Why Being Less Motivated Leads To More Results

today I'm going to teach you why you should be less motivated and how to achieve less motivation now this may sound insane because you're sitting there telling me but hey Dr K I'm actually not motivated enough my life suffers from a lack of motivation all I do is sit at home all day or I want to go to the gym or I want to eat healthy or I want to work harder at work I wish I could study harder but I'm just not motivated enough to do it and I would actually argue that the problem

isn't that you're not motivated enough the problem is that you are too motivated in the wrong direction so let's take the case of you sitting at home and doing nothing so if you sort of think about it as you try to go and do something there are very powerful forces for you to overcome for you to do something right you really have to try hard to extract yourself from the computer or TV or whatever you have to really try extra hard to go to this extra study session or go to office hours with your professor

so if we really look at it doing things in life requires extra effort and now you may think that's because I'm not motivated but if you really pause and think about it you're highly motivated to continue doing what you're doing there's a part of your brain that is telling you hey we don't want to do that we actually really want to stay here and watch one more episode of whatever we happen to be binging at the time or queue up for one more video game or as you struggle to find the motivation to stop using

social media there's a part of your brain that's like no no no no no no my friend we are not going to stop we are actually highly motivated to continue doing what we're doing let's take a quick look at the neuroscience and see if this kind of pans out because it absolutely does in order to understand how to become less motivated and these are the bad motivations that we have we've got to start by understanding the Neuroscience of motivation motivation comes from the nucleus accumbent of our brain the nucleus accumbent governs reward behavioral reinforcement and

motivation so basically the way this works is I try something and depending on how pleasurable it is I get a spurt of dopamine in my nucleus accumbens if my nucleus accumbent gets some dopamine it says okay this thing feels good it feels pleasurable therefore let us reinforce the behavior and if we stop and think about what do behavioral reinforcement mean it basically means motivate to do it again right so if I play a particular video game and I have lots of fun I will get a lot of dopamine and then I will be motivated to

Play It Again the other important part of the nucleus succumbent is that it is also very sensitive to pain so not only does it help us seek pleasure it also is very very sensitive to avoiding pain and this is exactly why we're highly motivated to do nothing right so if there's a task that you're procrastinating on like like hey I need to email my professor for an extension you're concerned that the professor may think something bad about you may say no that you may really be screwed and in the avoidance of that pain your nucleus

succumbent is like whoa whoa whoa buddy why would you engage in that conversation that could end badly when we can queue up for another game right and then we can get that dopamine and it's totally fine and so if we think about our internal struggle to do the things that you should do instead of doing the things that you're motivated to do what we find is that it comes down to the nucleus accumbent now how do we break free of this how do we actually decrease our motivation now this is what's really cool there's another

source of happiness in our brain that's referred to by the term udics so when you kind of think about happiness there's two terms that kind of come up and they come from different parts of the brain the first is hedonics so this is pleasure this comes from the nucleus cumbent and this is like you know pleasure seeking like games are f fun booze is fun pot is fun dancing is fun sex is fun like all this stuff is fun right it's pleasurable but then if we look at happiness and contentment this is actually governed by

a completely different part of the brain this is what we call udics and it's governed by this part called the insula and the primary like neurotransmitter involved is also serotonin so we've got kind of the dopamine system and we've got the serotonin system now the interesting thing about udics is the subjective experience of udics is that you're kind of chill you're vibing you're content you feel generally happy with life now the really interesting thing is that these two things are antagonistic so if you look at someone who's highly dopaminergic and their life is governed by

the nucleus accumbent they have very powerful motivations oh my God I I need to get up and I need to hop on the computer I need to hop on my phone I need to use technology I need to do this thing a lot and then generally speaking if you ask them how content are you in life how happy are you in life they will say low now if we flip it around and we take someone who is highly UD dimonic and we ask them what's your life like they kind of wake up and they're sort

of chilling they're kind of vibing they're like life is good and then if you ask them what do you want to do today today they'll be like whatever you want to do is fine they're not their brain is not sort of honing in on I need this pleasure I need to avoid this pain people who are highly UD dionic are also more resilient like we said it kind of relates somewhat to serotonin and what we understand is that boosting serotonin signals in the brain will improve things like depression and anxiety so if we sort of

think about someone who's UD dionic and kind of chilling and content they're less depressed they're less anxious and they're kind of going about living their day and so now what we really need to do is understand okay how do we make this shift from hedonics in the nucleus accumbens to udim monics in sort of being generally content now this is where thankfully we've got a really really really good technique that comes from yoga so couple thousand years ago you had a group of yogis and monks and people like that right and you have all these

people like um you know who will talk about how meditation makes them happier and more content boost willpower how does that work what the yogis basically figured out is that the attachment to pleasure and the avoidance of pain come hand in hand if I'm going to get a lot of Pride from a success I'm also opening myself up to Devastation from failure and so what the yogis decided that we're going to do is we're going to detach from all of that crap we're going to separate ourselves from the hedonics and then what happened when they

started doing these yogic practices they became more UD dionic they started to become more content and as they got better and better than that at that they even attain States called Enlightenment which is a period of sort of persistent happiness and contentment and you may sort of Wonder like how is that possible it's because they udics are through the roof they're kind of chilling vibing with whatever happens so how how do we make this shift so the yogis give us a couple of good tips the first is that they used to do practices like fasting

or the deprivation of positive stimuli now this is where we misunderstand really what the benefit of this is when people do things like fasting we think it's about willpower it's not actually about willpower it's about observing your life in the absence of a pleasurable thing so let me give you all an example so when I was in an asham right so when I first went to study yoga the food there sucked right so it's like asham food it's like Monastery food it's the same kind of GRL I was actually nauseous I could barely choke it

down and I longed for the foods that I wanted the nucleus accumbent of my brain that wants that dopamine from that double fisting of a beer in one hand and a Coke in the other and a slab of Pizza in front of me is like oh my God I don't want to eat this rice GRL day after day after day after day this sucks so much and then as I continued with the deprivation I wasn't starving myself or anything I started to realize oh actually like I can actually find happiness despite the fact that I

don't get my material desires fulfilled after a week goes by after two weeks go by I'm kind of like this is okay so one thing that you can do is abstain from some kind of pleasurable thing now the goal of this abstinence isn't to actually boost your willpower although that can happen the goal of this abstinence is for you to pay attention to what happens to your sense of contentment is your life absolutely miserable without a slice of pizza or without beer or without marijuana you may experience all kinds of negative things but really pay

attention to that and start to see what happens to your life when you deprive yourself of this thing now what's going on in the brain when you do this what's going on is that we are not feeding the nucleus succumbent because remember when the nucleus accumbent get something pleasurable Spurt of dopamine behavioral reinforcement stronger motivation the next day so we're sort of quieting down the nucleus accumbent now the problem with that technique is that it's pretty tough but I would recommend um you know giving something up that you find somewhat pleasurable but like is not

going to be life-changing so in my case I gave up ice cream for 10 years and that worked really really well it was awesome really helped me a lot next thing I know 10 years right honestly it's not that bad that's the whole point of the exercise you do it for a while you're like hey this ain't so bad I could live totally fine and I can be completely happy some of the best years of my life were outside of one of my favorite things second thing that we can do is dissect pleasure now this

is the key thing that they sort of understood that we miss out a lot in in life so right now everyone is all for avoiding pain right cuz pain sucks and that's bad and we don't want to Embrace pain we don't want to fast we don't want to deprive ourselves of anything you see your nucleus of cumbin it's like no no no no no no no we're highly motivated to not give up ice cream don't take that pleasure away from me me and it's going to drive you you see that motivational pull that's happening right

now I don't want to give anything up which is fine you don't have to so this is the cool thing you can not only embrace the negative but you can also detach from the positive now this may be where once again your nucleus accumbens is freaking out does this mean he's going to tell me like I shouldn't do fun things no no no I said detach from not abstain from so what does it mean to detach from the positive what this means is to dissect your pleasure right observe your pleasure from the outside so as

you eat a slice of pizza or have some ice cream take a look at what's going on inside you where in my body does this pleasure come from now what you'll find is that as you start to observe and dissect your pleasure the thing will become less pleasurable so I'll give you all just a simple example back in the day before I went on my monk training I was 19 years old I was in my college dorm and I was was living a hedonistic glorious lifestyle I would order fried rice 2 lbs at a time

to save on delivery charges and I would just Gorge myself on soda and fried rice for 24-Hour gaming binges while I was playing Diablo and man I was completely unconscious but it was just some sort of orgasmic gaming degenerate experience no awareness and so hedonic and it ruined my life instead what I want you all to do is just dissect it right so just pay attention to what about this is fun and what you'll discover is that the less aware you are the more lost you are in the stuff the more hedonic reinforcement you'll get

so as You observe pleasurable things instead of get lost in them the pleasure you receive from them will start to decrease a little bit but the cool thing is that as you decrease that pleasure your udics will actually increase so we know from studies of mindfulness is that when we do any activity mindfully our nucleus succumbent gets less activity it's less painful right so we'll use this for mindfulness for things like cancer related pain so it reduces the pain we experience and it even reduces the hedonic pleasure we experience but what it does is it

boosts our contentment so this is exactly what we want to do and the yogis have given us an answer which is to dissect the pleasure just observe it as much pleasure you want to engage in go for it but just observe where the pleasure comes from and it'll blunt that nucleus accumbent response the last thing that I want to leave y'all with is sort of this core understanding that the yogis came to that motivation is a bad thing so I want youall to think about this for a second the more motivated you are the harder

it is to make a choice because if we think about what is motivation I'm motivated I'm driven right so we'll even use the word I'm driven to whatever because I'm highly motivated so if you sort of think about it who's in control when you're highly motivated I've worked with CEOs who are so motivated to work really hard they've gotten married and divorced three separate times I've literally had to take patients who had Eating Disorders who were so motivated to avoid food that they had to be strapped into a hospital bed and hooked up with IVs

so they don't have heart arrhythmias and die this is the power of motivation but when we get highly motivated we lose all control so the crazy thing is that as you move away from motivation what you start to get in return is choice and now I want youall to think back to a time where you just had a good day where you woke up in the morning and you weren't particularly motivated now we're not talking about motivated to sit down and start playing games like the first thing when you wake up we're talking about truly

content and then you can kind of do whatever you want to that day if some someone suggests hey do you want to go for a hike and you're like yeah that's fine I can do that or you can wake up and you're feeling relatively content you're like ah let me just go ahead and take care of this work and there isn't this internal struggle so the crazy thing that the yogis ended up discovering is that motivation and choice are also antagonistic and the more that you boost your insula the more that your serotonin signal increases

the more you dionic you become the more freedom you have in life that contentment and freedom actually come hand in hand so I know it sounds bizarre and I know that yall think you struggle with motivation and you do struggle with motivation but the problem isn't that you have too little it's that you have too much and it's in the wrong direction so Free Yourself of that motivation and start to make the right choices in life one last thing that I want to share with y'all is how we leverage this principle of udics in our

coaching program when I was designing the program I started to look into research about what helped people feel content and what allowed them them to flourish and it turns out that this experience of flourishing and contentment and also motivation not really motivation but Freedom of Choice really comes to things like discovering a life purpose if you look at the science of what activates the insula and what boosts that serotonin it is things like discovering a purpose in life and the cool thing is that's what our coaching program really tries to focus on it helps you

sort of understand yourself understand your direction and help you go there and the really cool thing is that what we find is that as we increase that purpose depression and anxiety start to come down the the hedonistic dependence neuroscientifically starts to kind of come down as we start to build on that purpose now the reason I built this is because what I noticed as a psychiatrist is that we were focused so much on the depression and anxiety that we were completely ignoring the ud dionic side of things and it turns out that leaning into that

substantially improves people's lives so if yall are interested check it out if you're not by all means do the practices that we shared with yall today around dissecting pleasure and avoiding some amount of pleasure as well hey all if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life check out Dr K's guide to mental health it combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a ose Your Own Adventure format

so check out the link in the bio and start your journey [Music] today