How I Tricked My Brain to Love Doing Hard Things
A research-based technique that will help you to love doing challenging things
Let’s say, for one hour you can do nothing but two activities. You can either study or scroll through your favorite social media app. What would you do? I’m pretty sure you will choose the endless scrolling of social media.
Even though you logically know that studying for an hour or doing something productive will bring you more benefits in the long run, but you still prefer to browse social media. Why is that?
You might argue one activity is effortless and provides instant pleasure. On the other hand, studying or doing something productive requires you to put effort and doesn’t offer immediate gratification.
You’re quite right, but many people have no problem exercising, studying, or doing something productive, including myself.
I used to be an unproductive guy, I would always play video games and watch movies for hours, but I couldn’t do anything productive for even half an hour. But in recent months, I’ve managed to develop a tremendous consistency at doing productive tasks, and it takes me a lot less effort to do productive tasks than it used to be a few months ago.
But how did I tricked my brain to like doing hard things? To answer it, first, we need to look at a brain hormone called dopamine.
What is Dopamine?
Dopamine is a pleasure hormone that makes us desire things and motivate us to get up and do stuff.
Dopamine is what makes you feel good whenever you receive a text message from your favorite person, win a lottery, eat junk food, or seeing something amazing. You get the point.
If you’re still confused about how vital dopamine is, look at the experiment scientists did on rats.
Experiment on rats:
In this experiment, the psychologists James Olds and Peter Milne implanted some electrodes in the brain of rats. The electrodes were used to control the dopamine hits in the rat’s mind whenever the rats press a lever. The result was that the rats would press the lever, again and again, to get the dopamine hits until they drop off by exhaustion. Some rats would even push the lever 7000 times in an hour.
The stimulus was so strong that the rats became so lazy that they didn’t want to do anything at all but keep pressing the lever. They wouldn’t eat, sleep, or mate.
Your brain on dopamine:
The dopamine also similarly affects your brain, as described in the above experiment. Dopamine is why we give priorities to our tasks.
We give more priority to the tasks, which will provide us with higher amounts of dopamine. It is the reason why we prefer scrolling through social media rather than studying for our exams because scrolling through social media gives us high amounts of dopamine as compared to studying, which provides us with relatively low amounts of dopamine.
If an event releases high amounts of dopamine, you’ll be motivated to do it again. The dangerous part is that your brain doesn’t care if the activity is bad for you or not, it just wants more of it.
Some examples of high dopamine activities include playing video games, watching TV, watching adult content, scrolling through social media, etc.
The Big Problem:
We live in a world with instant gratification. There are so many instant gratification and high dopamine activities that it’s almost impossible to avoid them regularly. Once a person starts having high dopamine activities regularly, he will not be able to enjoy the low dopamine activities. That’s why he’ll most likely ignore the productive low dopamine activities and go for high dopamine activities.
So, What is the solution? How can we prevent it and trick our brains into doing hard things? The answer is doing a Dopamine Detox.
Solution: Dopamine Detox
To simply put it, you’ve to avoid all high dopamine activities for one whole day.
What you’re going to do is set aside a day, where you’re going to avoid all high dopamine activities such as playing video games or scrolling through social media. You’re going to stop most of the dopamine release in your brain and let your dopamine receptors recover.
You’re going to have as little fun as possible:
- You’re not permitted to scroll through social media.
- You’re not permitted to listen to music.
- You’re not permitted to eat junk food. (If possible no food at all)
You get the point. You’re going to do nothing, but you can still do the following activities:
- You can meditate.
- You can journal.
- Go for a walk
- Or a deficient dopamine activity.
One thing I would like to say is that don’t take dopamine detox too far if you don’t want, like not talking or making eye contact with someone or doing the detox for more than 48 hours.
Why does this work?
You might ask, why does this even work?
You can think of it this way. Let’s say that you go to the top-notch restaurants in your city every single day, and it’s your new norm. Now, if someone gave you a bowl of plain rice, you probably wouldn’t eat it because it wouldn’t taste as good as the restaurant’s food.
But what if suddenly, you teleport to a desert and there’s nothing to eat but that bowl of plain rice. Now that bowl of plain rice doesn’t seem that bad. This is what dopamine detox does.
Dopamine detox starves you of all pleasure. To put it merely, you become so bored that the boring stuff becomes more fun.
Smaller Dopamine Detox:
Suppose you don’t want to do the dopamine detox because it just seems too far or difficult for you. There’s another solution that I like to call smaller dopamine detox.
You’re going to pick one day of the week, where you’re going to refrain from one of your high dopamine activities completely. Whatever that behavior might be. Maybe checking your phone, playing video games, eating junk food whatever.
Smaller dopamine detox will not have the same effect as compared to the full dopamine detox, but it can still help you a lot. By just avoiding one activity can create a considerable difference than not avoiding it at all.
Conclusion:
To conclude, I would say that we’re all dopamine addicts to at least some extent, and that’s not certainly a bad thing. It motivates us to achieve our goals. It is what makes us who we are today. It is the reason I’m writing this article.
But it’s up to you to decide where you’re going to get your dopamine from. Are you going to get it from the things that are harmful and don’t benefit you at all? Or are you going to get it from your long term goals and good habits?
The choice is yours.
Have a beautiful day.
