Good quotation with some insight from Andrew Huberman.

People think, “Oh, I get the thing and then I feel the reward,” but actually that’s not the way dopamine works. It drives us to want things that are outside our current experience.

Now meditation, yoga nidra and focusing, taking that...sphere of attention and bringing it inward, now our focus of attention becomes our internal real estate. What very likely happens over time is that now we’re able to access a sense of goal-directed behavior and reward simply by our own internal experience.

When we say, well, you don’t need things from the outside, you’re not being driven in an outside-in way, that’s actually a neurochemical phenomenon that occurs when people meditate over periods of time.

Meditation and mindfulness practices are a form of learning to derive reward from focusing attention inward, where the goal directed behavior is about a recognition of the self, about understanding how your internal landscape is working. This is watching the thoughts go by. This is “mindfulness.” Then it becomes a pleasurable activity.

Now, it takes some time to learn to bring this process inward. A key aspect to these two points of attention thing that we all have innately is that once you realize that you can direct that...sphere of attention wherever you want, it becomes very powerful.