How to Increase Motivation & Drive
This episode explains the science of motivation and drive. I describe how dopamine, a chemical we all make in our brain, underlies our desire for and pursuit of our goals, as well as our capacity to move and experience pleasure. I describe how we can leverage specific behaviors, reward schedules and
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring you zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools. Along those lines, I’d like to thank the sponsors of today’s podcast.
Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink. I’ve been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, and so I’m delighted that they’re a sponsor of the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens is because I found it rather dizzying to know which vitamins and minerals to take, and Athletic Greens covers all my bases for vitamins and minerals. It also includes probiotics, and there are now a lot of data supporting the fact that probiotics are important for the gut-brain axis, for immunity, for metabolic health, endocrine health, many, many things.
So, I take Athletic Greens once, sometimes twice a day. I mix it with water and a little bit of lemon juice, and to me it tastes delicious. If you’d like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens. com/huberman, and if you do that, they’ll also give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. There are a lot of data now showing that vitamin D3 is important for immune function and a number of other important biological processes.
In addition, if you go to athleticgreens. com/huberman, you’ll get five free travel packs. Travel packs make it easy to mix up Athletic Greens when you’re in the car, on the plane, or generally on the road. So, that’s athleticgreens. com to get Athletic Greens, the year supply of vitamin D3 and K2, and the five free travel packs.
Our second sponsor of today’s podcast is Headspace. Headspace is a meditation app that makes meditation easy. I’ve been meditating on and off since I was 16 years old. I’m 45 now, so that’s about 30 years of on and off meditation, and I confess most of that time it was off, meaning I find it really hard to stick to a meditation practice. A few years ago I discovered Headspace while flying on JetBlue flights cuz at that time they were offering Headspace as something you could watch instead of TV or movies, and it made me feel great.
I’d find that I’d arrive where I was going more rested, more relaxed, and I got the Headspace app and I started using it daily, and I’ve continued to use it daily. Headspace has a large number of meditations, all supported by science. There’s also now just a tremendous amount of science supporting a meditation practice for all sorts of things, like improved sleep, reduced impulsivity, improved cognition. There’re just a myriad of positive effects of meditation. The hardest thing is doing it, and Headspace makes that easy.
If you want to try the Headspace app and all the meditations they have, you can go to headspace. com/specialoffer and you’ll get 1 month completely free of all the meditations they’ve have. That’s headspace. com/specialoffer to get 1 month free of Headspace. The third sponsor of today’s podcast is Magic Spoon.
Magic Spoon is a low-carb, grain-free, keto-friendly cereal. As I’ve mentioned a few times before on this podcast, the way I eat throughout the day has everything to do with when I want to be alert and when I want to be sleepy. So, in the first part of the day I fast because that enhances alertness. Then I eat keto, so my lunch and my afternoon meals are ketogenic. And then in the evening I eat starches and vegetables because those aid the transition to sleep.
So, for me Magic Spoon as a keto cereal is a great snack. It’s really tasty. I don’t actually mix mine with milk. I just eat it directly. They have a bunch of different flavors.
I like the frosted flavor mostly because it tastes like donuts and I have a pastry affliction and I love pastries. So, Magic Spoon allows me to remain on keto during the day. It’s healthy, it tastes great. I really enjoy it. So, if you want to try Magic Spoon, you can go to magicspoon.
com/huberman for a variety pack of different flavors. And if you put Huberman at checkout, you’ll get 5 off.
A quick note before we begin today’s discussion about the neuroscience of motivation. I’m pleased to announce that we have now captioned episodes 1 and 2 in Spanish. And soon, all the episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast will be captioned on YouTube in Spanish. We’ve used some of the revenue from the podcast to hire expert captioners, so it should be accurate. You might catch a mistake here or there, or dialect difference from time to time, but by our read and by our experts’ reads, it’s all accurate.
So, we’re very pleased that people who speak Spanish and digest information best in Spanish can now digest the information here on the podcast. Thanks to everyone for supporting the podcast, which allows us to broaden our reach in these ways. And we do hope to expand to other languages in the very near future. This month, we’re talking all about the neuroscience of emotions. And today, we’re going to talk about an extremely important topic that’s central to our daily life, and that’s motivation.
We’re going to talk about pleasure and reward. What underlies our sense of pleasure or reward? We’re going to talk about addictions. You can’t have a discussion about pleasure and reward without having a discussion about addictions and the addictive properties of certain substances, as well as how to break free of addiction. As well, we’re going to talk about the neurochemistry of drive and mindset.
So, all these themes are woven together in the context of emotions. Each one of them, of course, could also be its own entire month of the podcast, and in fact, we are going to have an entire month devoted to addiction. And I have a very special guest that’s going to be joining us to talk about the science and clinical practices that we know are important for understanding and treating addiction. But for now, let’s just talk about the neuroscience of motivation and reward, of pleasure and pain, because those are central to what we think of as emotions, whether or not we feel good, whether or not we feel we’re on track in life, whether or not we feel we’re falling behind. So, motivation is fundamental to our daily life.
It’s what allows us to get out of bed in the morning. It’s what allows us to pursue long-term goals or short-term goals. Motivation and the chemistry of motivation is tightly wound in with the neurochemistry of movement. In fact, the same single molecule, dopamine, is responsible for our sense of motivation and for movement. Even though nerves controlling muscles, so again, these are nerves in the spinal cord or brain that move our limbs, the effector chemical there, the one that actually causes the muscles to twitch, to contract, is acetylcholine.
In the brain, acetylcholine’s responsible for focus. However, whether or not we move, whether or not we want to move, whether or not we have the desire to overcome barriers of you know, they could be social barriers or financial barriers or time constraints, that depends on this molecule we call dopamine. It’s a fascinating molecule, and it lies at the center of so many great things in life, and it lies at the center of so many terrible aspects of life, namely addiction and c