Leverage Dopamine to Overcome Procrastination & Optimize Effort

The other approach that's supported by the literature to increase baseline levels of dopamine for very long periods of time... is to get into... 60 °F water up to the neck and to stay there for about 45-60 minutes.

If you were to take that state of being unmotivated or procrastinating and actually do something that's harder than being in that amotivated state—in other words, doing something that's more effortful, even painful—you can rebound yourself out of that dopamine trough much more quickly.

It's all very simple: Desire for things increases dopamine, but then our level of dopamine drops below baseline, and it's that drop below baseline that triggers the motivation to bring that dopamine level back up by going and pursuing the thing that you wanted in the first place.

Exposure of your body up to the neck to cold water... has been shown to increase baseline levels of dopamine... for not just 1 but at least 2 and probably as long as 4 or 5 hours.

There are papers showing that as little as 500mg [of l-tyrosine] but perhaps up to 1g... taken 30-60 minutes before a cognitive or physical task can increase baseline levels of dopamine for extended periods of time and thereby improve performance on those mental or physical tasks.

When friction becomes the reward... you can pass from an idea and a goal, no matter how daunting, to successful completion of that goal while experiencing what essentially will feel like pleasure the entire time.

Your craving for things is not just about your craving for those things per se; it's also a desire to relieve the pain of not having those things. And if you can internalize that... you will be in an amazing position to leverage all sorts of aspects of the dopamine system in order to increase your motivation...

The higher the peak in dopamine and the faster the rise to that peak, the further below baseline the dopamine drops after the drug wears off. In the case of cocaine, it's a very fast and very large rise in dopamine followed by a steep drop and very deep trough in dopamine below baseline.

Our dopamine baseline is our reservoir of dopamine. It's how full or empty our dopamine pool is. And that dopamine pool is the pool of dopamine that we use in order to create those dopamine peaks. And when those peaks come down, sometimes they go back to baseline; and sometimes they go to lower than baseline, which we call the trough.

I should mention one thing about recovery from addiction, which is that the reset of all that dopamine circuitry from unhealthy to healthy often involves, depending on the addiction, 30 days of complete abstinence.

Getting sufficient sleep each night literally restores your dopamine reserves. It allows dopamine to be present and for you to have a level of baseline dopamine that will allow you to even consider your goals in any kind of meaningful or reasonable way.

Yes, believe it or not, that morning sunlight exposure does increase your levels of dopamine, not just cortisol.

The effects of mucuna pruriens tend to be very much of the increasing the peak in dopamine and then very quickly dropping that peak—in other words, the peak/trough phenomena—not for increasing baseline levels of dopamine.