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Why are some people more motivated (积极的) to handle difficult things? And is there a way to make doing difficult things easy? To answer this question, we need to look at this: dopamine (多巴胺). Dopamine is often considered a pleasure molecule (分子). But that’s not quite what it does. Dopamine is what makes us desire things. And it’s that desire that gives us the motivation to get up and do things.

In fact, your brain considers something more important than others mainly depending on how much dopamine it’s expecting to get. If an activity releases too little dopamine, you won’t have much motivation to do it. But if an activity releases a lot of dopamine, you’ll be motivated to repeat it, over and over. So which behavior releases dopamine? Any activity where you expect there’s a possible reward releases it.

And in today’s digital society, we are flooding our brains with unnaturally high amounts of dopamine on a daily basis, even if we don’t know it. Some examples of high dopamine behavior include: visiting social media websites, playing video games, etc.

And you might think, “Oh so what? It’s not like it’s harming me in any way.” But you’d be wrong. Our bodies have a biological system called homeostasis (体内动态平衡). Whenever an imbalance occurs, our body adapts to it. Basically your brain gets used to having high levels of dopamine and those levels become your new normal. Thus you develop a dopamine tolerance. This can be a huge problem because the things that don’t give you as much dopamine don’t interest you any longer. That’s why people tend to prefer playing video games or surfing the Internet, compared to studying or working on their business.

But it is possible to make doing difficult things feel easier. Separate yourself from the unnaturally high amounts of dopamine, or at least expose yourself to it far less frequently. Only then will normal, everyday, low dopamine activities become exciting again and you’ll be able to do them for longer. That’s why you might want to limit your phone and computer usage, along with other high dopamine-releasing behavior.

We are all dopamine addicts (入迷的人) to a certain extent. And that’s a good thing because dopamine motivates us to achieve our goals and improve ourselves. But it’s up to you to decide where you’re going to get your dopamine. Are you going to get it from things that don’t benefit you? Or are you going to get it from working on your long-term goals? The choice is yours.