Learn to harness the Secret Ingredient to Habit Development: Dopamine

- Making Hard Habits Easy as Pie.

“Dopamine is the jelly to your peanut butter habit sandwich”- ShineVision Life.

Whenever you ask super performers: Olympians, great Artists, Musicians, Painters Writers, Successful businessmen, etc, they often share that they have developed and maintained certain daily routines that help them achieve their goals.

Michael Phelps would train almost six hours a day, 365 days, swimming in his pool.

Stephen King writes every day of the year without exception beginning work between 8:00 and 8:30 am.

Mozart felt the most creative in the mornings, which is why as soon as he rose at 6:00 am, he would immediately start working on his symphony.

As we chow down on our third doughnut, we often look at these super-performers as super-humans with enormous amounts of willpower and boatloads of commitment. We often wonder, how do they do it? How do they commit to this amount of training every day, and stick with it?

One of the secret ingredients to developing powerful habits and routines, that almost everybody forgets about is dopamine, our natural habit addiction creator.

1. What is Dopamine? How does it work?

Often called the "happy hormone," dopamine results in feelings of well-being. Dopamine is a hormone that the body releases, which among other things, makes people feel good expecting something, after, or while doing something. That’s why shopping, smelling cookies baking in the oven, all these things can trigger dopamine release or a "dopamine rush."

This good feeling motivates people to repeat the behavior that triggered the good feeling. In this way, dopamine is an important part of making habit development easier.

2. How to activate our natural dopamine?

Researchers have also discovered that receiving praise releases dopamine, the same chemical that is released when we fall in love, eat a cupcake, or meditate. Dopamine is nature's reward, a way of encouraging the same behavior in the future.

In His Book, “Tiny Habits”, B.J. Fogg shares that after doing an activity that you are trying to develop, end with a celebration. This triggers the dopamine hormone and it re-enforces the habit so that the body automatically would want to do it again next time. This process makes habit building so much easier.

Additionally, in an article in The Journal of Positive Psychology, Algoe and Haidt studied how praising others in a variety of different ways, such as letter writing or recalling a positive event, affected participants in a wonderful way.

Making the time to celebrate others, express gratitude, and admire others inspires us to be the best versions of ourselves, and helps us to work towards our goals as well.

So, if you are trying to build good habits in your life, don’t forget the secret ingredient at the end, celebrate and pat yourself on the back every time you finish your habit, and watch your good habits grow and develop for a lifetime.

Hope this is helpful in your Shine Journey to be inspired, learn, grow, get better and shine a little brighter, not just in our own lives, but in our families and the world around us, in small, simple, and easy ways.

Remember, Shine starts with small, and if sustained daily, becomes significant over time. Shine On, and wishing you the best to inspire and help others shine as well!