Motivation is not an emotion. It's a chemical. As soon as you understand the chemistry of what's happening in your brain to drive you through pass or over the most difficult challenges that you are facing in order to reach the rewards and recognition that you are seeking. A whole lot of good things happen when you understand how to unlock the chemistry that's actually happening between your ears.

This episode, we go deep into the chemistry of the mind and unlocking the habits and actions that are required to get to those end results. We have to tie them to things that we want in order to push us through to do the things that we don't necessarily want to do in the short term to receive the longterm gain that we are seeking.

This is an awesome episode. You need to listen to this one probably more than a couple of times to really let it seep in. But man, if you ever face that difficulty of always kind of coming up to last moment before you take action or kind of procrastinating, or if, or if you find yourself kind of in an analysis paralysis, there's all kinds of different challenges that people face in order.

You know, push through to the other side to get to where they want to go. If you've ever dealt with any of those types of kind of internal conflicts, internal friction that seem to kind of keep you hamstrung and not moving forward. This, my friends, is an episode that you absolutely want to dive into. I know you'll love it.

Welcome. Join us for this episode of the wealthy consultant podcast. I know you're going to get a lot out of it. Let's jump in right now. All right. How many of you on this call have ever, um, set a goal  to do something and then weeks go by.  And you haven't made any progress on the goal.  Been there, man. Yep. 

That's an easy question.  Everybody's been there. Now, I can make a question harder by saying, how many times have you been there? And then we start getting into shame. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't shame us.  Most people have been like, this is their whole life.  Um. You know, you get into the new year, you set a big target.

It's hoorah. Let's go, let's go, let's go. You're, you're flooded with this neurotransmitter, um, called dopamine,  but the dopamine hit too soon. So the timing of dopamine is important. I think we're just going to wrap on dopamine for a little bit. If y'all are okay with that, because, um, as I'm working on my new book. 

And putting all my research together, I've got way too much that can fit into the book. So I'm just going to give you guys some of the stuff that can't, we can't put it in. You can't write a 500 page book. It doesn't work. So I'm going to give that stuff to you. But when it comes down to the science of Jonathan says exactly three times.

I love the specificity.  When it comes down to the science of getting things done, um, a healthy understanding of dopamine and what it does and how to regulate it and how to use it is, is really important. Um, so what you see on your screen is, is, uh, the neurotransmitter  of dopamine.  How helpful is that? 

Not helpful yet.  There you go.  Go on and go on and be fruitful. Enjoy.  Okay. So I'm going to break down like where dopamine fits into the overall hierarchy of human emotion. Um, everything that we teach this so different because I,  yeah, now you get it exactly, everything is solved.  You're your emotion,  although.

Largely, uh, consultants and influencers have taught you to  disregard your emotions.  Your emotions are GPS signals and they exist for one reason. This is why our, our emotions exist. It's not, it's not even a feeling. So you can't actually, the idea of feeling doesn't exactly. Match science is not really a, there's not a practice you can go through to just feel something.

Now I know that  enlightenment coaches are going to say, just feel into it, just feel into it, but it doesn't mean anything. You, you actually, we have no way. There's no way for the human body to feel anything. What the human body is actually doing is this decoding chemicals. So if you, uh, you know, like AI, now you can, you can take a picture of something that's written in Spanish. 

And you can take it. You can say, Hey, translate this to English and it will decode it and rewrite it in a way that you can understand it. The  data already exists, but you don't know what it means  until you re translate it into English  in a similar frame. This is what's happening when we feel something.

We are  taking a chemical or neurotransmitter  and we don't understand it consciously. And so what our body does is our, our body will decode it and it will make us feel a certain way. And therefore we understand what the data is saying. Does that  does that context make sense? Yeah. Tracking. Okay, so you've got all these different neurotransmitters and you've got hormones and hormones can make you feel all certain sorts of ways.

Hormones can make you absolutely crazy. Um, but a neurotransmitter is essentially it's something released into your brain that your brain is trying to get you to do something is trying to get you to make a decision. So, when we feel  a certain way, it's the brain's way of trying to get us to do something.

It's not doesn't care about how we feel. It literally doesn't matter. It doesn't care at all what it feels like. It's trying to get us off the couch into the gym, or it's trying to get us to, uh, feed ourselves calories. It's trying to get us to text somebody that we're interested in romantically, and we want to talk to them.

It's trying to get us to do things, and, and the brain is, is largely interested  at a base level, if you, if you stay at the top of this. The brain is interested in two things. You know what they are?  What is it? Staying alive.  Number one  and, uh, procreating  number two. Sounds about right. All right. So the it's, if there were, if there were a fear, if, if you're, if your brain could be put into a computer and it could, and you could ask your brain questions and it had no ability to, um, to lie.

And you said, what are you? Jennifer bleams brain. We have Jennifer brings blame brain, and it's not allowed to lie. It's not Jennifer Bleem because it doesn't have consciousness,  okay? You're not Jennifer Bleem without the spirit. It doesn't have consciousness. It's just her brain. And you ask her brain, you say, Hey, what are the, what are you the most afraid of?

That brain will instantly respond with two answers. Number one, I'm afraid of dying.  Number two, I'm afraid of being alone.  That's what the brain will say. I'm afraid of death because that means that I'm violating my protocols, which is to stay alive. And I'm afraid of being alone because I can't procreate. 

Humans have not figured out how to procreate with themselves.  Okay. This is the brain. Are we too deep or you want me to come up or I'm going to take you somewhere. I promise. This is a level of like  metacognition that most people just don't have time to get into unless you're in TWC and then we just sit around drink margaritas and talk about this is normal.

Okay, so the brain's got all these different ways that it's going to it's gonna it's gonna release these chemicals to try to keep us from dying and it's going to try to keep us from being alone. That's what it's really trying to do. So every fear you have at the end of the day, you can track it back to two things. 

Every single fear is going to categorize itself underneath this filing system hierarchy of please don't die  and please don't get yourself stranded on an island by yourself.  Don't get rejected from the tribe  and don't die. Don't starve to death.  Don't get rejected.  Those are the two things. Inside of these two confines, we have different chemicals that are designed to keep us  attractive so that we don't get rejected and protected so that we do not die. 

Okay. So dopamine is one of the main neurotransmitters  that is responsible for getting you to do stuff.  So when you set a goal, it's January one, and you are so excited because you see yourself and you've gone through the 10x challenge and you're a part of our group. So you get access to the most cutting edge stuff.

Like, I don't even, I think I posted this in chamber, me and Mike are trying to license our stuff to colleges and they're like, uh, no comprende,  uh, like we can't even put it in general. We have to put it in masters level stuff. And some of the playbooks. Don't even fit into masters like doctorate level. So we're,  we're having to make the decision right now between like, do we water it down so that a sophomore in college can understand it?

Or do we keep it together so that it can go to a doctorate level? Um, so what you're getting access to even, even here is, is just a level that people don't get to touch very often.  Dopamine is, is released in seconds. It can maybe last a minute, maybe two minutes. And it's designed to get you past the hump or the hurdle points of doing something you don't want to do so that you can get something that you really want. 

And when we have people setting goals and they don't ever do anything, the reason that this happens, well there's a lot of reasons, but one of the main reasons is that they cannot keep their goals front of mind.  long enough  for dopamine to discharge appropriately, or  they routinely go through their goals so often that it loses its novelty. 

And it becomes less intense. So the dopamine will become, the dopamine, the, the intensity of the dopamine release is attached to the novelty or the intensity of the craving of the outcome. So for example, you want to be careful when you're even doing your morning formula. You don't want to read your morning formula nine times a day.

Don't do that. Um, you want to get into habit of reading it every day. And then you want to back off and, and three or four times a week you read through your morning formula. Because it can't become so novel that it's now nothing. It's not a big deal.  Okay. Let's go into actually how dopamine is, is  actually released.

We have, um, how many of you realize that  pretty much everything you want to accomplish is on the other side of  a handful of things that you most likely don't want to do.  Yeah. Yeah.  So let's scale the wall. Let's take like the cold plunge experience. Uh, my wife this morning woke up at five o'clock, went upstairs, got into a sauna.

She did like 30 minutes of prayer, comes out,  strips down, and jumps into a cold plunge in the middle of the snow.  And then she went out and she went on a run with the dog. I mean, she is like on another level. Right now, she's gotten goals. She's motivated. Her routines are locked in the only thing that can possess a human  to get out of 160 degrees sauna and jump into a snowy cold plunge.

is dopamine.  Nothing else will work.  So when, when, when you think that you need more discipline, you likely don't, you most likely need more rewards.  Ooh, that's a writer downer. Yeah. Because discipline is a function of What you're going to get on the other side of discipline.  And so be real careful when you're trying to barrel your way through something with just discipline, grind, clench your fists together and jump off a bridge.

No, no, no, no, no. That's not how, that's not how this works. My friends, this works life works. Through a series of  unfavorable activities that lead to rewards that justify  the activities. And so here's what happens. Um, you see, um, a picture. Let's say you're supposed to go to the gym every day. It's a goal that you set. 

You have this sensory input.  And this is usually a trigger or a reminder. Of the reward, but you need to see yourself in it, which is why visualization is powerful. Just seeing, um, just seeing a picture of somebody who's a model isn't going to do anything. If you don't connect that to your body,  you have to see yourself in it.

You have to,  you have to believe it to see it. And so you have a sensory input and based on the novelty or the intensity of how badly you want something.  You will start experiencing these small bursts of dopamine into your brain. You'll start feeling very enthusiastic. You'll start feeling very inspired, motivated.

You're like, I'm gonna get shit done because this is me.  And what happens Is this is really going to going to last just long enough to get you to do the first thing that you're supposed to do to get into flow.  Dopamine is not responsible for keeping the work going. Dopamine is responsible for starting the work.

Then boom, flow science takes over once you're in, you're engaged. That's why if you're struggling to go to the gym, just go for 10 minutes. Set a timer for 10 minutes. By the time you get through 10 minutes, you're probably going to want to finish. Because you're already going  low science kicks in. So if you're struggling to write, I've got to write this book. 

I really hate writing,  but  you give yourself a sensory input.  You're a best selling author.  Thousands of copies a day are being sold.  And what that does for your business. And it sinks you into this reward. Your dopamine is released until you write the first couple of pages. And then once you write the first couple of pages, you're in flow.

You're going to keep writing and keep writing until you're done writing for the day.  Totally love it. Love the graphic. And so all of this work down here is responsible. And now some people decide that they're going to just turn into deranged humans. And they, they, they, um,  they end up building dopamine into being this like discomfort, like uncomfort.

So when you see grinds, you know, grind culture,  people are like, man, you just need to. Work a hundred hours a week and you need to like  try to get a divorce because you work so much and like don't  Don't do anything else with your life. Just work work work work work. What what you're actually saying is you're seeing dopamine  The same thing is happening.

Dopamine now has been, uh,  re looped and the reward circuitry is coming from the value you have on work. Work is the most important thing to you. Effort is the most important thing to you. So when you're seeing somebody work really, really, really hard on Christmas day, you're tying that into, well, this is my value.

I want to be that person. And therefore dopamine is still getting you to do the work. You don't ever, you don't ever get rid of dopamine. It's, it's always the function that's getting you to do things. And so this is why we have to sometimes start with our values. It's why in the 10x challenge, we started with our values.

What are you, what, what makes you  feel like you're a good human? What makes you feel like you're not wasting your time on planet earth? What, what is, what is it that drives you in terms of your emotional alignment? And we're trying to train dopamine. We can train the circuitry of the brain. So dopamine is.

Is both nature and nurture at the same time.  There's a huge scientific debate and scientific community. It's a little bit less intense now around whether kids are programmed epigenetically.  So when a child is born,  is their personality merely a function of the junk DNA coming through? And is it merely a function of who their parents are, or is it a function of how their parents raised them?

And the, the consensus is that it's somewhat both.  Because it has to be both  keep in mind when God created the brain. The only way for the brain to function without you dying is through neuroplasticity. If you don't have any neuroplasticity, what that means is that the brain can change. It can rewrite itself.

It can, it can, you can become smarter. Hooray. Everyone here can become smarter. Your brain can consume more information and retain more information. You can be faster and how you, you can read faster. You can train yourself to read faster.  If there was no  neuroplasticity, there's no agility, which means when, um, the regime changes. 

Or 5, 000 years ago, the tribal chieftain changes. If you can't adjust, you're just going to die. And so the brain is magnificently put together so that it can have a rule book and then also rewrite its rule book. Both of those are true. So nature and nurture. What we want to try to do is we want to train our  dopamine  to release.

around appropriate rewards at the appropriate times.  So it's both. We want the what and we want the when to be trained correctly.  This is why, for me, I like doing my morning formula in the morning because, um,  I want it released when I'm about to, like, go work. I'm about to go do something. You ever got into a place where the only time you can finish a project is 30 minutes? 

I try to avoid that. Ha ha ha. Mark people typically do.  Okay.  The reason is because now you  kind of have dopamine that is being misused in so many different places. This is what this means.  This means that you've got too much dopamine being released in too many areas that the brain doesn't physically have enough dopamine to, to release in the right things. 

So if you're like, uh, the people who are last minute procrastinators, they can't do it unless the deadline is done. They're substituting dopamine for, um, epinephrine  or norepinephrine. They're substituting one chemical for another. Your best work is not going to come because of this. It's not It doesn't mean that you're just, uh, people say all the time, it'd be like, I'm just clutch.

My personality is clutch. No, you ain't. You just don't understand science and you don't understand how the brain works. You are releasing dopamine so quickly by scrolling through social media and watching movies and doing dumb shit that your dopamine is no longer present when you actually need to get the real work done.

Because the intensity, the craving of getting a project done doesn't compare to the intensity or the craving of scrolling through Instagram comments. Yeah, numb to it. You're numb to it. And you don't even have any dopamine reserves left. So you have to wait until, uh, until norepinephrine is triggered and norepinephrine was never going to be triggered until you get into fight or flight. 

So you're substituting dopamine with norepinephrine. Um, norepinephrine is the precursor to stress hormone is it's the precursor to epinephrine. Epinephrine is a hormone. Norepinephrine is a neurotransmitter. Um, and so, uh, norepinephrine is really that, that thing inside of a person's brain that regulates whether they were equal to a task or whether they need to run away.

So, if you have Let's say you're out camping. Anybody like to camp?  My daughter is begging me to take her camping.  That's great man.  I'm the worst person in the world to take me camping.  Um.  Are you a glamper dude? Are you the guy that has the, the 40 foot RV with TV and couch and internet connection? I'm not even a glamper.

I'm more like a Four Seasons. Okay.  Hey, you can be both dude. It's cool. I know. I know. But she like really wants and If there's one,  if there's a person in the world who can get me to do something that I hate, it would be Kate. Um,  so the other day she was like, Daddy, one of, one of my goals this year is to go to the gym with you in the afternoon.

And also I'd like to go camping. And I'm like, oh shit. She snuck that I can do the goals, uh, I can do the taking you to the gym, but camping is gonna be different. So, so let's get a tent and we'll just camp on our lands. We'll just try it first and see if we like it. Um, but  regardless, when you're, when you're camping, if you're like out in the middle of the woods somewhere and a, uh,  you're feeling pretty good, you know, you're autonomous.

Uh, nervous system is running and you're in homeostasis and blood flow is good and you're, you know, you're kind of resting and then a grizzly bear shows up. 

Neuropenephrine is being regulated at this point, prepping your body  to get the fuck away.  And, but, but the type of neuropenephrine that's being released is the, hey, you are not equal to this task. Do not run at this bear.  It's a, it's a specific type and, and volume of norepinephrine that just preps your body to run.

And we can frame this, we can look at norepinephrine a couple of different ways. When a mom has a child trapped under a car, the moment she realizes it, norepinephrine kicks in. But that's a different, it's going to have a different effect on the body. She's going to go and lift a car by herself to get her, her kid.

Out from underneath. So the fight or flight, you're being prepped into fight or flight. Notice that this happens at the moment of crisis,  which is why if you're like a last minute deadline type of person. You can't get it done until it's the last minute and you're in a crisis. You don't want to be in this position.

You, you don't, you don't, this is not a healthy position to be in. Usually you can fix this by going through like a dopamine fast. So, uh, how do you go through a dopamine fast? You just purge the body of dopamine. You do anything that's enjoyable to you. You just don't do it.  Why? Because you don't want dopamine. 

No scrolling through social.  Don't eat the pizza. Um,  do difficult things and avoid things that are enjoyable for like  three days.  And usually your body will start resetting and recalibrating because the brain can change.  And when this happens, um, the next time that you have something that you want to do, you have a really significant opportunity. 

Don't just go do it,  tie it  to something you don't want to do  so that you train it. Okay. So let's say you go through three days  and, um, for three days, you don't look at social media. All right. This is a basic, silly example. You don't look at social media. You're just going to purge dopamine that's coming from social media, because honestly, that's not helpful anyway.

So get rid of it three days. Then day four comes up and you want to look at social media because your fast is done. Your social media detox is done.  What people do that they mess this up as they go right back into social media. If you want to train the dopamine.  Regulation though, what you would do is you would say, if I go to the gym, then I can look at social media. 

And now all of a sudden you're going to tie two events together that are going to help you be, uh,  successful.  If I want to, uh, people who are like, you know, nicotine, people make fun of me for Zen all the time. I think Zen's wonderful. I think Zen's awesome. So get off my back about Zen. Um, but I'll go through periods where I won't do like any, now I've tried to do this with coffee and I'm just not successful enough to do this with coffee.

I, if you want to know what I'm actually addicted to, it's not nicotine, it's coffee and caffeine. Um, anybody who has tried to do like a caffeine fast and the headaches are crazy, Um, yeah, Cole's like, you have a problem. Cole,  Cole has an interesting experience with nicotine that I won't share  here in front of everyone. 

But I'll go through a couple of days without doing it. And then it's like, you know,  Zen sounds pretty cool right now.  Okay. Write 40 pages,  then you can have it.  And it's not an issue of, uh, of, of  whether you're addicted or not.  Guess who's addicted. On this call,  everyone is going to say everybody, everyone's addicted to something like your entire central nervous system runs on addiction.

Dopamine in technique, technically speaking is an addiction.  Um, everything you're addicted to everything, everything you do consistently, you're somewhat addicted to it because if you don't do it, you feel it and you notice it and you crave it. And so you can use this to tie yourself into behaviors that are appropriate.

Pizza. Let's take pizza. Pizza is my love language. 

Period.  Margarita and pizza. My body loves it. Um,  my wife loves it. Like if, if me and Linz want to just like, we're, we're having a good time. We want, we'll go get some pizza. We'll go to like Nelly's and  uh, Spring Hill. We'll get, we'll get a big pizza. We'll eat the whole, a large pizza. We'll eat it by ourselves.

Pizza is life. Um,  but let's say that I want to train. I want to train some dopamine.  Okay, if you, if you put a picture of pizza on the screen right now, I'm probably going to go get some pizza. It's that the trigger response stimuli is so baked in and so locked in. I don't even realize I'm headed to pizza.

I'm just in, I'm at, I'm at the pizza place and I forgot how I got there. I love blackout. I love it. And so when we're in New York, we just run to all the pizza places. And there's 5, 000 pizza places in New York. So we can just go back again and again. And there's so much novelty cause it's all new. Y'all I have a problem.

Okay. I understand this, but intervention incoming, let's say that it's Friday, Friday's pizza nights. And, um,  I want to use this chart to get me to do something that I don't want to do Fridays. I'm going to do like day Cole Taylor's organization. Actually is, um,  they train me. And so they're, they're,  the workouts are good and they do a really good job and, and they're pretty mean.

So  Fridays are leg days for me or my second leg day of the week because they're jerks. And, um, I don't wanna work out, but I can, I'll look, I'll, I can look at a PA picture of pizza and I can say if I work out, I can have as much pizza as I want. But if I don't work out, here's the rule. I can't have pizza. 

As I'll text my wife, I've done this before. Hey, I'm going to work out. I'm going to go a hundred percent. I'm going to max out and I  will not eat pizza. If I do not give a hundred percent,  she's like, okay. All of a sudden, the only thing I want to do in the whole world is go work out.  That's all I care about.

I'm not going to miss my workout and I'm not going to cheat. That's because I'm going to get a short burst of dopamine.  That's connected. So what 

the work work? Yeah, it's good. It's gonna push me to get off the chair, go to the gym. And once I'm there, then I'm in flow. And then I can have the reward. The sequence is only complete. When you have the reminder, the work completed, and then the reward,  the reminder, the work completed, and then the reward. 

Okay, so that's the spiel on dopamine. Any questions?  This was great, man. Congrats.  Turn into a knowledge piece. Congrats, Andre, on a six day coffee fast, or caffeine fast. That is, that is  hard to do.  It is heroic. Yeah, very hard to do.  Any questions, crew? I know there's a little bit of delay. Taylor, while that delay, uh, catches up to us, what's your thoughts on, um, dopamine and then fear?

And specifically what I mean is you can have people that  kind of crave that sense of fear, the reward on the other side. I'm just going to go full extreme sports because that's kind of where, where I would associate this to. You want to do something intense because you know  you want to do it. So you want to experience that rush or whatever, but there's a fear mechanism and a dopamine mechanism.

What's the difference between the fear and the dopamine? It's there's, there is no difference that those are your classic adrenaline junkies.  And their dopamine is being attached to the reward of just survival.  Got it. Yeah. So like, um, you're probably like this  Um, i've had a couple set a lot of sales people are like this because they're so high octane that what makes them actually feel Good is like they could have died, but they didn't so you'll just see a mountain biking on crazy crazy places You'll see them, um, surfing or  yeah, they're just, it, it, it means the dopamine circuitry is really well trained around the adrenaline that comes.

They're kind of addicted to the adrenaline.  Got it.  Makes sense.  Any questions here, crew?  Ari's got one. Do you have any insights on this with ADHD, which affects your dopamine and serotonin receptors? Yeah, so ADHD typically, um, is a byproduct of a neuropenephrine deficiency.  So when, when neuropenephrine shows up,  you are, um,  Oxygen moves a lot faster.

Your blood vessels, it's, you know, caffeine and nicotine are vasoconstrictors, so they, they tighten up your blood vessels and norepinephrine widens them back up so that your body can get nutrients where it needs to go. But norepinephrine, um, would be like if you're in a, If you're in a quiet place,  make sure you're just doing like some work in your home office,  um, and like, Ari, this is great for you because you have kids,  you ever hear like some loud sound and your kid's supposed to be asleep? 

And you're like, what the hell just happened? Did they just fall off their bed? Or did they like, is there a robber in my house? Like something loud destabilizes you. Neuropinephrine is gonna rush in. Um, and neuropinephrine  makes you go,  it's like your focus locks in. You become really tied into like, I've got to do one thing and that's go check on my kid to make sure he didn't just jump off the roof.

Um, or you're in a, a building and a loud, loud sound goes off. And everyone's looking for what they say, but you can't think about things in the mind when neuropinephrine is starting to flood the brain, you can't, you don't have a random runaway thoughts. You're just locked in. So being awake, focused  all in.

It's like neuropinephrine. So when your neuropinephrine is too, too small, there's not enough. Uh, there's never any like, okay. Um,  pressurized situations  that you kind of have to deal with.  There's also medication you can take for this, but ADHD, usually you see it show up when norepinephrine is deregulated.

Um, it's not as much a dopamine thing. It's more norepinephrine in, in my study, in my experience.