Hey, this is Borin Doulos with the Creative Ache Podcast, where we discuss the God-given passion, pain and purpose for the creative individual. Hello and welcome to the Creative Ache Podcast. I'm your host, Borin, and I'm a multi-instrumentalist singer, songwriter and composer, as well as a musical intercessor at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri. I have several music albums out under varying artists and genres. Wherever you stream music, and with this podcast, it's my desire to encourage and exhort artistic people to faithfully steward their God-given Creative Ache. Today, we are going to be discussing one of my favorite subjects. It's pretty sciency. I'm definitely not a neuroscientist or psychologist or anything like that, so I'm just going to be discussing a lot of my personal perspective on one of my favorite subjects, and particularly how it relates to your creativity and that, my friends, is dopamine.
Borin Doulos:Now, dopamine we often think of in terms of happiness and pleasure. Right, we think of doping up on something as something that gives us a whole bunch of pleasure, but dopamine is actually not really responsible for those feelings. That's usually in dolphins, and they actually usually come after waves of dopamine. Dopamine itself is a neurotransmitter that is associated with motivation, reward and the subsequent pleasure. Really, the pleasure that comes from. Dopamine comes from the pleasure of anticipation, a motivation to get something that is pleasurable. Dopamine plays a crucial role in the brain's reward system. It reinforces behaviors that are perceived as pleasurable or rewarding or beneficial. Even Dopamine helps regulate attention, focus and the generation of new ideas during the creative process, and that is what I want to focus on today. Dopamine is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter. There's nothing you can do to make it not be part of your biological process, and I believe God designed that especially for creatives, as a way to help us have creative output, as a matter of faithfulness, of stewardship. Now let's dive deeper into understanding dopamine and creativity. Dopamine itself impacts cognitive flexibility, or, in other words, divergent thinking, which is the fancy word of saying. It's the generation of new ideas, or the creative process in and of itself.
Borin Doulos:Whether you're a painter or a musician or any other form of art, you're constantly looking for a way to adjust what you know or what you see or what you're hearing into something new, something that rewards you with feelings of pleasure or feelings of reward, feelings of something beneficial happening. That's dopamine at work. There is a measurable link between optimal dopamine levels and increased motivation, enthusiasm and productivity in artistic behaviors. So understanding this is crucial in gaining the ability to output more and more authentic creativity, more art. Now, for some people, including myself, the way that this feels is there's almost an angst or a drive to go and produce music or whatever art form you express in, and it's a lot like hunger. If you think of hunger, dopamine is actually released in high levels when we're hungry and considering how to get food. In fact, dopamine is what drives you to the decision making and action of going into the fridge and getting something that you want to eat. Now, what's fascinating is the moment you have that thing, dopamine actually subsides dramatically because now you've got it, even if you haven't necessarily eaten it. The start of you eating that food causes your brain to signal a drop in dopamine levels because you no longer need the motivation to go and get the thing. You have it. So now we can apply this in terms of artistry, and I know for myself I've felt oftentimes tremendous pain in this desire to have this music that I hear inside of me expressed. That's dopamine at work for the creative process.
Borin Doulos:Now, again, dopamine is the thing, but the action that we take, or really the feeling that we have, is called dopaminergic drive or, more simply put, ambition. But dopaminergic drive is defined as the level of dopamine activity in the brain and its impact on motivation and goal-directed behavior. Now that sounds very calculated. It usually doesn't actually come out or manifest itself as calculated behavior. It's more just like I feel like doing this or I feel like getting this, and so I do or I don't, but there's the drive nonetheless. That is dopaminergic drive, and having a healthy dopaminergic drive fuels passion, persistence and the pursuit of artistic goals. Now I'm sure you can reflect for a moment, like me in this moment, on times where I had a lot of passion and a lot of energy to pursue an artistic goal. I felt restless. I stayed up until 3, 4, 5 in the morning, several nights in a row to finish a song that I just can't stop working on. In those seasons I had high dopamine levels, which was accompanied by lots of dopaminergic drive. But then I've also had times and usually they follow shortly after those kinds of moments where I go long periods of time thinking I should write some music, but I don't really feel like doing it and that's usually because of a low dopaminergic drive. We don't feel that passion, we don't feel that desire to pursue our artistic expression.
Borin Doulos:Jordan Peterson, who's a psychologist, has a fascinating quote about dopamine and creativity and he says the dopamine rush of a creative breakthrough is worth a thousand hours of fruitless labor. I think that's really fascinating because what he's saying is the moment you have the breakthrough in creativity, and what he's not saying is you've finished your creative work. He's talking about now something has opened up and I suddenly feel wind beneath my wings in whatever artistic pursuit I'm in right now. He's referencing the thousands of hours that led up to it, where you didn't feel anything. You felt like you were just laboring and nothing was becoming fruitful. That's actually part of the response that we should have to this thought of dopaminergic drive, because, like I just said about myself, I've had times where I have lots of dopaminergic drive, lots of ambition, and then I have other times where I don't have any, and a good artist, a fruitful artist, a successful artist, rarely actually has that passion fueling them, and it's mostly the rigor of being faithful to do their creative thing regardless of how they feel. And that's really, I think, what Jordan Peterson is leaving for us to get in that quote is that there are thousands of fruitless hours that then lead to a sudden breakthrough in our creativity. We have to do the labor.
Borin Doulos:It's challenging because what we feel, what we're experiencing as that lack of ambition, is actually an imbalance in our dopamine levels, particularly excessive dopaminergic drive that might be directed at other things, and a lot of times that manifests, at least for me, ways that I waste time pinging out on a lot of food, watching a bunch of YouTube videos, scrolling on social media. Those are actually an expression of very powerful dopaminergic drive, but we're actually applying it to something that really doesn't help us at all. It's been intercepted, more or less, so we really want to understand what's going on internally, because that's a behavior that was reinforced. Whenever we are actively pursuing things that don't bear any fruit and we're not pursuing creative things, it's because we've told our brain hey, just go for this quickly pleasurable thing and don't do the thing that we know is actually fulfilling. We need to divert our time and our energy even if we don't feel like it, because that reinforces this excess of dopamine to being directed to something that's actually fruitful, which then shifts our dopaminergic drive away from the things that waste our time and into the creative pursuit. So let's talk about training and harnessing the power of dopaminergic drive. And to start that off, I want to say it this way we, as artists, have to understand the balance of using dopamine as the thing that drives us, but using discipline as the anchor of our creativity. The more we are disciplined in our creative pursuits, the more we're retraining those dopaminergic responses to associate our art as something that is rewarding, something that is ultimately what will give us the pleasure we are looking for. So we need to have discipline in order to get to the place where our dopamine drives us to be more fruitful and more productive in our artwork. Some practical tips are setting clear and obtainable goals. We need to have things that we can reach for, things that we can measure in our own lives.
Borin Doulos:For myself, it's taken a lot of discipline, but one of the techniques I've done as a musician, as a songwriter, is I've set aside time in my daily schedule where I will write music, no matter how I feel, and most of the time I don't feel like it. But when I looked back at the music I've released, I sometimes go years with hardly any musical productivity. But whenever I changed my life around to start setting a daily time apart for writing music. My creativity has skyrocketed since then. Most of the time I enter into that session not feeling a dopamine urgent drive. I'm not excited, I'm not ambitious about writing music, but once I get started, usually within 10 to 15 minutes, my dopamine is now being redirected away from wanting to scroll on Facebook or watch YouTube videos and into.
Borin Doulos:I have to find this harmony. I have to lay down this next beat. I have to find the right chord to express what I'm feeling needs to go here, and so it's really about the discipline as that anchor that then reinforces this sense of drive or ambition Again, this dopaminergic drive to accomplish my creative pursuit. Something that's really important is the intrinsic motivation that we get, and that's really what I'm talking about when I'm saying now I feel like writing the intrinsic motivation or finding the joy in what we do. Dopamine is designed again by God in a way that, when we're operating in it right, it actually begins to reinforce the right pattern, instead of me feeling like I need to do these time wasting senseless things. I want to do a creative pursuit and in the process of doing it, I'm finding joy, I'm finding motivation, which my brain associates as a good thing. So then it keeps telling itself hey, we need to redirect this neurotransmitter to drive us to keep Coming back to this thing. That is for me, writing music, for you it's whatever artistic pursuit but again, this applies across the board.
Borin Doulos:Whatever you were designed to do, the enemy has laid all kinds of traps to intercept your creativity in a big one it's. However, he can distract you and get that dopaminergic drive redirected to something fruitless. You have the power to walk with the Holy Spirit, express yourself with discipline in a way that reinforces the way God designed you as an artist To want to create, to be motivated to express your art. So that's gonna be it for today's episode. Again, there's a lot in this subject that I personally did not cover, and there's way more that I Don't know, but I would encourage you to look more into this.
Borin Doulos:Dopamine, again, it's a lot of people are gonna take a certain approach to it, but it was given to us by God as part of our biological makeup and it's either gonna harm us or it's gonna benefit our work for the kingdom and you as a creative individual. You were designed with a particular Dopamine-ergic expression, a motivation inside of you to create. So we want to lean into that we want to lean into that ambition. We want to reinforce and train that Sense of I have to express, I have to create, I have to do this art and Finally, as Albert Einstein said, creativity is contagious. So pass it on as we live out this lifestyle. Not only are we going to replicate our art, we're gonna replicate the pattern of an artist, somebody who's faithful to do the work of art.
Borin Doulos:So thank you so much for tuning into this episode. If you want to keep more contact with me, see more of what I'm up to, you could follow me on Instagram at born doulos music, and if you're watching this on YouTube, please like this video, hit subscribe. I've got other Podcast episodes that I'll be releasing on here, but I also have a lot of other music content that I do regularly, so make sure you subscribe to keep up with me in that, and I will see you on the next episode of the creative ache podcast. You.