How To Rewire Your Brain For Focus And Motivation

In today’s newsletter I’m going to walk you through how to boost your focus and motivation naturally without relying on pills.

Growing up in school I had the smallest attention span. I couldn’t even listen in class for 5 minutes without getting distracted. Not matter how much I tried, I would always have this urge to escape boredom by:

• Playing video games

• Daydreaming about nonsense

• Scrolling my phone for the latest NBA news

I was deeply frustrated with my inability to sit down and focus. I was ambitious and had big goals for myself but I just couldn’t find the motivation to sit down and do the work.

I was desperate for a solution.

I began searching the internet for the answer that would unlock my motivation, only to find advice like:

• “Just do it”

• “You don’t need motivation you need discipline”

I felt like there was something was wrong with me. I was trying to do it. I was trying to be more disciplined. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t sit still for more than a couple of minutes.

The sad reality is that this is becoming our new normal. I constantly hear about how people struggle to sit down to read a book.

How can we accomplish anything meaningful in our lives if our attention spans are on the decline?

Everything changed when I came across a video that talked about the neuroscience of focus and motivation.

The change didn’t happen overnight. I’m still prone to distraction and procrastination (news flash: everyone is).

But I did notice a significant boost in my motivation. I began to finally make more progress in my life. Began taking action towards my goals and dreams.

Now I’m going to share with you how I rewired my brain for focus and motivation and how you can to.

The Motivation Molecule

I was surprised to learn that there’s a molecule in our brain that is directly responsible for focus and motivation.

It’s called dopamine.

Here’s how it works:

When you do something pleasurable (ie. eating food) your brain releases some dopamine and you feel good. Your brain is rewarding the behavior (aka eating) so that you will be more motivated to repeat that same action.

This reward circuitry was essential for our survival. Your brain rewards you for acquiring the skills necessary to stay alive and pass on your genes.

So the more dopamine you have, the more motivated you will be. The more motivated you are, the more you will be able to focus and block out distractions.

The more dopamine you have, the more pleasure you will have from attaining mastery.

But in our modern world, our reward circuitry is being hijacked by corporations for profit without us even knowing it. Things like:

• Pornography

• Social Media

• Processed foods filled with sugar, fat and salt

These highly addicting habits that might seem harmless are the same things that are sapping our focus and motivation.

These behaviours are very pleasurable which gives you a huge spike of dopamine only for it to come crashing down. Leaving you feeling depleted and anxious.

Your brain is rewarding you for these behaviours because it thinks it will help you with survival.

It doesn’t understand our world of abundance. Our reward circuitry is wired for a world of scarcity.

When your brain experience these massive spikes in dopamine, it responds by becoming less sensitized to dopamine. Think of it as building tolerance for dopamine.

As your brain gets accustomed to these large spikes of dopamine, everything else becomes less pleasurable.

You end up needing more sugar, porn or social media to feel that same pleasure that you initially felt.

This is why we’re seeing the rise in ADHD. People with ADHD tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their brains.

Common ADHD medication like adderall overcome this by boosting your dopamine which helps you feel more focused and motivated.

However, there are ways to do this naturally without relying on pills.

How To Boost Your Dopamine Naturally

The goal is to maintain a stable balance of dopamine for sustained focus and motivation vs. these large spikes and crashes in dopamine that is becoming more common.

The first obvious step is eliminating or significantly reducing these highly stimulating habits ie. doomscrolling TikTok, bingeing netflix, eating processed foods, playing video games etc.

I still watch Netflix and indulge in social media but it’s significantly less than it was a few years ago.

So if you still find value in some of these habits and don’t want to eliminate it from your life, focus on:

1. Significantly decreasing the time spent on these habits

2. Avoid indulging in these habits first thing in the morning

When you first wake up is when you have the most amount of dopamine aka you tend to be more motivated and focused.

So rather than sapping away all the motivation by doomscrolling TikTok, use that towards something more productive.

Then you can indulge in these other pleasures later in the day.

Once you get accustomed to having less of these spikes throughout the day you’ll feel more calm, focused and motivated.

Then you can start adding habits that will boost your dopamine baseline naturally. Things like:

1. Sleep

2. Exercise

3. Diet

4. Sunlight

I will be doing a separate newsletter for each of these topics. So stay tuned.

I’ll see you all next week.

Cheers,

Ashvin

P.S

If you want to talk 1:1 for personalized advice on how you can start implementing these changes, I’m offering FREE coaching for a limited time. You can click the link here to book a call with me.