How to Make Doing Difficult Things Easy

You probably dont have a problem playing video games or browsing social media on your phone. In fact, I have no doubt you could sit in front of a screen and do both of those activities for 2 hours or even longer without breaking your concentration. But what about half an hour of studying? Oof, that might be too hard. How about working on your side business for another hour? Hmm, doesnt sound too appealing.

Even though you logically know that studying, exercising, building a business, or something equally productive will bring you more benefits in the long run, you still prefer watching tv, playing video games, and scrolling through social media. One might argue that its obvious why one activity is easy and doesnt require much effort, while the other activity is difficult and it requires you to apply yourself. But some people seem to have no problem studying, exercising, or working on their side projects regularly.

Table of Contents

• 🧠 The Role of Dopamine in Motivation
• 🐭 The Effects of Dopamine in Humans
• 🔁 Dopamine Tolerance and Motivation
• 💡 How to Perform a Dopamine Detox
• ⚖️ A Smaller Dopamine Detox
• 📝 Conclusion

🧠 The Role of Dopamine in Motivation

Which begs the question, why are some people more motivated to tackle difficult things? And is there a way to make doing difficult things easy? To answer this question, we need to look at this brain neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is often considered a pleasure molecule, but thats not quite what it does. Dopamine is what makes us desire things, and its that desire that gives us the motivation to get up and do stuff.

If youre not sure how powerful dopamine is, let me introduce you to a few experiments neuroscientists did on rats. The researchers implanted electrodes in the brains of rats. Whenever the rat pulled a lever, the researchers stimulated the rats reward system in the brain. The result was that the rats developed a craving so strong they kept pulling the lever over and over for hours. The rats would refuse to eat or even sleep. They would just keep pressing the lever until they would drop from exhaustion.

But then the process was reversed. The researchers blocked the release of dopamine in the brain's reward center. As a result, rats became so lethargic that even getting up to get a drink of water was not worth the effort. They wouldnt eat, they didnt want to mate. They didnt crave anything at all. You could say that the rats lost all will to live.

However, if food was placed directly in their mouths, the rats would still eat and enjoy the food. They just didnt have the motivation to get up and do it themselves. You would think that its thirst or hunger that motivates us to get food or water, but theres also dopamine that plays a key role here.

Those rat experiments might be extreme cases, but you can see similar effects dopamine has in humans and in our daily lives. In fact, your brain develops priorities in large part based on how much dopamine it's expecting to get. If an activity releases too little dopamine, you won't have much motivation to do it. But if an activity releases a lot of dopamine, you'll be motivated to repeat it over and over.

🐭 The Effects of Dopamine in Humans

So which behaviors release dopamine? Any activity where you anticipate theres a potential reward releases it. But if you know there are no immediate rewards with the behavior, your brain wont release it. For example, before you eat comfort food, your brain releases dopamine because you anticipate that the food will make you feel good, even if it actually makes you feel worse. Thats because your brain doesnt even care if the high dopamine activity is damaging to you. It just wants more of it.

A stereotypical example would be someone whos a drug addict. He knows that what hes doing is not good for him, but all he wants is to get more of that drug. Besides getting you high, cocaine and heroin release unnatural amounts of dopamine, which in turn makes you crave them even more. Of course, it has to be noted that nearly everything releases some amount of dopamine, even drinking water when youre thirsty does. But the highest dopamine release happens when you get a reward randomly. One such example is playing on a slot machine in a casino. Even if youve only been losing money until that point, you eventually expect to get a bigger reward. You just dont know when it could happen.

And in todays digital society, we are flooding our brains with unnaturally high amounts of dopamine on a daily basis, even if we dont know it. Some examples of high dopamine behaviors include scrolling through social media websites, playing video games, watching Internet pornography, etcetera. We anticipate some sort of reward with each one of those behaviors. That's why we're constantly checking our phones. We expect to see a text message or some other notification, and we know that eventually we're going to receive it. We're becoming like those rats pulling the lever, trying to get a new dopamine hit.

And you might think, oh, so what? It's not like it's harming me in any way. But you would be wrong. Our bodies have a biological system called homeostasis. It means that our body likes to keep internal physical and chemical conditions at a balanced level. Whenever an imbalance occurs, our body adapts to it. Let me give you an example. When it's cold outside, our body temperature falls. As a result, we start shivering to generate heat and warm the body. However, when it's hot outside, our body temperature rises and we start sweating to lose some of that heat. Essentially, our body is looking to maintain temperature of around 37 degrees celsius or 98 degrees fahrenheit, no matter what.

But there is another way homeostasis manifests itself, and that is through tolerance. For example, someone who rarely drinks alcohol will get drunk really fast. But someone who drinks on a regular basis will have to drink more alcohol because their body has developed a tolerance to it. Essentially, it takes more and more alcohol to make them drunk because theyve become less sensitive to its effects.

🔁 Dopamine Tolerance and Motivation

And its not much different. With dopamine, your body tries to maintain homeostasis, so it down regulates your dopamine receptors. Essentially, your brain gets used to having high levels of dopamine and those levels become your new normal. Thus you develop a dopamine tolerance. This can be a huge problem because the things that dont give you as much dopamine dont interest you any longer, and its much more difficult to motivate yourself to do them. They feel boring and less fun because they dont release as much dopamine compared to the things that do release it in high amounts.

Thats why people tend to prefer playing video games or browsing the Internet compared to studying or working on their business. Video games make us feel good and comfortable as they release a lot of dopamine. Sadly, things like working hard or reading release it in lower amounts. This is one of the reasons why drug addicts who try to quit have a hard time adjusting to a normal life. Their dopamine tolerance gets so high that normal life isnt able to match it. They become like those rats from previous experiments who have no motivation to do anything if theres not enough dopamine release.

And its not just drug addicts. People who are addicted to video games, social media, or Internet pornography experience the same thing. Once their dopamine tolerance gets too high, they simply arent able to enjoy low dopamine behaviors. Which begs the question, is there anything that can be done to prevent this? The answer is, you need to perform a dopamine detox.

💡 How to Perform a Dopamine Detox

By now, you might already have an idea what dopamine detox is going to look like. What youre going to do is set aside a day where youre going to avoid all the highly stimulating activities. You're going to stop flooding your brain with high amounts of dopamine and you're going to let your dopamine receptors recover.

Just a disclaimer. If you're suffering from a drug addiction then I suggest you seek professional help as you've probably formed a physiological and psychological dependence, and I don't want you to experience any extreme withdrawal symptoms. Now back to the detox.

For one whole day, you will try to have as little fun as possible. You won't be using the Internet or any technology like your phone or computer. You're not allowed to listen to music. You're not allowed to masturbate or eat any junk food. Basically, you're going to remove all sources of external pleasure for the entire day. You're going to embrace boredom. And trust me, there will be a lot of boredom.

You are, however, allowed to do the go for a walk, meditate, and be alone with your thoughts. Reflect on your life and goals. Write down any ideas you get, not on your computer or phone, but on a physical piece of paper. All of this might seem quite intense, but if you want radical results and you want them fast, you need to be able to take radical action.

Now, you might be asking yourself, why would this even work? You can think of it this way. Lets say that youve been eating every single meal at the best restaurant in your town. As a result, what happened is that those fancy meals became your new normal. If someone offered you a bowl of plain rice, you would probably refuse. It simply wouldnt taste as good as your usual restaurant meal. But if you suddenly find yourself stranded on a deserted island and youre starving, suddenly that bowl of plain rice doesnt seem so bad.

And that is what the dopamine detox does. It starves you of all the pleasure you usually get, and in turn, it makes those less satisfying activities more desirable. To put it simply, dopamine detox works because you become so bored that boring stuff becomes more fun.

⚖️ A Smaller Dopamine Detox

Now, if you don't want to take such extreme action and starve yourself of all the pleasure, you can perform a 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 behaviors completely, whatever that behavior might be, maybe checking your phone all the time, playing video games on your computer, binge watching tv, eating junk food, watching Internet pornography, whatever. And from now on, every single week for one whole day, you're going to avoid that activity. You can still do other things, but the behavior you pick is off limits. Yes, you will feel slightly bored, but that's the point. You want to let your dopamine receptors recover from the unnaturally high dopamine that's been flooding your brain, and boredom is going to propel you to do other things that day, things that you would normally put off. Because they dont release as much dopamine and because youre bored, its easier for you to do them.

Of course, avoiding high dopamine behavior once in a while is good, but ideally you should avoid those behaviors altogether, or at least as much as possible. Instead, you want to connect more dopamine to the things that will actually benefit you.

And what I found is that your current high dopamine activities can serve as an incentive to pursue things that actually give you those long term benefits. In other words, you could use our high dopamine activity as a reward for completing difficult work.

And this is exactly what I do myself. I track all the difficult low dopamine work I do, cleaning my apartment, practicing the piano, reading books, doing some sort of exercise, creating these videos, etcetera. After I am able to get a certain amount of work done, I reward myself with some amount of high dopamine activity at the end of the day. The key words here are after and at the end of the day. If I indulge in high dopamine behavior first, then im not going to feel like doing the low dopamine work. Im simply not going to be motivated enough. So I always start with the difficult things. Only then I allow myself to indulge in high dopamine activities.

To give you an example, for every completed hour of low dopamine work, I reward myself with 15 minutes of high dopamine behavior at the end of the day. That means that for 8 hours of low dopamine, I allow myself roughly 2 hours of high dopamine behavior. Of course, these are my ratios. You can tweak them to your liking.

Also, it has to be noted that if you are addicted to something thats damaging to your health, then you dont want to treat that behavior as a reward. Instead, find a different reward thats not as damaging, one that you still think is worth the effort.

And if youre wondering what my guilty pleasure is, its the Internet. I can easily get lost there for hours without doing anything else. Thats why I have this system. Its so im able to control my addiction. But make no mistake, even with this system, I still plan days where I abstain from high dopamine activities completely.

📝 Conclusion

To conclude, it is possible to make doing difficult things feel easier. But when your brain is getting so much dopamine all the time, you wont be as excited about working on something that doesnt release much of it. Thats why you might want to limit your phone and computer usage along with other high dopamine releasing behavior and I can tell you that its definitely worth it.

So if you have motivation problems, start dopamine detoxing your brain as soon as possible. Separate yourself from the unnaturally high amounts of dopamine or at least expose yourself to it far less frequently. Only then will normal, everyday low dopamine activities become exciting again and youll be able to do them for longer.

We are all dopamine addicts to a certain extent and thats a good thing because dopamine motivates us to achieve our goals and improve ourselves. But its up to you to decide where youre going to get your dopamine from. Are you going to get it from things that dont benefit you or are you going to get it from working on your long term goals? The choice is yours.