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Dopamine, Smartphones and You: A battle for your time

270 points by dsnr 5y ago

Levitz 5y ago
More and more I feel that the real damage is not done to time, but to attention. It is fairly simple to reorganize your time, it does take willpower but once you do it that's all your time back to you. On the other hand it requires actual effort and practice to be conscious and present in the task at hand after getting used to mindless entertainment, it requires a process to gradually take it back. I worry about the upcoming generations that deal with this in their growing stages.
- fendy3002 5y ago
  In my experience the worst contributor is mobile games. Daily login reward, daily quests / tasks, etc. They divert your attention because you feared to miss those rewards. It's less effective for adult but very harmful to teens. However I found that missing one day of it and not spending any cash to those games helps with getting out of it.
  - 5px 5y ago
    What's ironic too is that these "daily" rewards offer so much leeway to the end user to get away with not actually hitting daily. In example, Timehop, has recorded days without me actually visiting the app - rather keeping the streak on the app seems to be more for my dopamine gain even if its number is invalid. Egg, Inc, a game I play on my phone has daily rewards. On its system, I have 24 hours until after my daily reward is given (or so I presume, I haven't missed one in months :/) that it gives me in difference to make sure I come into the app. It's annoying but the patterns are so apparent that it surprises me how many people don't notice them.
- Ettaa 5y ago
  It's possible this experiment will affect each of its participants. Even though I try to control my attention when I'm unaware my finger always slips to the new tab opening a page for quick dopamine shots.
  - 0des 5y ago
    Just a heads up, your account appears to be shadow banned.
- camillomiller 5y ago
  This is spot on. The feeling can be described as having been made dumber. The good news is that this skill is highly sensitive to training. Getting back to deep focus after social media have ravaged your brain is the new going from coach potato to running a 10K.
- nicbou 5y ago
  When people quit drugs, they need something to feel the void it leaves. It's one thing to stop consuming, but it's another to replace it with a meaningful activity. I feel the same about tackling internet addiction. The computer is off, now what?
  - Levitz 5y ago
    Absolutely, I feel it truly gives insight into how an addiction works. If every morning you wake up and smoke a cigarette right by the window while you brew coffee, then the day you decide to stop there are two forces at hand: first, the addiction to nicotine, but there is also the void left by the activity of smoking. When you quit social media or whatever smartphone boredom annihilator, what do you do on the bus back home? On the waiting room or queue of whatever place you find yourself at? In any of those small idle moments? For me I've found the answer to be obvious but not very exciting: I get bored. I get bored and let my mind wander, ideally this means I'm not merely unfocused, but rather at rest mentally, otherwise I dedicate some time to this or that thought that would surely have assaulted me right at the time in which I should be falling asleep. I think society has gotten into an habit of never being bored, I don't think that's healthy.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  In my experience it takes will power initially, but after I reached escape velocity I no longer needed much will power. I'm talking about the day that I decided to "mute' my life. This was back in 2014 (I can't believe it's already been that long). Set my phone so that texts no longer caused alert sounds or vibration, only calls from those in my contacts would ring through, and I deleted crap like Facebook (and didn't log in again for over a year). It took conscious effort initially, but then you adjust quicker than you think after you realize that exactly 0% of texts you will ever receive actually need your immediate attention. Maybe you the reader get important texts all the time, and I sort of feel sorry if you do, but I never ever do. If someone ever actually needs to reach me they will call, and they are never some rando number not in my contacts. These devices and the services surrounding them don't necessarily deserve all the negative credit we attribute to them. People get addicted to things not just because those things have addicting qualities but because those people's needs aren't getting met in other areas. Technology makes it really easy to tickle those addiction centers in our brains, if you will, so that's the most common way to cope for people whom are missing something. It's not a personal failing (most of the time anyway) because even knowing that you are addicted, or that there's more to addiction than the surface level, is actually a really hard thing. The other side of the equation is that not being addicted can be isolating in modern society. In my own life I sometimes have a hard time socializing with others, not out of shyness or anything like that, but because most people don't know how to relate to me when they find out that I don't surf social media, binge watch entertainment, or play video games for hours on end. They say "so what do you do with all that free time?" When I tell them that I am spending nearly all that time building things and learning, unless I'm among serious nerds, they don't get how my lifestyle is fulfilling to me. Truth be told, not living vicariously through the imaginary lives of others doesn't have to be boring. I think there's a few kinds of people; the kind who don't get fulfillment or enjoyment outside of entertainment, and the kind who can be self-fulfilled but also deep down realize that it would separate them from much of society, which can be a scary thing. It might not be a conscious thought, but I think it's probably there.
  - huachimingo 5y ago
    Beware of becoming The Steppenwolf.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  I am struggling literally right now with this. Two days in a binge of commenting stuff on social networks, my tasks are dangerously late.
  - wibagusto 5y ago
    Honestly my suggestion is to get rid of all social media. How many hours to master a new skill are wasted away with pointless debates and conversations? I have been off of social media for years now and I couldn’t go back. Really, ask yourself if your conversations on social media are yielding something productive to society or if it’s just wasting time. If you want social, get a group together and meet in person. Go do something.
    - afarrell 5y ago
      Alongside this, maybe set yourself up on calendly.com with some open time slots and tell people: "I'm taking a break from social media. If you'd like to get in touch with me, email foo@bar.com or click on [my calendar link](https://calendly.com/) and pick a time for a phone call" Will some people think you're odd for doing this? Yes. But it is better to miss out on 10 shallow connections and gain 1 deep one. Face the FOMO. > productive to society A better question: Are you really deeply connecting with the people you talk to or are you just wandering?
      - joeberon 5y ago
        Quitting social media is not really about FOMO, it's about the fear of being bored due to not having anything else to fill that time.
      - wibagusto 5y ago
        Please don’t forget that these platforms are designed to be addicting. What you’re suggesting is akin to: “why not smoke occasionally to take the edge off.” It’s about losing mental focus if you ask me. If you’re an occasional user, your mind is still going to be roped in. They have an army of scientist who’ve proven these facts already and social media companies exploit us all. I agree with the idea of establishing deeper connections: but take them offline and have a cup of tea or video chat. There’s simply better options.
- joeberon 5y ago
  My concentration and attention abilities are destroyed by computers and media. It doesn't seem to be retrainable, even after meditating 30 minutes to an hour a day for a year, using concentration on breath method, I still do not seem able to recover any kind of flow state or concentration. I think it is permanently damaged in my brain.
  - vaylian 5y ago
    Armchair psychologist here: Have you tried games? Either physical (e.g. sports) or digital (ideally single player, desktop computer games)? If you have fun, it is much easier to get into a flow state.
    - joeberon 5y ago
      Yes, I play about an hour a night, but I don't really get into the flow of them, I'm usually checking my phone during loading screens or cutscenes. I'm sure physical sports would be somewhat easier. Making music can sometimes do it in the right situation. The problem is though that I can't make it happen at will, but I really would like to be able to concentrate on my work as a physicist, e.g. reading a paper even if I'm not that interested in it personally is quite important to be able to do but it takes me days.
      - pkrznaric 5y ago
        It might help if you introduce more things to focus in and out on. I find that when I'm playing a game I'm not as interested in/has down time, by having something like music playing softly in the background, I'm able to focus in better during slow periods. Some amount of LoFi beats, classical, or music in another language might help a bit even if you feel you need to 'focus in' by just providing a bit more stimulation? I find that without music it's much harder for me to enter my flow state when programming even if I 'stop hearing' the music once I get into what I'm working on. But everyone's different, that's just something that works for me, but I hope that you keep up the hard work. Focus is hard, and you're taking some important steps to try and restore yours.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I think reading books is a good way of practicing concentration. The moment you stop paying attention to the text, the reading falls apart completely. It gives a very direct feedback when your mind has wandered. You can get away with skimming texts on the Internet, indeed you kind of have to with all the ads, inline links, and other visual cruft clamoring for your attention, but that usually does not work particularly well with books, especially if it's a more demanding read. Reading can be shockingly hard if you haven't done it in a while, but it rapidly gets a lot easier.
  - farias0 5y ago
    I don't know, reading books to me is very easy, but I find hard to focus on work. I conditioned myself to instinctively alt-tab from my IDE every time a problem gets frustrating to the point I often do this without realizing, meanwhile my "reading workflow" haven't been poisoned yet. So my thesis is that this is less related to losing attention/willpower overall and it's more related to creating distracting habits.
- infinitezest 5y ago
  I have no expertise on the subject so my diagnosis basically means nothing but I suspect that the explosion in ADHD diagnoses has something to do with this. If you constantly exist in an environment that is built to fracture and segment and compete for your time it doesn't seem surprising to me at all that you're going to have a very difficult time allocating attention.
- nkzd 5y ago
  I also struggle with this. My attention span is terrible. What is the process you used to gradually take it back? Can you recommend and resources regarding this topic?
  - CountDrewku 5y ago
    Meditation, exercise, good diet. You train your brain just like you train anything else.
- FearlessNebula 5y ago
  Isn’t the net effect still time? The apps have your attention, so the real task at hand takes twice as long. That weekend you wanted to work on a project? Gone to Reddit and YouTube. Not enough time to do the things you want when the things you impulsively scroll are hijacking time and attention.
marban 5y ago
https://hubermanlab.com https://hubermanlab.com has lots of episodes on dopamine — Highly recommended podcast.
- nelox 5y ago
  Yeah, I can’t get enough of that one.
Darmody 5y ago
This morning on my way to work I was listening to a podcast talk talked about dopamine "fasting". Recommended if you're interested in knowing s bit more. https://es.player.fm/1BKMFGF https://es.player.fm/1BKMFGF
- marban 5y ago
  Also helpful if you work out daily for ~90+ mins and need a kicker to get you through. Could be a pre-workout supp or just music. Occasional skipping/reducing will do the trick.
j7ake 5y ago
This feels analogous to Coca Cola framing their plans as a “battle for your stomach”.
superkuh 5y ago
Hearing ignorant computer science people talking about "dopamine" is just as bad as hearing people call their computer monitor their PC. It's wrong and it leads to bad conclusions. > smartphones and the social media platforms they support are turning us into bona fide addicts. While it’s easy to dismiss this claim as hyperbole, platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram leverage the very same neural circuitry used by slot machines and cocaine to keep us using their products as much as possible. This is hyperbole and it's not wrong at the same time. You know what else uses the very same neural circuitry as used by slot machines and cocaine? Reading a boook. Talking a walk. Petting your dog. Existing. Dopaminergic populations of cells existing in a dozen different functional populations among the brain and project nearly everywhere. And if they're trying to claim that reward prediction circuitry is 'hijacked' they're going to need to show some evidence. Cocaine hijacks the brains reward prediction circuitry by directly acting on the dopamine re-uptake proteins. There is nothing intrinsically addicting or anything at all that can "hijack" the reward prediction circuitry in a smartphone screen. It is simply another stimuli filtered through your normal senses going the normal routes. It is NOT hijacking anything. Tech bros need to stop talking about neuroscience like they understand it. For the most part, they don't and it leads to embarassing and dangerous claims like this article makes.
- nostrebored 5y ago
  https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Trevor-M-Haynes-2129302006 https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Trevor... Trevor has multiple articles attributed partially to him while affiliated with Harvard Medical School?
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    Yes he does. The answer is right there in that link.
    - joeberon 5y ago
      You were supposed to read it as if the question mark was not there. It was a "question mark of incredulity and disbelief" not a "question mark of question".
kashyapc 5y ago
On understanding dopamine, FWIW, I recommend two excellent resources: one is Robert Sapolsky's 720-page tome, Behave—he gives a robust intro to dopamine in the second chapter, "One Second Before", and expands on it further in the book. The other is prof. Andrew Huberman's podcast. He recently did a 2-hour episode[1] on dopamine. The segment on smartphones and how they alter our dopamine circuits starts at 01:15:28[2] [1] https://hubermanlab.com/controlling-your-dopamine-for-motivation-focus-and-satisfaction/ https://hubermanlab.com/controlling-your-dopamine-for-motiva... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU&t=4528s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU&t=4528s
- arvinsim 5y ago
  Other books that focus more on action steps?
  - didericis 5y ago
    Not a book, but these action steps are common: - Disable phone notifications - Create checklists of small things you want to do - Work in cafes and places with background noise/other people - Schedule activities with others
  - kashyapc 5y ago
    For the patient reader/listener, the mentioned book and podcast have several ideas to implement. Obviously, there are no shortcuts but methods that require discipline. As a quick example, one suggestion is to not reward yourself everytime the same way. Let's say, you really enjoy running with music. Sometimes just toss a coin whether you get to listen to music while running or not. In other words, reward yourself intermittently. It is far more likely to sustain the baseline excitement/dopamine levels over time. If we reward ourselves all the time the same way, the baseline levels tend to drop. I'm explaining it poorly, but Huberman and Sapolsky add a lot more colour to this.
polskibus 5y ago
please add [2018] to title
i_am_proteus 5y ago
I am always curious to read an exposé of the (hypothesized) neural mechanisms at work here. This is principally because the medium (it is some combination of the personal computer and the smart telephone) is not strictly new in its ability to engage the user. Industrial citizens spent a great deal of their time viewing television prior to the internet era, what is new is the rapid feedback those seeking to engage their audiences have. The A/B test, use of user data, et cetera, these are all mechanisms by which the software developer increases the attention-commanding power of his software. But of course, the software developer is not typically interested in or aware of the psychology (a complicated field) and is instead focused on outcomes. In reality, the software developer is conducting large scale psychological experiments on how to best entrance the user, but the language used for this process is more of business and technique than it is strictly of science.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Interesting that these topics always focus on smartphones or the Internet. It's as if we talked about smoking in terms of "lighters are causing addiction", or "holding cylindrical objects in your hands is addictive". Or, about alcohol, in terms of "ingesting beverages is a social problem". It's not the Internet itself that is the problem. It's not the devices - even extremely convenient ones, like always-connected smartphones. There are particular types of services that are problematic, provided by concrete companies, who optimize their addictive and distracting potential on purpose, advertise them heavily, and make money off the problems they cause. These are well-thought business decisions, made by well-known people. And yet, as a society, we shrink away from talking about them, preferring instead to put blame on incidental topics: the Internet, the smartphones, the engineers building the hardware and software[0]. I wish for a day when we collectively wake up and focus on the actual root cause, when we come to the conclusion that some business models just shouldn't exist. We've done it in the past, and because of that we[1] enjoy physically safe food, toys, medicine, appliances. But either we've lost our way in the last decades, defaulting to an asinine view that "all is fine as long as there is demand", or the process of understanding and mitigating threats to society takes too damn long. Maybe it's the latter - but that's not good, because the kind of abuse we throw at each other is following the economic and technological growth curves. -- [0] - Or, a related favorite of mine, "the AI". As if wild machine learning algorithms frolicked in the forest, and occasionally came out of the woods on their own, to take over some business or governmental decision process. No human making a self-serving decision to involve an unsuitable ML model in a system it doesn't belong in was ever involved. [1] - People in wealthier countries, at least.
- amelius 5y ago
  > We've done it in the past, and because of that we enjoy physically safe food, toys, medicine, appliances. Everybody wants safety. But nobody wants their smartphone taken away. It's an unpopular move. That's why it doesn't happen. Anyway, I think that we should take away the incentive of social media companies to be so addictive by banning ads on these platforms.
  - pnutjam 5y ago
nobody0 5y ago
“The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself. This is all that men have been able to make themselves happy. And those who philosophize on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.” (Pensees, Blaise Pascal)
tharne 5y ago
These articles always fall short at the end by suggesting we be more mindful when it comes to how we use smartphones. It's about as easy to use a smartphone in moderation as it is to do heroin in moderation. There are trillion dollar companies and some of the world's best engineers working as hard as they can to boot your "engagement" and keep you hooked. Good luck fighting that as a one-man army. Just get rid of the smartphone. You really don't need it. On balance, it's probably not making your life better. We tend to focus on the few benefits and ignore the all-in costs. I tossed my smartphone a while back and was expecting disaster. It never came, other than a few mild inconveniences. If you absolutely need to, get a cheap android just for work that gets shut off and put in a drawer at the end of the day. The most pernicious thing about the smartphone is that we've convinced ourselves that it's 100% impossible to live a happy and productive life without it.
- FearlessNebula 5y ago
  I mean I’d rather get a smartphone and just not download the offending apps, and only use it for maps and reminders. Flip phone UX is miserable
qq4 5y ago
About the only thing I find addicting on my phone is checking the weather everyday. My working hypothesis is that many people want to waste (or spend, call it what you want) their time on their devices, so they install applications that will help them do so.
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
All right, that's it: No more commenting on Hacker News.
calebm 5y ago
I had noticed myself using Facebook too often, and recently deleted the app from my mobile phone (and am not signed into FB via my mobile browser). And I've been surprised how much less I check into Facebook when my only way to check it is on my laptop.
FearlessNebula 5y ago
I felt pathetic while reading this article. I stopped after every paragraph to switch to Reddit and refresh my notifications. Great article and discussion

270 points by dsnr 5y ago

More and more I feel that the real damage is not done to time, but to attention. It is fairly simple to reorganize your time, it does take willpower but once you do it that's all your time back to you. On the other hand it requires actual effort and practice to be conscious and present in the task at hand after getting used to mindless entertainment, it requires a process to gradually take it back. I worry about the upcoming generations that deal with this in their growing stages.

fendy3002 5y ago
In my experience the worst contributor is mobile games. Daily login reward, daily quests / tasks, etc. They divert your attention because you feared to miss those rewards. It's less effective for adult but very harmful to teens. However I found that missing one day of it and not spending any cash to those games helps with getting out of it.
- 5px 5y ago
  What's ironic too is that these "daily" rewards offer so much leeway to the end user to get away with not actually hitting daily. In example, Timehop, has recorded days without me actually visiting the app - rather keeping the streak on the app seems to be more for my dopamine gain even if its number is invalid. Egg, Inc, a game I play on my phone has daily rewards. On its system, I have 24 hours until after my daily reward is given (or so I presume, I haven't missed one in months :/) that it gives me in difference to make sure I come into the app. It's annoying but the patterns are so apparent that it surprises me how many people don't notice them.
Ettaa 5y ago
It's possible this experiment will affect each of its participants. Even though I try to control my attention when I'm unaware my finger always slips to the new tab opening a page for quick dopamine shots.
- 0des 5y ago
  Just a heads up, your account appears to be shadow banned.
camillomiller 5y ago
This is spot on. The feeling can be described as having been made dumber. The good news is that this skill is highly sensitive to training. Getting back to deep focus after social media have ravaged your brain is the new going from coach potato to running a 10K.
nicbou 5y ago
When people quit drugs, they need something to feel the void it leaves. It's one thing to stop consuming, but it's another to replace it with a meaningful activity. I feel the same about tackling internet addiction. The computer is off, now what?
- Levitz 5y ago
  Absolutely, I feel it truly gives insight into how an addiction works. If every morning you wake up and smoke a cigarette right by the window while you brew coffee, then the day you decide to stop there are two forces at hand: first, the addiction to nicotine, but there is also the void left by the activity of smoking. When you quit social media or whatever smartphone boredom annihilator, what do you do on the bus back home? On the waiting room or queue of whatever place you find yourself at? In any of those small idle moments? For me I've found the answer to be obvious but not very exciting: I get bored. I get bored and let my mind wander, ideally this means I'm not merely unfocused, but rather at rest mentally, otherwise I dedicate some time to this or that thought that would surely have assaulted me right at the time in which I should be falling asleep. I think society has gotten into an habit of never being bored, I don't think that's healthy.
ravenstine 5y ago
In my experience it takes will power initially, but after I reached escape velocity I no longer needed much will power. I'm talking about the day that I decided to "mute' my life. This was back in 2014 (I can't believe it's already been that long). Set my phone so that texts no longer caused alert sounds or vibration, only calls from those in my contacts would ring through, and I deleted crap like Facebook (and didn't log in again for over a year). It took conscious effort initially, but then you adjust quicker than you think after you realize that exactly 0% of texts you will ever receive actually need your immediate attention. Maybe you the reader get important texts all the time, and I sort of feel sorry if you do, but I never ever do. If someone ever actually needs to reach me they will call, and they are never some rando number not in my contacts. These devices and the services surrounding them don't necessarily deserve all the negative credit we attribute to them. People get addicted to things not just because those things have addicting qualities but because those people's needs aren't getting met in other areas. Technology makes it really easy to tickle those addiction centers in our brains, if you will, so that's the most common way to cope for people whom are missing something. It's not a personal failing (most of the time anyway) because even knowing that you are addicted, or that there's more to addiction than the surface level, is actually a really hard thing. The other side of the equation is that not being addicted can be isolating in modern society. In my own life I sometimes have a hard time socializing with others, not out of shyness or anything like that, but because most people don't know how to relate to me when they find out that I don't surf social media, binge watch entertainment, or play video games for hours on end. They say "so what do you do with all that free time?" When I tell them that I am spending nearly all that time building things and learning, unless I'm among serious nerds, they don't get how my lifestyle is fulfilling to me. Truth be told, not living vicariously through the imaginary lives of others doesn't have to be boring. I think there's a few kinds of people; the kind who don't get fulfillment or enjoyment outside of entertainment, and the kind who can be self-fulfilled but also deep down realize that it would separate them from much of society, which can be a scary thing. It might not be a conscious thought, but I think it's probably there.
- huachimingo 5y ago
  Beware of becoming The Steppenwolf.
elzbardico 5y ago
I am struggling literally right now with this. Two days in a binge of commenting stuff on social networks, my tasks are dangerously late.
- wibagusto 5y ago
  Honestly my suggestion is to get rid of all social media. How many hours to master a new skill are wasted away with pointless debates and conversations? I have been off of social media for years now and I couldn’t go back. Really, ask yourself if your conversations on social media are yielding something productive to society or if it’s just wasting time. If you want social, get a group together and meet in person. Go do something.
  - afarrell 5y ago
    Alongside this, maybe set yourself up on calendly.com with some open time slots and tell people: "I'm taking a break from social media. If you'd like to get in touch with me, email foo@bar.com or click on [my calendar link](https://calendly.com/) and pick a time for a phone call" Will some people think you're odd for doing this? Yes. But it is better to miss out on 10 shallow connections and gain 1 deep one. Face the FOMO. > productive to society A better question: Are you really deeply connecting with the people you talk to or are you just wandering?
    - joeberon 5y ago
      Quitting social media is not really about FOMO, it's about the fear of being bored due to not having anything else to fill that time.
    - wibagusto 5y ago
      Please don’t forget that these platforms are designed to be addicting. What you’re suggesting is akin to: “why not smoke occasionally to take the edge off.” It’s about losing mental focus if you ask me. If you’re an occasional user, your mind is still going to be roped in. They have an army of scientist who’ve proven these facts already and social media companies exploit us all. I agree with the idea of establishing deeper connections: but take them offline and have a cup of tea or video chat. There’s simply better options.
joeberon 5y ago
My concentration and attention abilities are destroyed by computers and media. It doesn't seem to be retrainable, even after meditating 30 minutes to an hour a day for a year, using concentration on breath method, I still do not seem able to recover any kind of flow state or concentration. I think it is permanently damaged in my brain.
- vaylian 5y ago
  Armchair psychologist here: Have you tried games? Either physical (e.g. sports) or digital (ideally single player, desktop computer games)? If you have fun, it is much easier to get into a flow state.
  - joeberon 5y ago
    Yes, I play about an hour a night, but I don't really get into the flow of them, I'm usually checking my phone during loading screens or cutscenes. I'm sure physical sports would be somewhat easier. Making music can sometimes do it in the right situation. The problem is though that I can't make it happen at will, but I really would like to be able to concentrate on my work as a physicist, e.g. reading a paper even if I'm not that interested in it personally is quite important to be able to do but it takes me days.
    - pkrznaric 5y ago
      It might help if you introduce more things to focus in and out on. I find that when I'm playing a game I'm not as interested in/has down time, by having something like music playing softly in the background, I'm able to focus in better during slow periods. Some amount of LoFi beats, classical, or music in another language might help a bit even if you feel you need to 'focus in' by just providing a bit more stimulation? I find that without music it's much harder for me to enter my flow state when programming even if I 'stop hearing' the music once I get into what I'm working on. But everyone's different, that's just something that works for me, but I hope that you keep up the hard work. Focus is hard, and you're taking some important steps to try and restore yours.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I think reading books is a good way of practicing concentration. The moment you stop paying attention to the text, the reading falls apart completely. It gives a very direct feedback when your mind has wandered. You can get away with skimming texts on the Internet, indeed you kind of have to with all the ads, inline links, and other visual cruft clamoring for your attention, but that usually does not work particularly well with books, especially if it's a more demanding read. Reading can be shockingly hard if you haven't done it in a while, but it rapidly gets a lot easier.
- farias0 5y ago
  I don't know, reading books to me is very easy, but I find hard to focus on work. I conditioned myself to instinctively alt-tab from my IDE every time a problem gets frustrating to the point I often do this without realizing, meanwhile my "reading workflow" haven't been poisoned yet. So my thesis is that this is less related to losing attention/willpower overall and it's more related to creating distracting habits.
infinitezest 5y ago
I have no expertise on the subject so my diagnosis basically means nothing but I suspect that the explosion in ADHD diagnoses has something to do with this. If you constantly exist in an environment that is built to fracture and segment and compete for your time it doesn't seem surprising to me at all that you're going to have a very difficult time allocating attention.
nkzd 5y ago
I also struggle with this. My attention span is terrible. What is the process you used to gradually take it back? Can you recommend and resources regarding this topic?
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  Meditation, exercise, good diet. You train your brain just like you train anything else.
FearlessNebula 5y ago
Isn’t the net effect still time? The apps have your attention, so the real task at hand takes twice as long. That weekend you wanted to work on a project? Gone to Reddit and YouTube. Not enough time to do the things you want when the things you impulsively scroll are hijacking time and attention.

marban 5y ago

https://hubermanlab.com https://hubermanlab.com has lots of episodes on dopamine — Highly recommended podcast.

nelox 5y ago
Yeah, I can’t get enough of that one.

Darmody 5y ago

This morning on my way to work I was listening to a podcast talk talked about dopamine "fasting". Recommended if you're interested in knowing s bit more. https://es.player.fm/1BKMFGF https://es.player.fm/1BKMFGF

marban 5y ago
Also helpful if you work out daily for ~90+ mins and need a kicker to get you through. Could be a pre-workout supp or just music. Occasional skipping/reducing will do the trick.

j7ake 5y ago

This feels analogous to Coca Cola framing their plans as a “battle for your stomach”.

superkuh 5y ago

Hearing ignorant computer science people talking about "dopamine" is just as bad as hearing people call their computer monitor their PC. It's wrong and it leads to bad conclusions. > smartphones and the social media platforms they support are turning us into bona fide addicts. While it’s easy to dismiss this claim as hyperbole, platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram leverage the very same neural circuitry used by slot machines and cocaine to keep us using their products as much as possible. This is hyperbole and it's not wrong at the same time. You know what else uses the very same neural circuitry as used by slot machines and cocaine? Reading a boook. Talking a walk. Petting your dog. Existing. Dopaminergic populations of cells existing in a dozen different functional populations among the brain and project nearly everywhere. And if they're trying to claim that reward prediction circuitry is 'hijacked' they're going to need to show some evidence. Cocaine hijacks the brains reward prediction circuitry by directly acting on the dopamine re-uptake proteins. There is nothing intrinsically addicting or anything at all that can "hijack" the reward prediction circuitry in a smartphone screen. It is simply another stimuli filtered through your normal senses going the normal routes. It is NOT hijacking anything. Tech bros need to stop talking about neuroscience like they understand it. For the most part, they don't and it leads to embarassing and dangerous claims like this article makes.

nostrebored 5y ago
https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Trevor-M-Haynes-2129302006 https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Trevor... Trevor has multiple articles attributed partially to him while affiliated with Harvard Medical School?
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  Yes he does. The answer is right there in that link.
  - joeberon 5y ago
    You were supposed to read it as if the question mark was not there. It was a "question mark of incredulity and disbelief" not a "question mark of question".

kashyapc 5y ago

On understanding dopamine, FWIW, I recommend two excellent resources: one is Robert Sapolsky's 720-page tome, Behave—he gives a robust intro to dopamine in the second chapter, "One Second Before", and expands on it further in the book. The other is prof. Andrew Huberman's podcast. He recently did a 2-hour episode[1] on dopamine. The segment on smartphones and how they alter our dopamine circuits starts at 01:15:28[2] [1] https://hubermanlab.com/controlling-your-dopamine-for-motivation-focus-and-satisfaction/ https://hubermanlab.com/controlling-your-dopamine-for-motiva... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU&t=4528s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU&t=4528s

arvinsim 5y ago
Other books that focus more on action steps?
- didericis 5y ago
  Not a book, but these action steps are common: - Disable phone notifications - Create checklists of small things you want to do - Work in cafes and places with background noise/other people - Schedule activities with others
- kashyapc 5y ago
  For the patient reader/listener, the mentioned book and podcast have several ideas to implement. Obviously, there are no shortcuts but methods that require discipline. As a quick example, one suggestion is to not reward yourself everytime the same way. Let's say, you really enjoy running with music. Sometimes just toss a coin whether you get to listen to music while running or not. In other words, reward yourself intermittently. It is far more likely to sustain the baseline excitement/dopamine levels over time. If we reward ourselves all the time the same way, the baseline levels tend to drop. I'm explaining it poorly, but Huberman and Sapolsky add a lot more colour to this.

polskibus 5y ago

please add [2018] to title

i_am_proteus 5y ago

I am always curious to read an exposé of the (hypothesized) neural mechanisms at work here. This is principally because the medium (it is some combination of the personal computer and the smart telephone) is not strictly new in its ability to engage the user. Industrial citizens spent a great deal of their time viewing television prior to the internet era, what is new is the rapid feedback those seeking to engage their audiences have. The A/B test, use of user data, et cetera, these are all mechanisms by which the software developer increases the attention-commanding power of his software. But of course, the software developer is not typically interested in or aware of the psychology (a complicated field) and is instead focused on outcomes. In reality, the software developer is conducting large scale psychological experiments on how to best entrance the user, but the language used for this process is more of business and technique than it is strictly of science.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

Interesting that these topics always focus on smartphones or the Internet. It's as if we talked about smoking in terms of "lighters are causing addiction", or "holding cylindrical objects in your hands is addictive". Or, about alcohol, in terms of "ingesting beverages is a social problem". It's not the Internet itself that is the problem. It's not the devices - even extremely convenient ones, like always-connected smartphones. There are particular types of services that are problematic, provided by concrete companies, who optimize their addictive and distracting potential on purpose, advertise them heavily, and make money off the problems they cause. These are well-thought business decisions, made by well-known people. And yet, as a society, we shrink away from talking about them, preferring instead to put blame on incidental topics: the Internet, the smartphones, the engineers building the hardware and software[0]. I wish for a day when we collectively wake up and focus on the actual root cause, when we come to the conclusion that some business models just shouldn't exist. We've done it in the past, and because of that we[1] enjoy physically safe food, toys, medicine, appliances. But either we've lost our way in the last decades, defaulting to an asinine view that "all is fine as long as there is demand", or the process of understanding and mitigating threats to society takes too damn long. Maybe it's the latter - but that's not good, because the kind of abuse we throw at each other is following the economic and technological growth curves. -- [0] - Or, a related favorite of mine, "the AI". As if wild machine learning algorithms frolicked in the forest, and occasionally came out of the woods on their own, to take over some business or governmental decision process. No human making a self-serving decision to involve an unsuitable ML model in a system it doesn't belong in was ever involved. [1] - People in wealthier countries, at least.

amelius 5y ago
> We've done it in the past, and because of that we enjoy physically safe food, toys, medicine, appliances. Everybody wants safety. But nobody wants their smartphone taken away. It's an unpopular move. That's why it doesn't happen. Anyway, I think that we should take away the incentive of social media companies to be so addictive by banning ads on these platforms.
- pnutjam 5y ago

nobody0 5y ago

“The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself. This is all that men have been able to make themselves happy. And those who philosophize on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.” (Pensees, Blaise Pascal)

tharne 5y ago

These articles always fall short at the end by suggesting we be more mindful when it comes to how we use smartphones. It's about as easy to use a smartphone in moderation as it is to do heroin in moderation. There are trillion dollar companies and some of the world's best engineers working as hard as they can to boot your "engagement" and keep you hooked. Good luck fighting that as a one-man army. Just get rid of the smartphone. You really don't need it. On balance, it's probably not making your life better. We tend to focus on the few benefits and ignore the all-in costs. I tossed my smartphone a while back and was expecting disaster. It never came, other than a few mild inconveniences. If you absolutely need to, get a cheap android just for work that gets shut off and put in a drawer at the end of the day. The most pernicious thing about the smartphone is that we've convinced ourselves that it's 100% impossible to live a happy and productive life without it.

FearlessNebula 5y ago
I mean I’d rather get a smartphone and just not download the offending apps, and only use it for maps and reminders. Flip phone UX is miserable

qq4 5y ago

About the only thing I find addicting on my phone is checking the weather everyday. My working hypothesis is that many people want to waste (or spend, call it what you want) their time on their devices, so they install applications that will help them do so.

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

All right, that's it: No more commenting on Hacker News.

calebm 5y ago

I had noticed myself using Facebook too often, and recently deleted the app from my mobile phone (and am not signed into FB via my mobile browser). And I've been surprised how much less I check into Facebook when my only way to check it is on my laptop.

FearlessNebula 5y ago

I felt pathetic while reading this article. I stopped after every paragraph to switch to Reddit and refresh my notifications. Great article and discussion