AMA #4: Maintain Motivation, Improve REM Sleep, Set Goals, Manage Anxiety & More

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

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I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor

of neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

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Without further ado, let's get to answering your questions.

And as always, I will strive to be as accurate as possible,

as thorough as possible, and yet, as concise as possible.

Our first question is about motivation,

in particular, how to maintain motivation

over long periods of time.

This was the question asked by Martin Zokov.

He wrote, "I alternate between periods

of two different states that vary from a few weeks

to a couple of months.

I have extremely high motivation in one state,

where I can do multiple things--

side projects, making music, as well as my main things,

or really low-motivational states, where I can barely

do anything, and I only look for short term entertainment."

I'm guessing, short-term entertainment comes

in the form of video games, social media,

and just doing generally unproductive things,

as we all do from time to time.

He goes on to write, "What would be the best set of protocols

to normalize those extremes into a more

stable and consistent state?"

Well, first off, this is an excellent question.

I say that because it's a question that I hear a lot,

and I think that many people are interested in knowing how

motivated they ought to feel.

And I think a lot of people also feel a lot less

motivated than they would like.

Now, here the question was, specifically,

about how to not go from these extremes of days

or weeks of high motivation to days

or weeks of low motivation.

But before we do that, we need to take a step back

and acknowledge that, just as with anxiety, or happiness,

or sadness, we as human beings don't have an objective window

into how other people experience motivation.

In fact, most of the time, we don't even

realize how we experience motivation.

We just know whether or not we feel

a high barrier or a low barrier to leaning into work

and getting things done.

In fact, I have a good friend who

did many years in the special operations community,

and then went on to the finance community,

and then now works in health and wellness community.

He has a great mental image for all of us to adopt.

It's certainly one that I've adopted, which is--

for anything in our life, we can either

be back on our heels, flat footed, or forward

center of mass.

Back in our heels, meaning really struggling; flat footed,

meaning we're doing OK; or forward center of mass,

meaning that we feel as if we're really tackling things

and that we are in control of our environment

or at least to some degree.

So I place that imagery in your mind

because I'll return to it a little bit later

in the question when we get into some

of the underlying circuitry and tools.

In the meantime, I want to remind everybody what

the basis of motivation is.

There are many neurochemicals and neural circuits involved

in what we call motivation, but a central theme

of the neuroscience of motivation

is that the neural modulator dopamine is involved.

Now, dopamine does other things besides control motivation.

In fact, it controls light adaptation

in the retina, that is your eye.

It controls a number of different things

in terms of movement.

It controls all sorts of things, but it is strongly related

to the motivation pathways.

How do we know that?

Well, there are experiments on animals and humans, which

show that even in the absence of dopamine,

or in the presence of very low dopamine, I should say,

people and animals can still experience pleasure.

However, when dopamine levels are too low,

people's ability to pursue pleasure,

or their willingness to pursue pleasure, in particular,

their willingness to undergo effort to pursue pleasure

or any goal of any kind, not just pleasure,

any goal of any kind, is strongly

regulated by the levels of dopamine.

So if dopamine levels are too low,

people simply will not put in the effort

to obtain or reach a goal.

If dopamine levels are adequately high,

they will put in that effort.

And if dopamine levels go too high,

you actually see something that is pathologic,

which is that people consider every goal a reasonable goal.

This is often seen in the manic phase of a manic bipolar

person.

So for instance, somebody with manic bipolar

who is in a manic episode, dopamine levels

are very, very high, and they will think

every idea is a great idea.

And they will have tons of energy to do that,

so much so so that they're not sleeping.

So obviously, that's not what we want.

What we want, and what the question asker, Martin,

is asking about, is how to keep dopamine levels in a range that

allow us to lean into effort but that we don't expend

our ability to stay motivated.

And we can really trace that back

to a biochemical/neural circuit statement, which

is-- we really want to control our output of dopamine

and the baseline levels of dopamine

from which that output is taken.

In other words, we want to think about dopamine as a reservoir

or residing in a reservoir.

That reservoir can be depleted, so it's exhaustible,

it's depletable, but it's renewable as well.

And one of the best analogies that I've ever heard

was by a previous guest on the Huberman Lab podcast, Dr. Kyle

Gillett, who's a medical doctor, obesity specialist, expert

in hormones.

We did an episode on optimizing hormones

in males with Dr. Kyle Gillett.

You can find that at hubermanlab.com or anywhere

you can find podcasts.

Dr. Gillett offered an analogy of the baseline levels

of dopamine as a wave pool, and I really like this.

So if you think about this pool full of dopamine-- and here

we're just talking about the dopamine

that resides in the circuits of the brain that

control motivation.

But that pool of dopamine you could imagine

is just sitting there not doing much of anything

while you're asleep.

In fact, while you're sleeping, you're

replenishing those dopamine levels.

I'll tell you another tool in a moment

to replenish those dopamine levels.

But if you were to pursue a goal,

really, really go forward-center of mass

for many, many hours or many, many days, in some cases,

and pursue a goal or multiple goals

and you're really driven to do a ton, what you're effectively

doing is generating waves in that wave pool.

And if those waves are too big, well,

then the waves can't keep repeating themselves.

So think about the wave as the motivation

and the depth of the pool is the reservoir of dopamine.

And if those waves are too big, too much excitement, too

much motivation, too much center of mass

for a given period of time, then the water in this wave pool

sloshes out of the wave pool lowering the reservoir.

And then there are really three ways

that you can replenish that reservoir,

and you want to maintain or replenish that reservoir

if it's been depleted.

How do you do that?

Well, first of all, quality sleep.

So when I say quality, I mean where

you're getting enough slow wave sleep and rapid I

move in sleep.

So for some people, six hours, for some people, eight hours.

Some people might even need a little bit more

or a little bit less.

We have episodes-- the Perfect Your Sleep episode,

the Master Your Sleep episode.

We have a toolkit for sleep.

All available at zero cost at hubermanlab.com,

links et cetera.

So check those out for getting your sleep right.

But sleep is really when you replenish

that reservoir of dopamine.

So you cannot ignore sleep.

I'll come back to this in a moment.

The second science supported tool

that's really been shown to replenish

dopamine, in particular, dopamine within the pathways

that regulate motivation, is a practice I've talked about

before on the podcast called non-sleep deep rest,

sometimes called yoga nidra, although, yoga nidra is

a little bit different.

There are two studies out of Denmark

that have explored yoga nidra in the context of dopamine.

The first one simply involved having people do a yoga nidra

practice.

Again, this doesn't involve any movement,

but it involves people, potentially you,

doing anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, although there are now

data showing that as short as 10 minutes

of a non-sleep deep rest, a.k.a. yoga nidra protocol,

leads to dramatic, really dramatic increases

in striatal dopamine reserves.

So it essentially is replenishing

the dopamine reserve pool.

This is why I'm such a fan of using NSDR, a.k.a.

yoga nidra, at least once a day and especially under times

when you're engaging in a lot of high output.

And when I say, especially at times

when you're engaging in a lot of high output,

this is a mistake many people make.

They push, push, push, push, push.

They're in pursuit of a goal.

Then they hit that point where they're exhausted.

Then they start doing all the dopamine reserve

pool replenishing tools such as yoga nidra or NSDR.

The real key is to always tap off

that or refill that reservoir once a day

before it's completely depleted.

Now, this gets into some of the biochemistry of dopamine

and the relevant circuits, but it takes a lot longer

to restore the dopamine reservoir--

think of it still as a wave pool,

but that reservoir from a place of complete depletion

then it does of partial depletion.

So there's an asymmetry in the way this is done.

So it's not as if you drink a glass of water.

You fill the glass of water at a certain rate

and it fills up to a certain level,

and the rate is constant.

Think about it as once the level of dopamine in your reserve

is depleted past a certain point,

it takes a lot more effort, much more sleep, much more NSDR,

things of that sort to replenish that reservoir.

Now, oftentimes what people will do

when they start feeling less motivation

is they will start relying on things like Adderall,

Ritalin, some cases illegal substances that

can increase dopamine.

You know what those are.

Please don't ever lean in to those.

They are extremely dangerous.

They really are because of their ability

to potently release dopamine.

And guess what, deplete that reservoir even further.

We've talked about some supplements

on the podcast that can replenish dopamine,

L-tyrosine in particular.

Mucuna pruriens is actually 99% l-DOPA,

the precursor to dopamine.

I don't necessarily recommend Mucuna pruriens.

It tends to make people very dopaminergic--

drive, drive, drive, drive, motivated, and then crash.

Again, depleting that pool.

L-tyrosine is a little bit milder.

But I really encourage people to lean first

on the behavioral tools such as an NSDR.

And by the way, there's a NSDR script, totally zero cost,

that you can find by putting my name and NSDR into YouTube.

That one works quite well if you are looking for a short NSDR.

There are some other NSDRs.

You can simply look on the internet or YouTube

and just put NSDR and you'll find NSDR.

Or if you prefer to do the more classic yoga

nidra type approach, there are a lot of different yoga nidra

options to choose from on YouTube.

Many people think NSDR or yoga nidra are simply

meditation with a body scan.

That's not true.

Meditation is a focus exercise.

Most meditations are focus exercise.

NSDR restores energy through the dopamine system,

and newer data are starting to show

that it can actually recover lost sleep,

so if you're not sleeping enough.

But to return to NSDR, a.k.a. yoga nidra, as a practice,

yes, it's been shown in laboratory studies, in humans,

by the way, to restore dopamine levels.

There's another study, lesser known,

from that same group that was published in 2011,

which is entitled Dopaminergic stimulation enhances confidence

and accuracy in seeing rapidly presented words.

This was a cognitive task.

They explored yoga nedra, a.k.a.

NSDR, in the context of increasing striatal dopamine.

They already knew that it did that, so that's great.

They confirmed that result. But what they also found

is that doing NSDR could restore confidence in cognitive ability

and performance in these cognitive tasks.

So this is a really powerful, zero cost

tool for re-upping or replenishing

that dopamine reserve.

So this is something to do every day, especially when you're not

feeling depleted.

So the question, again, was about how

to make sure that you don't go through these cycles

of extreme motivation and then lesser motivation.

Well, get your sleep right.

I always say, 80% or more of the nights of your life,

hopefully the nights that it's not good, are for good reasons

that you're enjoying yourself.

But hey, life happens, so 100% of the time

it's just not reasonable to expect of yourself.

Do NSDR once a day for either 10 minutes.

If you have the time to do 20-30 minutes or an hour,

you will see even more positive effects.

It has been shown in these research studies

to replenish dopamine, levels of confidence,

cognitive ability, et cetera, and sense of motivation.

And I said there were three tools,

and the third tool that really can

allow you to keep the dopamine, a.k.a. motivation

circuitry, tuned up properly is to really start

paying attention to peaks in dopamine

and be very careful about layering

in too many things that can stimulate the dopamine system.

I talked about this quite a bit in the episode

that we did on ADHD and building and maintaining focus.

There are many things out there nowadays

that will deplete the dopamine system.

For instance-- and by the way, none of what I'm about to list

is necessarily bad.

I actually used some of these things.

For instance, caffeine will increase dopamine receptors

that will allow whatever dopamine

is available to be more potent.

OK, so caffeine is great for some people,

less good for people with anxiety.

Don't drink it too late in the day

because it will interfere with your sleep,

and so on and so forth.

But many people will combine caffeine with music

that they particularly like.

Music's great.

Music can stimulate dopamine release, we know this.

It can enhance motivation, especially

if is the kind of music that really puts you

in the groove for the particular type of work

you're going to do.

For me, I like to listen to either loud fast music or Glenn

Gould classical piano, so one or the other.

I know what's right for me for a given time.

You'll know what's right for you for a given

time and your preferences.

But what will happen is people will start consuming caffeine

at higher and higher levels.

Again, caffeine isn't necessarily bad,

but they'll start doing that.

And they'll start layering it in, or stacking,

very potent music, potent for them,

plus things like L-tyrosine.

Again, none of these things are terrible on their own.

In fact, they can be very beneficial.

Sometimes they'll start taking Mucuna pruriens.

Sometimes they'll start relying on things

like Adderall, Ritalin.

And pretty soon what's happening is

they're getting these big waves in that dopamine wave pool,

big peaks.

And within a few days or maybe even within a few hours,

they're depleted and they're at that low.

And then, as Dr. Anna Lembke, who

is a guest on the podcast, talked about in terms

of addiction but also in her wonderful book Dopamine

Nation, what happens is after those big peaks in dopamine,

the reservoir, the baseline in dopamine,

drops below its initial level.

So it's as if the reservoir got deeper, and it's emptier,

and it takes much, much longer to fill.

So to be quite specific, what I'm recommending

is get your sleep right.

Ideally, every night of your life, but for as

many nights of your life as possible.

That's clearly replenishing dopamine and sense

of motivation.

Do all the things associated with that-- morning, sunlight,

lack of artificial light at certain hours

of the night, et cetera.

All of that's in the Toolkit for Sleep and other episodes

I mentioned before.

Have a practice that is research supported

to replenish dopamine, and incorporate

that practice any time of day.

Again, NSDR can be done morning, afternoon, or evening,

or middle of the night if you wake up

and you need to get back to sleep,

it can be very beneficial for that.

But do it as a consistent practice

so that dopamine reservoir remains tapped off.

And as a third point, please be wary of, or at least aware of,

these peaks in dopamine and the fact

that layering in a lot of things that stimulate dopamine, well,

that can be wonderful for your wedding, birth of a new child,

going to a sports event with a bunch of friends,

celebrating a big anniversary.

Yes, please do celebrate and enjoy

the wonderful events of life, but please also understand

and expect there will be a lull, a sort of postpartum low,

maybe not full blown depression, that

follows that unless you incorporate

some tools and practices to replenish that dopamine.

Does that mean you should never combine caffeine, L-tyrosine,

music, and a workout, and time with friends?

No, absolutely not.

But don't expect to do that, and then

go do an intense bout of work, and then get up

the next morning and do it all over again for more

than a few days before you find yourself pretty depleted.

So rather than give you a specific schedule

of do seven days of this and four days of this, what

I encourage you to do is, for at least five days a week-- maybe

give yourself some time off on the weekends, maybe not.

But for at least five days a week,

get into a consistent routine that

is, I should say, neurobiologically consistent as

well with how the dopamine, a.k.a.

circuits that control motivation, work.

And I assure you that you will find yourself

in a more regular groove of focus, and attention,

and alertness, and motivation when you need to.

And provided you're doing all the things

I described, and hopefully paying attention

to other things like nutrition and social connection too,

of course, you'll find a much more even pattern of motivation

over time.

One last thing before I conclude the answer to this question.

When I was in graduate school, I got some wonderful advice

from an excellent neurologist.

His name is Robert Knight.

He used to be at University of California, Berkeley.

I think he's retired now but is still

active in the scientific community.

And I asked him what he was doing that weekend.

I don't know why this came up.

And he said, oh, I'm going fishing.

I like mindless recreation.

I said, that's great.

You know, fishing is fun.

I'm not particularly into fishing myself,

but I've done it a few times and I enjoy it.

And he said, the most important thing for a science or medicine

career or any demanding career?

I said, what?

I was all ears, super hungry to get in the mix

and do research and publish papers.

And he said, figure out how many hours a day you

can do real work consistently.

That means five days a week, for some people six or seven,

but five days a week I think for most people

is going to be a bit healthier overall for your social life

and family, et cetera.

And he said, figure that out, and know

that that number is what you should apply over, and over,

and over again, but update that number about every four or five

years.

And I said, OK, so does that mean that over time I'm working

more and more or less and less?

And he said, ah, here's the deal-- as you get better

at your profession, you will find

that you can do more potent work, more directed work,

in a shorter amount of time, but that

does not mean that you can continue

to expand the amount of time that you're doing focused work.

In fact, the opposite.

So this follows a sort of general principle

that's also present in resistance training,

weightlifting, right?

The analogy there is that people always

imagine that as you get better and better at resistance

training that you should do more and more volume,

just keep adding volume.

And there's some evidence to support that.

More volume for hypertrophy as opposed to less, et cetera.

We've done episodes on this.

However, there's a different school of thought

that works exceedingly well, and it

runs in the exact opposite direction,

which is as you get better at controlling muscular

contractions--

or let's say for in an endurance sport,

as you get better at regulating your stride, and breathing,

and all those things, you actually

can do more "adaptation" stimulating damage

during a given training session.

So you want to train less not more over time

because beginners don't actually have the ability

to get much done in a lot of time or a short period of time,

whereas, experts can come in there and really nail it.

So I think that advice that Robert Knight was really key,

and it's something that I've followed throughout my career.

So at one period of my life, I won't mention the hours

that I worked in graduate school,

they were pretty insane to be honest.

I had family members get a little concerned.

I actually lived in the laboratory

even as a junior professor.

I don't suggest people do that by the way,

but I enjoyed it at the time.

And the key thing is that you figure out

what you can do consistently and still maintain mental health

and physical health.

That's key as well.

And do that, and then, every couple of years or so,

update that, typically, by reducing

the total amount of time that you're

doing that high-potency work.

I think that, combined with the other tools

that I described before for generating

ongoing dopaminergic circuits, keeping that reservoir full,

ought to give you consistent motivation.

Again, it's an art, and a practice, and a science,

so don't expect to get it perfect the first time around.

But I wish you all luck, and I'm certain that these tools work.

Thank you for joining for the beginning of this

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