Most people think motivation comes first and action follows. It's actually backwards, and once you understand why, you can hack your own brain chemistry instead of waiting around to 'feel like it.'
If there’s anyone who knows how dopamine works from the dark side, it’s me. As a former opiate addict, I spent years artificially blasting my brain’s reward system with chemicals that no natural human experience could ever compete with. When you dump that level of synthetic dopamine into your system, your brain eventually says, 'Alright, we don't need to make this stuff naturally anymore,' and it shuts down the factory. When I finally got clean, my brain was like a scorched-earth desert. I entered a phase called anhedonia — which is just a fancy scientific word for the complete inability to feel pleasure, joy, or motivation.
For months, everything was completely grey. Getting out of bed felt like trying to climb Mount Everest. If I had waited until I 'felt motivated' to do anything, I’d still be lying in that bed today, or more likely, I’d be dead from an overdose. And then, at forty-three, I had my stroke. Talk about a double whammy. Now, not only was my brain chemistry depleted, but my physical body was paralyzed on the right side. Relearning how to live was the ultimate test of what I call the dopamine loop trick.
Dopamine isn't really the 'reward' chemical the way pop psychology sells it. It's the anticipation chemical — it spikes right before you get something, not necessarily after. That's why scrolling your phone feels compelling even though nothing good is actually happening: your brain is chasing the next hit of anticipation, not any real payoff. The trick is redirecting that same circuitry toward things that actually build your life instead of things that just numb it.
When I started physical therapy, the goals seemed impossibly high. I wanted to walk. I wanted to use my hand. But you don't start by walking; you start by trying to twitch your big toe. I remember sitting there for hours, sweating and crying, just trying to make my toe move a fraction of an inch. When it finally twitched, even a tiny bit, I had to learn to celebrate that as a massive victory. If I had waited until I could walk across the room to feel good, I would have drowned in frustration and quit.
Here's the loop: pick something small and finishable — make the bed, do ten pushups, answer one email you've been avoiding. The second you complete it, your brain gets a small, real dopamine hit tied to actual accomplishment. Stack three or four of these first thing in the morning and you've built momentum before 9am, which changes the emotional tone of your entire day. This is why 'small wins' isn't just motivational-poster talk — it's leveraging real neurochemistry.
The mistake most people make is waiting to feel motivated before they act. Flip it. Act first, in a small enough way that it's almost impossible to talk yourself out of, and let the mood follow the action. You are not your mood on any given morning — you're the person who shows up and does the rep anyway, and the mood catches up shortly after. Discipline isn't the opposite of feeling good. Done right, it's the fastest route to it.
Don't trust your mood. Your mood is a liar. Trust the action, and let the chemistry follow.
Go love somebody that you don't like. I love y'all. 🙏
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