Still On The Enemy

I’ve been studying the roots of procrastination and how to overcome it for several years now and I’ve learned a lot of things but the most revealing one by far has to do with how the human brain works.

For example: when you eat a good piece of food, your brain starts to light up.

It sends a signal to your brain of positive reinforcement.

In the neurochemical form, this is known as dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter responsible for motivation.

Dopamine signals to your brain “this activity is good, do more of it” because it has highlighted that activity as beneficial to your survival.

Dopamine helps you push through those long days and nights working on something that offers no short term reward.

Without dopamine, we would never do anything.

People with Parkinson’s have chronically low levels of dopamine because an area of their brain called the “substantia nigra” is damaged. If you know someone with Parkinson’s you’ll notice they are very stiff. That’s because dopamine helps control movement. Levodopa or L-DOPA is used to help mitigate the symptoms of Parkinson’s. This is dopamine in medicinal form.

Likewise, without dopamine there would never be such thing as addiction.

Think about this: every adult knows that smoking is bad for you. Despite this, there are millions of adults around the world who smoke regardless of the consequences.

Photo by Manja Vitolic on Unsplash

It’s because they have a dopamine problem. They literally can’t stop because they’ve wired their brain to seek out the “reward” which is in this case, smoking. They’ve latched part of their motivation to buying and smoking cigarettes.

When many smokers see a carton of cigarettes, smell tobacco, or even think of smoking, they get a rush.

They get a rush of dopamine, a rush of motivation.

Not surprisingly, dopamine is chemically similar to adrenaline. If you add an ethyl group you get adrenaline. If you take it away, you get dopamine.

The entire tobacco industry is built around the reward system in the human brain.

Ponder that for a bit before you move on.

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A main reason why I personally believe a lot of people have a problem with procrastination is because of the prevalence of what I call “red herrings” in our society.

These “red herrings” are more often than not low hanging fruit that produce good feelings without offering any real, tangible reward.

Our world is filled with so much stimulation that someone can spend their entire life being titillated but accomplish nothing of real value.

Shooting blanks, essentially.

What are some examples of red herrings?

• Social media

• TV

• Foods high in sugar, salt, and fat

• Drugs of all kinds

• Gossip

• Games

All of these things work on the reward circuitry in the brain to elicit good feelings. When you log onto social media, you get buzzed by the +1 of likes and comments. When you eat junk food, you feel satiated. You have no room for food with actual nutrients. When you play games, you can spend hours and hours chasing imaginary rewards.

Yeah, all of these things are fine. But people more often than not use them as a means to escape.

Think of your motivation as money. You have a certain amount of motivation to spend per day. If you want to complete a big project that will stretch you, you need more motivation. If you spend your motivation all on things that don’t help push your life forward, you have wasted that day’s motivation.

Come back tomorrow. Tomorrow comes. You do the same thing. As a result, you have now attached “motivation” with transitory pleasures.

That is not good.

That means when the fortime comes for the heavy lifting, the things that produce results, you can’t do it. You’ve associated enjoyment with quick hits of stimulation. You feel great already, why bother doing that thing just to get a reward of a job well done??

This is part of the reason why you should use very little social media. Too much mental space for such little reward.

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It’s all too easy to create a life where you have done nothing but waste time.

You will never see all the shows on Netflix, read all the information on the web, or get to the end of your news feed.

So what do we have to do? We need to create boundaries. We have to limit these things. We have to put them in a box.

Or else they’re going to take over. They’re going to be like the weeds in the garden.

Put a limit on how much time you spend on the Internet, playing videogames, or chasing after imaginary rewards.

Spend that time on actual things that will help you in the long run.

No, you won’t get that quick dopamine high - but think of it as an investment.

You don’t invest when you don’t need it…you invest for when you WILL need it.

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There will be days where you are just tanked.

Do you have a backlog of things that need to be done because you didn’t invest the time and energy to do them? Or can you actually afford to rest because you’ve already put in the work?

It takes self-discipline. And it’s hard to practice self-discipline. But once you have it, once you have this background of self-control - you begin to become the master instead of the servant.

At that point, you don’t “need” external motivation. You are already internally motivated because you have a background of hard work and good habits in your arsenal.

Cravings for junk food don’t faze you. Being tired after work to go to the gym doesn’t faze you. Not getting approval from others doesn’t faze you. You become extremely hard to throw off their game.

That’s one way I’ve found to overcome laziness. I’m sure there are others, but we need to watch out for these red herrings and constantly ask ourselves: is what I’m doing now going to make me look back at the end of the day and think to myself “that was a waste of time and energy”?

If it is, limit your time on it or remove it.

You only get one shot at life. Don’t spend it in an overstimulated haze of useless garbage.