Essentials: Controlling Your Dopamine for Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are going to talk all about dopamine. and what drives you to do the things that you do. We're going to talk about motivation and desire and craving, but also how dopamine relates to satisfaction and our feelings of well-being.

So let's talk about dopamine. If ever you've interacted with somebody who just doesn't seem to have any drive, they've given up, or if you've interacted with somebody who seems to have endless drive and energy, What you are looking at there in those two circumstances is without question a difference in the level of dopamine circulating in their system. Dopamine is what we call a neuromodulator. Neuromodulators are different than neurotransmitters.

Neurotransmitters are involved in the dialogue between neurons, whereas neuromodulators influence the communication of many neurons. In the nervous system, what this means is that dopamine release changes the probability that certain neural circuits will be active and that other neural circuits will be inactive. So how does dopamine work and what does it do? Well first of all, it is not just responsible for pleasure, it is responsible for motivation and drive, also for craving.

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