Well, well. If it isn't my "That sounds like a January problem" problems coming home to roost.
–February.
In this post, I'm going to talk about the pathology of stealing from the future, when your December self promises to "hop on calls" that your Jan-Feb self cannot even existentially contemplate.
I love podcasts, they're the best kind of habit stacking... one of my faves is the Huberman Lab by Dr Andrew Huberman. He often discusses the importance of aligning our behaviors with our circadian biology.
The idea is that forcing high productivity during winter months conflicts with our natural "hibernation" tendencies, noting that our dopamine* systems are naturally lower during shorter daylight hours.
PS: The dopamine connection comes back around later on in this post.
Dr H recommends "calendar syncing" - matching our highest-demand activities to our biological rhythms rather than social expectations, a concept that we might all agree with in principle.
For parents of young children, however, manual overrides to festive/social calendars are much less realistic as we're under extreme cultural and familial pressure to provide magical experiences and make memories to last a lifetime.
My empath tendencies align more with Dr Katherine May's poetic ideas of accepting the "fallow" period in life, that winter is a time when we sit with feelings of isolation. Her book, "Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times," explains: "Wintering is a season in the cold.
It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider."
She argues that fighting against this natural rhythm creates unnecessary suffering... so in a sense, aligning with wintering as a time of suffering is a healthier way to suffer than fighting against suffering, which only serves to compound it.
Dr. Stacy Sims, leading female physiologist and author of "ROAR," specifically addresses how women's hormonal cycles interact with seasonal changes. She notes that forcing intense "new year, new you" programs in January can particularly impact women's stress responses and metabolic health...
Amen! But what choice is there when our December selves have already got us on the hook for unrealistic deliverables in Q1?
What's wrong with me??
Perhaps the "January reset" isn't broken because we lack willpower - it's broken because it fundamentally misunderstands human biology and seasonal rhythms?
Asking for a friend!
Sliding Doors Practice
Our tendency to compound suffering by caffeinating our still-hibernating selves in Q1 is a metabolic conundrum, pitting neurobiology and metabolism at odds.
Scroll on to soak up the crux of this post, then head over to its continuation – Sliding Doors, Slow Rewards – exploring the power of yoga and mindfulness practices to balance dopamine and metabolism for healthy seasonal transitions.
James Clear (Atomic Habits), points out how our "January surge" often fails because we're trying to make massive changes (motivated by dopamine) during a biologically challenging time. He suggests instead "sliding door moments" - small, strategic choices that honor our current energy levels while building toward larger goals.
As I was listening to this concept, it occurred to me that it has been floating around in the media for years under various avatars (eg, habit stacking). I just always wrote it off. As an Ashtanga yoga practitioner, it didn't resonate with my sacred, six-days per week practice. My motto was always go big or don't bother.
However, since becoming a parent, I have felt this massive tension, always near breaking point, never "having time" for my practice and feeling the kind of guilt/depression that only recovering Ashtangis (and maybe Catholics) can relate to.
Joking aside, any addict can relate to this concept, as we'll explore next.
Looking into the neurobiology of what makes us want to do hard things, I find it fascinating to see that this conflict between what the mind wants and what the body needs is written like an epic family feud, with wants and needs cast as foes:
Your mind wants to do hard things for the rewards it anticipates yet it is winter and your body needs to rest. What drives this at-all-costs craving?
In a word: dopamine.
Dopamine plays a significant role in the motivation to exert effort, influencing both exercise addiction and the willingness to engage in effortful activities. But here's the crux: it primarily enhances motivation by associating effort with potential rewards, rather than directly responding to the effort itself.
We are all gambling with our future, it turns out, to one degree or another. So you can blame dopamine for those chickens.
Check out the Science section below, then read on for further connections to breaking the dopamine addiction cycle with yoga and mindfulness practices.
The Science:
Dopamine and Effort
- Reward Association: Dopamine is closely linked to the anticipation of rewards, promoting actions directed towards obtaining these rewards. It is less sensitive to the anticipated cost of effort, suggesting that dopamine's primary role is in reward-driven motivation rather than effort itself (Walton & Bouret, 2019; Salamone & Correa, 2023).
- Effort-Based Decision Making: Dopamine is involved in the activational aspects of motivation, helping organisms decide whether the effort required for a reward is worthwhile. This is evident in both animal and human studies, where dopamine influences the selection of high-effort activities (Salamone & Correa, 2023; Hosking et al., 2015).
- Parkinson's Disease: In Parkinson's patients, dopamine therapy increases the willingness to exert effort for rewards, indicating dopamine's role in overcoming motivational deficits (Chong et al., 2015).
Exercise Addiction
- Exercise and Dopamine: Physical exercise can enhance excitatory inputs to dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area, similar to addictive substances. This suggests that exercise can have addictogenic properties, potentially leading to exercise addiction (Medrano et al., 2020).
- Cue-Reward Association: The drive for exercise is influenced by dopamine through cue-reward associations, which can increase the motivation to engage in exercise, similar to drug-seeking behavior (Medrano et al., 2020).
Mechanisms of Action
- Phasic Dopamine Transmission: Dopamine levels rise in anticipation of reward-seeking actions, reflecting the vigor and effort exerted. This response is specific to the type of action and the brain region involved, such as the nucleus accumbens (Ko & Wanat, 2016).
- Effort and Reward Integration: Dopamine modulates how much effort is worth a given reward, enhancing motor vigor and effort allocation when rewards are high (Michely et al., 2020; ZeĢnon et al., 2016).
Dopamine significantly influences the desire to exert effort by enhancing motivation through reward association rather than directly responding to effort costs. This mechanism is evident in both exercise addiction and general motivational behaviors, highlighting dopamine's role in promoting reward-directed actions.
Stay tuned and wait for the next blog post OR sign up to my free newsletter below to make sure you get each post in the series straight to your inbox. You can check out the previous post in this series to soak up the basics on metabolism.
References
Walton, M., & Bouret, S. (2019). What Is the Relationship between Dopamine and Effort?. Trends in Neurosciences, 42, 79 - 91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2018.10.001
Salamone, J., & Correa, M. (2023). The Neurobiology of Activational Aspects of Motivation: Exertion of Effort, Effort-Based Decision Making, and the Role of Dopamine.. Annual review of psychology. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020223-012208
Chong, T., Bonnelle, V., Manohar, S., Veromann, K., Muhammed, K., Tofaris, G., Hu, M., & Husain, M. (2015). Dopamine enhances willingness to exert effort for reward in Parkinson's disease. Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior, 69, 40 - 46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.04.003
Hosking, J., Floresco, S., & Winstanley, C. (2015). Dopamine Antagonism Decreases Willingness to Expend Physical, But Not Cognitive, Effort: A Comparison of Two Rodent Cost/Benefit Decision-Making Tasks. Neuropsychopharmacology, 40, 1005-1015. https://doi.org/10.1038/npp.2014.285
Medrano, M., Hurel, I., Mesguich, E., Redon, B., Stevens, C., Georges, F., Melis, M., Marsicano, G., & Chaouloff, F. (2020). Exercise craving potentiates excitatory inputs to ventral tegmental area dopaminergic neurons. Addiction Biology, 26. https://doi.org/10.1111/adb.12967
Ko, D., & Wanat, M. (2016). Phasic Dopamine Transmission Reflects Initiation Vigor and Exerted Effort in an Action- and Region-Specific Manner. The Journal of Neuroscience, 36, 2202 - 2211. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1279-15.2016
Michely, J., Viswanathan, S., Hauser, T., Delker, L., Dolan, R., & Grefkes, C. (2020). The role of dopamine in dynamic effort-reward integration. Neuropsychopharmacology, 45, 1448 - 1453. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-020-0669-0
ZeĢnon, A., Devesse, S., & Olivier, E. (2016). Dopamine Manipulation Affects Response Vigor Independently of Opportunity Cost. The Journal of Neuroscience, 36, 9516 - 9525. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4467-15.2016
Head over to the continuation of this post – Sliding Doors, Slow Rewards – exploring the power of yoga and mindfulness practices to balance dopamine and metabolism for healthy seasonal transitions.
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I sourced and synthesized these papers with the help of Consensus, an AI-powered search engine for research. Try it at https://consensus.app
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