URSABLOG: Motivational Priorities

Motivation is a very difficult thing to stimulate, especially after the summer holidays, especially on a Monday morning after the summer holidays. What drives us to get out of bed in the morning and start our daily lives? Deep down it is about survival; we are genetically hardwired to actually go out and look for food and drink, or the modern day equivalent, because without that the human species will not be able to continue on this planet. And our brain rewards us for it. 

Dopamine is the evolutionary wonder drug that drives us in our fight for survival, and it comes for free. Its release is triggered in our brains by a number of different activities that are both good for us and for the prolongation of the species. Good food and drink give us good feelings, and so as well as a full stomach we get a nice feel-good boost at the end of a meal. Images of great beauty, passages of music and dance, theatre, cinema – you don’t even have to take part, you can just watch and listen – are important for group cohesion and expression, so we get a shot of dopamine to appreciate it a little bit more. 

It doesn’t stop there. Visions of physical human beauty, erotic or otherwise, pique our desire and emotion: the desire is important for reproduction, the emotion is important for developing familial bonds to care and provide security for the young who would die without it. Doing exercise just doesn’t make you feel good because oxygen is being pumped around your body, it’s because you get a dose of dopamine as well. In fact all of the things that we needed as a species to maintain and develop our communities – as well as ourselves – came with that dopamine sweetener to reinforce their importance to us and reward us for doing it.

Other things give us a buzz too, like danger (and overcoming it), conflict (as well as fighting the battle), competition (as well as winning the contest) all of which, to my mind at least, ensure that aggression – in whatever form it takes – will always be part of our nature as we face the struggle of surviving in a world of finite and scare resources. And this is as it always has been.

There are the distortions and excesses that can unbalance us. Obesity and drunkenness can come not from love of food and drink necessarily, but from the feeling we get from good food and drink, and the desire to have it again and again. Obsession with both eroticism and sexual acts themselves can lead to, well, compulsive and almost inappropriate addiction-like behaviour (as well as a lot of fun – it’s all in the balance). Even exercise can be become addictive, especially as the amount of dopamine needed to make you feel just as good after exercise increases the more you exercise, which is perhaps why people keep on pushing themselves more and more. I suspect that this is not just to get a better time over distance, or lift heavier weights, or even simply to challenge themselves, but to get the same buzz again and again.

And then there is the use of so-called recreational drugs, the things that apart from causing great highs can lead us to terrible lows of mental and physical health. Persistent drug use can change what motivates people in daily life – sometimes profoundly – as decision-making becomes distorted as users concentrate on finding and taking drugs at the expense of all other activities – such as finding food and drink – and often with little care or even recognition of the likely adverse consequences of their actions. This is because drug use changes and distorts the priorities the brain uses to dole out dopamine for food, drink, exercise and so on. Persistent drug use narrows the brain, makes the user literally narrow-minded, single-minded in their pursuit of the high. Recent research has shown that such drugs – in particular cocaine and morphine – actively interfere with signalling and disrupt natural responses of mice to food and water, changing their priorities and putting themselves in danger because they stop caring the simple necessity of eating and drinking. 

I don’t wish to suggest for one moment that we are all like mice at heart (evidently we are not), or that our industry is full of abusive drug takers (evidently it isn’t) but I do find the phrase ‘motivational reprioritisation’ interesting. If we get a shot of dopamine when we do one particular thing, and then get a burst of adrenaline as we anticipate it, then our priorities will surely change as we become motivated to try and repeat this feeling again and again. 

Gambling addicts do not walk – cannot walk – away from the table once they have won a lot of money. It’s not what it is about. It’s about the adrenaline they get before the race starts, or the cards are dealt, and they want the dopamine hit when they win. And then they want it again and again. Hours and days pass, as the addicts’ priorities change, often with little care or even recognition of the likely adverse consequences of their actions.

It should be no wonder to us that ‘mind bending’ drugs alter the working and functions of our brains, but I am no expert on this topic and am probably making some fairly wild assumptions; how and why some people become drug addicts or gambling addicts and others don’t is, well, complicated. 

The motivation to get up in the morning is part of our fight for survival, however feeble it feels sometimes. People with depression find it difficult to make sense of why they do what they do, when they can do it at all. The fight for survival seems less important somehow, and in fact any fight loses significance. The purpose of many anti-depressant drugs is not to turn patients into sedated happy zombies, but to turn off a couple of triggers in the brain that cause some of the symptoms, and smooth the way forward so that the patient can recover in time. But when I was being treated for depression a few years ago, I resented being on anti-depressants because I felt that I had lost my edge, and I still wanted to feel the extremes of life, of feeling – good or bad -otherwise my life was being lived less than authentically. I think I made the right decision, and I have certainly lived and felt a lot – highs and lows – since then. 

The area in the brain called the nucleus accumbens is a key control centre for feeding and drinking and has long been recognised as important for dictating priorities and in addiction itself. Drugs that alter the neural circuitry that naturally exists there to satisfy survival needs cause problems of course, but it is the changes in decision making and motivational reprioritisation that cause most of the real life – and death – issues for drug addicts. 

The nucleus accumbens is also important for behavioural prioritisation of other goals, for example economic and social goals like becoming rich and famous, which overlap with other parts of the brain that reward the same things. But the nucleus accumbens also occupies a strategic position at the interface of brain networks for value, learning, and decision-making.

I would sometimes, if not kill, at least do some serious damage for the ability to find a switch in my brain to motivate me – at certain times at my choosing of course – to become spectacularly rich (fame is not of interest to me) but I suspect that flicking that switch would not leave the other networks for value, learning and decision-making untouched either, just like drugs wouldn’t. Something more than just my priorities would change: my judgement, my abilities, my insight would be affected too.

But I am forever optimistic. There must be a way to change, or at least reshuffle a bit, the priorities in my life so that I can become motivated to change the areas that need improvement. I think there is, but it is not as simple as deciding to do so; the reward system in the brain needs to be reconfigured a bit as well. However this is possible, I am sure of it. 

When I was a teenager my priorities and tastes were very different to what they are today. It is not just a matter of ‘growing up’ – whatever that means – that has changed my tastes and priorities, it is gaining knowledge, experience and understanding of the world around me that has.  Maybe this is what growing up really means. But I do also hope that there will be a time in the future where my priorities will change again. We should have different priorities at different times of our lives, to deal with the different challenges that face us at different times.

Getting up in the morning then, even after holidays, even the Monday morning after holidays, is all a matter of motivation. The reasons why, and how, you do it will change over your lifetime, and your motivations themselves will change too. This is not a bad thing, it is essential. It is an instinctive matter of survival. More than that we are hardwired this way, and this able to adapt and train our brains to reward us for different goals should we so wish.

It is at the end of the day a matter of a means to an end, when the end justifies the means.  We do not have to do just what gives us pleasure, or remain stubbornly in our comfort zones. We can not only learn new things, but give new meaning to our lives when we decide to teach ourselves what we want to give us pleasure. If we can decide what we want, and make steps towards making it happen, the pleasure we will get from it can free us from the shackles of what has become stale and we will be rewarded by that greatest of givers, ourselves. That, I feel, is motivation enough to keep us getting up in the morning, whatever life throws at us.  

Simon Ward