dopamine the neurochemical that causes you to self-d distract overeat and waste hours on Tik Tok but what if you could leverage your dopaminergic system to propel you forward such that it becomes your number one tool for hyperfocus well in this video I'm going to show you how I'm R Daris the CEO of flow research Collective where we use Neuroscience to help professionals access Flow State at [Music] will I'll never forget it I was 9 days into a silent Zen Meditation Retreat 16 hours of meditation a day no talking reading or writing eating only Bland boring
tasteless food after the retreat I caught a cab home and I was sitting in the back seat my fingers were hovering over the screen of my phone my anticipation was part excitement part anxiety messages flooded in and the dopamine reward that I got was intoxicating the next day though I was still in this heavily meditated Zen likee state and I rediscovered the mundane aspects of life I started working on a big laborious boring task that had been delaying for months to my surprise my attention was sucked into the present moment and I got into a
flow State almost immediately that optimal state of effortless absorption and heightened productivity the once dreaded task hooked me and hours melted away any impulse I had to do anything else was overruled by the thrill of Discovery and problem solving that had once seemed dull my brain had been resensitized to find the work rewarding how did this happen how had what was once so boring become so rewarding well it boils down to dopamine dopamine has been called the molecule more the reason that cocaine is so addictive and that scrolling social media is so compelling it's also
responsible for the high that we get from accomplishment it makes us want more of whatever we've done to produce dopamine in the first place and that brings us to the problem of dopamine detoxing scientifically you can't really detox dopamine it's it's a neurochemical we can't function without it dopamine plays many roles but one of its key roles is that of a focusing mechanism stimuli are paid attention to because of the dopamine they produce so dopamine is the reward we get for engaging in certain activities now this is key it's not stimulation that you want it's
the dopamine that the stimulation squirts that you want however through over stimulation we can become desensitized to dopamine when this happens dopamine is still signaling but fewer receptors receive the signal so rather than detoxing dopamine we want to resensitize ourselves to it low sensitivity to reward means you need lots of stimulation to capture your attention High sensitivity to reward means you need less stimulation to capture your attention think of it like your Roi on dopamine how much stimulation do you need to feel rewarded by dopamine and have your attention focus into the present moment the
less the better do you get a hit of dopamine while listening to a nice song or watching a beautiful sunset or do you need to play a video game and scroll Tik Tock while simultaneously gobbling down ice cream to get that same hit of dopamine now I used to fall more into the ladder Camp I needed a lot of stimulation for my brain to get enough dopamine for the activity to feel rewarding but I reset my reward sense sensitivity by sitting on a mat with my eyes closed for 16 hours a day but I've since
learned that such an approach is not needed there are simpler ways to do it which I'm going to show you in a second so you can reset your sensitivity in minutes instead of days of Silence like I went through now through resensitizing we boost our impulse control which means we can delay gratification just imagine for a second what would happen to your productivity if you were as thrilled with writing a book book or creating a product or whatever you have to do within your day job as you were with scrolling Tik Tok or checking your
bank account after payday well this is what's possible when you calibrate your resensi to reward there's a few steps step one to master your dop energic system means to master the art of making the boring rewarding first way to do this is to modify how we take breaks when we engage with work most people take dopamine fueled breaks scrolling social media checking email reading the news the critical mistake when taking breaks is doing something that's more stimulating than the work that you're breaking from imagine trying to read a research paper after swiping through social media
for an hour against instant and infinite novelty reading that research paper is dull as all hell now the inverse stare at a wall for 20 minutes doing nothing not even meditating suddenly that research paper is going to make you salivate so take boring breaks that reset dopamine and heighten your reward sensitivity and make whatever you do before and between work as boring as possible we want our work to feel as easy as scrolling through social media and that's a function of dropping the bar for what bores us to the floor and making the boring rewarding
so a 20-minute nap walking stretching mindfulness breath work foam rolling light exercise all of these things are good things to do on a break a favorite of mine all jokes aside is wall staring I'll stop working and I'll start staring at a wall for 5 or 10 minutes and just let things simmer letting the snow globe of my attention just settle for a little bit because when on a break you want to starve your brain of dopamine so that it craves getting back to work because ultimately that dopamine seeking cage rat inside you one way
or another is going to have its way so you may as well have it suck you back into work rather than having it keep you stuck on the thing you're doing in the break now the second thing we want to do is habit the in between just just take a minute and think about what you did the last time you were waiting in a line or sitting alone at lunch while your friend ran to the bathroom well you probably read your messages or scrolled through social media that'll be my guess now this is not ideal
we all have these in between moments every day but we're so accustomed to reaching for our phones for that quick hit of dopamine that it's it's almost subconscious inhabiting the in between means leveraging these moments by allowing ourselves to Simply settle bring ourselves back to the present in these moments we cut out the unintentional information consumption which fractures our attention further desensitizing our dopamine receptors making us less sensitive to reward a few tips for this when you arrive early to a lunch meeting just sit quietly without your phone when waiting in line pay attention to
your breath when commuting to work just drive ride or walk in silence you will be forced to be present and tolerate those moments where you don't have much stimulation or engagement and this will make you more and more sensitive over time your Baseline for what's boring will shift and you'll cultivate a monkik quality of mind which is highly conducive to profound levels of focus and flow third thing we want to do is do everything one thing at a time you can heighten reward sensitivity by simply doing things once at a time with singular Focus now
as I've improved my focus and my access to flow there's certain things that become more worse at and one of those things is multitasking I've become way worse at multitasking it's embarrassing in fact my team laughs at me because whenever I'm out on a walk with them of any kind and I need to send a text I literally stop talking mids sentence reach out my phone then I end up not walking either and all of a sudden I'm standing in silence texting while we were made conversation and they're walking ahead of me this is due
to the interplay between the default mode Network the dmn and the task positive Network the tpn in the brain when you're not engaged in a task the default mode network is active but when you're focused the tpn the task positive Network takes over in my texting example what's happening to me is I'm rapidly shifting from the default mode network of disengaged attention to the task positive network of engaged focused attention and this is creating a tunnel for my awareness such that it becomes attention which then makes me oblivious to my surroundings hence standing there not
talking and not walking while sending the text now while this rapid shifting from the default mode Network to the task positive network is kind of a burden for multitasking like texting while walking it's a superpower for flow because the faster you can shift from the default mode Network to the task positive Network the faster you can engage focus and the higher your reward sensitivity the easier it is to make this shift and the faster you can make this shift because you get more focusing neurochemistry funneled into the system in the form of dopamine so to
train this abil ility focus on one thing at a time it's that simple the next time you're eating just eat when working just work when you have a conversation just Converse Embrace Life as a series of singular activities rather than scattered efforts to secrete dopamine through constant novelty seeking so to master your dopam energic system to propel you forward and access Peak Performance take boring breaks so that what's boring becomes rewarding inhabit the in between and do everything one thing at a time now we're going to be breaking down the latest Neuroscience research on Flow
State to give you practical tools so that you can plunge yourself into flow more consistently and reliably so that you can stay in flow for longer and ultimately so that you can turn your work into play which is the ultimate competitive advantage to have
