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Great, great piece.

It reminds me of what Andrew Huberman says in his episode about dopamine, something along the lines of "learn to enjoy the effort."

This means we can actually get satisfaction and reward from doing the thing itself, rather than some reward (a protein shake!) afterwards. It means our motivation and reward pathways get trained to fire during the thing itself, which makes it more sustainable over time.

After 10+ years of consistent exercise, I feel like I'm 80% in the embodied/intrinsic zone, but still 20% of me lives in the extrinsic. I mainly exercise because I love it, but a part of me still wants to get jacked, look great, etc. which I'm fine with as I feel it motivates me but isn't primary.

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thanks connor! love that line from Huberman. i should listen to his episode on dopamine and map it to this theme. his ideas around not overloading through "dopamine stacking" are super interesting and def relevant here.

on the 80/20 intrinsic/extrinsic: i'm in a similar boat. don't think there's anything wrong with having extrinsic goals. progress can be super motivating and enjoyable. plus, if we really want these things then ignoring them completely could lead to frustration and internal conflict.

i need to write more about this but one way to think of it is to design your high-level exercise routine to align to whatever you want most (jacked, healthy, etc) and then approach each individual workout from in an intrinsic/embodied way. a few ideas here (will write more soon): https://www.firststonefitness.com/principles/actually-aligned

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I just listened to this episode and Sam's post is a timely, essential follow-up!

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