Load Your Reward Chemicals Strategically

If you’re waking up and scrolling on your phone, you’re making the day harder than it needs to be.

You can divide everything we do each day into two groups: Easy Dopamine and Hard Dopamine.

Things like scrolling on your phone, eating junk food, watching Netflix, and more fall into the Easy Dopamine category.

But to our brains, dopamine is dopamine.

Dopamine is…?

Put simply, dopamine is the chemical your brain releases when you complete a task or achieve a goal. It gives us a boost, motivating us to continue the activity that provided the chemical hit.

The problem is that the modern world has hijacked our brains to produce dopamine all the time and for the most trivial of reasons.

For example, scrolling on your phone floods your system with dopamine, but that’s something that doesn’t achieve anything (usually). It’s why we spend hours scrolling through nonsense, because it literally feels good to our brains.

Hard Dopamine In the Morning

Most of our days are spent on hard/low dopamine tasks.

Responding to emails, sitting through meetings that could have been emails, creating reports, researching things, etc.

These tasks take work to complete, and release a small amount of dopamine — the “reward chemical” — in our brains when we complete them.

Yet if we’ve started the day scrolling on our phones, we’ve already flooded our system with easy dopamine. Our brains have a new threshold for dopamine that working on low dopamine tasks just isn’t going to hit.

The key to this is avoiding high-dopamine activities throughout the day, and particularly in the morning.

Low Dopamine Morning Routines

When you wake up, don’t reach for your phone.

Instead, read a book or jump straight into the shower, and then start working on the things you need to get done.

This could be actual work, or going to the gym, or journaling, or whatever.

This keeps you at a low dopamine level, making it easier to tackle the jobs you need to get done during the day.

Because you're at a low level of dopamine, these low-dopamine tasks actually feel high, because you've not flooded your brain with easy dopamine first thing in the morning.

Then at the end of the day, you can do all those easy, high-dopamine activities as a reward.