The explanation for why you can't get yourself to work

And what you can do about it

Feb 20, 2025

est. reading time: 9 mins

Yo... it's Brook. It has been a while! You might not recognize me, but I am the author of the KEEP GOING Newsletter. You probably have seen my 'How I travel the world for less than 3k per month' newsletter or maybe even the one on how betting on yourself isn't really that risky...

Either way, I am grateful to have you here.

This is the official return of the KEEP GOING Newsletter, where every Wednesday you get a letter to fuel your journey with lifestyle design via health, business, philosophy, and productivity.

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Anyway, let's get into why you can't get yourself to work and what you can do about it.

In a world of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, dating apps, corn, and more productivity apps than you could even imagine.... We are not designed for this environment of hyperstimulation and hyper connection. This is what prevents us from doing the work to attain our dreams.

Doing the work required should be enjoyable, and it often is. But it pales in comparison to the stimulation from scrolling the timeline and engaging in pitiful comment-section arguments.

And honestly, you can't blame yourself. As I said before, the world we live in is made to keep us engrossed. Without systems in place, and an understanding of our own physiology and psychology, we are doomed.

I don't believe that there is an unground society that wants to keep us deaf, dumb, and blind to dark sorcery. I do believe that people and those in charge are operating with the best of intentions because I believe in humans. But this is the truth: our environment is an awful byproduct of the mission to improve the human experience, gone terribly wrong.

We have ratcheted the stimulation lever so much that we are destined to fail if we can't figure out a way to manage it. But this won't be done at the corporate level. There is ZERO incentive for big corps to have our well-being in mind. So long as they still get their ad revenue money, this dystopian show will go on.

This means one thing...

Action must be taken at an individual level.

We are not designed for this environment of hyperstimulation and hyper connection. Our minds and bodies are designed to be hunting and gathering, looking for blueberries and tilling dirt. We are not designed for casino-grade slot machine addiction algorithms in our everyday life. We are not designed for having poison in our food system that keeps us in a state of dull discomfort.

We are not designed for our environment.

Simply put, we need to take action for ourselves to get back our agency. We must take radical individual action.

It starts with two things:

Understanding a basic neurotransmitter: dopamine
Becoming aware that you are a slave to everything that has to do with it

It all begins with biology: Dopamine

There are probably two types of people reading this: The ones who can't get enough of Andrew Huberman and love the word neurotransmitter. And then other ones who want to run and hide whenever they hear the word.

I'll keep it simple for you, as it is the only way that makes sense for me.

Dopamine is the thing that gets us to do anything. It's the neurotransmitter of motivation, discipline, and pursuit of something.

How the dopamine system works is simple: Think of it like a heart beat monitor, with a baseline, and then spikes up and down.

What affects this and causes blips along this baseline is a cycle of expectation and outcome. Our brain sets an expectation of what will happen if we do something. Once we do whatever we were thinking of doing, our dopamine baseline will either go up or down. It does this based on the result and how it compares to our expectation.

Let's break it down a little further with a little more nuance.

We have a desire to do something
We set an expectation of what the result will be like
We get a small surge of dopamine to supply us with the energy to complete whatever it was that we desired to do
Based on our perceived result (positive or negative) of doing the thing, our dopamine either goes up or down.

Let's see some examples: Positive outcome

Our desire: Acquire and eat ice cream
Our expectation: Ice cream will be tasty and make you feel good
you do the action... you get and eat the ice cream
The outcome and comparison: The ice cream is indeed tasty and makes you feel good. Your expectations are met/exceeded.
The result: Dopamine goes up.

In the positive outcome, it forms a pathway in our brain to do it again because it felt good, and the outcome was satisfactory to our expectation. This can lead to eating ice cream more often (and is an example of why things are so easy to get addicted to even if you only did something once)

Okay now lets flip the script: Negative outcome

Our desire: Acquire and eat a highly rated flavor ice cream
Our expectation: Ice cream will be exemplary and will be the best ice cream you have ever had
you do the action... you get and eat the ice cream
The outcome and comparison: The ice cream doesn't meet your expectation. It's mid.
The result: Dopamine goes down below baseline. You are disappointed.

In this negative outcome, if forms the opposite pathway. It tells our brain that we shouldn't do this again, and it reduces our motivation to try again in the future.

So this is the core mechanism/equation of dopamine:

Expectation Reality

Is our expectation exceeded, met, or a let-down?

The thing is... this comparison equation is done CONSTANTLY for every waking second of our day. The only thing is that most of the things we already do are pre-set pathways that we have discovered lead to a reliable positive outcome.

Here are some examples:

Drinking coffee

Expectation: Get energy and enjoy a warm beverage
Reality: Satisfies expectation

Eating a normal meal:

Expectation: It will satisfy like the time before, and the time before that
Reality: probably satisfies expectation again

Watch YouTube video:

This one is dicey. We form an expectation based on many things here: how much does the thumbnail/title intrigue us, is it a channel that we have watched in the past and have a positive history with... to name a few...

Expectation: The last video I watched from this guy was great, and this one is about something relevant to my life.. I will love this one!
Reality: Video turned out great, and I took some notes / OR / Video was disappointing and didn't hit on anything I actually cared about, I was click baited.

If you have been paying attention, those two different outcomes will cause different blips along our baseline dopamine. And will cause us to feel differently.

Scrolling Instagram/TikTok:

Expectation: Effortless entertainment and a steady stream of stimulation and novelty.

The reality could be either satisfactory and we get the stimulation, or the timeline is dry and nothing interesting comes up... you can decide the reality for this one.

This is all well and good in concept and example, but in reality it's hard to see how you do this comparison equation for literally everything in life...

I highly recommend you take a step back before doing anything today, and ask yourself what your expectation is for what you are about to do... That alone might change your life.

You are probably thinking... "So how does this knowledge help me achieve my goals and dreams, you aren't even a biology teacher what do you know!?!?"

Settle down...

Like I said before, this dopamine equation is something we do CONSTANTLY; and it also stacks.

We can follow the dopamine, stacking up hit after hit of feel good stimulation into a serious crash if whatever we are doing lets us down.

And when we hit a dopamine crash and our dopamine falls below baseline... we tend to do just about anything to get it back above baseline. (This is the cycle of addiction)

A dopamine crash feels like this:

Low energy
No motivation
Brain fog
Lethargy
Boredom
Mild depressive feelings
Hunger even though we may have just ate (this is the desire to get dopamine from food)
The great desire for easy stimulation and dopamine (e.g. social media, junk food, etc.)

All of this to say that everything we do in our day to day is based on this dopamine equation. Because we have so much stimulation, and are constantly stacking easy hits of dopamine, we cannot get ourselves to do the hard things.

We are always in the cycle of quick stimulation.

I guarantee you this: You are in this cycle, whether you want to accept it or not.

How do I know this? You are reading this article. You have an expectation based on reading the title and getting this far in. Yes, I just broke the 4th wall. You and I are slaves to this system as much as anyone else is.

Okay, great. Now you understand dopamine.

Now, you must audit everything you do

Find your largest points of distraction and stimulation. What takes up all your time? What gives you the most stimulation but doesn't add much value to your life?

I can't answer these questions for you, but I can tell you mine.

This is what took up most of my time and how I am actively fighting them:

YOUTUBE, INSTAGRAM, and ICE CREAM

I love YouTube as an example because it is the most used social media on the planet, right after Facebook.

Number of monthly active users *in millions* (aka 2,504 is 2.5 billion monthly active users)

YouTube has a near perfect recommendation algorithm. It is designed to keep you stimulated for as long as possible.

I used to watch YouTube for HOURS at a time. It used to be video game creators that hooked me when I was young slave to the dopamine system in middle school and into high school.

But I have improved since middle school... Only a few months ago I was watching hours of lifestyle vlogs, sports/training videos like Dr Mike Israetel telling me how to get JACKED. Hours of my day would be eradicated by something that didn't really get me closer to my goals. Yes, getting jacked is a goal of mine, but watching YouTube WILL NOT GET ME JACKED nor net me much long-term satisfaction.

But now, my habits are different.

Now I only watch ~1 video a day, and it is ALWAYS highly actionable and philosophically aligned with my goals. It always provides me immense value.

How did I do it? I removed myself from the system, kind of.

Here is the truth: Removing YouTube entirely from my life would probably be a net negative. I think that it is a fantastic platform with some of the most valuable information out there, all for free...

But, I did remove many aspects from the platform and manufactured it to work for me and not against me:

This is how MY YouTube works (thanks to the UnTrap For YouTube extension)

No home feed → automatically redirects to my Watch Later playlist
No custom thumbnails → it picks a random frame from the video and uses that instead
No recommendations on the watch video page
No profile pictures in the comment section
No autoplay

^ shoutout

The Vitruvian

This way, I use YouTube for good 99% of the time, and I have no issue getting off the platform.

I have done the same for Instagram as well and removed my home feed and reels, thanks to another browser extension called SocialFocus — it's made by the same creators as UnTrap For Youtube.

» By removing thumbnails from Youtube, I don't have high expectations that can lead to a dopamine crash.

» I removed myself from the hyper-addictive recommendation algorithm. Now I can't downward spiral into stacking dopamine hits until an inevitable crash.

Youtube is just an example... but it can be done for everything in life.

I did this for food as well.

I was eating a bowl of lovely, clean ingredient chocolate ice cream every night for like 2 months straight.

I had an expectation that whenever I got myself a bowl of chocolate ice cream, I would feel good. And it satisfied nearly every time.

But I got a little tubby (:<), and I didn't get enjoyment from real, satiating food— and I felt like couldn't wind down at night without a bowl of ice cream.

So, I removed it from my house. I no longer have a frictionless source of stimulation in my freezer. By doing this, I prevent a stack of dopamine hits that could lead to a crash later on.

This goes for any easy source of food-based stimulation in my house. I only keep whole foods that provide me with satisfaction, and that don't lead me to being a complete glutton.

What you need to do: Become aware of how this dopamine cycle is ever-present in your life. Slowly chip away at sources of stimulation, and you will find yourself doing the hard things that move you towards your goals, nearly effortlessly.

I am a hunter-type/ADD-ADHD person, so addiction and low-dopamine are a part of daily life.

You might need less management than me, but I guarantee you need more than you currently have.

We are all a slave to this cycle, no matter what gender/age/occupation/etc you are.

If you can master this cycle in 2025 and have it benefit your life... have it fuel your journey. I can say with confidence that it will be the best year you have ever had.

That wraps it up. This is definitely the longest newsletter I have ever written. If you found it useful, please share this with a friend who you think is a slave to dopamine and needs to become aware.

You can read the previous letters here.

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As always...

KEEP GOING.

B.S.