How to like doing Hard Things?

If I tell you that you have two options:

1. Complete your work and study for an upcoming test
2. Scroll through social media and play on your phone

Why do 80% of us choose the second one? Is it because we are lazy? Simply put, doing the first choice will require hard work while the second one is easy and doesn’t require any efforts.

Is there any way, that makes difficult things easy? If there is any such way then all of us will become at least 10x productive. Well, there is something that can get you there. Now, before I tell you about that secret, you need to know some science. It’s actually pretty easy, there is this hormone in our body called dopamine, it is responsible for experiencing happiness and thus is known as the “happiness hormone”. Dopamine is basically a brain neurotransmitter which means that it is responsible for transmitting signals between the neurons of the brain. Dopamine is released when we get rewards or some good thing happens to us.

Dopamine is what makes us desire things. And its that desire that gives us the motivation to get up and do stuff.

Better than yesterday

How cool would it be if we could just release this dopamine whenever we wanted! I bet that everyone would be super happy.

Our brain gives priority to stuff by measuring how much dopamine we will get from it. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s what makes humans crave for rewards and greedy for money. I mean, it possibly cannot be our responsibility if we are greedy or not if our brain itself (without our permission) has made some super-complex chemical that expects a reward. Imagine if we give our teacher this reason- “Miss, I couldn’t do the homework because some chemical that I read about in a stranger’s blog didn’t like doing homework. This caused my brain to hate doing homework and I couldn’t do anything about it.” Disclaimer- If you perform this kind of stuff in real life, it probably will be enough to get you expelled from your school, so don’t try this reason.

Basically, if you get less dopamine by doing something, then your brain won’t like doing it. But if you get more dopamine by doing it, then your brain will make you do it and you will crave for it. Dopamine is released when an activity has a potential reward. But if there are no immediate rewards, then your brain won’t release dopamine. For example- If you look at social media, your brain thinks that it will find something fun and cool, and makes you look through social media.

Another thing about this is that the brain doesn’t care whether the activity that you are doing is good or bad, harmful or not. All it cares about is that it will get dopamine after doing it. Does this sound like that friend who doesn’t care whether you win or not, all he cares about is that you share the prize with him? Yep that’s our brain in this case. Fun fact- Drugs like Heroin and Cocaine will get you lots of dopamine. Another Fun Fact- YOU WILL DIE IF YOU TAKE DRUGS. IT WILL DAMAGE YOU BRAIN, HEART AND ORGANS!! Moving on, the highest dopamine release happens when you get a reward randomly.

In today’s digital world, we are flooding our brain with very high amounts of dopamine on a daily basis. Playing video games, watching YouTube videos and checking Whats App statuses are all examples of this. There is something known as Homeostasis, which balances everything in our body. This makes our body adapt to imbalances. It also generates tolerance. For example, someone who runs rarely gets exhausted fast. But someone who runs frequently, will get exhausted after a huge amount of time, because their body has developed a tolerance to it.

The same thing happens with dopamine- our body tries to balance things out because of Homeostasis and these huge levels of dopamine in our daily life become our normal. This is known as dopamine tolerance. So, the things that don’t give you as much dopamine like reading, working and studying become boring and you don’t feel motivated to do them. This is why you prefer playing games instead of working.

To balance this out and motivate yourself to do hard things, you need to do something known as a dopamine detox. There are two such dopamine detoxes.

The first one is a larger dopamine detox that can help you improve faster but will be very difficult. How to do this? It’s quite simple, you decide a day, where you don’t use your phone, laptop, TV, nor play any video games or even any physical games. Although you can do things like reading, writing (on a piece of paper…..with a pen….not typing on your laptop), you can also go for walks and spend time with your family. Most people will think of this is impossible and too extreme, that’s where the second dopamine detox comes into the picture.

The second one is a smaller dopamine detox that will make the improvement gradual but will be possible and quite easy for most people to practice. In this one, you pick a single day in a week and you are going to stay away from one of your high dopamine behaviours completely. These behaviours can be anything, maybe checking your phone or watching YouTube or even playing video games. You are going to do this same thing one day each week without fail. You can do other dopamine-releasing things, but that highest dopamine-releasing activity cannot be done at all on that day. This will lessen your average dopamine exposure to the brain and will improve your ability to be motivated to do things that you won’t do normally like studying or even reading.

After doing any of these two dopamine detoxes you need to move on to the next level. Here, you need to start connecting this dopamine to activities that will benefit you in the long term like reading or exercising. To do this, you need to do all the difficult and important activities at the beginning of the day and whenever you complete this, you allow high dopamine activities to your brain at the end of the day, by playing games or watching TV etc (remember, only at the end of the day, so that doing hard work won’t become boring). This will make your brain think that doing this hard work will get it lots of dopamine and it will start loving to do this hard work.

Another thing to consider while choosing this reward, is that it should not be harmful like a beer or a cigarette, but something that is fun and yet is not harmful to your health like YouTube.

So, that was it. I loved doing the research for this article and tried it on myself, and it helped me start programming hard websites instead of watching movies on that TV. Shoutout to Better Than Yesterday, an awesome Youtube channel that introduced me to this awesome idea. Hope you guys liked this article, and if you did, rate it 5-star, comment down below and don’t forget to subscribe to my blog at the bottom of the page. Thank You and I will see you next Sunday. Till then…peace.