Published: 1/17/2025

Let’s start this week's blog with 4 such words that play a very important role in your life. If you ever wanted to achieve or did achieve a big goal, you must have used the power of dopamine and discipline to generate motivation and drive. In this week’s blog, we will learn what each one of them means and how they are all related together. We will also be sharing how you can use the information gained to apply it in your own life.

DISCLOSURE: Moving forward, I would like to explicitly disclose that I am not a doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, or hold any degree in neurology or psychology. The information shared in this blog is gained through personal reads of articles, blogs, videos, discussions with domain contacts, observation, and own life experiences. Please read the below text as a step towards gaining a little understanding about the topic—dopamine, discipline, motivation, and drive.

Let’s begin.

What is dopamine?

Dopamine is the hormone that is responsible for the motivation and drive that we humans experience. How it generates motivation is by acting as a reward when we do something that is beneficial for our survival—eating high-calorie food (natural ones), winning a war/gaming match/sport, mating and reproducing, or achieving a personal milestone.

Dopamine is released when we get that “feel-good feeling” on achieving or doing a thing that we like, e.g., ever felt that good feeling on eating very delicious food (dopamine released due to taste sense) or felt that good feeling, that relief feeling, after you felt thirsty and had a glass of water (dopamine released due to agitation/irritation being satisfied), etc.? The point being every time you get a dopamine release (or reward), our mind tends to remember the path (the actions it did to get to that end result), and next time we experience a similar feeling, our mind uses this remembered information as a guiding path to fulfil that need.

You can easily relate to this behaviour in your life, as a child or adult; whenever you feel bored or hungry, you naturally go to the fridge and check if there is anything interesting or tasty food to eat. How did this behaviour come into existence? Well, once upon a time, you found a tasty or exciting food while checking the fridge, which you consumed, and your brain remembered the action it took to experience the reward (the tasty food). Now, each time your mind craves or experiences an agitation at not being able to consume a tasty food in a while, it uses that remembered path to direct you towards your fridge so that it can experience the same reward once again.

Dopamine drives habits in humans, and an extreme form of habit-forming or obsessive behaviour is addiction. Think of addiction as a destructive behaviour in which your mind is just focusing on getting that reward (feel-good feeling) again and again just so that it can keep experiencing that feel-good feeling again and again.

What is discipline?

Discipline, in layman's terms, is the ability to follow rules. Yes, discipline simply means to follow the rule; it doesn’t matter who created the rule (you or someone else) or if that rule is beneficial or not. That is why you see phrases like disciplinary actions (when someone doesn’t follow what the rule is) or when you said you would do X from now on but didn’t do it, you broke your own rule, hence the lack of discipline. Moreover, discipline is the act of taking or doing action no matter if you are feeling like doing it or not, and what makes it hard to implement is? It’s the old friend dopamine! Yes, when we talk about discipline, we are talking about doing things that we may not feel like doing, and hence where will our brain get the dopamine it so desires? Making this action non-useful to our brain. Then how to resolve this? Simple: whenever you do a thing that you said you would do, try to reward yourself (by appreciating your effort and action or eating or listening to something that gives you that feel-good feeling). This way, your mind will start to associate that following rule as rewarding, hence it will crave this behaviour in the future.

Interesting read—read about the “habit loop” if you would like to learn about habits and discipline.

What are motivation and drive?

Coming to our last and exciting topic: motivation and drive! How to bring the motivation to do something and build that drive, which is something personal to me. Motivation simply means the feeling to do something or having that energy and emotion to do something either due to a deep personal reason, the end reward you get, or out of pain and anger.

To learn how to motivate yourself, you should again remember our old friend dopamine. Dopamine hormone is present in a default level in our brain, which we call the base level (you can think of it similarly to how we have a base sugar level in our blood); any rewarding behaviour (feel-good feeling) creates a peak or spike in this base level and increases our dopamine level to a higher level temporarily. The difference between the base level and how high the dopamine level spiked determines the level of pleasure you experience from that activity. This level of pleasure is what creates motivation in our mind to seek this experience again (ring any bells for you guys when consuming something really sweet and can’t stop?). , each time you seek the behaviour in a short period of time, the base level of dopamine in your brain rises up (similar to how you eat sugar in a short period, and it will increase your level of sugar in blood), which means the difference between the base level (which has increased due to excessive reward generation) and the high peak achieved from the activity will decrease. The more you seek that behaviour in a short period of time, the less pleasurable or motivating it will become. Thus, it is often advised to take a break from such pleasurable experiences so that your base levels can go back to what they were before the activity.

One last interesting fact: You now know that your dopamine levels increases when you indulge in a pleasurable activity but when you take a break from that activity your dopamine levels starts to go back to it’s base level (similar to sugar withdrawal) you feel that empty feeling or boring or non-exciting feeling this is not a bad thing to feel instead this is your body telling you that your dopamine levels are going back to it’s base levels. Once you endure this temporary empty feeling, if you again indulge in the same activity, you will again experience the same level of pleasure and motivation that you did when you first started.

Drive is the intense, motivating feeling you feel when you indulge in an activity that gives you an inner satisfaction or is a personal milestone—working on your business, going on a solo trip, meeting your loved ones after so long.

How can we use dopamine and discipline to generate motivation and drive?

Now that we have learnt about dopamine, discipline, motivation, and drive, let’s connect all of these topics together.

• The brain releases dopamine on experiencing a rewarding behaviour.
• Dopamine release makes the brain remember the steps or path it took to experience that rewarding behaviour, so it seeks it again.
• The difference between the base dopamine level and the high dopamine level it experiences while indulging in the activity determines the level of pleasure it experiences. This creates motivation in our mind to experience such a behaviour again in the future.
• Drive happens when we indulge in a behaviour that brings personal satisfaction and pleasure.
• Discipline is the act of following rules; it is hard to follow because you don’t experience the feel-good feeling of dopamine upon indulging in it.
• Hence, to develop discipline and drive, one must reward oneself upon achieving our personal milestone or indulging in activity that benefits us so that our mind remembers the path or steps to experience that feel-good feeling (dopamine hormone), and over time, with repeated behaviour, it turns into a habit.

That All 🥳🎉

Thanks for staying tuned! And reading till now, I hope you must have learnt something about your mind and how it drives your behaviour. I would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or taking this present discussion further with me.

Keep learning. :)