Sober Synthesis

“It’s not about perfect. It’s about effort. And when you bring that effort every single day, that’s where transformation happens. That’s how change occurs.”

Jillian Michaels

What Are the Neurobiological Factors that Influence Motivation?

• Motivation involves coordination between several key neurochemicals to manage duration, path, and outcome.
  • Norepinephrine gets you going and stimulates our energy resources
  • Acetylcholine promotes attention
  • Dopamine system keeps you on the path/pursuit.
• One often passes through a discomfort (agitation, stress, confusion) process before focusing and then proceeding with an activity/path towards  a goal/outcome. This discomfort phase is generally the phase that leads to procrastination.
• Recognizing progress (self reward, self affirmation) releases dopamine in a modulated way that results in more energy and motivation to continue the effort (behavioral changes).
  • Learn to dose dopamine from effort itself: focusing only on the reward at the end of effort can undermine the process, making the process feel more painful and time feel longer.
  • All people, even elite athletes, quit a behavior if one builds up too much norepinephrine (brain stem shuts down the effort). 
  • The most powerful way to balance levels of norepinephrine are self reward dopamine releases. For example, when a marathon runner “hits the wall”, the key for continuing is to have a self rewarding mental strategy to take the next step. 
    • Early recovery is like running a marathon with little to no pre-training and significant depletion of dopamine. Practicing self-affirmations for getting through minutes, hours, and then days of abstinence can provide powerful sources of motivation “fuel”. 
• Thoughts are spontaneous. Trying to suppress negative thoughts is futile.
  • Our power is the ability to introduce new thoughts to stimulate new actions.
• Willpower and tenacity are dependent on our autonomic function and balance.
  • Tenacity and willpower will diminish when we are sleep deprived, in physical or emotional pain, hungry, and when we are chronically stressed. Remember HALT (hungry, angry, lonely, tired)?

What Activities Support Building Motivation Muscle?

• Practice daily self-affirmations linked to progress, small or large, towards goals.
  • For example “what am I proud of today”?. This practice is especially helpful in early recovery. 
• Minimize reliance/expectations for external rewards.
• Choose doing something regularly that is not easy or pleasant (micro-sucs/micro-challenges). 
  • Extra set at the gym, resisting picking up the phone, doing chores when “not in the mood”. 
  • While doing these “stretch” activities, practice experimenting with ways to tolerate the mental and/or physical discomfort including self affirmations for progress.
• Advanced Activity: Cold exposure, most common practice is time in a cold shower (30 sec-2 min.).
  • Can boost dopamine up to 2.5x above baseline and is sustained for up to three hours post-exposure. 

Proposed questions for thought and/or sharing:

1. How have you used self-affirmations/rewards to support your motivation/progress in your recovery, in your relationships, in your work?
2. What are your barriers to doing so?
3. What other activities have helped you maintain motivation?

Disclaimer

This summary is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor/patient relationship is formed.