How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain

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Almost every drug of addiction, whether we go from nicotine to alcohol to heroin to cocaine to amphetamine, almost every drug of addiction hijacks that dopamine system we were talking about. We find when that circuitry is not working that you can get profound loss of motivation, apathy. When that circuitry is on overdrive because it’s been hijacked by these drugs, you get states of hyper motivation. So, of course, this is going to be overly simplistic to think dopamine levels are the only factor that affect our motivation, but it certainly turns out to be a very important factor in graduating the level of motivation we have to seek particular outcomes. >> Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss [music] science and science-based tools for everyday life.

[music] >> I’m Andrew Huberman and I’m a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Massud Hussein who is a neurologist and neuroscientist at Oxford making key discoveries about the relationship between motivation and pleasure. Today we discuss what really determines our level of drive and determination to do everything from getting up to go to school or work to pursuing long hard challenges that last many years. We start off by talking about the opposite of motivation, which of course is apathy.

And as you’ll learn, perhaps surprisingly, apathy is separate from one’s desire for something. We also discuss something very useful, which is how you can change your own perception of your own effort level. Today’s discussion really gets to the heart of motivation and procrastination and how anyone, healthy or otherwise, can leverage that understanding to their benefit. As you’ll soon hear, Dr. from Massud Hussein is a remarkable scientist, neurologist, and communicator.

Indeed, he’s the author of a spectacular book. I’ve read it. It’s entitled Our Brain, Ourselves, and it’s a terrific read if you want to learn more about how your brain works, how it can change over time, and how it makes you who you are. Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, today’s episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Massud Hussein. >> Dr. Massud Hussein, welcome.

Thank you for having me. You’ve worked on a huge variety of topics. Alzheimer’s, attention, apathy. We’re definitely going to talk about apathy. Spatial neglect, which I’m guessing most of our audience probably doesn’t know exactly what that is.

I’d like to start with the one that sounds like a bit of a downer, but as a window into understanding motivation and these states of excitement that most of us would like to be in, but let’s talk about and really define through your lens what is apathy? How does the brain bring about this thing that we call apathy? And is apathy just a lack of motivation? Yeah, I mean these are big questions and I think the way we’ve approached them is somewhat serendipitous in the sense that you [snorts] know 15 years ago I wasn’t studying apathy or motivation like many people I might think someone’s lazy or they’re highly motivated but that’s a sort of psychological state it’s a personality and it was only about 15 years ago I started beginning to be aware that there may be a an important biology underlying motivation and when that biology goes wrong, it can lead to loss of motivation and even pathological apathy. And the way this happened was completely out of the blue.

Uh I was then working in London at the National Hospital for Neurology in Queens Square at UCL. And we received a letter from a doctor describing a guy in his 30s. And this guy had been a highly productive person. He was in finance. He was also really liked socially, had a wide network of friends.

But suddenly he had become completely different from being highly motivated. He went to I’m not interested. I can’t be bothered. And that was both at work as well as with his friends. So people began to think this is something really different in this guy David.

What’s happening? They wondered if he had become depressed. That’s why he wasn’t really functioning. and he went to see his doctor who started him on an anti-depressant but it made no difference. He was still the same.

So he lost his job. He got fired because he had lost motivation and he was so apathetic that he couldn’t be bothered to get social security benefit. So his friends said, “Okay, come and stay with us. ” And they regretted it almost immediately because David did nothing. He just sat there in a chair all day long waiting for his friends to come back, do the cooking, clean.

They needed to prompt him to have a shower because he literally just sat there. His level of motivation was almost zero. When we got to see him, and it was difficult because he’d never come to his appointments. We I had to phone him up to say, “Look, I am going to be here tomorrow. Please come.

” and he grudgingly said, “Okay, I’ll I’ll try and make it. ” And he was, of course, late. Um, he came and there was this very sad guy. He, you know, he was disheveled, really not looking after himself, stains on his shirt. But the one thing he wasn’t was unhappy.

He was absolutely happy about life, right? Which was the perplexing thing. He’d lost his job. He’d lost his apartment because he wasn’t paying the rent. Couldn’t be bothered to get social security.

But there he was really happy about what was happening in life, looking forward to something that he didn’t know what, but he was still looking forward to good things in life. So when I asked him, why aren’t you doing anything when you’re at home? What would you what would you normally do? I would listen to some music. So why aren’t you listening to music?

Because it would take me some time to put my music system together. How long would it take? 5 minutes. So this was really sort of revelatory for me. The effort of putting the cables together for his music system.

Taking out the loudspeakers was too much in terms of the pleasure he could obtain from listening to music. It turned out that David had a very unusual neurological problem. His MRI brain scans revealed that he had two tiny little strokes in the basil ganglia. These are deep nuclei in the brain which are evolutionally wellconserved. They go back to the earliest vertebrate that we still have the lampay 360 million years old.

And the key thing that we’ve discovered from the neurohysiology of the lampay is the basil ganglia are important in linking motivation signals to action. Some people call it motivation to act. So in an organism like the lamprey, motivation signals might be hunger or sex that lead to action to fulfill those goals. In David, these strokes in the vententral stratum, what what’s called the nucleus encumbent in in animals led to no motivation signals leading to action. Nothing happened.

But if you prompted him, go take a shower, come on, he would do it. But of his own valition, he wasn’t motivated to act. And that was really something that was extraordinary for us because here was a man who had been highly motivated and that motivation had been extinguished by these two tiny little strokes which didn’t affect him physically but affected his behavior. And the studies that we performed with David to try and understand this led us to the concept that we might be able to deconstruct this nebulous thing called motivation. >> May I ask a question?

It’s fascinating. Um, and I’m sure everyone including myself is also wondering what became of David. But before you tell us, was it the case that he would feel overwhelmed? Like I want