BENGALURU: Do you know why most people fail to meet their health, lifestyle or body goals? Or why do they fail in love, business, the corporate world or personal growth? There is a beautiful science to this. When you understand this, decide that enough is enough and that it is time for a change, then your life, health, relationships, career and personal growth change for the better.
It all revolves around the beautiful word DOPAMINE.
Carelessly used and highly misunderstood, this incredible neurotransmitter is known as the feel-good or reward molecule. When you achieve a challenging target or win anything that involves difficulty and struggle, for instance, moving from level one to two in a game, you feel a sense of achievement and motivation. This is your dopamine working for you. Dopamine drives, motivates and inspires us to keep going. Without it, one can struggle to stay motivated. We have all heard of breaking down goals into smaller goals and milestones. As you achieve each of them, they drive you to move forward and achieve the next until you finally hit your main goal. It makes you feel great about yourself.
Let me illustrate this for you. Say you want to be able to do fifty push-ups or ten clean pull-ups or master a complicated yoga asana. On day one, you try to do fifty push-ups and fail. The following day, your muscles are sore. Still, you try to do fifty push-ups, and fail. You are exhausted and in pain. To top it off, your mind starts to create illusions of failure. Your negative self-talk doesn’t help. ‘I can’t do it. It is difficult. I am not strong enough. Maybe I should quit. This is not my cup of tea.’ Your subconscious mind keeps hearing this. You start to burnout and believe that your goal is unrealistic. You lose motivation as you cannot achieve your goal. You do not produce dopamine and cannot feel good.
Similarly, when you enter a new relationship, you set massive goals because you are in love. You want all the good feelings that come with it. You set out to impress, your partner gets impressed, compliments you, loves you back and appreciates you. All of this is good, but then you set unrealistic relationship goals thinking, the more,the better. And you can’t achieve all of them because your partner also needs space and time and may not be as enthusiastic as you.
When you don’t meet these goals, you start feeling demotivated, sad and unloved. It marks the beginning of the conflict. You do not produce dopamine or feel good. Your mind begins to tell you that you are failing, unworthy, useless and not meant for love. It stirs up stories and illusions that get out of control. When you set unrealistic goals and keep failing, your intelligently designed brain tries to protect you from the pain and negative emotions that come with failure. It tells you, ‘Don’t perform this again because you will fail.’
It creates neural patterns over time when you fail, and negative thoughts follow. How do we change these limiting thought patterns? By creating new ones. We do this by breaking down your goals into smaller goals that still hold some challenges but are ones that you can achieve over time. As you do, you produce more dopamine, feel good and start to be driven to activate the next goal leading to the larger goal you created.
(Excerpted from Small Wins Every Day by Luke Coutinho, published by Penguin Random House India)