https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-TW2Chpz4k
• Sleep well (8 hrs) literally restores the baseline dopamine
• Sunlight early in the morning (10 minutes, double if it is cloudy)
• Cold shower or inmersion (30 sec to 3 minutes, if shower, on the head) (11.5 min total / week)
• Caffeine (early in the morning)
• 30 days of absolute abstinence of the thing you want to stop doing (painful, but worthy)
• L-Tyrosine supplements (early in the morning) (500 mg - 1 gr)
• Exercise: anything will give you everything.
• How dopamine works: like a wave pool, if the spike is too high, some water will drop out of the pool and the baseline will go below what was before.
• Desire -> spike in dopamine; followed by a decrease in dopamine below baseline -> triggers craving; cues of how we're doing (directly proportional of our sensation that we're going in the right direction towards obtaining what were craving -> mini spikes in dopamine; After getting what we wanted we restore the dopamine to baseline, plus the difference between what we got and what we expected.
• The steepness of the curve of dopamine (the rate in time as the x-axis and the amount of dopamine releasing every second as the y-axis at which dopamine releasing increases) is as important to the dopamine cycle and how we feel about the thing we're desiring, as the size of the peak itself.
• That's why cocaine (or any other drugs), orgasms by masturbation, chocolate, fast food, etcetera are so dangerous: the amount of time between desire and getting the thing is so tiny, so we tend to want more, and more, and more.
• There are 3 types of 'pleasure-unpleasure' that our brains categorize: the yum (very good, pleasurable), the yiugh (very unpleasant) and the meh (neither one nor the other)
• There's also a phenomenon that goes like this: if we give dopamine stimulating rewards to people after the do things that are 'yum', and do it repeatedly and every time they engage in that activity, and then stop giving them the reward (there was an experiment with children giving them rewards after they drew or wrote anything in their spare time -meaning that was the thing they liked more, because they were doing it instead of every other thing-), then they will lose the pleasure for that activity (and will turn out to be 'meh' for them from now on (they will return to normal, but takes time).
• If we want to really engage in an activity and feel please by doing it, we must, then, learn to feel pleasure by doing the activity itself, not by stacking rewards or boosts neither prior or after the activity (e.g. staks of pre-workouts, caffeine, yerba mate, Alpha GPC, L-Tyrosine, etc; do them from time to time and watch out what is your baseline level of caffeine: the caffeine you need to have every day [preferably in the morning so you don't ruin your sleep at nights] to survive or do basic functions, if you're part of the ones who don't need caffeine to survive, you're already ahead of those who need at least a little bit of it and not systematically, the point is to avoid the brain knowing 'its caffein' time' so the cravings start.
• The difference between an activity or a substance that makes our dopamine peak and one that increases our baseline dopamine
• The duration of the dopamine troph (troph is the contrary to peak, is directly proportional to the deepness of that troph itself. What that means is that in order for us to get out of a dopamine troph as soon as possible (maybe we had a peak prior to it, or just feel dismotivated or want to overcome procrastination, what we gotta do is:
• Increase that troph: engage in an activity that makes you feel discomfort (IMPORTANT: not physical or mental pain, that's useless and not what we're referring to), maybe it is cleaning the house or deliberate cold exposure or meditation, so the more disconfort makes (the more steeper the troph is -I guess, in relation to time), the more quickly we'll be able to get out of that disconfort and procrastinating zone.
• The holy grail of motivation: to be able to attach reward to the effort process itself.