Have you ever said to yourself, “I won’t start writing that essay until I can get it absolutely perfect?” or “I won’t start that project until my desk and room are spotless”.
Welcome to the world (and trap) of perfectionism.
I come from a family of perfectionists. So I have first-hand real world experience of the debilitating and crippling effects of perfectionism.
When you hold yourself to an incredibly high standard, it’s really hard to get anything done. It’s no surprise that perfectionists start dozens of projects but don’t quite manage to finish any of them. If perfectionists finish a project, they do so in most painfully drawn out way.
Psychologist Dr Sharon Melnick says perfectionists live in the hope that one day they will be a success. One day they are ‘gunna’ do it. And they hang onto this hope instead of taking the first step.
Why don’t perfectionists take the first step? What’s with that?
The reason is they’re scared. They’re scared that they may not have what it takes or they won’t be able to handle the criticism. So they protect themselves from criticism by never putting anything out there.
Instead, they make excuses for why they can’t get started. The conditions aren’t quite right. Plus the bed needs to be made. The dog needs to be fed. They’ll start when they’ve ticked those things off the list and they feel ready. Sound familiar?
Trying to do things perfectly is just plain crazy. Writer Anne Lamott says perfectionism “will keep you cramped and insane your whole life”. Do you really want to live like that?
Your work will never be perfect. My PhD supervisor’s 8-year-old daughter can tell you that.
On the day I handed in my PhD thesis, I mumbled something to my supervisor and her daughter about my PhD not being perfect. My supervisor’s daughter looked at me with this serious look on her face and said:
“Jane, nothing can ever be perfect!”
I was shocked. Such wisdom from an 8-year-old child!
I shot back, “How did you learn that Elizabeth?”
She shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “Come on Jane, isn’t it obvious?”.
Indeed, writing coach and author Catherine Deveny says in her book ‘Use your words’:
“The best thing you can hope for is that it gets finished. It will never be perfect. Perfect is the enemy of good. Embrace your inner completionist. Tell your inner perfectionist to go sort the cutlery drawer. But not until you’ve completed your writing!”
It feels good to be a ‘completionist’. It feels great to get stuff done.
Over the last few years, I’ve learnt strategies to help me shift from being a perfectionist to ‘completionist’. Below are a few strategies that you may find useful too.
Tell the little voices to go away
Most things are usually a lot easier to do than we think they will be.
I find the toughest bit of doing any work is usually the getting started part and having to deal with the negative voices in my head.
You know the voices I’m talking about. The little voice that says, “You’re work is rubbish”, “You’ll never be able to do this”, “This isn’t up to scratch” or “You’re going to fail”.
Unfortunately, these voices never go away. But you can learn to manage them.
I visualise the negative thoughts as being a pesky little monkey on my back. Whenever the monkey of self-doubt strikes, I strike back. I usually say something along the lines of:
“Go away you feral monkey! You can come back once I’ve finished writing this paragraph. Now go eat some peanuts. I have work to do here!”.
I know it sounds nuts, but it works. Try it out for yourself.
Exercise to clear out the mental cobwebs
Research shows that exercise can help you think more clearly, sharper, and boost your creative outputs. When I exercise it’s like all the toxic gunk in my brain is being washed out and replaced with feel good chemicals. Indeed, research shows this is what happens.
I’ve reached the point in my life where I need to exercise before I can work on anything substantial. But is this just another way to procrastinate?
I don’t think so. Exercise plays a critical role in mentally preparing you to pump out your best work. As Deveny states:
“..it [exercise] gives you access to parts of your brain you can’t get to if you are sluggish. Chess players exercise for the same reason. To get the wriggles out, think clearly and remove the sludge off the top. To get into the ‘good rooms’ in their brain”.
When I exercise, I also find that I’m in a better position to tell those little negative voices where to go (“Get out of here monkey! I’m busy!”).
Focus on one project at a time and take it to completion
Do you feel like you are spinning your wheels and not getting anywhere?
This is what can happen when you take on 10 different projects all at once.
Psychologist Sharon Melnick recommends you focus your time and energy on just one project and take it to the finish line.
She uses the analogy of rugby players taking the ball all the way over the line. She encourages us to imagine taking the next step on that project, then the next step and the next..until touch down!
Completing one project gives you the confidence to take on the next project.
Eat the frog first thing
Brian Tracy wrote a bestselling book called ‘Eat that frog’. The idea behind the book is simple: if you have to eat a frog every day of your life and it’s the worst part of your day, you should eat the frog first thing.
In short, start your day by tackling the hardest thing you need to do.
If you do manage to eat the frog, you’ll feel relieved and awesome for the rest of the day.
Find your ‘completionist’ mantra
Whenever I hit struggle town, I need words of wisdom. I have a little deck of palm cards with quotes I’ve scribbled down that I flip through when I am doubting myself or in a funk.
When I was working on my PhD, I had a saying (you could call it a mantra) that I would tell myself to keep me going. It was this: “Just keep chipping away”.
If I wasn’t telling myself to chip away, I would say “Done is better than perfect” or “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly”.
You want to find your ‘anti-perfectionism’ quotes. Quotes that resonate with you. And then write those quotes out on palm cards and carry them around with you. When your inner perfectionist starts running the show, grab your cards and read those quotes out loud.
Life has a use-by date: Create a sense of urgency
Towards the end of my thesis, I travelled overseas to Japan to say goodbye to a friend who was dying of cancer. She was only 45. It was devastating because I thought she would live for a lot longer.
Sitting by her side in the hospital had a profound impact on me. It made me realise that you just don’t know when your time is up. You could live until 100. Or you could be dead in a year’s time. So what do you want your life to be about? What do you really want to do? I couldn’t help but think about these questions.
I knew I wanted to finish my PhD. So when I arrived back in Australia I worked on it with a sense of urgency to get it done.
I knew I could spend the rest of my life tweaking my thesis but I didn’t want to do that. I just wanted to get it done.
Writer Catherine Deveny suggests that you should write (or work) “like you are on fire and you’ll be dead this time next week”.
Don’t be afraid to make a mess and make mistakes
When you first start working on an essay whatever you write isn’t going to be great. The first draft of my thesis was a complete shambles.
But that’s just how the process goes. Your work starts off being not so crash hot and gradually, it gets better.
I’ve learnt to enjoy making a mess with my early drafts and not compare my early drafts with other people’s finished products.
Catherine Deveny talks about the futility of comparing your ‘behind the scenes’ work with someone else’s ‘final cut’. She says:
“Imagine you turned up early to my place for a dinner party – say, at 4pm. There would be a mountain of washing on the couch (with the dog sleeping in the middle of it), the kitchen surfaces would be covered in dirty plates, half-eaten food and half-unpacked shopping bags. There’d be three dishes in preparation on the stove, and the only music would be the sound of the electric mixer droning at full bore. You’d think, ‘This is the worst dinner party I’ve ever been to. And what are you wearing, Dev? Are they jeggings? Crocs? A nightie?’ Because it’s not done yet! This is not the dinner party. This is the getting-ready-for-the-dinner-party”
I find when you think this way (“It’s not done yet, I’m still working on it”) it gives you permission to make a mess in the kitchen. You know that later on you’ll get round to tidying things up and making everything look pretty.
To sum up (and get this blog post done!)
I could keep perfecting this blog post for days but I’m not going to do that. Done is better than perfect, right?
What project would you like to take over the line and score a ‘touch down’ on? Could you apply some of the strategies mentioned above to help you do this? Do you have any strategies that I haven’t mentioned above that help you be a ‘completionist’? If so, I’d love to hear what works for you.
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I understand this cringe factor.
In high school, goal setting felt forced. I’d think, “Why are they making me do this?” and “What’s the point?”.
However, once I got to university, I realised that goals are a helpful life strategy.
In this article, I want to share my perspective on goal setting and how this strategy has helped me to get things done.
I’m going to tell you:
• What goals are
• Why you’d want to have them
• How to stick at them
• Why you need to protect your goals from destructive outside forces
Let’s go!
Goals are things you want to do. Perhaps you want to write a book, jog around the block every morning, start a podcast, get a part-time job to save money or learn to play an instrument. These are goals.
• Goals give your life a sense of purpose
• Goals give your life meaning and a reason to get out of bed
• Goals help to focus your mind on what you want/need to do
• Goals help you to create a better, less boring life
As Giovanni Dienstmann explains in his book Mindful Self Discipline:
“We all need to aspire to something and feel that we are going somewhere. Otherwise, there is a sense of boredom in life. Our daily routine feels stale and unengaging. As a result, we seek relief through bad habits, and seek engagement through mindless entertainment, news, social media, games, etc.”
Have you ever set a goal, you felt excited, but then that excitement quickly dissipated, and you gave up on the goal?
Whenever this happens, it’s easy to think, “Goal setting doesn’t work!”.
However, the problem isn’t with goal setting as a strategy.
The problem is that motivation is completely unreliable (it comes and goes). Plus, you were probably never taught how to achieve your goals in the first place.
In other words, you were set up to fail.
There’s a lot of pretty average advice out there about goal setting. I’ve heard dozens of goal setting pep talks, and many can be summed up like this:
“Set a goal, make it SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), break it down, blah, blah, blah.”
Most students tune out when they hear these pep talks. You can feel the energy being sucked out of the room.
This advice doesn’t work for most people. And it’s incomplete.
I’ve found that the following simple ideas can make a big difference in helping you move from inaction to action when it comes to pursuing your goals:
Achieving big long-term goals requires consistently engaging in small behaviours over time. You need to chip away and develop habits to get there.
For instance, after taking a hiatus from writing books (because I felt stuck and overwhelmed by the idea), I finally started writing down my ideas.
By starting small.
I told myself all I had to do was open the Word document and write one sentence. And the sentence didn’t even have to be good! But I had to do this every single day.
If I wanted to write more than one sentence, I could. But one sentence was my absolute minimum. Most days, I wrote at least a paragraph. But when I didn’t feel great, I would show up and write one sentence.
Nine months later, I had a draft manuscript ready to send to my editor.
Many different behaviours can help you achieve your goal. The first step is to brainstorm all the possible behaviours that can help you move closer to it.
One way to do this is with BJ Fogg’s tool, Swarm of Behaviors (also known as Swarm of Bs).
Here’s what you do:
You write your goal/aspiration/outcome (whatever you want to achieve) in the middle of a sheet of paper. Then, you spend a few minutes listing all the behaviours that will help you achieve it.
Dr Fogg stresses:
“You are not making any decisions or commitments in this step. You are exploring your options. The more behaviors you list, the better.”
When I was brainstorming behaviours that could help me to write my next book, I came up with the following list:
1. Use an Internet blocker app and block myself from distracting websites
2. Carry a notepad and pen with me everywhere I go (to capture ideas)
3. Write one sentence every morning
4. Speak my ideas into a voice recorder when I go for a walk
5. Use the Write or Die app
6. Manage my inner critic (when it strikes, say to myself, “It can’t be all bad!”)
7. Give myself a pep talk each day (e.g., “Done is better than perfect!”)
8. Do Julia Cameron’s morning page activity (i.e., free writing)
9. Attend a writing retreat
10. Sign up for the ‘Turbocharge your writing’ course
11. Pick up a mind map, select an idea and use it as a writing prompt
Once you’ve finished brainstorming potential behaviours, go through your list and select just a few behaviours to get the ball rolling (I selected #1, #3, and #6).
It’s well worth spending a couple of minutes making each of these behaviours ‘crispy’ (i.e., specific). For instance, for Behaviour #1, I decided which websites I would block myself from using and at what times.
When we work towards big life goals, the process is never neat or linear. Showing up and doing whatever you need to do (even just writing one sentence) can feel like a daily grind. Mild discomfort usually infuses the whole process.
Accept that’s how it is. It will sometimes feel like a hard slog, but the rewards are worth it.
The long-term rewards of working on your goals far outweigh the superficial rewards of scrolling through social media, watching Netflix, etc.
Even if you don’t achieve what you initially set out to do, chances are you’ll still be better off than you were before. Why? Because you’ll have learnt a bunch of new skills and life lessons.
Be careful who you share your goals with. Some people delight in stamping all over your goals and crushing your hopes and dreams.
For example, when I was 10 years old, I started attending drama classes outside of school. These classes were a lot of fun and quickly became the highlight of my week.
I remember thinking, “When I grow up, I want to run a drama academy to help boost kids’ confidence”.
I felt inspired by this idea. Drama had helped me come out of my shell and I wanted this for other kids who were lacking confidence. So, I decided to be brave and share my plans with my primary school teacher at the time.
I was expecting Mr D to say, “Good for you, Jane!”. But instead, he said with a smirk, “How do you think you’re going to do that?”
And then he started grilling me with questions . . .
“Where will you get the money from to set this up?”
“Who is going to come to your classes?”
“Where do you plan on running these classes?”
On and on Mr D went.
Ugh. “Just stop Mr D!” I wanted to scream.
I was left feeling crushed.
So, take it from me: Be careful who you share your goals with. Because some people get a kick out of squashing stuff (e.g., your dreams).
But nowadays, there’s a more powerful (and often overlooked) force that can mess with your goals: social media
If you’re constantly checking social media and looking at what other people are doing, that’s time and energy you could have spent working towards your goals. But that’s only part of the story . . .
Social media exposes you to a hodgepodge of content: the best bits of people’s lives, advertising, conspiracy theories, and outrage-inducing influencers. All this noise messes with your goals by subtly shifting and changing your worldview, beliefs, attitudes, and what you view as important in life.
In his brilliant book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, ex-Google strategist and now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams shares his struggles with this. He states:
“. . . I felt that the attention-grabby techniques of technology design were playing a nontrivial role. I began to realise that my technologies were enabling habits in my life that led my actions over time to diverge from the identity and values by which I wanted to live. It wasn’t just that my life’s GPS was guiding me into the occasional wrong turn, but rather that it had programmed me a new destination in a far-off place that it did not behoove me to visit. It was a place that valued short-term over long-term rewards, simple over complex pleasures.”
He adds:
“…I found myself spending more and more time trying to come up with clever things to say in my social posts, not because I felt they were things worth saying but because I had come to value these attentional signals for their own sake. Social interaction had become a numbers game for me, and I was focused on “winning” – even though I had no idea what winning looked like. I just knew that the more of these rewarding little social validations I got, the more of them I wanted. I was hooked.
. . . I had lost the higher view of who I really was, or why I wanted to communicate with all these people in the first place.”
When you go on social media, you need to realise that there are thousands of highly intelligent people on the other side of the screen and it’s their job to figure out how to capture and exploit your attention.
In short, the values and goals of these big tech companies are not aligned with your values and goals. Facebook’s first research scientist Jeff Hammerbacher summed it up nicely when he said:
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads . . . and it sucks.”
Take a moment to think of the people who you admire. How would you feel if you saw them spending vast amounts of time distracted and obsessed with social media?
I’ll leave you with this powerful quote from author Adam Gnade:
“Would you respect them [your biggest hero] as much if you saw them hunched over their phone all day like a boring zombie? No, you want them out there in the world doing heroic things, writing that great novel/song/whatever, saving the planet, standing up for the disenfranchised, or whatever else it was that made you love them in the first place. Let’s try to be as good as our heroes.”
Whatever you want in life, work out what you need to do to get there (i.e., the concrete behaviours), and then roll up your sleeves and get started.
This means you need to prepare yourself mentally and physically for them.
You can work so hard to memorise large quantities of information for an exam, but if you’re not mentally and physically prepared, all that hard work can sadly go to waste.
When it comes time to take your exams, you have to relate to yourself as a professional athlete. Leading up to the day of the big performance (i.e. the exam), you need to eat nutritious food, be in the right frame of mind, manage your nerves, and allow your body to rest. These simple things can make all the difference to your exam performance.
You may be thinking “But isn’t this just common sense?”
It is! But creating healthy habits takes time and practice.
It’s one thing to intellectually know you should be eating well but it’s another thing altogether to incorporate healthy meals and snacks into your lifestyle.
I see a lot of students drinking energy drinks, getting very little sleep, and eating highly processed foods in the days leading up to exams. I have to admit, there was a time when I engaged in these behaviours too. I can tell you from personal experience, this is a recipe for mediocre grades and a miserable existence.
Here are my top 10 tips to prevent burnout and boost exam performance:
Sleep is critical to the learning process, exam performance, and wellbeing. Yet it’s usually the first thing students sacrifice to get more study done.
If you miss two hours of sleep each night for a week, the cognitive effects are as bad as going without sleep for two days straight!
Studies have also found that if you stay awake for 18 hours straight that’s like having a blood alcohol level of 0.05. In other words, it’s like being legally drunk. Your ability to focus, think, and learn will be seriously impaired.
You can’t adapt to getting less sleep. As adolescents, you need about 9-10 hours of sleep per night to be as alert as possible when you wake up.
If that feels unachievable, try to just get an extra 15 minutes of sleep tonight. Gradually increase this each night until you reach your target.
Often students stop exercising when they start preparing for exams. They think “I don’t have time to exercise!”. It’s as if they think they must spend every moment studying. Don’t fall into this trap.
Movement is your friend when it comes to studying for exams.
Research shows engaging in regular physical movement will help you to study more effectively. Firstly, it’s a great way to relieve stress and release feel good chemicals. Secondly, it gets the blood flowing more efficiently to your brain, which can give you a cognitive boost.
One study found students who engaged in 5 minute movement breaks every 17 minutes during a lecture retained more information and could focus better.
Every time you engage in a short movement break, you’re enhancing your study sessions.
Research has found that students who skip breakfast experience a decrease in cognitive performance and alertness compared to students who eat breakfast.
Eating a nutritious breakfast will give you a cognitive boost before an exam. It will also help you to feel fuller for longer, stabilise your mood, and give you plenty of energy to get through the exam.
Here are some healthy breakfast ideas:
Muesli or porridge with nuts and fresh fruit (e.g., berries) Wholemeal toast with a variety of toppings (e.g., baked beans, tomatoes, and avocado) and a piece of fruit A healthy homemade smoothie (click here for my brain boosting smoothie recipe)
Your brain requires adequate hydration to function properly. Drinking water ensures that your brain receives the necessary fluids to perform tasks efficiently, such as retaining information and problem-solving.
Take regular sips of water as you study. It’s a good idea to have a glass of water or a reusable drink bottle within arms reach.
You may even want to create a tiny habit to remind yourself to engage in this simple behaviour (e.g., “After I finish answering a practice exam question, I will take a sip of water”).
Many years ago, I started thinking that my teachers and lecturers were out to get me. I thought they would mark me down wherever they got the chance. As a result of this distorted thinking, I became too scared to write anything in one of my first tests at law school. After receiving a terrible grade (5%), my brother said to me:
“Remember sis, your teachers want you to do well. They will try to give you marks wherever they can. It’s in their best interest to do so.”
Don’t worry about writing a perfect answer. If you’re unsure, be brave and still write something down. Even if it’s just a few dot points, it’s better than nothing. You may not get any marks for it, but your teachers won’t take marks off.
Just remember, most of the time your teachers are on your side and they want you to succeed. When you do well, it makes them look good.
Chances are there will always be something that you could have studied more thoroughly come the day of your exam. But on the morning of an exam, you can’t do much about that, so there’s no point worrying. Worrying will just deplete your finite energy, which you need to conserve for the exam.
Instead of worrying, try saying this to yourself before each exam:
“I now know so much more than I did before. I’ll be able to answer many questions in this exam.”
Telling yourself this positive micro-thought will allow you to enter the exam in a calm and confident frame of mind.
It’s normal to feel a bit nervous before an exam. But there are certain things and people that can push your anxiety levels into dangerous territory and impair your exam performance.
For example, coffee and energy drinks will skyrocket your stress levels. Similarly, hanging out with people who have a lot of nervous energy and are venting about the exam (“I’m going to fail!” and “I hardly studied!”) are going to leave you feeling distracted and a little jangled.
Before the exam, do your best to isolate yourself from these people. If you’re worried about offending someone who is venting to you, you could say “I’m sorry but I really need to do some last minute cramming”. Then proceed to pull out your notes and pretend to read them.
How many times have you stayed back after an exam to talk to your friends about what you put for each question? Have you ever felt terrible after doing this?
It can be reassuring to know that you wrote the same answer as your friends. But if you find out that you wrote something completely different, you may start to second guess yourself. If you have another four or five exams to go, this may throw you off your game.
This is why I don’t recommend engaging in a postmortem of the exam until you get your results/exam paper back.
When you walk out of the exam room, tell yourself:
“That exam is over. There’s nothing I can do to change how I went. It’s time to move on!”.
You could imagine yourself locking the exam in a box and throwing it off a cliff or rolling it up and stuffing it in a bottle and throwing it out to sea. The point is you need to mentally disconnect from that exam and focus on studying for the next one.
If you come across a question that you’re not sure how to answer, stop for a moment and take a few deep breaths (in for the count of 4 and out for the count of 4).
A simple breath activity you can try is the Box Breathing Technique. This involves imagining yourself breathing along the sides of a box (breathing in for the count of four on one side, out for the count of four on the next side, etc). Repeat this 2-3 times. Then take a look at the question again.
If you are still unsure how to answer the question, move on to another question.
The worst thing you can do is panic (remember, stress impairs your ability to think and recall information).
By engaging in Box Breathing, you can help yourself to remain in a calm and stable state.
Many of us are familiar with writer’s cramp. This can be caused by gripping onto your pen too tightly. Try loosening your grip a little.
Alternatively, experiment with a range of different pens. Some biros require you to press down hard on the page to make a mark, but not gel pens. The ink just flows onto the page!
The reality is, even with a good gel pen, your elbow will start to hurt at some point if you’re taking a 3 hour exam. When it does start to hurt, have a rest for a few seconds (yes, you have time to do this). Stretch your arm out. Shake it a little.
Treat each exam like a mountain hike rather than a 100 metre sprint. Resting for a few moments here and there will be time well spent and will enhance your overall performance.
These simple strategies can help to elevate your exam performance. My advice is to start small. Even if your exams are several weeks away, select one or two of these ideas and start testing them out today. At first, the strategies will require a bit of mental effort. But like anything in life, if you persevere they’ll become second nature to you and they’ll just be things you do without even thinking.
Want to learn more exam strategies? Click here to download a free copy of 70 ways to ace your exams.
About 10 years ago I met the beloved Australian celebrity Costa Georgiardis from the television show Gardening Australia.
I was blown away by Costa’s energy and enthusiasm.
He was exactly like he appeared on TV. But he wasn’t hamming it up for the camera. Costa was the real deal.
He was high on life.
I’ve heard that people often ask Costa “Why are you so energetic?”, “Why are you so up?”, and “Don’t you get tired?”
Some people feel tired just being around Costa (check out this video to get a sense of Costa’s energy).
What’s the difference between motivated and energised people and less motivated people who struggle to get off the couch?
According to Stanford professor Dr Andrew Huberman the difference has everything to do with dopamine.
In this blog post, I want to explore how dopamine works and how you can adjust your dopamine levels to experience more motivation, focus, and energy in a safe and healthy way. Let’s go!
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is involved in reward processing. Your brain releases this molecule whenever it anticipates a reward.
In a healthy brain and environment, dopamine plays an important role in keeping you motivated, focused, and on track with your goals.
Unfortunately, this natural feedback system can be hijacked by big tech companies and fast food corporations.
Tonic dopamine is your baseline level of dopamine that circulates through your system. People who are generally enthusiastic and motivated have a high baseline dopamine. But if you struggle with motivation and often feel lethargic, chances are you have a low baseline dopamine.
But then there’s phasic dopamine. This is where you experience peaks in dopamine above your baseline level. These peaks occur as a result of engaging in certain behaviours and/or consuming certain substances.
For example, social media companies train users to seek out quick, easy, and frequent hits of dopamine. Fast food companies engineer foods that have just the right amount of salt, fat and/or sugar to release big spikes in dopamine. This make you want to eat more of the food product and keep going back for more.
It’s important to understand that these peaks in dopamine don’t last.
After engaging in a dopamine-rich activity, you will experience an inevitable drop in dopamine. And this drop will be below your baseline level.
It should come as no surprise that when you’re in a dopamine deficit state you don’t feel very good. You experience pain and discomfort.
According to Psychiatrist Dr Anna Lembke this is our brain’s way of trying to bring everything back into balance and establish homeostasis.
In the book Dopamine Nation Dr Lembke talks about how pleasure and pain are experienced in overlapping regions of the brain. She states:
“Pleasure and pain work like a balance”.
If you tip to the side of pleasure or pain, self regulatory mechanisms kick in to bring everything back into balance.
But you never want to tip to one side for too long. Dr Lembke states:
“With repeated exposure to the same or similar pleasure stimulus, the initial deviation to the side of pleasure gets weaker and shorter and the after-response to the side of pain gets stronger and longer, a process scientists call neuroadaptation . . . we need more of the drug of choice to get the same effect.”
In other words, consuming more of a dopamine-rich substance or behaviour is bad for your brain. It will leave you in a dopamine-deficit-state.
And when you’re in this state, it’s much harder to do your school work.
There are a number of simple things you can do to regenerate your dopamine receptors and increase your baseline dopamine. I’ve listed several strategies below.
Before you start your work or study, you want to avoid engaging in activities that will cause spikes in dopamine. If you watch TikTok videos or play video games before sitting down to do your homework, this is going to make your work feel a lot more painful and boring.
Here’s why . . .
Dr Huberman states that how motivated you feel to do a task depends on your current dopamine levels and what previous peaks in dopamine you have experienced. This is important to understand because with this knowledge, you can create routines and habits to conserve your dopamine and motivation for pursuing your goals.
With this in mind, I’ve recently simplified my morning routine in the following ways:
• I don’t start the day by looking at my phone or computer
• I exercise without listening to music
• I have a healthy breakfast of overnight oats and berries rather than a super sweet smoothie
• I have a cold shower (more on why I do this below)
Whilst this may sound boring, it’s had a dramatic impact on how easy it is for me to get stuck into doing my work.
The term ‘Dopamine Detox’ is a little misleading since it’s technically not possible to detox from dopamine. Nevertheless, the idea is a good one.
When you engage in a dopamine detox, you’re taking a break from engaging in dopamine-rich activities (e.g., consuming junk food, going on social media, and watching Netflix). This will give your dopamine receptors a chance to regenerate.
After taking a dopamine detox, you’ll probably notice that simple things like eating basic wholefoods or going for a walk are much more pleasurable. As Dr Huberman points out:
“Our perception for dopamine is heightened when our dopamine receptors haven’t seen much dopamine lately.”
Research shows that cold water therapy (i.e., being submerged in cold water) can increase your dopamine by 250% above your baseline level.
Let’s put that in context:
Chocolate increases dopamine by 150% above baseline
Alcohol increases dopamine by 200% above baseline
Nicotine increases dopamine by 225% above baseline
Cocaine increases dopamine by 350% above baseline
Amphetamines increases dopamine by 1100%
You need to remember that these peaks in dopamine are followed by a sudden crash below your baseline level. Let’s not overlook the fact that chronic substance abuse causes brain damage and can be fatal.
Unlike other addictive substances, cold showers create peaks in dopamine that can last for several hours. You also don’t experience the subsequent dramatic crash below your baseline level.
Word of warning: Before you turn on the cold shower tap or start running an ice-bath, it’s important to be aware that people can go into shock when plunging themselves into cold water. Please be careful!
If cold showers aren’t really your thing, try increasing your dopamine with exercise. Exercise has been found to increase dopamine by 130% above your baseline level.
In the book Move The Body, Heal The Mind, neuroscientist Dr Jennifer Heisz says:
“Exercise increases dopamine and repopulates dopamine receptors to help the brain heal faster during recovery [from addiction]. Although all forms of exercise can do this, runner’s high may do it best.”
Look for ways to make it harder to engage in the dopamine-rich activities. Create barriers and/or friction points to stop you from mindlessly seeking quick shots of dopamine.
For example, I recently noticed I had a problem with compulsively checking my phone. Whenever I felt bored or lonely, I’d check my phone to see if I’d received any messages. I didn’t like the fact I was doing this but I found it hard to stop. What could I do?
I could use a dumb phone.
I found a ‘seniors’ flip phone that allowed me to do basic things like make calls and send texts. But sending texts is not easy! I have to type in each letter and change from upper to lower case. It really puts you off wanting to text your friends.
Since switching to a dumb phone, the number of times I touch my phone each day has significantly decreased.
As you do your work, praise yourself for the effort you’re putting in. Doing this can increase the dopamine you have for the activity.
Dr Huberman suggests saying the following while you’re doing painful work:
“I know this is painful. But you need to keep at it. Because it’s painful, it’s going to increase my dopamine later and I’m doing this by choice.”
We live in a dopamine-rich world. It’s so easy to flood your brain with quick hits of dopamine that feel good in the moment but leave you feeling flat and irritable shortly after. These peaks in dopamine make it harder for us to pursue our goals by undermining our motivation.
No matter what your current dopamine baseline is, just remember this: you have the ability to increase your dopamine in a healthy and sustainable way. Kick-start the process today!
Dr Jane Genovese delivers interactive sessions on learning to learn, combating procrastination, exam preparation, how to focus in the age of distraction, habit formation and much, much more!
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