Motivation isn’t a personality trait

You've made it through more than half the year, and it's starting to feel like the whole thing is a wash.

You're not on track to lose the five pounds. Or get the promotion. Or even write that weekly newsletter you swore you'd stick to - and yes, I'm talking about myself here. But maybe you relate.

Maybe you were cruising for a while, checking boxes, making things happen, and then you fell off a cliff you didn't see coming. Or maybe the idea was amazing but you never even got off the starting line. Either way, you're standing here now, asking: where the hell did my motivation go?

Here's where you're getting it wrong: motivation isn't something you are. It's something you do. You're not an herbalist because you were born one, you're an herbalist because you show up to the mortar and pestle. You don't have a practice, you do a practice. Motivation works the same way. Inspiration can strike, sure. But if you're waiting on it to show up before you pick up the pestle, you're going to be making some pretty mediocre medicine.

So let's figure out how to actually build the thing.

What Motivation Actually Is

Motivation runs through your brain's dopamine reward system. Dopamine-producing neurons in the ventral tegmental area talk to the nucleus accumbens, evaluating rewards and pushing you to chase them. This is the wanting pathway, which is separate from the pleasure of getting what you wanted.

And the old story — dopamine equals pleasure — is outdated. Research out of the University of Michigan found dopamine doesn't just spike when something good happens. It's tracking, continuously, how worthwhile your current situation is. That tracking is what decides how hard you're willing to work.

Which is a problem, because modern life is a dopamine leach. Social media, video games, porn, junk food, drugs, shopping, one more episode of your favorite binge worthy show. All of it hijacks the same chain reaction, convincing your brain that what you're doing is worth doing — even when it isn't.

So if you want real motivation, the kind that survives past the dopamine hit, you have to go deeper than the chemistry. You have to look at your purpose.

Motivation and Purpose

Western philosophy, starting with Hobbes, treated motivation as fundamentally self-interested — arguling that even the acts that look selfless trace back to self-preservation. Kant, writing almost one hundred years later, pushed back hard on that. He believed that real motivation was in duty: doing the right thing because it's right, not because of what you get from it.

However, eastern traditions and those with more land-based world-views, go further still, locating motivation in relationships, in alignment with something larger than the self, in the quality of your intention rather than the payoff waiting at the end.

Both can be true at once. You want the promotion because it will more easily pay the bills — and because it buys you more time with the people you love. You want your business to make money — and you want the future its mission is pointing toward, one where people are freer, healthier, more themselves.

Motivation, at its root, isn't about scraping together the energy to do a task you're dreading. It's about staying connected to a purpose bigger than the task. And staying connected to something that big, that often — that's hard as hell. Borderline overwhelming.

So how do you reconnect when you're feeling like absolute shit? You go back to the why. Remember — dopamine isn't just rewarding you for finishing. It's tracking, in real time, how worthwhile the work feels. Which means you can't live in the weeds of your daily to-do list. You have to keep the bigger picture in view, on purpose, over and over.

Hate the job? Focus on the apartment it’s helping you save for instead. Struggling to build the brand? Read your the vision statement daily, hourly if you have to.

Whatever your why is — big, small, sacred, petty — stay tethered to it often.

But, when even your why is feeling far away, I’ve got herbs for that.

Herbal Allies for the Work

Some plants make this easier. Not by sipping a potion and immediately manifesting your desires, but by supporting your neurons to do optimal work so that you can tap into your dopamine with ease.

Mucuna pruriens (velvet bean) — This one doesn't mess around. It contains natural L-DOPA — the direct precursor your brain uses to build dopamine in the first place. It actually hands your brain the raw material and says go make some joy. Ayurvedic medicine has leaned on it for centuries, and modern clinical research (including in Parkinson's disease) backs up that it actually raises dopamine levels.

Because it's feeding the pathway directly instead of nudging it from the sidelines, people tend to feel this one. And that’s why it’s woven into our Bliss formula. Bliss works on serotonin, dopamine, and gives you a little boost of energy, so you can work on your creative projects.

This one's powerful. Treat it with a little respect.

Rhodiola rosea — Rhodiola isn't handing you extra dopamine — it's working the door, keeping the dopamine you've already got from getting swept out too fast. It works by inhibiting MAO, the enzyme whose entire job is breaking dopamine (and serotonin, and norepinephrine) down after it's released. Less breakdown means more of it hanging around doing its job.

Most of the human research is actually about fatigue and stress resilience rather than a direct dopamine spike — but the mechanism holds up, and if you've ever felt like your motivation evaporates the second you look away from it, this is the herb that tells it to stay.

Curcumin (turmeric) — Yes, the stuff in your curry. Turns out it's been moonlighting as a mood and dopamine-support herb this whole time, though most of the receipts are still in mice and petri dishes, but Ayurvedics know what they’re doing.

One well-cited rat study found curcumin raised serotonin and dopamine at higher doses while inhibiting the same MAO enzymes rhodiola targets — same trick, different plant. Later studies built on that, reversing depressive-like behavior in chronically stressed mice and, more recently, showing dopamine increases specifically in the frontal cortex, hippocampus, and striatum. So next time you're seasoning dinner, know your spice rack is quietly overachieving.

While, none of these are substitutes for the deeper work of having a strong why, they're all great supports. Your brain chemistry is not separate from your purpose. It's the vehicle carrying it. Might as well give it good fuel.

Nike Got It Right

None of this — the neuroscience, the philosophy, the plants — replaces the part where you actually show up. Motivation was never going to knock on your door and hand itself to you. You build it the way you build anything worth having: badly, at first. Inconsistently. Then a little less badly. Then, one day, without noticing exactly when it happened, you're just someone who does the thing.

And that’s why Nike got it right when their marketing team said, “Just do it.”

Because it’s not about the ‘it’, and, surprisingly, it’s not about the ‘do’. The most important part of that slogan is ‘just’ – when it’s messy, imperfect, and when you really don’t want to. Just do it.

I'm not writing this from the other side. I'm writing it from the middle, same as you — half a year gone, staring down the goals I meant to have hit by now. But I'd rather make mediocre medicine for a while than never pick up the pestle at all. So today, that's what I'm doing. Tomorrow too. And I’ll be taking my herbs to get me through.

If you’re dopamine needs a little backup, you know where to find me.