Maximize Your Motivation: Dopamine, Discipline, and Acceptance | Being Well Podcast

We all have things we want to accomplish in life, but having goals or knowing we should be doing something is often not nearly enough to get us to actually sustain our efforts in getting where we want to go.

Today on Being Well, Dr. Rick Hanson and I explore how to optimize our motivation. We distinguish motivation from discipline, liking from wanting, and describe how our brain’s reward circuitry works. We then explore how to best frame our outlook so we can feel relaxed, diligent, and uninhibited from being who we want to be and accomplishing what we want to accomplish.

0:00 Introduction
2:00 Expanding our view of motivation and distinguishing from discipline
5:30 Why don't we just want the things we know are good for us?
11:05 Creating unity between our biology and cognitive processing
15:50 Neurological overview of motivation
22:00 Distinguishing liking from wanting
26:10 Natural variations in dopamine metabolism
28:55 How people with lower levels of dopamine can stay motivated
32:35 Updating the reward value of your experiences
37:15 Being, doing, and having
43:20 What has helped Rick stay diligent and let go of resistance
47:00 Practical how-tos for interacting with the dopaminergic system
51:10 Letting fish be fish
52:55 Recap

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Who Am I: I'm Forrest, the co-author of Resilient (https://amzn.to/3iXLerD) and host of the Being Well Podcast (https://apple.co/38ufGG0). I'm making videos focused on simplifying psychology, mental health, and personal growth.

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