Cautions of Dopamine and a Lean Into Mastery

Rhythms of Focus

Caught in the tug-of-war between “should do” and “want to do”? You’re not alone. In this episode of Rhythms of Focus, we unravel the hidden dance between dopamine, motivation, and the pursuit of mastery-especially for those with wandering minds and ADHD.

We’ll explore why chasing dopamine hits can leave us feeling empty, and how shifting our focus from quick fixes to meaningful learning can restore a sense of agency. Instead of forcing productivity, discover how leaning gently into challenge-and finding ease and play within it-can help you build rhythms that last.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why relying solely on dopamine or brain chemistry explanations can distance you from your own experience-and what to do instead.
• How to use the “Lean into Challenge” approach to transform overwhelm into small, achievable steps toward mastery.
• The power of play and ease as markers of true learning, not just fleeting motivation.

Three actionable takeaways:

• Pause and acknowledge your feelings before pushing forward-self-compassion is the first step to agency.
• Break tasks down to their simplest elements, slow your pace, and seek out the “level below” when stuck.
• Invite playfulness into your work-even a single note or tiny success can reignite engagement and growth.

This episode features an original piano composition, “Sky Lily” as an example of structure shaping emotion.

Subscribe and join us at rhythmsoffocus.com to keep guiding your wandering mind toward creative mastery.

Keywords

#ADHD #WanderingMinds #MindfulProductivity #Agency #Mastery #PlayfulFocus #LeanIntoChallenge #Dopamine #RhythmsOfFocus #CreativeGrowth

Transcript

 

Introduction

Staring at your to-do list, you know exactly what you "should" do, but your mind won't budge. You quickly jump to something else on the list or off the list.

"I'll do it later."

Is it a lack of willpower, troubles with brain chemistry, or something else entirely?

 

 On Dopamine...

One struggle of a wandering mind is this sense that sometimes we cannot seem to do things by our own free will. Having bashed ourselves against our internal walls trying to prove otherwise, we might find some solace in science that our free will isn't truly free.

There are at least a couple of examples of this, and one we'll look at today is found in the word "dopamine."

Dopamine is a chemical in the brain that relates to reinforcement.

The theory for ADHD at least is that the sensitivity, the receptors, the anatomic distribution and more of this chemical dopamine is somehow different.

We can even dive further into the scientific words and say things like the dopaminergic cell bodies that relate exist in the pars compacta of the substantial nigra in the ventral tegmental area. Reinforcement sensitivity may be altered as related to the DAT1 gene variable numbered tandem repeat. ... and we can go on.

There's a lot of benefit that can come from such study: medications, tools, new perspectives, and more.

But as with any perspective, we can invite problems when this is our only way of looking at it. These words tend to distance us from experience, and this may seem like a trivial point, but I assure you it is not.

The word "dopamine" can become a metaphor not only for the rest of these concepts, but for worlds we do not fully understand, and more importantly, worlds within ourselves that we do not control, at least not directly.

This doesn't mean we should toss the science out the window. There is plenty within ourselves that we do not control. Psychoanalysis formalized this concept of the unconscious, for example, which by the way means that there are things that are not conscious. Depending on which analyst you ask, dopamine might even fit into that category.

We can carry this metaphor further though, this metaphor of dopamine being that which we cannot control, calling it a button to push. That we use other things to press, for example, cold showers, video games, taking a stimulant medication, exercising. These can all help. The idea is that having bathed ourselves in dopamine's Ambrosia through this roundabout method, we can now act.

And again, these can help.

But what we lose in this perspective is the original role of dopamine.

...vs Learning

Now we've looked at it as reinforcement, but even there we lose a closer term: learning. We can see this distinction, this loss in the word, when we also look at dopamine in reference to negative things like cocaine, risky sexual behaviors, gambling, and the like.

In other words, when using the word dopamine, we might be saying something like, "I'm tired," or "I'm struggling to engage, among other possibilities," but we have to be cautious that we're likely not saying anything about decision or meaning.

Where we place our mind, what we do with our attention while we're there, what things mean to us? Couldn't these also be paths to stimulation that would get us moving?

I come back to the same word: "learning."

I don't mean learning in the sense of sitting there staring at some teacher in the face while your thoughts are going somewhere else.

I mean truly learning. When we truly learn, it means that we are gaining things, incorporating things that feel meaningful to us, that have somehow this sense of growth of agency within us, that that can support our sense of agency. That reinforces itself, doesn't it?

When we start to get good at something, even if, and sometimes, especially if it was difficult to begin with, doesn't that turn us on?

Okay, but how do we even begin to make it through that difficult hump, that beginning of, "I don't wanna."

Well, it's a complex mix of many emotions, that simple phrase, "I don't wanna," maybe I'll come back to that for another episode. But there are several things that we can try, some more concrete, some more abstract.

And even if I were to tell you to try them all, I can't guarantee that it would help you necessarily make it through, but I can encourage a try.

A Lean Into Challenge

So let me offer you this one possibility. It will focus on a complexity of overwhelm, perhaps, because many emotions can tie into that. And this one, this particular technique I'll get into now, I think does do a good approach for many different problems.

A Lean into Challenge.

When you begin to practice a visit- based approach, as I described in an earlier episode, the idea is that you show up to a thing and then decide. That's the shorthand of it.

As you are there, you're bathed directly in the emotions of the work.

You may well feel any number of things. You might feel repulsed, angry, irritated, bored, confused among any number of other feelings. The nuance of emotion becomes clearer instead of the oversimplified crayon box we use of happy, sad, worried, or whatever.

In that time there, in that single deep breath, you might decide to leave. That's fine. It might be intolerable. Caring for yourself in whatever way makes sense to you is of great importance. If you're exhausted beyond your ability at that visit, pushing further would be too much- okay, fine. Put it aside.

Come back to tomorrow's visit. And even then and the next, you may only be there for that single deep breath to stare at the taxes or gather the materials for the DMV or whatever it happens to be.

But at some visit, should you decide to stay beyond that single deep breath, you might discover some natural window of challenge, something that works for you, "that I can make that little nudge forward."

Fine and sometimes not.

So what do we do if that doesn't naturally show?

And this is where we can use that tool of a Lean into Challenge. In short first pause. I find this to be vital, and I'll get into that maybe another episode as to why pausing is vital, but pause.

Second be with those feelings, frustration among any number of others, acknowledging them, seeing them, maybe even feeling them in your body.

Next search for the marker of mastery.

What is that? Ease.

Kenny Werner, the author of Effortless Mastery does a nice job of describing this sense of doing something with ease, with barely even a thought as being this marker for mastery.

We want to aim for ease and how do we do that?

Here are three things you can try.

One, reduce the scope of whatever it is you're looking at. Break it down. That doesn't mean break it into all of its parts. That can be its own overwhelming thing. I'm talking about one tiny piece.

Two, slow it down. Slow yourself down instead of looking at everything, come down to almost a standstill if you like.

Third, find what I would call "a level below", meaning find something fundamental, something simple in the work. If it's a textbook you're looking at, look at the chapter that's before. Maybe you haven't quite gotten that one down. If you're stumbling, going across the piano keys, go to the arpeggios or scales. If you're coding something, developing some computer program. Maybe there's something simple in there that you haven't quite totally gotten to that point of ease.

Keep using these three levers. Shrink it down, slow it down, level below until you can find some ease, some tiny little speck within the fog of frustration, overwhelm, or whatever the negative feeling state is.

If you can find that ease you are finding where you have some sense of mastery, even if it's just being able to breathe within it.

Another marker of mastery is the ability to play. And I mean that in the toddler sense, in that Hericlitus sense that I mentioned in episode two of a person being most themselves when they're in the heart of play. That depth of flow between self and world, where I can touch that one single note and tap it with a little bit more and a little less and see how loud and soft I can make it, just almost making a song with just that. I can adjust that one thing on the website. I can speak to my boss with this one single sentence. I can raise my eyes this far in trying to connect with somebody.

We begin to find play.

And then the question is, can we bring that spirit itself back into challenge, the little nudge forward? Because that's when we are learning. And not only are we learning, but we're doing it from a sense of depth from where we are.

And when we learn from that depth of self, it's no longer about dopamine. It might be there, but that's only one ingredient. More importantly, we have agency, again.

Beyond excitement, it becomes about engagement, discovery, creativity. And over time, it becomes about passion and even identity as we continue the visits forward. In fact, as we do this over multiple visits, it shifts from being a Lean into Challenge, into a Lean into Mastery.

There's a richness that we start to be able to hold onto, engage and develop that has meaning.

Again, now it's no longer about dopamine. It's about having agency.

The Takeaway

So as a takeaway here, consider something you'd like to make a visit to. Maybe be there, pause, feel that frustration. See if you can find that ease within it, by slowing down, breaking it down, finding some level below.

Can you find that sense of play within that ease and then return to challenge?

Couldn't that be a nice place to build from?

Structures, Experience, and Sky Lily

  Music is this landscape of emotions. When we listen to music, we hear structure in the echoes and the repetition. Even variation requires repetition.

And within these structures, our minds create space. Within that space are the emotions that we fill it with, the emotions that we carry within us.

We're stirred by these structures every time we hear them. As our mind internalizes these trellises that these sounds have created. And we listen, repeating the song, hearing it again and again, asking our record players and apps and such to play it for us. Until we've grown through those trellises, we can now shed them.

I find this happens in the creation of a piece, and I find it happens as we listen to a piece.

This piece I'll play for you is called "Sky Lilly" and creates a world between two keys. One is in B flat minor, while the other is in a related major D flat

in reality, there's a lot more going on. There are a lot more structures that are created between individual notes and phrases. If I just told you all the notes, you wouldn't experience it. And experience is where things really seem to change, much like a Visit.

I hope you enjoy the piece.

 

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The Weekly Wind Down is an exploration of wandering minds, task and time management, and more importantly, how we find calmer focus and meaningful work.