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Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Everything Everywhere
Is in Motion All the Time

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What would we do without dopamine? The answer is: nothing. We can’t do anything without dopamine, which is the literal source of all motivation—all movement—whether physical or psychological. Why then are so many people going on and on about how we all need a dopamine detox? Why are we advised to be wary of substances or activities that provide us with “hits” of dopamine, as if dopamine were a drug?

Considering popular, and even some scientific, perspectives on dopamine tends to put me in mind of the lyrics of a song by the Animals straight out of the wayback machine:

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good.
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

While dopamine’s functions* are wide and varied, its role in regard to the brain’s reward system has been clarified. Dopamine is not the source of pleasure in the brain. That role is played by the liking neurochemicals, such as serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, endocannabinoids, and endogenous opioids. Dopamine is called the “wanting” neurochemical because it is the source of…wanting, which is really just another word for motivation.

Dopamine is released when the brain expects to experience a reward, meaning it expects to experience something it likes. It causes us to take action by moving toward the reward.

Let’s say you notice you’re thirsty and you consider getting up from your desk to get a glass or bottle of water. Do you want the water enough to stop what you’re doing and take an action to get it? In other words, how motivated are you? How enticing is the water? How rewarding do you think it will be? How much pleasure do you think you’ll get from it? (Of course, it’s your brain that makes the choice, but you get to experience both the wanting and the liking.)

Although dopamine is not one of the liking neurochemicals, the brain “likes” to want. It likes to be motivated, to get us to move. So liking neurochemicals are released along with dopamine, to a greater or lesser extent depending on how rewarding the brain expects the experience or substance to be. The so-called wanting system in the brain is considered to be robust, while the liking system is fragile. That’s because the liking neurochemicals don’t stick around for long, so the brain moves on to wanting something else. Liking comes and goes but wanting persists.

Those who believe we should not want simply don’t understand how the brain works. Wanting is essential for being awake and for living an awake life, as was illustrated in the 1990 movie Awakenings. Robin Williams played neurologist Oliver Sacks, who in the early stage of his career dosed catatonic patients with levodopa, the precursor to dopamine in an attempt to literally wake them from their unresponsive states.

Going on a dopamine detox (conceptually, anyway, since the idea is nonsensical), would be like deciding to stop eating altogether in order to avoid sugar. It would be like advising someone not to pursue something they’re passionate about because that would generate “too much” dopamine.

Although dopamine plays a role in compulsive or addictive behavior, it is neither a drug, nor does it function like a drug. Instead of trying to manage dopamine—which is not a game for amateurs—we ought to focus on identifying better targets. We could learn how to use the wanting system to pursue the things we think would provide us with a more satisfying and meaningful life.

Next time I’ll talk about two important dopamine pathways in the brain and how they affect our ability to create change.

*Dopamine plays a role in your brain’s reward system, which includes feeling pleasure, achieving heightened arousal, and learning. Dopamine also helps with focus, concentration, attention, memory, sleep, mood, and motivation. And it is involved with decision-making, movement, working memory, and learning. It is one of the most extensively studied neurochemicals, mainly because it plays such diverse roles in human behavior and cognition. Dopamine is also a factor in Parkinson’s disease, addiction, schizophrenia, and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

The Reward System Is Functional

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Yes, the reward system is functional, which means that it isn’t conceptual or fanciful—or optional. It’s integral to our survival, and it’s even older than we are: it evolved in worms and flies about a billion years ago. It doesn’t care what your or my opinion about rewards is. Having an opinion about the reward system is like having an opinion about whether or not your car should need gas. No matter how deeply committed to your opinion you are, unless you have a battery operated car, it needs gas. If you fail to put gas in the car, it won’t operate. If you fail to utilize your brain’s reward system, on the other hand, it will operate you. It fulfills a non-optional function that’s essential to survival.

One thing that gets in the way of using rewards intentionally and effectively is the mistaken belief that things like rewarding experiences, benefits, or celebrations are the same thing as rewards. They are not.

Rewarding Experiences Are Not Rewards

You undoubtedly have experiences and engage in activities that feel rewarding to you. All that means is that you enjoy them, which is really neither good nor bad. Some of the experiences or activities people enjoy or find rewarding are the very ones they want to eliminate or change. And the reason these behaviors are difficult to eliminate or change is because they are rewarding (smartphone scrolling, eating unhealthy food, binge watching, buying things, snorting cocaine…).

So it’s extremely important to recognize that rewards and rewarding experiences, while related, are not the same thing. They both elicit “liking” neurochemicals in the brain at the time they are experienced. And some rewarding experiences also involve dopamine, the “wanting” neurochemical. In fact it’s the dopamine, rather than the liking neurochemicals that makes altering some existing behaviors so difficult. This is an example of the reward system operating you.

Rewards utilize dopamine intentionally. Dopamine can help develop creative tension, which increases the motivation to take a specific action or series of actions that you want to take in order to get the anticipated reward. It’s a carrot…if carrots motivate you, that is. I can take or leave carrots, but the opportunity to add new music to my digital playlist always motivates me. Dopamine also puts your brain on notice that this particular action or series of actions is important and it should pay attention.

Experiencing an unmediated rewarding activity is passive. Identifying and using a reward to reinforce behavior change is active.

  • Rewarding: providing satisfaction or gratification; enjoyment
  • Reward: an act performed to strengthen approved behavior; reinforcement

You can use rewarding experiences as rewards, but they are not rewards in and of themselves.

Neither Are Benefits

A benefit is something that is advantageous or good. Benefits can be short-term or long-term. They result from actions you take. (Of course, you can also benefit from actions other people take or from fortunate changes in circumstances, but you have no direct control over those things.)

If there were no benefit to you for embarking on a particular course of action (completing a project or goal action plan, changing or starting a habit, or following through on an intention), there would be no point in doing it. Benefits answer the question of why you want to do something. So it’s useful to clearly identify all the benefits that would—or could—accrue if you accomplish what you set out to do.

It seems logical, doesn’t it, that understanding the benefit or beneficial nature of a particular action somehow ought to magically translate into the taking of that action? And yet this isn’t how the brain works. The brain’s reward system is functional, not logical. Benefits are not interpreted by your brain as rewards just because they are good for you. And understanding what benefits may accrue doesn’t have any direct impact on your behavior. Knowing that ordering from the salad side of the lunch menu instead of from the burger side is better for your cholesterol level and maybe your overall health will not make ordering a salad happen. Nor will it turn a salad into a reward or even a rewarding experience.

But you could use a reward to motivate you to order that salad if good health or some aspect of it is a long-term desired outcome.

Celebrations Aren’t Rewards, Either

In behavior-change terms, a celebration is an impromptu acknowledgement, after the fact, of something you’ve accomplished. The difference between a reward and a celebration is in how you use it, not what it is. In order for something to be effective as a reward, you need to crave it. That’s because dopamine is triggered by the expectation of a reward. So in order for you—and your brain—to crave a reward, the reward needs to be (1) something you really enjoy and (2) identified ahead of time.

Celebrations are great! Go ahead and celebrate your successes and accomplishments. But don’t try to substitute celebrations for rewards because they will not help you train your brain to do what you want it to do, which is the point of a reward. If you have trouble identifying suitable rewards, pay attention to how you celebrate and the treats you give yourself. You may be able to use some of those things as rewards.

The Bottom Line

Rewarding experiences and celebrations are enjoyable, and benefits are…beneficial (good for you). But, unlike rewards, they do not serve the function of motivating you to create behavior change. Because the reward system operates at the unconscious level, you can’t simply dismiss it or try to circumvent it. The best course of action is to take advantage of it and work with it. Otherwise, you may unwittingly develop and reinforce behaviors you don’t want. No one sets out to develop undesirable behaviors or habits on purpose. And yet each of us has trained our brain, often unwittingly but via the same process, to engage in every one of the behaviors and habits we now have, both the ones we like and want to keep and the ones we don’t like and want to change or eliminate.

I’m beginning a six-month experiment called Contrivance of the Month. This experiment includes using my newsletter, lucidwaking, to feature an article on the relevant contrivance in one issue and links to worksheets, instructions, and additional information in another issue. The March contrivance, as you may already know or have guessed, is rewards. If you want to play along, you can check out the 2/20/24 issue on the Newsletter page on my website, where you can also subscribe to lucidwaking to keep up with the contrivance content. The next issue with all the links and other good stuff will be published tomorrow, 2/28/24.

Is Santa Claus Coming to Town?

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I was standing in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to be ready while mulling over the implications of delayed gratification. But what came to mind was being a child and waiting for Christmas—more particularly, Christmas presents! The weeks leading up involved lots of thinking and dreaming about what I wanted; it was hard to choose from so many possibilities. Then there were the lists, written and rewritten. And once the die was cast, wondering what I would actually get and picturing opening those colorful wrapped packages.

Reminders were everywhere, stoking the imagination: Christmas carols on the radio and in stores, decorations inside and outside houses and other buildings, sending and receiving cards, Christmas trees, sugar cookies and other holiday treats.

Christmas was on December 25th every year; nothing I could do about that. And I would get what I got on that date; nothing I could do about that, either. Until the big day arrived, I was full of eager expectation, aka anticipation. Unlike with the concept of delayed gratification, there was no self-control involved, since I had little to no control over the contours of the holiday.

OK, I have to amend one of those statements. Theoretically, I had some control in that I was supposedly more likely to get what I wanted if I was “nice” than if I was naughty. According to the well-known song:

He’s making a list,
He’s checking it twice,
He’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice

He being Santa Claus, of course. I don’t recall paying a price for not being “nice,” even though that word was probably not in my vocabulary. In any case, we could look at Christmas presents as rewards for good behavior, which is the way we use them now to get the brain to pay attention to what we want it to pay attention to.

No Stanford Marshmallow Experimenters Need Apply

Kiyohito Iigaya, the lead author of the paper published last year in Science Advances on the brain regions associated with anticipation (mentioned in this blog post) says:

Anticipation can probably drive us to prepare better for actual reward consumption so that we can get the most out of it. It’s also healthy—good for our mental health—to have something to look forward to. The reward is not physically here yet, but the brain somehow manages to create it in our mind.

When I hit upon a really good reward for myself, delaying getting it or consuming it is an entirely enjoyable experience that doesn’t involve any amount of self-control whatsoever. This makes sense because, other than the hippocampus—which is more or less keeping track of who we are—the brain regions involved in self-control and anticipation are not the same. (However, it also makes sense to me that having an ability to make use of anticipation might have a spillover effect on impulse control. Something to explore down the road.)

Double Your Pleasure (Redux)

All of this is to say that anticipation is not the same thing as delayed gratification. Although it’s possible the two concepts have become entangled for some, it’s important to recognize they are entirely different.

Anticipation amps up the potential pleasure of a future reward now, while delayed gratification (and self-control) minimize the potential pleasure of a future reward now. So if you want to develop your anticipation skills, focus on the pleasure, not on the delay.

Two experiments you can run (often—not just once):

  1. Think about any situations from the past when you experienced anticipation. Maybe they were like my Christmas example in which I didn’t have control over when I would receive the thing I wanted. That doesn’t matter because the point of the exercise is to recognize the feeling and the experience.
  2. Play with creating anticipation incrementally by waiting to do or get or consume something you want. During that time, think about the thing you want. Imagine doing or getting or consuming it. Focus on the pleasure you expect to feel. You can start with a few minutes and work up to hours or days.

Rewards are an essential component of lasting, significant behavior change. But rewards don’t work if you are unable to anticipate them. A bonus result from these experiments may be that you learn more about what you really derive pleasure from, which will give you good information about future rewards as you develop your anticipation skills.

I’ll leave you with this video of Melissa Hughes, author of Happy Hour with Einstein even though it features that Carly Simon song I hate (however, it was interesting to learn that Simon wrote it about Cat Stevens).

This is the fourth and “final” post on the topic of anticipation.

Anticipation or Apprehension?

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In his bestselling book Behave, Stanford University’s Robert Sapolsy says that anticipation requires learning. (That appears to be more the case for some personality types than others, but casual observation suggests that quite a few people have some degree of difficulty with anticipation.)

I think the learning needs to begin with making a distinction between anticipation and expectation, two states that are oriented toward a future event and tend to be used interchangeably, thus muddying the waters considerably.

Expectation is the sense that something is about to happen. We can expect positive, negative, or neutral things to occur. The unconscious part of our brain, System 1, is continuously predicting the immediate future so it can determine what actions we should take next, and those predictions sometimes give rise to conscious, System 2, expectations. Of course sometimes the predictions bypass consciousness and go directly to motor neurons that control movement.

For our purposes, it makes sense to view expectation as essentially a functional process.

Anticipation, on the other hand, is a feeling of excitement and pleasure about something we expect will occur, especially in the near future.

The opposite of anticipation would be apprehension, also a feeling, but one of fear, anxiety, unease—even dread—about something we expect will occur in the future.

Anticipation is associated with excitement; apprehension is associated with anxiety. While excitement has positive connotations and anxiety has negative connotations, these two states are not as different from each other as they might appear. In fact, the difference is primarily a matter of interpretation.

Name that Emotion!

Both excitement and anxiety are what are called high-arousal states with similar neurological and physiological symptoms, such as increased heart-rate, restlessness, rapid breathing, difficulty concentrating, and nervousness or tension. Certainly context (the circumstances surrounding a particular high-arousal state) contributes to our interpretation of it. But some of us are more inclined in general to interpret this set of sensations as anxiety and some of us are more inclined to interpret it as excitement.

So the first thing to focus on in learning how to anticipate is your experience of this emotional state and your interpretation of it.

Central to both experience and interpretation is the concept of emotional granularity, which means putting feelings into words with a high degree of complexity. But as psychology professor Lisa Feldman-Barrett, who coined the term, says:

Emotional granularity isn’t just about having a rich vocabulary; it’s about experiencing the world, and yourself, more precisely. 

The more precisely we can identify and recognize our emotions, the faster and more accurate our brain will be in assessing circumstances to determine the most appropriate response. The payoff for the brain (System 1) is efficiency. The payoffs for us (System 2) are numerous, including more nuanced interpretations of our feeling states, greater ability to identify our desired outcomes, enhanced experience, and improved critical thinking and decision-making.

Your Mental (Conceptual) Model

How does the brain figure out what any collection of bodily sensations means? Most likely it does the same thing with internal sensations that it does with external sensations: it makes something up, i.e. it constructs. The brain is continually constructing our experience in—and of—the world based on our mental model, which determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and what it all means.

In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion. —Lisa Feldman Barrett

Although we operate under an assumption that emotions have some sort of independent existence and are “triggered” by events and experiences, this does not appear to be the case. The brain, which always goes for the path of least resistance, is merely making the easiest and fastest interpretation it can make so it can determine what action to take. We are not passive experiencers of our emotions even though we may believe ourselves to be. In actuality, the more often we interpret a set of bodily sensations as a particular emotion, the likelier we are to keep interpreting it that way.

Get Granular

I don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. In addition to her book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman-Barrett has a great article and TED talk on how to increase emotional granularity, which I highly recommend.

But as a quick example of the concept, here’s an excerpt from a 2018 article in lucidwaking that involves moving from the non-granular general feeling bad to the first distinction of angry/mad (as opposed to sad or anxious, for example), and then fine-tuning that feeling to a permutation of angry/mad, such as:

resistant … belligerent … offended … agitated …  indignant … resentful … irritated … furious … cranky … annoyed … perturbed … enraged … hostile … huffy … wrathful

You can also check out this feeling vocabulary chart to train yourself to detect more nuanced emotions.

The bottom line is that you aren’t entirely at the effect of your brain’s habitual interpretations of your emotional state. Sometimes apprehension is an apt emotional interpretation of a situation or set of circumstances. But if apprehension is always your interpretation of that set of sensations, you are letting your brain off easy, which may feel comforting but limits your options and your possibilities. (Bad brain!)

OK, one more post on anticipation and delayed gratification.View the previous two posts here and here.

More Is Definitely More

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In April, I abruptly decided to re-start my strength training program. It turned into a series of intentions with a nearly perfect reward structure that includes craving, anticipation, and more-ness, for lack of a better word. I’d like to say it was all on-purpose, but some of it was accidental.

My initial intention was to complete three sessions a week for three weeks, and to get a reward for doing precisely that. If I failed to get three sessions in during any of those weeks, my three week period would start over. I don’t watch much TV, but I recently discovered a show I liked that was cancelled but had 10 seasons on DVD. So I set the season one DVD as my reward. The whole thing was more an experiment than anything else.

Craving

It turned out I really wanted that first DVD! One day when I felt I might be better off not exercising, I considered the possibility of having to start the three weeks over, thus delaying the reward, and decided I wasn’t willing to take that chance. I ended up doing fine, which was informative and gratifying.

I also really like how I feel when I’m doing strength training, and I began to crave that sense of energy and wellbeing, which started paying dividends in other areas.

When I got the first reward, it was more enjoyable than I expected. That’s what’s known technically as a reward prediction error, and it releases even more dopamine.

Anticipation

I look forward to tracking my progress each session, to completing another series of exercises, and to getting closer to my reward. During my second three-week period, I saw that the season two DVD might not be available on the day I completed the 9th session. I could have ordered it then to be “safe,” and put it away until I’d earned it. I have enough willpower to resist. But I realized I would miss out on the anticipation—and that would have felt like a deprivation.

Right now, I’ve finished watching season one and am awaiting the arrival of season two, which I’m really anticipating due to the cliffhanger ending of the last episode!

When you enjoy anticipation, the waiting provides a cascade of feel-good neurochemicals. Of course, while I’m anticipating receipt of the second season, I’ve begun working toward the third.

More

Well, obviously I want all the seasons of this TV show. The best case scenario is that I complete 30 consecutive weeks of three sessions per week, so that’s what I’m aiming for. (Since I recently hit my 1,000th consecutive day of walking, this new intention seems more doable than it might have previously.) I doubt I will become habituated to this reward because there’s always something new going on in the show. Each season is different. Plus I don’t binge-watch the episodes but enjoy one or two at a time.

And there’s more involved in the strength training as I move up to heavier weights and more reps. There’s even more in being able to get (by which I mean righteously justify the purchase of) the next set of weights. And of course, there’s more in continuing to feel better and have more energy.

The Alternate Route

I could watch this show on Netflix, if I still had Netflix, whenever I want to. But that isn’t even remotely appealing to me. By connecting the show with something I want to do and having to wait to enjoy it until I’ve completed the actions, ordered the DVD, and collected it from my mailbox, it has a much bigger impact than it would if all I had to do was turn on the TV. [fyi, I can state this as a fact because I’ve had both experiences, and there’s no contest.] And since I am collecting the DVDs, I’ll not only be able to watch them in the future, I’ll also be reminded of what I achieved in order to earn them. That reinforces the sense of accomplishment and personal agency

Some Unexpected Outcomes

I said I don’t watch much TV, but since undertaking this experiment I don’t watch any TV at all.

The two physical activities I haven’t been able to engage in during the past 5+ years of multiple heart conditions are hiking and dancing. Last year, just before Covid restrictions were put into place, I set up a program to see if I could get myself into shape to hike. But hiking was not in the cards last year, and without that to look forward to, I let the program slide.

Dancing is something I used to do in between sets of strength training exercises, before and after classes, or just spontaneously whenever. Every time I tried it the past few years, I immediately got out of breath, so I stopped trying. But now…I can dance!  And it occurs to me that the dancing might be a better means of getting in shape for hiking than anything else.

I see that I’m getting different rewards for different aspects of this program, which makes it more interesting and compelling to my brain.

Motivation

I actually enjoy strength training, appreciate the increase in vitality and wellbeing I get from it, and understand and value the benefits (mental, physical, and emotional). There are a lot of good reasons to do it. But it’s anticipation of the rewards that increases the likelihood I’ll continue with this program instead of letting other things get in the way.

Dopamine is not just about reward anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behavior needed to gain that reward; dopamine “binds” the value of a reward to the resulting work. —Robert Sapolsky

And that makes all the difference in the world!

Coming up next: an investigation into learning how to anticipate.

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