High dopamine activities are those that are engineered to pique and hold your interest. Video games, tv, social media, news aggregators, porn, etc.
Our brains are designed to prioritize the most interesting stuff. Back on the Serengeti, that made sense. There wasn’t much novelty, so when you found some, your hardware wanted to ensure that you were able to focus on it long enough to grok it. Will it hurt you? Can you eat it?
Nowadays novelty is ubiquitous. Interesting stuff is everywhere! Learning new things can be pretty interesting, but it will never be as interesting as stuff that’s literally engineered to be interesting.
The solution is to simply (ha!) remove those more interesting but less rewarding options from the equation.
You don’t have to believe me—it’s an easy hypothesis to test. Just quit ALL high dopamine activities, cold turkey, right now. Zero exceptions. In my experience, those relatively boring tasks become attractive again within mere minutes of dogged abstinence from high-dopamine activities.
I recommend reading this book to everyone who are struggling to focus for longer times, or consider themselves chronic underachievers.
This book had a huge influence in my life and getting my shit together.
I’m in the boat where I’m always learning, but get easily distracted since some tech is a huge dopamine hit whereas sitting down and deeply studying something isnt.
Edit: just ordered the hardcover book
If you’d like to hear more, consider reading Dopamine Nation, the book that turned me onto this line of thinking. It’s a quick read and very enlightening.
Sounds pretty demotivating.
Then, try introspection. Start a journal and write in it consistently every morning or evening. After awhile you will notice patterns that come up. You may also want to review previous entries to find patterns that aren't immediately obvious. When you find a pattern, journal on it to investigate it further. You will be surprised what you discover about yourself through this kind process. Happy to chat about any of this if it's helpful. Email is in my profile.
Additionally, consider any part of your workflow you could automate and then write the software to do so.
For me, these things help.
You can use a tool like Double[0] to find others to do these things with if you don’t have people you already know.
you can "nudge" instead of going cold turkey, set your phone to grayscale, turn notifications off, close social media accounts (or at least uninstall apps), stop binging tv shows (if you do), or watching tv, you probably get the gist of it, make it so that what to you now requires motivation, is the fun option
This refrain about lacking motivation is something that I think all of us have been seeing more often: to the point where it shouldn't be primarily considered a "you" issue where better sleep/nutrition/etc might be the go-to recommendation, but a blaring alarm bell that something about society isn't really working well.
(The problem of course is that Teams Red/Blue/Yellow/Green all disagree about what needs solving)
The other day, I was not motivated to work on my side project. But I needed to know how some small part of an external API worked. I dedicated 5 minutes to reading the docs. That 5 minutes turned into me implementing the whole thing.
You never know where a small bit of work that you do not want to do will take you. Just my two cents.
i solve new problem, give support to it, made my user life easier. fixing the bugs.
thats bring my adrenaline back again
When experiencing the sea, riding the waves would be the thing you would want to be comfortable with, and you could just drift with no problem.
OTOH an attractive shore or perhaps sharks closing in from the deep could be what it takes to motivate anybody, to head in about the same direction either way.
It's not usually that extreme, but it's a thing.
Maybe revisit some physical activity that both reduces worry and provides joy at the same time, which could lead you in a direction where you really look forward to continue moving that way more.