The world is full of experts offering advice on how to boost neurochemicals that improve mood and motivation. While many of their methods can have impressive positive effects, they often fail to make people feel consistently energetic and motivated, as if those ‘happy hormones’ sometimes forget their job.
Your brain is an extraordinary electrochemical computer. The more you learn about how its chemistry affects you when you’re the best of yourself, and how it changes when you’re not, the better you’ll understand what exactly is needed to bring yourself into a state of mind that best serves you in any situation.
You may believe that bad weather and the lack of sunlight are the reasons why people tend to feel low on energy, melancholic, or even depressed during the winter period. In fact, you only experience low mood and low energy on dark, cold, gloomy days, because your brain wants you to feel that way in such conditions.
You can read a stack of books on motivation, but at the end of the day you will see that it all comes down to only two simple factors.
Our success-related neurologic response mechanisms have some problematic aspects. When you achieve something important, dopamine is released in certain reward pathways in your brain. However, for the same achievement repeated again and again, that reward usually decreases.
Turtles can bring themselves into a deeply relaxed state when diving underwater to use as little oxygen as possible. It allows them to stay there for a very long time without breathing. You can learn to induce the same neurological mechanism in yourself through a simple exercise, which can also bring you to an exceptionally deep and joyful state of relaxation whenever you desire.