Successful
Neuroscientist: How to Unlock Your Brain's Full Potential
(upbeat music) - Save on O'Reilly Break Parts Cleaner. Get two cans of O'Reilly Break Parts Cleaner for just $8. Valid in store only at O'Reilly Auto Parts. ♪ Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh ♪ ♪ O'Reilly ♪ ♪ Auto Parts ♪ - America, we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By honoring your sacred vocation of education, you impact your family, your friends, and your community at Grand Canyon University, our online bachelors, masters, and doctoral education degree programs allow you to balance online coursework with observational and hands-on experience in the field. Find your purpose at GCU, private, Christian, affordable. Visit GCU.edu. - Success in any endeavor is very closely related to how much focus we can bring to that endeavor. We need to accept that there's a period of agitation and stress that a company is dropping into these highly concentrated states. You have to pass through that gate to get to the focus component. Now you're starting to wire in the behaviors that make people really good at certain things. They essentially have an infinite amount of energy to pursue those goals, and it's all internal. The early stages of hard work and focus are gonna feel like agitation, stress, and confusion, because that's the norepinephrine and adrenaline system kicking in. None of us would expect to walk into the gym and do our PR lift or a performer or go do something without warming up. The brain also needs to warm up and start to hone in which circuits are gonna be active. And it's unreasonable for us to think, oh, I've got an hour, I'm gonna plop down and write beautifully for an hour of my best work. We need to accept that there's a period of agitation and stress that accompanies the dropping into these highly concentrated states. Now in terms of the reward that accompanies the feeling that we're funneling into that groove of being productive, the dopamine system is really important to understand. The dopamine system is mother nature's hardwired, ancient system in all animals, including humans, to put us on the right path. Now, a lot of people talk about dopamine as this thing that you get when you publish the book or when you get the book deal or when something wonderful happens like your child's born. And that's true, but dopamine's main role is to be released any time you achieve a milestone or you think you're on the right path. And when the dopamine system is tethered to a particular pattern of focus, remember duration, path and outcome. So it's like, oh, you sit down, maybe you don't get much text out, but then the next day you get 800 words of really solid text and you feel good, like I'm into this. What does that dopamine system do? The dopamine system takes the norepinephrine which is normally rate limiting. Like at some point, there's so much norepinephrine that you quit, dopamine can push that nore adrenaline back down, that adrenaline back down and give you more room, more space to do duration, path and outcome work, highly focused work. And I'm making duration path outcomes synonymous with highly focused work. Why would this happen? So let's think about an animal. Let's think about a deer that wakes up and is thirsty and it's wandering out looking for water. That animal needs water. It doesn't know that it needs water. It experiences agitation. The same way that a baby feels agitation when it wants food, but it doesn't know it needs food. It just feels agitation and cries and the caretaker comes hopefully. That deer is now foraging for something that it needs. And let's say it smells water 'cause deer can actually do that and arrives at a stream and takes a sip of water. There's dopamine release then that puts it on a path to maybe a larger lake or something of that sort or to be able to go achieve food. So when we are on the right path and we hit a milestone, dopamine is released and it tends to tighten our focus more for that activity. So the dopamine, this is why drugs of abuse and why alcoholism and some process addictions, which are behavioral addictions are so dangerous because a lot of those drugs of abuse are dopamine. So it becomes this cyclical loop where there's no other behavior that can evoke the same level of release. I sort of define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. And I say that because it really is the way that the dopamine system works. Normally the dopamine system is designed to be generic. It's designed to get me to do lots of things, social quality, social interactions, work, exercise, all those things. Just like the stress system is designed to get me out of bed in the morning, a cortisol pulse is what gets me out of bed in the morning. It's also what leads me to, or led me to pursue a career in science out of fear initially and eventually pleasure. So the dopamine system is tethered to those states of focus. And it's what mother nature designed so that neural plasticity would occur and you would want to continue those behaviors again in the future. That deer needs to know and remember and create a memory not just of where that stream is, but the process of, oh, when I feel that agitation, I'm gonna get up and go down this particular path. And so people think of the dopamine system as this kind of like catch all for reward. Oh, you get likes on Instagram and it makes you feel good. That's not really how it works. And the important thing to understand is when you start getting a convergence of norepinephrine, so that level of agitation, duration path outcome, acetylcholine and dopamine, now you're starting to wire in the behaviors that make people really good at certain things. What this means is that for any of us, success in any endeavor is very closely related to how much focus we can bring to that endeavor. And the reward system you start to realize is entirely internal. No one's coming along and cramming dopamine in your ear or dripping it in your brain. It's all internal. And this starts to bring us into the kind of like discussion around mindsets. It's the idea that we can change, so that's built into that. But the discovery of growth mindset was of these kids that actually really enjoyed doing problem sets that they knew they couldn't get right. But for them, they would get this like dopamine release from just focusing on the problem. They liked doing puzzles, they couldn't get right. It sounds crazy, but inevitably those kids are very good at puzzles and very good at math and on these kinds of things. So growth mindset is, I believe, if a sort of a neuroscience lens on growth mindset would be that the agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something and when you're trying to lean into it and you can't focus, is just a recognized gate. You have to pass that through that gate to get to the focus component. And then if you can reward the effort process, you really start to feel joy and low levels of excitement in the effort process. That's that buffering of adrenaline. That's that feeling like, yes, I've got a lot of adrenaline in my system, but I'm on the right path. It feels good to walk up this hill, so to speak. And when you start to bring those neural circuits together, you really start to create a whole set of circuits that are designed to be exported to any behavior you want. So if it's writing a book, great, if it's podcasting, great, if it's building a business, great, if it's building a terrific relationship, great, then the circuits that Mother Nature has designed are incredibly generic so that we could adapt to whatever it is that we need to do. And I think the misunderstanding around how these circuits work has led to this idea that there's some secret entry point, maybe marked flow on the door, and there's a trampoline up to that door, and you just open that door and you're gonna be in it. And nothing could be further from the truth. And anyone who's done well in any career or athletic pursuit knows this, but unfortunately, there's a kind of obsession with the idea that it's all supposed to feel good. And it does feel good, but there's a whole staircase in which it feels kind of lousy. The idea that you can self-reward the effort process is extremely powerful because what it means is that if you can recognize agitation, stress, and confusion as an entry point to where you eventually wanna go, I do think that just that even just mental recognition can allow people to pass through it more easily. They think they're doing something wrong. And then rewarding yourself when you achieve any milestone, like running to a particular location if you're trying to run a long distance, and then registering that as a partial win. What we know is that the dopamine that's released in response to that suppresses the total amount of adrenaline and gives you more room, more time, more energy to run. And this is anchored in a real scientific result. So last year there was a paper published that essentially was asking why any human or animal quits at any behavior. But we're talking about running, where we're talking about long bouts of work. The question is, why do we quit? Like, what is that? And it turns out that every time we exert effort, a certain amount of noradrenaline in the brain is released. And there's a sort of a counter in the brain stem. And at some point, enough noradrenaline is released and it shuts down cognitive control, deliberate control over the motor circuitry. And we quit, that's it. But the thing that can restore those levels, or it can sort of reset those levels lower and give us more gas, more mileage is dopamine. And it makes perfect sense because our species had to move against very challenging things in nature and in terms of in culture at every stage or evolution, including now. A good example would be, if you're really slogging it out and things are miserable, just think like the worst family vacation, everything's a disaster or a very hard physical event. And someone cracks a joke. You're almost immediately feel a sense of relief. You see this in the team that wins the Super Bowl. Both teams slogged it out. You have to believe they were both at max effort the entire game. Look at the team that wins. They have extra energy. They're jumping all over the place. So it can't be physical energy. It can't be glycogen related. It's not ketone related. It's nothing in the body in that sense. It's dopamine's ability to take that level of norepinephrine and smack it back down. And so we can learn this, right? I mean, I think this is where there's real power. Like the ability to push through those pain points is something that we really can export to other aspects of life because it's the same neurochemicals that are involved. So when you get to a particular location or maybe you're feeling lousy, you know, you're injured or you feel like you're hurt and you can reframe it mentally and think I'm actually still on the ladder. I'm still holding on to a wrong. I know at least that much. I'm still breathing. I know that much. And the lift that we get is not some psychological pump up. It's a neurochemical thing. It's dopamine suppressing norepinephrine and saying you're on the right path. You can keep going. It's a permission to keep going. And we grant that permission to ourselves. No one grants that permission to us. I think one of the other kind of misconceptions that we want to dissolve is this idea that external rewards can actually propel us down long past of success and high performance. They can't. There's a famous Stanford study done at Bing Nursery School and they did a study where they looked at kids that liked to playing during their recess, it's all recess in nursery school, but they're drawing and they took the kids that really liked to draw and they started giving them little gold stars on their drawings. And then they liked the gold stars for a kid. That's an extrinsic reward. And then they stopped doing that. And the kids stopped drawing. They associated the good feeling of doing it with the external rewards. We have to be very cautious about how much of our internal dopamine we attach to external rewards if we want to continue to grow and pursue and focus and work hard. If you just want to get to some place and cash in, then fine. But most people find themselves in a pretty miserable place because their dopamine was so attached to external rewards. And so to put this simply, one of the most powerful things that any person can do is to learn to control this idea of duration, path and outcome and attach an internal sense of reward, just that you're doing well, to reward yourself mentally. Just say, I'm doing well, I'm actually on the right path. To do that inside of the demands that come from the external world, the more often that we can self reward some aspect of the process provided it's in the right direction of what we're trying to achieve, the more energy we're gonna have for that, the more focus we're gonna have for that. And remember, the reason I say energy, I don't throw that around loosely, is that limiting amount of noradrenaline is constantly being kept at bay. You're literally buffering the quit response. And so when people start realizing that if they set the goals inside of the larger goal and self reward each one of those, they essentially have an infinite amount of energy to pursue those goals. They have an infinite amount of focus to pursue those goals. (gentle music) (gentle music) [MUSIC PLAYING] (gentle music)