389: Dopamine, Rewards, and Novelty: How to Keep Writing When the Excitement Fades

389: Dopamine, Rewards, and Novelty: How to Keep Writing When the Excitement Fades

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[00:00:00] Have you ever become intensely interested in a new writing project? You start collecting articles, you open up a new document, you're imagining the argument you wanna make. Maybe you work on a detailed plan, and you spend several hours writing because the ideas are coming to you easily and quickly. Then eventually, the project becomes a bit too familiar.

You've been reading about this topic for months. You've revised the same section so many times. The document is too long and hard to navigate, and the finish line still feels far away. The project may continue to matter to you, but working on it is starting to feel less stimulating. For some writers, especially those with ADHD, that shift from novelty to repetition can become a real challenge, but this [00:01:00] experience is common beyond ADHD.

Anyone can struggle to return to their work when the progress is hard to notice, when feedback is nonexistent or delayed, or when the task becomes too repetitive and boring. Today, we're talking about how to add supportive rewards, visible progress, and novelty to your long-term writing while still staying connected to a project.

One important reminder, though, is that if you're losing interest in a familiar task, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have anything wrong with you. Motivation is something that's influenced by your attention, your stress, your sleep, your health, your workload, your environment, and whether or not that work feels safe and meaningful to you.

So let's get into it. Let's talk about dopamine, rewards, and novelty and how to keep writing when the excitement [00:02:00] fades.

Welcome to the award-winning Grad School Femtoring Podcast, the place where first generation BIPOC students and professionals can listen in on inclusive grad school stories and gain practical tools for sustainable success. This is Doctora Yvette Martinez-Vu, a certified coach, consultant, author, and speaker.

I will be serving as your femtor, providing you with insider knowledge to help you thrive in grad school and beyond.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Grad School Femtoring Podcast. This is your host, Doctora Yvette. Today, I am going to talk to you about all things dopamine, rewards, and novelty.

[00:03:00] I'm briefly going to talk about dopamine and motivation. I'm also gonna share a few ways to make your longterm writing more approachable through things like supportive cues, visible feedback, giving yourself choices, and adding more novelty to your work. And as I always say, you don't need to try everything that I mention today.

Take what works and let go of the rest, so choose one or two things that might match how you're feeling right now, what your energy level is, what your health access needs are, and then see how it goes. And as I always mention, this episode is for educational purposes only.

It's not meant to diagnose. And as I always mention, this episode is for educational purposes only. And if you are substantially struggling to get your work done, if you're struggling with your mental health, if you're struggling with your physical health, I strongly recommend reaching out to a [00:04:00] mental health or healthcare professional to get the support that you need.

And on the topic of support, if you continue to experience some challenges, you may also benefit from looking into some workplace or educational accommodations. Okay, let's get into the context for today. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, and it's involved in several brain processes, including movement, learning, motivation, and noticing what feels important to you.

And a lot of times when people think about dopamine, they think about it how it's described online, which is as a pleasure chemical, but we know that that's an oversimplification. Even what I'm sharing today, to some extent, is an oversimplification. But I want you to recognize that dopamine is part of a much larger system that helps us learn from what happens and decide what may be [00:05:00] worth pursuing.

And so novelty, surprise, uncertainty, and things like meaningful feedback can influence your attention and learning. And it also impacts people differently. Some people gain a lot by having more novelty in their work, while others might find it to be distracting or overwhelming. The key here is to get to know yourself better and how your brain works so that you can get a sense of what is going to help you to decide and to keep doing the work that you have to do. The other thing I wanted to mention is the topic of executive functioning, because that also impacts your ability to get work done.

And executive functioning refers to mental processes that help you initiate tasks, organize information, hold ideas in your mind, switch activities, regulate [00:06:00] your attention, and monitor your progress. And these are things that fluctuate for everyone, depending on your stress, your sleep, your pain, your illnesses, workload, financial pressures, what's going on in your work environment.

Are you dealing with discrimination? Do you have a lot of roles and responsibilities at home? All of that impacts your executive functioning. And so when we think about you beginning a new writing project, it's understandable for you to find ways to notice progress and to feel motivated to get work done because you're finding the new sources, you're exploring a new question, you're starting to picture what the final project looks like.

But then as you keep working, those sources of feedback and motivation sometimes fade. So you start to revise, but then you notice you're not getting a lot of new words or page counts from it. You might be spending too much time [00:07:00] revising one paragraph, and then at the end of it, you notice that not much has changed in terms of noticeable and quantifiable outcomes. Meanwhile, the larger rewards of academic writing often take months or years to come.

If you're waiting for you to finish a chapter, for you to finish a book, for you to finish a dissertation, it's gonna take a while to get there. Even if a project is really important to you, if you don't have ways to feel the rewards or a sense of motivation, a sense of momentum, it can make it harder to keep going.

And if you're having a hard time with getting back to your work, that doesn't mean that you stopped caring. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. But it does say something about your conditions and what you need to keep going. Maybe the next step is unclear. Maybe you are having a hard time tracking your progress.

Maybe the task needs to be broken down further. [00:08:00] Maybe you just need a little bit more feedback. Or maybe you're tired and you need a break. And of course, your institution, your department, your work environment all matter too because if this work is tied to your sense of financial security, if this work is being impacted by you experiencing discrimination, if expectations are inaccessible and maybe you need things in written form instead of only verbal feedback, that's all gonna impact how you get your work done.

It's gonna make things a lot harder to approach. All of this to say that I'm gonna share some strategies. I'm also gonna share a reward menu, but these things don't solve structural problems. Sometimes you do need to address those as well or remind yourself of those things impacting you. And so keep an eye on that.

Like, maybe you need rest. Maybe you need an accommodation. Maybe you need [00:09:00] redistributed labor. Maybe you need to advocate for yourself more. And at the same time, there's something that you can do to take agency to get back to your work. And so those are the strategies that I'm gonna be sharing today.

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To start, I'll talk about the types of support and rewards you can give yourself before, during, and after writing.

You don't need to wait until the end of a work session to reward yourself. You can add supports. You can add rewards any time during the process Before writing, you can think about creating something that's gonna help you to get started or creating a ritual that's gonna help you to get into the work.

Maybe it's making a beverage that you really enjoy, your favorite cup of coffee, your cafecito, your tea. [00:11:00] Maybe it's music or ambient noises. Maybe you need to adjust the lighting just a bit. Maybe you need a more comfortable location, or maybe you need to reach out to a writing partner, send them a text and say, "I'm starting now. I'm gonna be working for X amount of minutes, and I'll check in when I'm done." So these are all different things you can do. Maybe when you're actually getting into the writing, you need to read your research question. Maybe you need to reconnect with a part of the project that's still really interesting to you.

Maybe you need to review a passage that reminds you of the argument. Maybe you need to return to the problem or the main reason why you got started on this work in the first place, because having a sense of purpose can help. Of course, it's not gonna provide you with unlimited energy, but it reminds you of why you're doing this. Sometimes that is enough to help you to get back to it. Now, during the writing session, you [00:12:00] can give yourself feedback. You can give yourself some flexible options for doing the work. Choose an interval that feels contained and that works for the type of work you're doing. Do you need 10 minutes? Do you need 15 minutes?

Do you need 25 or 45 minutes? And then instead of telling yourself, "Oh, I'm just gonna work on this chapter," ask yourself, "What can I seriously work on and get done during this interval?" Because you want the progress to be visible. You want it to be specific. And that might look like after that first interval, you move a sticky note after completing a paragraph.

Maybe it means mark each writing interval on a tracker. I have a client who recently started using this Toggle tracker. It's an app on an iPhone that allows you to set timers and write down what you're going to work on in each timer, and then it gives you that visual of everything you've worked on and how long you [00:13:00] worked on it, which is great for tracking your time, having access to data, and then using that data to know how long something's gonna take you in the future.

All of this to say that you wanna make progress visible, and that progress has a lot more to do than just tracking your word count. That's only part of the work. You can also try to experiment with increasing your sense of social connection. For a lot of people, they feel isolated when they're doing their writing.

And so body doubling is a popular strategy that a lot of people engage in where they work in the presence of others, in person or online, and you work silently with them. You're usually working on different things. A lot of neurodivergent folks describe body doubling as helpful, and so that's something to try if you haven't already. Maybe what you need instead of working with others is simply connecting with others about your [00:14:00] experience.

Because like I said earlier, long-term writing is isolating, and it can help to feel witnessed during the process. And I say this after spending the long weekend getting to spend an afternoon with some of my comadres from grad school, some of my grad school besties, and there's something so healing about getting to connect with someone on such a personal level that they got to see you during some really challenging moments when you were working on a really challenging project under challenging circumstances, and they were there, and they witnessed you, and they see how far you've come.

So please don't underestimate the power of community, the power of having support, and the power of increasing your sense of social connection. The other thing I wanna mention, which is another strategy you can try out, is to [00:15:00] keep the project but change the experience. So what does that mean?

Sometimes you need a little bit more novelty, but that doesn't mean that you need to start a new project. Sometimes you need to change your process, change the medium, change the mode, change the task, change the environment, change the sequence, the social setting, the level of challenges. There's so many things that you can change.

If typing is hard, dictate your ideas. If you're having a hard time explaining an argument in your writing, say it out loud and share it with someone. Record yourself or talk to someone. Maybe it's a student or a trusted colleague or a trusted family member. If the argument is also challenging to write down in that format, maybe you need to draw it.

Maybe you need to arrange ideas using sticky notes. Maybe you need to print out what you've written and then cut it and then rearrange it. And why do I know this? Because I've [00:16:00] done that before. If you spent hours looking at a screen, maybe you need to revise a printed page by hand. Yes, the old school way.

Grab out a red or a purple pen and mark it and revise it that way. You can also change the type of writing task. Maybe instead of thinking about, "Oh, I'm just, you know, revising an entire paragraph," you are focusing on, "Okay, I'm just gonna revise this one page, or I'm just gonna map the argument, or I'm just gonna identify a few key sources and where they belong."

You can also change your environment. Maybe you need it to be working in a different room. Maybe you need to sit by a window. Maybe you need to change your lighting or work in another, more accessible location. And none of this needs to cost money, but it does mean trying to figure out what the right environment or workspace is for you.

You can also change the sequence, so instead of writing in linear order, you can start at [00:17:00] the end. You can start in the middle. You can start wherever it feels easier to enter and to get back to the writing. You can also change the challenge. What do I mean by that? Maybe you focus on one specific question per work session.

So how clearly can I explain this idea in five sentences? Almost like you're trying to gamify it. What evidence is missing here? Which three sentences are doing the most work here? Or what can I leave unresolved until next time? Because I can't think straight right now, so I'm just gonna let it go. That small question gives you enough of a focus so that you know what to do during that session.

And so these are all examples of ways to change the process and add novelty to the process while still working on the same project. Now, another thing that I wanna mention is the menu of options that I [00:18:00] mentioned earlier. So instead of thinking, "I'm working on chapter three," and writing that on your calendar, you want to break that down to, "I'm gonna write one paragraph.

I'm gonna revise one page. I'm gonna create a visual outline. I'm going to record a voice memo explaining my argument. I'm going to address one piece of feedback. I'm going to identify the next question I need to answer." And then you choose accordingly based on how you're feeling. So you wanna have this list of options of things you can regularly do.

And ideally, you wanna have some options that account for low capacity days too. And that might mean, okay, on a low capacity work session, I'm gonna open up my document, read the last paragraph, and leave a note to myself for next time. You can do this on your own. I don't wanna give you something that you can work off of because I don't know what works best for you.

So think about your process. [00:19:00] Think about every single little baby step that you take to get into your writing. And I do this with clients all the time. I'll have them work on a checklist and start with the baby steps. You know, as soon as you're getting started, what's the first thing that you do?

Oh, I look at the prompt for the assignment. Okay, after that, what do you do? Oh, I start to do the reading for that assignment. Okay, after that, what do you do? I take notes and pull relevant sources and quotes. Okay, after that, what do you do? I create an outline and come up with my argument. After that, what do you do?

I expand on the outline. After that, what do you do? I start to write the first paragraph. You see how all of that is giving you the choices? And even among those choices, there's things that you can do in different modalities and different mediums and different ways depending on your energy level. And I want you to do that for yourself. When you create your own menu, you can ask yourself the following four questions: What could make approaching the work feel more supportive [00:20:00] for me?

What could make the work more comfortable or engaging while I'm doing it? How can I notice my effort after a manageable interval? And how can I make the same project feel different today? Again, for you, it might look like making your tea, having a playlist, joining a virtual writing group, dictating a paragraph, talking to a friend about your argument, using sticky notes, working somewhere different, taking lots of movement and sensory breaks, texting a friend when you're working on something, stopping at a specific planned endpoint.

And these are all things that can feel supportive or even rewarding. I wanna remind you that rewards don't have to involve spending money, they don't have to involve food, they don't have to involve social media, although if it works for you, go ahead and do it. But they do often involve movement or music or comfort or connection, sensory regulation, or that acknowledgement, [00:21:00] whether it comes from you or others, that you did something. So next time that you have a writing session, please, please, please consider the following.

Consider adding one supportive cue before you begin. Consider adding one source of comfort, interest, or connection while you're working. Consider adding one form of novelty within the project, so something that you're gonna do that's a little different in terms of the process. And add one way to acknowledge your effort, either by tracking your progress or doing something to give yourself credit for what you did.

And then at the end of the session, ask yourself, " Did these things make it easier for me to begin, to stay engaged, to notice my progress, to return to the work?" And if the answer is no, that's okay. That's also information. That means that next time you do this, you want to approach it differently. [00:22:00] Maybe you need more clarity.

Maybe your amount of workload was unrealistic. Maybe you need more feedback. Something's gotta change, right? So think about your conditions, think about your process, and that is how you will find the supports, the rewards, and the novelty that works for you. Long-term writing is not easy. We have to return to it so many times.

Some days might feel easy, some days might be hard. Some days you're drafting, some days you're dictating, revising, mapping. And consistency doesn't mean that you have to get a certain number of words done every single working session. It might just mean getting back to it and trying out a bunch of different methods to write.

And so there's nothing wrong with you if you need more novelty than others. There's nothing wrong with you if you need more breaks or rest or accommodations than others. What I do want you to remember is to ask yourself, [00:23:00] "What would make this work more approachable today?" Because you deserve to have your needs met.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this episode helpful, please consider sharing it with a friend, with a colleague, with a writing buddy, another student, or anyone who needs a more compassionate way to approach their long-term writing. And if you need additional support, of course, as always, you're welcome to learn more about my one-on-one and group coaching services for first-generation students and professionals.

All right. That's it for today, and as always, I'll talk to you all next time.

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