Most of us have been thinking about dopamine backwards. We treat it like a reward — something that arrives when a good thing happens. Huberman's corrective here is fundamental: dopamine is not the experience of pleasure. It's the drive toward it. It's anticipation, craving, pursuit. The moment of arrival is almost beside the point.
Once you understand that, a lot of behaviour that previously seemed irrational starts making sense. Why does achieving a goal often feel hollow? Because dopamine was doing its heaviest work during the chase. When the chase ends, it quiets. The system was never designed to celebrate arrival — it was designed to keep you moving.
Here's where this gets practically important, especially for anyone thinking about daily protocols. Every significant dopamine peak is followed by a drop below baseline. The bigger the spike, the deeper the trough. And if you're routinely spiking high — stacking caffeine, loud music, pre-workout stimulants, social media, all before the first real effort of the day — you're quietly eroding the very baseline that makes motivation accessible.
I see this directly confirmed in our other Huberman content on natural dopamine elevation. The cold exposure article in the knowledge base makes the same point with a useful contrast: most stimulants give you a sharp spike followed by a crash. Cold water does something different — it produces a rise of roughly 250 percent above baseline that builds gradually and holds for hours, without the subsequent drop. The mechanism involves both dopamine and norepinephrine, which together produce that rare combination of calm and readiness.
There's broad consensus in the neuroscience literature on the peaks-and-baselines model — that's well-established receptor pharmacology. Where Huberman adds something specific is the behavioral application: the idea of "dopamine stacking" as a practice to actively avoid. That framing is his, and it's useful. The intermittent reinforcement section is similarly grounded in decades of behavioral research, from Skinner's variable-ratio schedules to modern addiction studies. Unpredictable rewards sustain effort better than predictable ones. Casinos have always known this. Now you do too.
Audit your morning. If you're arriving at your first real effort of the day already primed with coffee, music, and motivational content, you've already spent some of what you were going to need. Save the stacking for when you genuinely need the lift — not as a precondition for starting. And build deliberate cold exposure into your routine, not because it feels good in the moment (it doesn't), but because the dopamine profile it creates is the closest thing to a biological reset button that exists without pharmaceutical intervention.
What strikes me most about this entire body of research is how it rhymes with everything we know about contrast therapy specifically. The contrast protocol — heat followed by cold — works through the same underlying logic as everything Huberman describes here. You introduce stress deliberately, at a controlled dose, to elicit a biological response that outlasts the stress itself. The discomfort is the mechanism. Learning to find something to value inside that discomfort — not just the outcome, but the process — is how you keep the system working for you over time rather than burning it out chasing the next hit.