Dr. Nicole Cain explains dopamine's role in motivation and mood, then shares three ways to boost it: get morning sunlight, cut light at night, and use intermittent rewards to reinforce effort. She contrasts dopamine with serotonin, which handles contentment.
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Dopamine is a molecule in our brain and body that makes us feel good and motivated. When dopamine levels rise, we feel more energized and we feel like we want to do things. Dopamine can create feelings of want and desire. This is in contrast to serotonin, which is a little bit more about feeling happy with what we already have. We all have a baseline of dopamine, which can spike and drop based on various external and internal factors like the environment or our genetics or even nutrition. If that baseline is too low, you're going to feel safe, sad, and unmotivated. But if that baseline is way too high, you may feel anxious and panicky. So here are some hacks to optimize your dopamine baseline levels. Number one is to get sunlight. First thing when you wake up, don't loiter in bed. Get up right away. And if you can, go outside. Number two is contrast is at nighttime when the sun goes down. Try to lower the lights and reduce light and sun exposure. And the third most important and maybe under discussed hack is to use intermittent reward timing schedules. An example of this is you go to the casino and you pull that lever. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. That intermittent reinforcement makes the win even more exciting when you get it. So a way to do that is to focus winning on the effort that you put in as opposed to the outcomes that may mean something really good happens. And you're like, yeah, I can chill with that. When you work really, really hard, then you celebrate. No bars held. Learn more about how to leverage your dopamine levels by going to the Holistic Wellness Collective, which is a membership that I created that teaches you how to be your own brain health and emotional health expertise.
