Lets Be Real #7: The Secret is Revealed
Hello 👋 and welcome 🙏 to the 7th edition of “Lets Be Real” - where we talk about the real challenges we face that stop us from living our best lives.
Rejecting Mediocrity
So this is where we stand:
We want to intentionally Reject Mediocrity throughout 2023 to build the life we desire (this is why).
But we struggle to do that practically. Our world is filled with distractions and temptations, and we keep choosing mediocre options unintentionally.
Dopamine Self-regulation
We want to change but don't know how. Maybe we are lazy, inadequate, or just one of those people who don’t have any motivations or aspirations.
No, No, and No.
We are not to blame.
The culprit is Dopamine imbalance.
When dopamine goes out of balance, we make mediocre choices - plain and simple.
After all, dopamine is closely linked to our sense of intrinsic motivation. It can also enhance our depth of focus and lower our threshold for taking action toward specific goals. It also determines how we feel at any given time.
So, to break this loop and reject mediocrity every day, all we need to do is learn to self-regulate dopamine - to correct the imbalance.
Let us learn how:
The knowledge of knowledge can allow us to Intervene and Self-regulate
Neurologically, pleasure and pain are processed in the same area of our brain and work together like a see-saw or a pendulum.
When the balance tips towards pleasure, the brain reflexively self-regulates. It does that by first going toward pain and then slowly returning to the state of balance (called the baseline level).
The reverse is also true - it tries to overcompensate for pain with pleasure.
So, when we seek pleasurable activities (like food, entertainment, porn, social media, games, even work for some people, etc.), we get rewarded with more dopamine and feel pleasure.
But when we relentlessly seek more pleasure, the brain downregulates dopamine (less dopamine on repeated actions), leading to a feeling of pain. The definition of pain here goes beyond physical and emotional pain and includes regret, anxiety, anger, self-doubt, boredom, unhappiness, overwhelm, burnout, depression, etc.
If we gave it some time, our brain would return to baseline. But we don’t wait - the moment there is pain, we seek even more pleasure. Often, this happens without our conscious realization. We are hardwired to avoid pain at all costs. And the vicious cycle continues.
Continuous pleasure-seeking forces our brain to constantly reduce the dopamine released, lowering our baseline dopamine rate.
This leads to addictive behaviors, creating a high dopamine tolerance, and we lose motivation and passion. Seeking pleasure for pleasure’s sake eventually tilts the neurochemical see-saw in favor of prolonged pain. That’s why chasing dopamine leaves us feeling depressed and shitty.
We lose our ability to feel motivated or find true happiness unless we “up our dose” or seek something “bigger and better” than the last stimulus.
We lose focus, find difficulty in keeping our attention fixed, deep work becomes problematic, and mindlessly escaping into distractions becomes compulsive.
This explains why we always choose the mediocre option - at its core; we are trying to avoid the pain at all costs. Yet that choice keeps leading us to more pain.
Interestingly, this mechanism is as true for distraction-seeking behavior as it is for seeking pleasure through work.
Pain is the key
It turns out the way out of this vicious cycle is through, you guessed it, PAIN.
If we consciously seek activities that seem painful, the entire process would work in reverse, leading to a self-sustaining dopamine high.
When you seek pleasure, the brain overcompensates and gives you pain.
So when you seek pain or get comfortable with pain, the brain overcompensates for the lowered dopamine and gives you more of it for longer.
And that’s how we crack the code to Reject Mediocrity intentionally.
There are 3 ways in which we can achieve sustainable and healthy levels of dopamine through self-regulation:
1: Seek less PLEASURE - by changing your relationship with Pain
90% of the triggers that lead to distractions are internal.
Something we are feeling internally that we want to STOP feeling - could be anxiety, boredom, self-doubt, overwhelm, or some other feeling of “pain” - so we start seeking the “pleasure” of distraction.
That is the key - we seek “pleasure” to avoid feeling “pain”.
But, the dopamine system has no sense of what is defined as “pain”. It doesn’t know that boredom is bad for you. We decide that.
And we can change that definition. When we stop running away from the sensations of “pain”, our need to seek these “pleasures” dissolves.
Countless schools of Meditation and Mindfulness have this at the root - to learn to change our relationship with “pain”.
There are specific practices that we can adopt from these ancient disciplines to stop running away from boredom, anxiety, or overwhelm.
We will cover these in the next edition.
2: Seek more PAIN - to counterbalance the pain-pleasure see-saw
Engineer pursuit as a requirement to getting pleasure.
Deliberately and consciously tip the balance towards the pain side by employing techniques that push you towards physical and mental “pain” - like cold showers and plunges, fasting, resistance workouts, meditation, etc.
Embracing the pain is the way out of the pain.
Don’t be overwhelmed 🫥
There is a method to this madness.
We will explore detailed tactics for both of these mechanisms in the next edition.
In the meanwhile, tell me how did you find this edition:
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See you next week. 👋
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