How You Can Train Your Brain To Be Motivated | Dr. Andrew Huberman
In a Nutshell
The brain learns in two phases: focused effort with neurochemicals like acetylcholine and adrenaline, followed by deep rest (especially sleep) that consolidates and rewires neural connections. Small 10-second micro-rests during learning trigger 20x faster replay in the hippocampus, accelerating skill acquisition. Dopamine drives motivation through learned associations rather than pleasure, so prioritizing post-action satisfaction over pre-action anticipation creates sustainable motivation while avoiding addictive crashes.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
The whole process of neuroplasticity and learning is a two-stage process. First, there must be focus and alertness associated with the release of neurochemicals including acetylcholine, which acts as a highlighter pen for certain connections in the brain to later be reinforced, and adrenaline (also called epinephrine), which is associated with an increase in agitation and alertness. The second stage requires periods of deep rest, in particular sleep and non-sleep deep rest (NSDR), for the nervous system to change. NSDR includes yoga nidra, shallow naps, and forms of meditation that don't involve a lot of focused concentration.
The brain actually re-wires during deep sleep and rest. During deep sleep and rest, naps, yoga nidra, and deep sleep, there's a replay of the very same cells in the brain that were active during learning, often times in reverse, at a much higher repetition rate. This is why straining to learn a language, motor skill, or maths over and over doesn't result in immediate learning - taking a couple of nights sleep allows the learning to consolidate and suddenly become available.
There's a so-called ultradian rhythm which consists of 90-minute cycles during which people can focus pretty well for a duration of about 90 minutes, though nobody really focuses for 90 minutes straight unless they've built up that capacity or are very interested in what they're learning. The brain can focus really hard on one thing for about 90 minutes before it needs a true rest of an hour or two before returning to learning or working very hard.
Shallow naps or NSDR (non-sleep deep rest) done within 4 hours of one of these 90-minute learning bouts can be very beneficial for accelerating learning.
There are studies on so-called gap effects where people learning skills (physical skills, mental skills like piano scales, math problems, or spatial problems) are interrupted at random intervals by a buzzer and told to do nothing for about 10 seconds before returning to the learning task. During these micro rests, the hippocampus and neocortex undergo replay of the material being learned at 20 times the speed, also in reverse, leading to accelerations in learning.
Every so often when trying to learn something, pause for 10 seconds or so, do your best to clear your mind, and then return to the learning task. This has been shown to significantly accelerate the learning process and the retention of newly learned information.
Early in development (up until the mid-20s), humans can learn things in larger batches and much more easily than later in life. However, batching work into smaller increments - for instance, setting a timer for 3 minutes of intense focus on learning something even if feeling like failure - leads to an outsized amount of learning overall when done repeatedly. The nervous system loves incremental learning and batching things into focused little bouts.
People in their 80s and 90s still have neuroplasticity. There's even evidence that new neurons can be produced in the hippocampus of people in their late 80s and 90s.
Sleep deprivation makes it very hard to learn. There's a stage of sleep called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep that tends to come later in the night during the second half of sleep, where there's a tendency to have dreams laden with emotional content. During REM sleep, there's atonia (sleep-induced paralysis) and a complete failure of the nervous system to release adrenaline/epinephrine.
REM sleep functions as a kind of trauma therapy where people experience a replay of emotional events minus the neurochemicals that make them feel tense and agitated. If people are deprived of REM sleep, they fail to dump the negative emotions of things that happened the day before. Sleep deprivation causes little things to seem like big things, but after a few nights of sleep, emotional equilibrium returns.
Dreams convert the ordinary sequence of life events into heuristics and shorthand symbols. The brain represents things in the external world as shorthand abstract representations. In dreams, people and objects are replaced with animals or different objects because the brain thinks more in terms of relationships between objects than the objects themselves.
Dream analysis always has to take into account that the brain operates in symbols where objects are replaceable and there are only relationships between objects. In early waking state (the first 30 minutes around waking), people are in a liminal state where symbolism is still quite fluid. A recommended tool is to stay lying down with eyes closed for a few moments upon waking, avoiding bringing in too much new sensory experience, to better understand dream relationships.
People spend more time with symbols and people on social media than with physical individuals. Creating an interject or introject - a subconscious representation of somebody else's ideas and approach - occurs when listening to someone repeatedly, leading the nervous system to unconsciously ask questions like "what would this person do in this circumstance?" Physical symbols are important because the brain likes to make predictions and symbols provide a shorthand way of eliminating useless information.
Tattoos represent an externalization of how people feel on the inside, created through the process of stamping into skin with intense pain involved. These serve as powerful symbols operating at a subconscious level.
Getting bright light, ideally sunlight, in the eyes within the early hours of waking puts neurochemicals and hormones into a state of positivity. Mood is enhanced, immune system function is enhanced, and sleep is enhanced 16 to 20 hours later. This anchors subconscious physiology because every cell in the body has a 24-hour clock that needs to be timed to the rise and fall of the sun each day.
A study at University of Colorado found that college students camping had their melatonin rhythms, cortisol rhythms, dopamine, and epinephrine all reinstated to proper timing by waking up and seeing the sun and going to sleep not too long after sunset for two nights and two mornings. This effect lasted at least two weeks even though people were getting artificial light afterward.
Try to get sunlight exposure without sunglasses if safely possible, never staring directly at the sun or any light so bright it's painful to look at. It only takes a few minutes on a cloudless day. In winter conditions, going outside provides more light than indoors with bright lights. Duration ranges from 2 minutes to 30 minutes depending on conditions. Sunglasses, eyeglasses, and contacts are fine as they focus light onto the retina. Do not attempt this through windows or windshields as they filter out desired light.
Having an image of something that makes you feel good and seeing that early in the day is tremendously powerful. Having a mental image of something is equally powerful. Being able to bring the mind and body into a somatic experience - looking at a photo of someone loved and actually sensing and feeling it at a complete nervous system level - leads to an outsized effect on nervous system function.
People are bombarded with negative symbols throughout the day but can buffer against them by strongly associating with certain things. Oliver Sacks had an obsession with minerals and stones, developing such a strong relationship to them that their touch made him feel safe, especially as he started to lose his vision later in life.
Dopamine is the substrate by which epinephrine (neural energy) is created. Dopamine is not about feeling good but is the molecule of motivation and the desire to pursue additional things. When positively associating with a song, person, face, object, or sunrise, the benefits come from both the effects of those activities and what is believed about those activities combined. A small half a percent increase in dopamine transmission in the brain is the difference between feeling like life is bleak and being able to completely attack the day positively.
People who have overcome tremendous challenges have internalized symbols such that the tiniest of things can evoke dopamine release. Dopamine is a generic neuromodulator that doesn't know anything about experience - it only knows what is believed about experience and is deployed according to those beliefs. In theory, the dopamine system could be trained to release dopamine every time raising the right hand if genuine meaning is attached to that action. This is the art of superstitions - building positive associations with outcomes according to certain behaviors. The brain is making predictions about both the external world and internal state.
A lot of depression and anxiety stems from people feeling that when they feel lousy, that lousy feeling is going to go on forever. The way to rewire this is to understand that making and controlling predictions about how you feel internally gives you a sense of agency. That sense of agency is purely neurochemical at the end of the day, and these are straightforward things to master.
Everything about dopamine release is learned. There are a few hardwired triggers including reproduction, food, and sugar, which has a powerful dopamine pathway in the brain and gut because of its nutritive value. Food when hungry and warmth when cold are also hardwired. However, the dopamine system is designed to be trained to associate with anything.
This explains how someone can meditate for long periods of time, experiencing both brutal and incredible phases. It also explains how David Goggins can repeatedly punish himself with running yet invert the dopamine circuit so that it becomes something he either wants to do or gets dopamine release from overcoming the resistance to doing it.
Drugs of abuse like cocaine and amphetamine, along with excessive pornography, create excessive dopamine release. The diabolical aspect of dopamine under these conditions is that the higher the dopamine release and the bigger the amplitude, the bigger the crash always, due to how the circuits are designed.
The focus should be on self-training in healthier amounts of dopamine release, non-addictive amounts, or mildly addictive patterns of behavior that serve both the individual and people around them well. This can be viewed as an adaptive addiction or compulsion that doesn't need to be avoided.
The distinction between addictive and positive patterns can be made by examining whether something feels good after doing it versus before. The dopamine release experienced after an action is more important than the dopamine experienced before. Examples include not feeling good before going to the gym, meditating, or eating healthy protein-rich food, but always feeling good afterward. Conversely, people may feel good before staying up late, eating pizza, or consuming loads of sugar, but experience negative effects afterward.
Dopamine reward prediction error, defined by Wolfram Schultz, states that when positively anticipating something, there is dopamine release. When the anticipated reward doesn't materialize or falls short, dopamine drops below baseline. When the reward is received as expected, it doesn't create additional dopamine beyond the anticipation level. If the reward is disappointing or lost, dopamine relative to the anticipation level doesn't feel great.
This explains the diabolical nature of addictive drugs where people get a dopamine surge in anticipation of using, but over time get less and less dopamine surge, while the punishment signal or trough afterward goes lower and lower, creating an asymmetric seesaw effect.
If you have less dopamine heading into something than afterward, this tells the synapses to reinforce themselves and engage in that behavior again. Surprise creates bigger dopamine signals than high expectations. Setting up high expectations for something like the best sushi in Los Angeles actually reduces enjoyment compared to discovering something unexpectedly amazing.
The key is to control the dopamine knob by ensuring more pleasure, thrill, or excitement in retrospect than during the experience. This provides two benefits: avoiding addictive behaviors and avoiding the crash, since dopamine release after an experience means no crash, and it creates a tendency to return to that behavior repeatedly.
Early relationship phases involve a well-established dopamine surge where everything feels possible and people become somewhat manic. When entering phases of real challenge, if people can't transition seamlessly and constantly focus on how great things were, they create a dark picture by comparing the differential. A wonderful model for relationships is to temper dopamine release and spread it out over time, ideally over 50 years.
Dopamine is the hallmark of human bonding, particularly early on, before oxytocin and other feel-good warmth molecules take over. Dopamine is fundamentally about accessing things outside immediate experience, reaching for things beyond the confines of one's skin like degrees, money, or developing relationships. Serotonin and oxytocin are associated with things already possessed, like knowledge of how wonderful a partner is or appreciation for a meal.
Neither dopamine nor serotonin is inherently bad or good. These molecules allow establishing new relationships of all kinds and then sustaining them. However, the big dopamine peaks early in relationships are very dangerous and need to be tempered and spread out over time as a calibrated resource.
Change is stressful even when positive because the nervous system is trying to make predictions. When things change, there's release of adrenaline and associated molecules. The hierarchy of stressors includes death of a child at the top, followed by divorce and death of a loved one, with moving to a new home or birth of a child also being stressful because they require extensive reconfiguration.
Once the brain learns something, it prefers not to think about it. Walking is automatic, but learning new dance steps or sports skills requires conscious thought and work, which involves release of adrenaline and epinephrine from the adrenals and locus ceruleus in the brain, acting as a sprinkler system to wake up brain areas and increase alertness.
To deal with change, designate 20 to 30 minutes daily to put the brain into a state of non-thinking and non-doing, moving into being and feeling without making predictions. This is the practice of yoga nidra, literally meaning yoga sleep, which involves lying down meditation with breathing. The term non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) is used to make these practices more accessible without washing away the culture and tradition around them.
This practice involves shutting down the prefrontal cortex, which makes predictions about what's happening next. As one moves into sleep, they enter a liminal state where things become disjointed, representing the state of not thinking and doing but rather being and feeling in pure somatic experience.
When stressed, it's especially hard to disengage from thinking, which is why meditation should be practiced twice as long during stressful periods. The ability to turn off thinking enhances the ability to enter sleep, which is vital for mental and physical health and learning. The skill should be developed during periods of low stress, with 20 to 30 minutes daily or even 10 minutes of practicing turning off prediction.
People are bombarded with contextual change through social media, where scrolling Instagram for 5 minutes can expose someone to a thousand different contexts that the human brain has never dealt with before. This is more change than even the increase from three or four television channels to 240 cable channels.
The brain can cope with rapid contextual changes like walking from a room into a jungle, then a Thomas Keller restaurant kitchen, then underwater, which represents the social media experience. People with narrow attentional focus have advantages in one-on-one interactions because they can make the room disappear, while those with broad situational awareness are better suited for roles like special operations, police work, or teaching.
As old world primates, humans have the capacity for covert attention, paying attention to someone while also noticing peripheral activity. Attention functions as two spotlights that can be broad or narrowly focused, and can be merged to intensify focus. The process of falling asleep involves learning to take the attentional spotlight, move the two apart, and extend the luminosity more broadly until sleep occurs.
Most bad things people do to themselves and others come from a heightened state of reactivity where they're not conscious because their attentional window is too narrow. Space and time are linked in the brain, where narrow visual focus tends to create narrow time slicing with fast frame rates catching micro-nuances but missing everything else.
Today in 24 hours, people are exposed to more tragedy through news than in their entire lifetime 25 years ago. Judgment and criticism in processing social media content is exhausting, and deliberately disengaging while remaining connected to reality can feel like being in no man's land.
There's an asymmetry to learning where negative experiences involve one-trial learning. Touching a hot stove once changes behavior permanently. This requires working harder to counter the negativity bias, similar to how highly palatable processed foods are more immediately rewarding than healthy foods, especially to young nervous systems, yet children need fruits and vegetables more than candy.
Building a good life involves honoring and challenging the asymmetries of the nervous system. The key is building positive symbols and internal symbolic representations, not just physical things in the environment, but how those things are held inside. This relates to the concept of intentions and right action, which requires working against the tide pulling toward negativity.
A study published in Science in the 1960s involved people with stimulating electrodes in their brain who could stimulate multiple areas and report their feelings, learning that people could feel drunk, happy, or sad depending on which area was stimulated.
The brain area that people preferred to stimulate the most was the one that led to anger and frustration. Anger and frustration serve as signals to the brain and body that something needs to be done in response. Usually this involves moving away or moving forward into an aggressive state.
Twitter represents a more combative zone due to the nature of the platform and the presence of many academics. Logging onto Twitter produces an adrenaline surge that prepares users for confrontation. People have an innate bias towards frustration, anger, and friction, but understanding this can help individuals relax around these responses.
Psychiatrist Paul Conti, an expert on trauma, describes emotional responses using the metaphor of a ball bearing maze toy. Sometimes a slight shift causes the ball bearing to go down the chute. The goal is to develop a slightly concave state where events of life cause the ball bearing to move around rather than drop into reactive patterns. This takes work, though some people are naturally positioned this way.
Meditation, non-sleep deep rest, good sleep, excellent social relationships, mindsets, intentions, and gratitude practices serve as foundational elements that provide perspective. These practices are not weak but rather create a foundation from which people can approach challenging situations and consciously lean away from impulsive reactions.
Modern life presents a buffet of junk food in terms of dopamine stimulation. Understanding that nutritious options exist within this environment allows people to override natural signals of immediate desire by thinking about how they will feel afterwards. This approach involves dilating perception of time and moving out of slave-to-dopamine mode.
Not being exposed to something does not protect people but rather makes them weaker. Dopamine fasts have their place when people have been engaging in high dopamine-evoking behaviors, but the goal is to bring the system back into balance so individuals can notice subtle inflections in life.
Dr. Anna Lembke at Stanford wrote Dopamine Nation, which addresses dopamine in the context of addiction. Moving away from intensely pleasurable activities for about 30 days can be necessary for some people to reset. However, returning to the world means continued bombardment with temptations of different kinds.
Dopamine drives pursuit of external things, while oxytocin and serotonin relate to how people feel about what they already have. The habits mentioned earlier create balance between these systems. The question arises whether dopamine is needed in long-term relationships or whether serotonin and oxytocin are sufficient.
A psychoanalyst wrote the book Can Love Last? which operates on the premise that initial romantic attraction involves objectification of the other person. People do not initially rely on potential partners for safety, only for the ability to pursue and obtain them.
When romantic relationships develop trust, true dependency emerges. If one person leaves, dies, cheats, or breaks up, it devastates the safety mechanisms of the brain and body. This reactivates machinery designed for infant-parent attachment. Work by Bowlby and Main on attachment, involving deliberately taking babies away from mothers and evaluating responses, demonstrates circuitry that gets repurposed for romantic attachment rather than lost during development.
Certain cultures strategically prevent men and women from physically contacting one another for several weeks each month to maintain relationship excitement. Modern relationships often combine lover, best friend, and business partner roles, which can work for some people but eliminate excitement for others.
Missing one another and yearning for the other person represents a beautiful aspect of relationships. A couple reported having only three nights apart in their entire relationship. For some people this model works beautifully, while for others it eliminates positive neurochemical features of the relationship.
Dopamine serves as the molecule of reward prediction and novelty. Routine provides serotonin and oxytocin through predictability and safety. Creating ways for couples to miss one another or generating new experiences can re-up dopamine in relationships. Neuroscience should be incorporated into relationship design in intelligent and respectful ways.
Rather than immediately pursuing new relationships when excitement fades, understanding the push-pull between dopamine and serotonin proves more valuable. Missing someone represents anticipation of how great it will feel when together again. People who get very excited about new experiences should temper their excitement, while those not easily overwhelmed should learn to ramp up excitement.
Best advice received: "Know thyself." People must be good scientists of themselves, understanding where they have talents, competency, and challenges, then work with those.
Worst advice received: That everything is just experience and all experiences are equivalent. More intentionality is needed than assuming all steps lead to enlightenment.
Something newly valued: Family. Having relied heavily on friendship as reinforcement, recent recognition has emerged of family supports that set up success in life.
Morning and evening routines: First thing in the morning is getting outside for sunlight, or turning on lights if the sun is not up, followed by drinking a glass of water. Before sleep, thinking about three important people from life has become an automatic nightly practice.
One law or habit for everyone: Learning to deliberately calm down through non-sleep deep rest or a couple deep breaths. Much misfortune and pain could be avoided if people learned to calm down, and more joy becomes accessible through this practice.
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