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How much time do you spend on high dopamine activities each day? High dopamine activities are those that are engineered to pique and hold your interest. Video
by marcusverus 4y ago
How much time do you spend on high dopamine activities each day?
High dopamine activities are those that are engineered to pique and hold your interest. Video games, tv, social media, news aggregators, porn, etc.
Our brains are designed to prioritize the most interesting stuff. Back on the Serengeti, that made sense. There wasn’t much novelty, so when you found some, your hardware wanted to ensure that you were able to focus on it long enough to grok it. Will it hurt you? Can you eat it?
Nowadays novelty is ubiquitous. Interesting stuff is everywhere! Learning new things can be pretty interesting, but it will never be as interesting as stuff that’s literally engineered to be interesting.
The solution is to simply (ha!) remove those more interesting but less rewarding options from the equation.
You don’t have to believe me—it’s an easy hypothesis to test. Just quit ALL high dopamine activities, cold turkey, right now. Zero exceptions. In my experience, those relatively boring tasks become attractive again within mere minutes of dogged abstinence from high-dopamine activities.
- rammy1234 4y agoInteresting, This is great thought. I am uninstalling social apps. Twitter, FB, Insta to start with. I want to see where else I am going to spend time on. Will report back here to this thread to let how it helped. Thanks !!
- marcusverus 4y agoI hope it helps! If you’d like to hear more, consider reading Dopamine Nation, the book that turned me onto this line of thinking. It’s a quick read and very enlightening.
- renaissance_tea 4y agoNeat idea. I’m taking a couple weeks to relax this holiday and will experiment with this. I’m in the boat where I’m always learning, but get easily distracted since some tech is a huge dopamine hit whereas sitting down and deeply studying something isnt. Edit: just ordered the hardcover book
- rg111 4y agoCal Newport discusses a very similar idea in his book Deep Work. I recommend reading this book to everyone who are struggling to focus for longer times, or consider themselves chronic underachievers. This book had a huge influence in my life and getting my shit together.
- rammy1234 4y agoI am ordering this book. Thanks.
- QuantumGood 4y agoChange your perspective to success is in all the things I am NOT doing. See avoiding something interesting as making a deposit for your future self.