Were You Looking for Dopamine and Got Cortisol Instead?

If you’ve tried a reward system to maintain motivation yet find yourself to be even more stressed, then I think I know where you went wrong — and what you can try instead.

I coach people around work and wellbeing. Part of that is setting and working towards goals, including planning, self-organizing, and maintaining motivation. Looking for a video to use in a workshop, I came across a video about how to “hack” our brains based on knowledge of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is associated with good feelings, attention, and engagement in tasks. (I won’t link the original video, but I will recommend Dr. Andrew Huberman as a great source on this subject.) Having only the best intentions, I shared the video with my clients.

The Dopamine “Hack”

The idea is this: our brains struggle with long-terms goals and delayed reward. Thus, we get distracted by other activities for which there is less labour required to get our dopamine hits — think swiping on your phone through boring TikTok videos to get to a funny one. To trick your brain, then, you could try creating a reward system for the process of working towards our goals. In other words, you create a series of smaller goals, and reward yourself for each one. Work one hour, get a break. Finish your resume rewrite, get some takeout. Maintain focus for an afternoon, give yourself half an hour of…