How To Leverage Meaningful Dopamine
The only dopamine your body actually wants to have.
The self-help industry has a dopamine problem and everyone knows it. Gurus talk about it offhandedly all the time. So much so that when it comes to implementing systems and the like, there is bound to be a mention of dopamine.
But while many gurus talk about it, it’s hypocritical of the industry that several people leverage it all the time.
We saw this with Matthew McConaughey’s “The Art of Livin’” live event where it was a lengthy sales pitch for a course on bolstering confidence and living your best life. Unsurprisingly, they preyed on people’s lack of confidence in convincing them to do anything to get this course.
But while dopamine in this context gets a bad reputation for it, I’m still in the camp that it can be used in a meaningful and beneficial way. In the end, we all need motivation and inspiration. That persists in our various goals because dopamine reminds us of the feel-good feelings it naturally brings to us.
The only issue is not many people spell it all out for why this brand of dopamine is good and how to get the most out of it. From my own experiences, these are the steps that can make a big difference in creating healthy dopamine that is meaningful to anything you want to pursue in life.
Stop Hoarding Ideas
From business ideas to hobbies or efficient techniques, hoarding information or ideas doesn’t get you anywhere. This step is one of the biggest struggles because most people either get wrapped up in the emotions of the moment when information is dropped, or they do pay attention but forget to apply it in their lives.
This will always be a struggle as this is a standard occurrence in self-help seminars, books, courses, and programs.
To be fair though, there are situations where hoarding can be realistic. I know a business owner who gets new business ideas on a regular basis and he legitimately does not have time to indulge them. He’s got a kid to look after and runs multiple businesses here in town. And that’s all before startup costs.
But the key difference is whether you are hoarding with purpose or hoarding for the sake of it. It’s totally understandable if in your life right now it’s not realistic to act on an idea. But at the same time, it’s a good idea to consider how you can get yourself prepared to take action when the moment is right.
For the business owner, I have a feeling he’ll act on it once his businesses start building up more. He has a stable primary income which allows him to build business after business. And with outsourcing work and AI, I can imagine he can ramp up production quickly and save time.
Getting to that point boils down to creating a strategy for yourself and having your own set-up plans.
Don’t Just Write Them In A Notebook
Along the same vein as hoarding ideas, but I clump this into more of a financial incentive. This is even more regressive because while we think having some financial incentive helps, it can actually make matters worse.
Early on my self-help journey, I bought a journal and used it to jot down various ideas and summaries of webinars. There’s only been a few times since then that I’ve cracked that open and actually read what I jotted down all those years ago.
Along the same lines, I have a notes app on my phone for various writing ideas. It’s pretty rare for me to open it up and look at the prompts.
While we all work off of incentives and disincentives, you need to have more of a reason to look at and use those tools beyond a monetary incentive. There has to be some personal connection to it.
Stop Mulling Over Tutorials & Advice
The self-help industry is a big culprit in this as advice can be generally vague and not focused. Not every self-help guru provides their own personal stories and experiences into these sorts of subjects.
That or the stories are so outlandish it’s hard to associate with them or figure out what they are implying. Going back to that McConaughey live event, why he was inspired to make a course on confidence was due to his journey to an unknown monastery where he spoke with some random enlightened monk.
Cool story bro.
Even when it comes to tutorials they can be unclear and focus more on the feel-good feelings. They can provide just enough information for people to make some progress but get blindsided by other problems. A good example is marketing articles. Every time I get some tutorials on them, it’s easy for me to think that these results can happen in a matter of days or weeks.
Often times forgetting that the one delivering the advice is often a big-name marketer who has a brand that is immediately recognizable.
All of this comes back to having an action plan which I swear I’ll get to specifics soon. However, in order for the plan to become effective, it helps to know what kind of emotional roadblocks that can get in your way and how to deal with them.
In the case of getting the more direct advice, the biggest thing is to keep doing research and consider other angles and possibilities. Find someone you resonate with and you can piece together what you have to do.
Start Acting With A Plan
Now to finally get things going. Taking action begins with some sort of plan in mind. This plan doesn’t have to be rock solid or jotted down at all.
All that matters is knowing where to start and how to get started.
The upside to looking at tutorials or people’s advice on achieving certain results, they all boil down to common pieces of information. If you want to lose weight, you generally want to have a meal plan in mind and an exercise routine to follow.
Actually following through with all that is a whole other thing of course, but having clear and obvious first steps tends to help out a lot. You know exactly what you need to do.
Not all plans need to be mapped out to its completion and not every plan has to be followed. We are fluid individuals and we can leverage different things. Be sure to experiment and find what is the best way for you to stay focused and get in the flow.
I can tell you with my writing, I’m having a much easier time when I have the title, subtitle, and headings all planned out well before writing. That way I can spend time mulling over what to write, how to frame it, and hopefully speed up my writing. After all, I find myself taking much longer to put these articles together than usual.
Overall when it comes to planning, some things to keep in mind when forming it are:
- Make it all natural — Habits are formed through neuropathways in our mind and they get reinforced the more we use them. While new pathways are trickier to handle, practicing them on a regular basis will reinforce them. Making it all natural is about making pathways similar to existing ones that you know you have. Another way to describe this idea is habit stacking. Beyond that, making habits and actions that align with your personality helps a lot too.
- Keep the formatting brief — I love to do lists and they are effective the most when they are very short. When you have several items — like 6 or more — on the list, adding more to the list is overwhelming and you’re just going to skip over them. Generally 3 to 4 items on a daily to-do list is good.
- Keep the tasks difficult — When tasks are easy to complete it’s easy for us to get into that dopamine fix without creating anything meaningful. Always make you tasks something meaningful to you but also something that takes some time to do. If you’re starting a new business or developing a habit, make sure you’re able to spend at least a few hours devoted to it.
Embrace The Process And Emotions
A lot of self-help gurus sell the solution but also the end result because it’s effective. It’s the point of the huge dopamine pay-off that you then get to leverage and snowball into other things in your life.
The problem is when that’s being pitched at you hard, it blindsided you from the process itself which is very emotional. For sure you run into negative emotions that you learn to deal with. But there are also those feel-good moments where you nod to yourself, you smile and you think “Yeah this feels great.”
Even if there isn’t that immediate super-high payoff, preparing your mindset for the long haul is where meaningful dopamine really shines.
And the best strategy for doing that is by framing your mindset more to value the journey itself rather than the actual outcome.
A lot of self-help gurus want us to be dopamine junkies because it keeps us in that loop. They want us to ride the super high waves only to come back down and have our problems be in the same spot as we were before.
Except this time you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on some product you don’t need that promises to fix your problem.
Dopamine is a powerful drug that our brain produces. As manipulative as many self-help gurus can be, learning about yourself and how to best use it for yourself can make a big difference and can help you see genuine progress in anything.
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