I watched an interesting TED Talk I stumbled across yesterday by Robert Sapolsky. I read “Behave” this year and so I my interest was piqued when I came across an article on how he likes to write. I lost interest in reading the interview transcript but I was intrigued by a link that was to his talk about how and if humans are different from other primates. His main point in the intro was that we’re not really unique in what we do BUT how we do it and to the level we take it.
Watch it here: https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_sapolsky_the_uniqueness_of_humans. It’s about 38 min, so maybe download just the audio or watch it while you’re eating dinner.
You could discuss many of the points in this speech and maybe I’ll come back to them another time. The part I hung on to was about anticipation. While discussing how dopamine spikes before and not after rewards, I thought of many different activities that are mainly driven by anticipation. Furthermore, when success isn’t guaranteed but is a maybe, dopamine actually spikes higher. In addition, how anticipation can really be a driving factor in whether or not someone adopts those activities — especially if they are a target habit (i.e. healthy eating, exercise, etc.).
Here are a few top of mind examples, they may or may not be applicable but worth thinking about. It might help you to put your own habits, hobbies, and goals under the lens and see where your motivations lie and how you might be able to take advantage of them to do more of what you want and to identify activities that you don’t actually like.
I enjoy cooking which is driven by the anticipation of what the meal will taste like. When cook times are longer, I of course taste little bits during the preparation. This gives you a little tease and let’s you imagine how everything will taste together and once completed. A recipe for dopamine, if you’ll pardon me taking the low hanging fruit pun. Also, you can easily imagine yourself with heightened senses, smelling and staring at something baking in the oven, causing you to salivate and get excited.
As I mentioned, this could be great to take advantage of to lock in goals. Specifically I think of working out, which so many people seem to struggle with doing consistently. Here are some ways this might be taken advantage of:
Develop a pre-workout routine that gets you excited to work out. This would work in tandem with a pre-workout that gets your heart going, if you’re into that or could even be a light stretch'/warm-up routine with music that gets you hyped.
Instead of just going to a standard gym, find a sport or physical activity that involves other people, music, competition, or some other aspect that can have you thinking before and even after so you are excited. Take rock climbing for example; you might be excited to see what new problems they set up, which people you’ll see there (much easier to stick with it there is a little community), even what music they might play. Then after your workout you’ll feel good, riding the endorphins from the workout and then you’re thinking about the problems you couldn’t solve and how you might solve them next time. Then your good feeling is paired with not only the climbing itself, but the planning and breakdown of the tasks before and after. With a mix of some good old fashioned buzzwords, compound interest and feedback loop, you’ll have a strong habit in no time. The hard part is to build it before that can take effect.
Here’s a little more risque of a topic and one that I’m only theorizing about. As is often talked about, men have it far easier when it comes to sex and orgasms. While men are extremely likely to orgasm, while as the media has broadly explained, women are not. Why is this? There are probably tons of studies out there but just using Sapolsky’s information, we can take a good guess. Using his “maybe makes dopamine rise higher” idea helps differentiate men from women. Women are said to prefer anticipation and teasing well before anything moves to the bedroom, where of course foreplay is more important as well. Could it be that since their orgasms are more likely to be ”maybes” that anticipation hits them that much harder? Is the fact that men are so likely to orgasm that our dopamine hit comes into play that much later? I don’t know, but it’s an interesting direction to take this.
I’ve read before that Vacations/Trips/Etc.. are great because of this exact feature, that is, planning, going on, and reminiscing is a before/during/after goldmine where anticipation can bring you excitement far before you leave. Not to mention, while reminiscing gives you a slightly different feeling, it can also trigger anticipation of the next trip you’ll go on. Here is a study I found in my 5 second google search (via a Huffpost article) which is maybe what I remember seeing a long time ago. Anyways, it’s a good reason to plan a trip, even if you don’t actually end up pulling the trigger and going on it, it’ll feel good to imagine it.
Thanks for bearing with me on this exploration, I know it was long this time. I’ve been gone a while and it always takes time to get back to being concise. Hopefully I’ll be back with more soon.