This Morning Habit Will Boost Your Dopamine By 250%

The Huberman Notes
6 min readJul 26, 2022

We always crave more dopamine.

It feels great. So we seek it through food, sex, screens, and a host of other substances and activities.

But how you get more dopamine matters.

Let’s look at a behavior that can give you sustained increases in dopamine without hurting your baseline motivation.

The Dopamine Curve

One of the most important things to understand about dopamine is how your dopamine curve works. I’ve written more extensively about this here.

Throughout your life, you’ll have a baseline level of dopamine released in your body. This baseline is important for how you feel and how motivated you are.

During the course of your day, your levels will fluctuate around this baseline. This is due to the things you eat, think, and experience.

What’s important to understand is that these dopamine spikes have a cost. After a surge, you’ll experience a drop below your former baseline. And the drop is proportional to the height of the peak.

We all know this as the post-win low. In this state, we lack motivation and feel deprived of energy.

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