Stuart Munro is a performance and wellbeing psychologist, specialising in helping people perform effectively in high performance environments. He is currently supporting international Paralympic alpine ski racers, develops performance psychology content for corporate sectors, and runs mindfulness-based sessions for performance and wellbeing.
Stuart offers you some guidance on setting new behaviours into long-term habits……
New Year Resolutions vs Lifetime Habits Part 1 invited you to consider how to develop motivation and willpower to start a new behaviour. In this section you will learn how to keep those new behaviours going – to build a lifetime habit.
Part 2 – The Reward Pathway – building new habits
Do you know someone that has that enviable capability to get up 6am to go training, regardless of the weather, and is just completely driven to get things done? As humans, we learned to admire these qualities – the hunters, gatherers, carers, educators, innovators that achieved in spite of things being tough. And you may think they have some unique genetic ability that makes it easy for them to be like that, but that is not the case.
We are all built with the same system that creates this capability to achieve and develop new behaviours that benefit us. For a lot of us, we simply just don’t activate this system efficiently. A major reason for those being able to keep new behaviours going as lifetime habits is related to how the person’s reward pathway – or dopamine system – is functioning.
So, to help you create and keep your new behaviours as lifetime habits, I will help you to understand and exploit this system so that it functions better for you.
Let’s start with the science. What is dopamine and what does it do? Dopamine is a molecule in the brain and body that acts as a neuromodulator, which means that it acts as a chemical messenger to influence many neurons in your brain at once. It is part of your reward system, which is evolutionary designed to give you a feeling of reward when originally you were doing activities to survive, compete, connect and reproduce. Our brains evolved to have this reward pathway, to motivate us to do these behaviours and to
learn to do certain behaviours again.
When we do something that is pleasurable or gives us a sense of achievement, your brain releases dopamine – it feels good – motivating us to do that again. Hence, we learn and create habitual behaviours from this reward pathway. When dopamine levels are higher than your normal baseline it focuses your attention to your goals, you are motivated and have a desire to pursue things you want. Dopamine
therefore is the key determinant for excitement, motivation, anticipation and drive to push through effort. Of course, the dark side to dopamine is that junk food, drugs, high-risk behaviours, for example, give us this huge spike in dopamine and then a subsequent low.
And because of the way our reward system is designed, we crave doing those behaviours again. Craving is simply the pain created by your baseline level of dopamine having dropped significantly and your reward pathway screaming at you to do the behaviour that gave you that dopamine spike again.
Exploiting your reward system
Part of the dopaminergic reward pathway is your prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain is responsible for your executive control and decision-making abilities which means this offers you subjective control over motivation levels. How does this work? Well, consider that a gold medal, for example, doesn’t drip-feed dopamine into your brain and body from outside. You subjectively decided that the event of winning the gold medal was rewarding and this evoked a dopamine release. There is now an association with this
event and dopamine release. And this is where you can exploit this system. The act of telling yourself that your effort is moving you towards a goal, and is a rewarding endeavour, stimulates large dopamine spikes – and this is under your control.
Making change needs effort
Of course it does, you may be thinking. But I want to explain why this is so important to understand and why it is the key to keeping new behaviours going.
Making any change is tough, it requires effort. And a key aspect to this is that if you are not getting a perception of effort, then you are unlikely to be learning or adapting. The effort is the key to change. It is the effort that will move you from where or what you were, to where and what you want to be. So, the effort needs to be recognised as the pivotal factor for your change. And what I’m trying to show you here is that the effort should be commended, lauded, loved, self-affirmed, encouraged, praised by you. Yet, when it comes to the effort of a new behaviour we commonly detest it. It’s uncomfortable, unpleasurable, hard, tough. All words and connotations that build a perception or mindset that effort sucks.
And it is this mindset that affects your reward pathway and your dopamine release for the new behaviour. Because if you don’t recognise the effort as being rewarding then your brain
does not activate dopamine for that effort. And this is not your fault. As humans we are programmed to have outcomes praised, not the effort. As children and as adults, in schools, universities, sports, work, we tend to be rewarded (or punished) at the end of our endeavours, so this mindset unhelpfully persists.
Focus on rewarding the effort
To start a new behaviour we often try and use future-oriented goals to reward us for doing the new behaviour. Let’s say, for example, that you decide you’re going to start walking in the mornings. You know that the thought of walking is uncomfortable, and doing the walking is effortful, so you decide to incentivise yourself by having the goal of treating yourself to a nice coffee and croissant at the end.
However, the process of working hard for a reward that comes later doesn’t help you build a habit because of the way dopamine controls our perception of time. This future, external reward skews your dopamine release to the end. And this influences your brain’s interpretation of the activity you did – that you didn’t do the activity because you enjoyed the activity, you did it for the reward. And because of the way that dopamine regulates itself, when you experience the dopamine spike, you get a dopamine drop below your baseline level. It’s a sort of pleasure/pain balance, where your dopamine levels are depleted and take time to regenerate. So, there is no dopamine release during the activity, and you experience a drop in dopamine after the later, external reward (e.g. the coffee), and both these are closely associated with the activity you did.
If you decide to push through the ‘uncomfortable effort’ for the reward that comes later, your brain dissociates and diminishes dopamine release that would have been functioning during the activity. Any pleasure or enjoyment that could have been associated with that activity is now less. In fact, because the reward is future-focused it actually makes the new behaviour you are trying to do in the moment seem harder and more challenging.
So, how do you change?
Well, the advantage that you have over the dopamine system is that there is a subjective element. Your decision-making part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) is part of the reward pathway. It provides you with a means of control over your dopamine release, called a ‘belief effect’. Telling yourself you are moving towards your goal ‘during the activity’ powerfully stimulates dopamine release.
And there’s the challenge. Because the effort to do the new activity is tough. You need to engage your prefrontal cortex and tell yourself that this effort is actually good. That the effort is enjoyable. Of course, this is hard to do, if for example, your new exercise behaviour is uncomfortable. However, here are some ways that can stimulate more dopamine for the effort phase:
Create a new belief towards ‘effort’
Recognise that it is the effort that is getting you to where you want to go. Develop the mindset that the effort is the important part. Associate your milestones (e.g. losing weight) with the effort. Tell yourself that the effort is the good part. Without the effort and this uncomfortableness there is no change. Every step is making you stronger. The exertion is making you fitter. You will find, over time, that you will get
the dopamine release inside your effort. The bonus here is that even if this belief is in one particular aspect of your life, such as fitness, this ‘effort is rewarding’ mindset transfers into other areas of your life.
This is your willing consent
Having a sense of autonomy to your actions is crucial. This is why exercise routines mandated by GP’s do not work. In the moment of doing the effort, tell yourself this is your choice, you want to do this activity even though it is tough.
Randomly reward the milestones
Why do people get addicted to slot machines? Because the winnings and reward is intermittent and random. How can you exploit this? Well, if you reward every milestone, the brain knows what is going to happen, so it doesn’t give you that dopamine spike. It is good to achieve, and you want to know that you efforts are taking you somewhere. This is where you can enlist the help of family and friends. You can inform them of milestones, but let them decide when to celebrate them.
Bring novelty to your efforts
Brains love novelty and being curious. Mix up your training plans, rather than doing the same thing all of the time. If you’ve walked a certain way before, create a new route. What do you see or create when you are putting in the effort? Can you look for something that you’ve never seen before. Bring awareness to what your doing, and really take in what is being achieved from your efforts.
Increase your distress tolerance
Making change is tough and most of us don’t like tough. But most of this ‘tough’ or ‘hard’ is subjectively added by us. For example, if you get slightly out of breath, you may think that this is the worst feeling ever. Gently challenge these subjective thoughts. Is it really that uncomfortable? Is the discomfort really that bad? Say to yourself you’ll push through the next 5 mins. Increasing your distress tolerance brings so many beneficial aspects to your life and wellbeing. Difficult thoughts and emotions suddenly become less intense because you’ve been learning to deal with uncomfortableness in other areas of your life.
Be careful of layering dopamine sources into your effort
The new behaviour of walking, for example, is tough and you don’t like the thought of it, so you have an energy drink before, decide to put on your music and have some jelly sweeties just in case you need a little extra sugar. And you only exercise with your walking partner. You have now layered different sources of dopamine into your new activity. But by stacking up these dopamine sources means it gives you a bigger crash afterwards, meaning the association with the activity is less pleasurable. Also, the dopamine relation to the activity is weaker so you are less likely to build long-term motivation for the new behaviour.
Understanding how your motivation, willpower and reward pathway function is a pivotal aspect in making behaviour change. When you understand how it works you can follow the guidance provided to help you begin making lifelong beneficial change. The effort is tough, yet, if you embrace that initial uncomfortableness, bringing a belief that the effort is good for you and keep going, your mindset begins changing and with that, effort becomes a rewarding endeavour.
Stuart can be contacted by email: stu@minds2perform.com
Stuart is an expert in mindfulness-based training for performance and wellbeing having
extensive training and experience working with various client groups. He will be offering an
online group session in 2023. Please contact Stuart if interested.
