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…

Being motivated and in pursuit feels great. But part of that drive forward is a feeling of discontentment with your current moment. So if your life merely consists of charging forward, you’ll endure a lot of dissatisfaction. For most of us, contentment is a necessary ingredient of the good life…

Casinos work so well that the wealthiest companies in the world try to imitate them. Can you do the same and run yourself like a casino? Yes. And if you do, you might find dopamine to be a more powerful currency than money. You can apply this key lesson about…

Who thought not eating could become so popular? In recent years, fasting has resurged in our culture. We moderns have caught up with the intuitions of the ancients; more does not always equal better. Too much of a good thing is still too much. Once again, dopamine is the neural…

Imagine what you could do if you could sustain long-term motivation, even if it requires hard work. There are very few things you can’t accomplish if you do. Yet few people manage to do it. We’ll look at one who did and how he did it. David Goggins had…

You’re scrolling on Instagram and see something captivating. Dopamine spikes your system. The next picture is not that engaging. But — it might have attracted your curiosity if you had seen that second picture first or at another time entirely. Your judgment of that second picture was shaped by how…

Most people, most of the time, forget one thing — how we think about something matters. A set of thoughts and interpretations appear in our minds, and we immediately take them for granted. …

Right about 30+ lifetimes ago, a former Indian prince noticed an emotional nuance while investigating his internal landscape. Desire — or motivation, by another name — has a dual nature. The Buddha was right, and the logic behind his astute observation lies in the dopamine system. We should all understand…

A staggering little molecule fundamentally shapes the best and worst of life. Dopamine is the chemical substrate we recognize as our insatiable zest for life. It’s also the puppet-master of addiction. Mastering this double-edged molecule can be the difference between achieving your most venerated visions, and drowning in the current…