Artificial scarcity, artificial fatigue

From the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman on the Jocko Podcast:

We can now access dopamine release without any effort at all. High-flavor, high-calorie food, right? That was probably rare in nature at one point. We had to work hard in order to get game, get grains, get berries. So it used to be: "effort, dopamine, relaxation, repeat." But now…

It's fair to say that high levels of dopamine achieved without effort will destroy a person. Whether or not that comes through a high-potency drug or a high-potency food, if it comes with an intensity and a frequency that doesn't require effort, it will destroy a person.

I've done a lot of reading and thinking about dopamine over the years because of its central role in energy management. And in four simple words — "effort, dopamine, relaxation, repeat" — Huberman captures the two most important insights I've found for managing my motivation over the long term.

First, by consistently going out of your way to exert effort before rewarding yourself with dopamine, you leverage a kind of self-imposed "artificial scarcity" (to borrow a term from economics) that makes it easy to stay hungry and proactive in those moments when projects become difficult. I think of it as always hunting before you eat, even if you've already stored a bunch of food.

The second insight, "artificial fatigue," is less intuitive. It's when you go out of your way to recharge with low-stimulation activities immediately following those exciting hunts and feasts — even if you aren't exactly "tired." Most high performers in disciplines with well-defined measures of success [1] have incorporated full nights of sleep and even afternoon naps into their deliberate practice regimens. But these conventions are a lot less common in knowledge-work discliplines where it's harder to measure success, like entrepreneurship, fiction writing, etc.

In Plan, Do, Learn, I described my own convention of looping through 3-hour "sessions" of intensive project work, then self-imposing 30- to 60-minute cooldown periods where I relax and recharge. What I didn't mention was that I usually restrict these cooldowns to low-stimulation activities like walking in nature, meditating, showering, and reading physical books, and that this almost always brings me roaring back to my workstation with enthusiasm and countless fresh ideas.

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Footnote:

[1] Think competitive sports like swimming, chess, and even memory competitions, as well as some of the performing arts. The late psychologist K. Anders Ericsson spent decades studying expert performers across dozens of fields and detailed some of the resting patterns of these practitioners in his book Peak, as well as in many of his academic papers.