Why We Lack Motivation to Work Hard
The Overstimulation of Dopamine and How it Hampers Our Productivity
Do you remember the times when you could sit and complete tedious school assignments or study for longer hours with little or no boredom? Or learnt to play a new sport, code or art that took you months to get better at?
If you look back at those learning processes, you will realize you actually found the process to be interesting or at least, not very uninteresting. You were somehow able to pull off things, no matter what. Though things demanded putting in much of your energy and time, you didn’t find it too boring to give in in the first two or three days.
Put simply, you were able to persevere putting in the work for days, either you liked it or not.
But do you think you can do the same for the things you want to learn or work on now? It might be a “Yes,” but most probably won’t be a “Big Yes” as you could in those days.
Why is that?? What happened to you? Practically speaking, your ability to focus and attention span should have only improved with age with more access to self-improvement resources online. Despite that, why in the world do you still struggle to discipline yourself and focus?
Well, dopamine overstimulation may be the reason for that.
Dopamine the Drug
Every time you scroll through the feeds on Instagram or hear a message notification sound on whatsapp, your dopmaine level spikes artificially. Since we use social media more often than usual, overtime we become addicted to the abnormal doses of dopamine than what our brain releases normally.
Because of this, our brain’s usual dopamine threshold level is increased, and therefore, making us crave for more and more. This is what we call as overstimulation of dopamine.
And what ultimately happens when we overstimulate our dopamine levels is that we will feel unmotivated to work on things that matter the most to us like working on our dreams, learning new things, planning things for your life, or disciplining yourself to practice something daily or whatever.
The lack of motivation to do these things is simply because of the fact that the amount of dopamine released when you work on these important things is many times less than when you scroll through social media or watch a cat video on YouTube.
So, to reprogram our brain to work on these rather boring but important things, we first have to habituate our brains to less dopamine levels.
The way we can do this is by reducing our time on social media. This can be achieved by simply allocating specific hours for social media in a day and turning off the notifications in your phone settings during the remaining hours.
Mind you, like any other addictions, you may struggle to control the use of social media for a few days or even weeks. But with time and a clear cause, you can easily bring things under your control.
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Actually Im following time limit nd notification off techniques. Difference i noted ✨
Congratulations on first post, Akash !! Wish I use ths article to push back social media addiction 🤞