopamine as the gas in your engine of motivation.  By increasing the baseline amount of dopamine flowing in your body, and managing how and when dopamine is released, you allow yourself to experience motivation for the activities you actually value. You also allow yourself to continue experiencing motivation for those activities in the future. If there’s no dopamine, there’s no gas, and the engine won’t run. 

Dopamine Guzzlers

There are many things we do in the modern world that waste our gas.  Dopamine-guzzlers. Spiking your dopamine in pursuit of the unimportant reduces the amount of dopamine available for the tasks that are actually important to you.

As mentioned in How Motivation Works, after dopamine spikes, it falls below baseline for a period of time after the spike. And since the amount of dopamine (motivation) you experience is dependent on your baseline level of dopamine when you approach the activity, there will be less dopamine available for activities that follow. So if you spend hours of your morning scrolling through Twitter, you’re going to have less dopamine available immediately afterwards for activities you actually value.

This is why removing distractions can be so important to deep work.  It forces you to use your dopamine towards the activity you should be doing rather than wasting it on the distractions around you.

Common Dopamine-Guzzlers

Here are some common dopamine guzzlers to watch out for.  This is not to say you shouldn’t be doing these activities at all.  Just be mindful of their effect on motivation and strategize when to use them and when to avoid them. You may have your own particular dopamine guzzlers.  Think about what tends to distract you when you know you need to be doing something productive.

1. Social media
2. Alcohol/Drugs
3. Online shopping, Amazon
4. Television
5. (This is a sneaky one). Doing a task that is interesting to you and maybe even holds value to you, but that is not your most highly valued activity of the moment. For example, constantly finding new chores to do when you should be working on your most valued task instead. Or reading an interesting book instead of doing the work you need to be doing.

Putting gas in the tank: Interventions of the body to increase your motivation.

Now that we’ve gone through what NOT to do (or at least what to watch out for), let’s talk about what TO DO. Most of these strategies will involve ways of building up dopamine levels in your body, allowing you to put more gas in your tank. Given that in depression, baseline dopamine levels are reduced, this section is particularly important for those experiencing depression. You often know what you want or need to do, but you can’t muster up enough motivation to bring yourself to do it.

1. Start with smaller tasks.

If you’re having difficulty getting moving AT ALL, think of smaller tasks that feel doable to you, even if you can’t see how the smaller tasks might make a difference. So, if you would like to be able to go to the gym and workout for an hour but you can’t bring yourself to do it, make the goal walking to the end of the street and back instead.  Or, if your house is a mess and you can’t bring yourself to clean it up, make the goal just to clean the kitchen.  Or, if you need a new job but you can’t bring yourself to create a resume and start applying, make the goal to simply look through jobs on Indeed for 30 minutes. When you have a goal, and you complete it, you complete the dopaminergic circuit and a dopamine spike is experienced. You can think of a dopamine spike as encouragement to act.  If you never close the circuit, you never experience the encouragement. This will have a compounding effect, and you can build into larger and larger tasks. This isn’t just “in your mind”.  This is a physical effect, in your body. 

2. Try Cold Showers.

Yes, I know they’re all the craze. But they appear to work. Cold showers have been shown to increase dopamine levels in your body for a prolonged period of time. For example, this study on cold water exposure showed that dopamine concentrations increased by 250% after 1 hour of a head-out ice bath at 57.2 degrees fahrenheit.  And the increase was long-lasting.

How often, how long, and how cold?!

The Stanford neurobiologist Andrew Huberman recommends 11 minutes per week total to get the beneficial effects of deliberate cold exposure.  This is not 11 minutes in 1 sitting, but “2-4 sessions lasting 1-5 minutes each distributed across the week”. As for the temperature, he recommends you should be thinking to yourself “this is really cold (!) and I want to get out, BUT I can safely stay in.”

3. Exercise.

Exercise increases dopamine levels.  It increases it even more if you can learn to enjoy exercise. For those who feel depressed, I do understand this is common advice given, and it can be hard to follow. It can be hard to make yourself do it.  But it does work. Maybe knowing why it works will help.  Start as small as you need to, but start. It will help you build up and maintain your dopamine levels, increasing general feelings of motivation.

4. Practice Appreciation.

Make a conscious effort to notice what you appreciate throughout your day or during a specified time. It can be even better to make a practice of journaling what you appreciate. Studies have shown that appreciation increase dopamine levels.

5. Get more sunlight.

Manage your exposure to sunlight.  Sunlight affects you at the biological level.  Increase your exposure to sunlight in the morning and during the day (safely). At the very least, aim to get 10 minutes of direct sunlight in the morning when you wake up.  And, AVOID exposure to UVB light, blue light, or other bright light between 10pm and 4am. If you are experiencing depression, maybe even try to avoid UVB light or other bright light as early as 8pm.  Exposure to these spectrum of lights during those hours can DECREASE your dopamine and other feel-good neurotransmitter levels overall. Here’s a great interview with Dr. Sameer Hattar, Senior Investigator and Chief of the Section on Light and Circadian Rhythms with the NIH, on this topic.

6. Improve your general body state through eating right, getting enough sleep, and drinking plenty of water.

This last tip has less to do with dopamine, but is an important strategy of the body to improve your motivation.  Your body state affects the way you experience the world.  The better your body feels, the more energy you will have, and the more possibility you will see.

Don’t feel like you need to incorporate all of these suggestions right away, or at all. Choose the activity or activities that seem the most doable. Be sure to remain mindful about how you feel during and after these activities. When are you able to realize their affect on your motivation, you are more likely to continue to use them to fill up your tank when needed.

Time to talk about how to use your mind to improve your motivation.

Interventions aimed at the body are only one half of a full approach to increase your motivation. Stay tuned for Improve Your Motivation: Interventions of the Mind.