6 ms·

> The only way I can convince myself to do it is by finding a suitably engaging show I can distract myself with on my phone while I huff and puff. > Combine th

> The only way I can convince myself to do it is by finding a suitably engaging show I can distract myself with on my phone while I huff and puff. > Combine the task with something you enjoy. You know what makes cleaning out the garage a lot better? Some good tunes. This motivational advice is deeply misguided. These are very clear examples of "dopamine stacking". The idea is that by combining a stimulating activity (eg watching show/music) with a motivation-requiring activity (eg working out/cleaning) you can get an initial boost in motivation to accomplish the hard task. It works (initially) because the stimulating task (show/music) is giving you a dopamine increase which feels like motivation to complete the hard task. The problem is that if you repeat this behavior with any consistency, your dopamine system quickly adjusts the high activity-combo level of dopamine as a new baseline. Soon not even the dopamine you get from the combination is sufficient to motivate you to accomplish the task. At this point people often seek another short lived dopamine-increasing stimulus to combine into the mix. You can see this pattern in people who exercise only with some combination of pre-workout, caffeine, music, phone scrolling. The off-ramp is learning how to derive dopamine (aka "motivation") from the actual activity itself. further reading: 1. https://youtu.be/PhBQ4riwDj4?si=n-afP-Rj_k7qfATz https://youtu.be/PhBQ4riwDj4?si=n-afP-Rj_k7qfATz

emil-lp 1y ago
> further reading: youtube
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  turn on subtitles, i guess?
  - siva7 1y ago
    it's more about the source, not the format
  - robotnikman 1y ago
    Off topic, but I'm guessing your username references the M4 Sherman tank? Kinda clever and funny.
SoftTalker 1y ago
The "treat yourself to a donut" suggestion got me. Sure, eat a donut, completely negating the caloric burn of the 30 minutes of aerobics you're motivating/rewarding yourself for.
- watters 1y ago
  For plenty of already-in-shape people, the calories expended during the exercise are largely incidental, with the goal of exercise being to enhance or maintain some other property of their physical capacity.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  You'll still have improved cardiovascular fitness even if you aren't losing weight. Any ways, a lot of studies have shown your body has a variety of methods that attempt to counteract excess calories burned, like reduction in non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
- Nifty3929 1y ago
  I'll disagree slightly, though clearly you are correct that if your goal is to offset calories, then eating a donut negates the benefits of the exercise activity. My disagreement is that I think exercise should not primarily be about calories - it should be about fitness. And almost all of the fitness gains from exercise persist even if you replace the calories with a donut. Exercising for 30min and then relacing those spent calories with donuts is FAR better than not exercising and forgoing those extra calories.
  - Melatonic 1y ago
    Exactly - and on top of that being super extra lean (for vanity purposes) is often actually detrimental to real world performance anyways. There's a balance to everything. Of course this assumes that in addition to the single donut the rest of your diet is decent - if you're eating shit all day then you are asking for an injury
- stronglikedan 1y ago
  that not how it works. that's not how any of this works. the aerobics build up muscle that will always be burning calories by merely existing. a donut here and there won't make a negligible difference, as long as the weekly aerobic activity level is maintained.
idle_zealot 1y ago
> The off-ramp is learning how to derive dopamine (aka "motivation") from the actual activity itself So, just start liking the things you don't like? Sure, ideally that's the solution you want, but it's not exactly actionable advice.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- fapjacks 1y ago
  Yeah, the ancient stoics made a whole philosophy about it.
- somethingsome 1y ago
  My 2 cents : I make it a game or I find beauty in it. As a more concrete example, as soon as you learn to enjoy learning as an activity, it becomes fun, whatever you are studying. So you only need to learn to have fun while learning. Start with simple things, make it a game, find beauty in what you are learning.
- macNchz 1y ago
  People are adaptable. Likes and dislikes and comfort zones are all malleable. I never liked working out in the slightest. Never stuck to any sort of "gym routine" more than a few days. Did most of the Couch to 5k program in college but never kept running. Just...never liked it. I had lots of friends in high school and college who ran Cross Country, and was always a bit baffled about the appeal. It seemed terrible, honestly. When my friend randomly suggested that we try a very ambitious hiking route, I knew it would absolutely suck if I didn't train for it. I got a gym membership and told myself I'd at the very least set foot in the gym 7 days a week for the first few weeks, just to build the habit of going. I was motivated to make sure I didn't slack off and ruin the hike for the group by being undertrained. A few months of that and the hike went great. When we got back, though, I found it felt weird to not go to the gym in the mornings before work (as a decidedly NON-morning person my friends and family looked at me like I'd grown a second head when they heard me say I was working out before work). I started running outside on days the gym was crowded, and it felt good! In the nearly eight years since then, there have been only a handful of weeks where I didn't go for a run—I genuinely really enjoy it, no motivational tricks required.
johnfn 1y ago
Really, deeply misguided? It's "deeply misguided" to listen to music while coding? I find that hard to believe.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  You probably like music and coding, and friends and food, and singing and hiking. OP was talking about blending activities you like with activities you don't like, as a way of getting you to do the thing you don't like.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
nerdponx 1y ago
I don't think listening to or watching something entertaining while doing something unpleasant or boring or uncomfortable is an example of dopamine stacking. It's just a distraction technique that helps you take your mind off the aspects of it that you don't want to think about or be aware of. Listening to music or a podcast while you work or exercise is a completely normal, non-dopamine stacking, thing to do. In the past, before radio and recorded music, people daydreamed or sang to accomplish the same goal.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  Daydreaming and singing to yourself is not entertaining. It's just something that an unstimulated brain does. To get to that destimulated place is the object imo - where what you're doing is so habitual that every step seems like a breath, and you only notice the ones you miss. I remember before I learned the basics of cooking how hard everything was, and how much I had to concentrate. These days I'll spend 20 minutes cooking something, plate it and go to the bathroom, and have forgotten what I cooked before seeing it again. I remember when I was learning Spanish, and every successful paragraph I read merited a celebration, and now I sometimes can't remember whether something I read was in Spanish or English an hour after I've read it. My biggest improvement in writing came after I stopped listening to music while doing it. Get it over with, then listen to music. Once you get into the habit, it's like taking a nap not having a party. I remember a factory I worked at in my 20s where I got up to doing 76 hour weeks with no days off because I was so good at what I was doing, I entered a timeless place. There was no time to get bored in. I'm sure I might have hummed, but I wouldn't remember. I certainly wasn't thinking about anything important; those machines could have ripped my hands off.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 1y ago
    >Daydreaming and singing to yourself is not entertaining. This is such a case study of a HN comment.
    - djtango 1y ago
      Not to take away from your meta comment but there's something to be said about the mind originating content from a place of wandering versus having content blasted at you from an external source.
tgv 1y ago
So, where does the evidence come from? I don't buy the explanation, and I can't find any article published by Huberman on dopamine.
- bubblyworld 1y ago
  I think people use "dopamine" in quite a loose sense to refer to reward centres in the brain and habit formation, not literally the hormone (though it's related). You might have better luck digging around those topics.
Capricorn2481 1y ago
Firstly, Huberman has turned into a hack, and this video is a great example of his drift into "just trust me bro" pop science. Secondly, > You can see this pattern in people who exercise only with some combination of pre-workout, caffeine, music, phone scrolling Where do you see this pattern? I would wager nowhere, even if it sounds like it "could" happen. I've worked out with a lot of people. I listen to music while working out, as do many people. I would enjoy working out less without it. But I'm not in some Dopamine spiral where I need to stack more stuff on top just to keep working out. I've been doing it for years. I've noticed a lot of health influencers like Huberman, who need to make content frequently, have been honing in on gut-feeling conclusions derived from novice science facts you can expect anyone to know about. He casts a wide net with a Psychology Today level concept, and he builds an audience of people that can't separate the lazy conclusions he makes from the objectively true but elementary facts he bases them on. Look at the comments, where people are accusing each other of being dopamine hijacked because they eat and read at the same time. Give me a break. Your reward system is not a fragile thing that is easily broken. The actual causes of dopamine hijacking are things like spending all day playing video games, not having a coffee before working out.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  > who need to make content frequently I think this is a major issue with so much of the "creator community". When you make this thing your job, you can't just not show up to work for a few months at a time. But, if your content is "information regurgitation", like reading health studies and reporting them to your audience, is there really enough out there to make it a full time job? Doubtful. So, you'll end up either rehashing yourself over and over (your viewers will get bored and leave), or start going to the fringes of your field where there is far less basis for your statements than what originally brought your audience in.
- bubblyworld 1y ago
  Your reward system is a fragile thing that is easily broken. Just look around you next time you go anywhere. We live in a society of smart phone addicts. That said, the examples OP gave of tunes while exercising seem pretty benign compared to superstimuli like social media or drugs...
saghm 1y ago
I'd also worry that the association of a fun activity with one you don't like can reduce the amount of fun from the first activity even when you stop doing them together. This is obviously not a scientific experiment, but I always struggled to wake up in the morning even with alarms (which I've since improved at with better understanding of some specific sleep conditions I have), and in an attempt to try to make it less annoying, I tried a couple times over the years to pick a song I liked as an alarm phone rather than a typical alarm sound. It never helped make waking up any easier, but it completely ruined both of the songs I tried for me in the short term, and even now years later I don't really enjoy them nearly as much as I used to. Hearing the opening notes of either of them just reminds me of the annoyance I felt waking up years ago.
- multjoy 1y ago
  I’ve got colleagues who have to grade CASM (scrolling through images and classifying them as category A, B, C etc. This can take literally days and the first thing they are told is don’t listen to music they enjoy while doing it, because they will never again be able to listen to that music.
layman51 1y ago
I generally agree. Some of the things I don't want to do are actually pretty complex and require my full attention so I wouldn't be able to listen to a podcast or music with lyrics. Maybe I'm in a weird situation that requires some kind of shift. On the other hand, I am sure I can do 30 minutes on an "assaultbike" without having to distract myself with a TV show.
- layer8 1y ago
  I’m kind-of the opposite: I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on a TV show while exercising.
Llamamoe 1y ago
Person with severe ADHD here. At least for me, it also helps because many hard activities are not stimulating enough for the effort they require, and persisting through understimulation is HARD.
ge96 1y ago
Ha my pre-workout is ibuprofen and redbull
lucas_membrane 1y ago
I think I've found ways to dodge the problems you describe. I am a person who is has been addiction-adjacent in my search for novelty for an absurdly long time. I've been quite devoted, however, to physical exercise very much like that described in the article for around 20 years, with favorable results. Throughout this time, I have listened to audio recordings while exercising, and it has always been my favorite aspect of the routine. But I have switched between music, audiobooks, and podcasts a few times during the 20 years, and the novelty of the various genres and topics available is enough to keep me going. For the last few years I've been doing the podcasts, and these seem to keep my interest. I've got a 32 GB mp3 player, which allows me to select from 15 or so roughly hour-long episodes of 15 or so podcasts, some of which take in a wide range of topics and most of the rest are put together by people who embody novelty in their deepest vesicles. I spend an hour or three every month or three searching out new episodes of the podcasts that continue operating and archives of old podcasts that arouse my interests. And I like doing that, too.

emil-lp 1y ago

> further reading: youtube

shermantanktop 1y ago
turn on subtitles, i guess?
- siva7 1y ago
  it's more about the source, not the format
- robotnikman 1y ago
  Off topic, but I'm guessing your username references the M4 Sherman tank? Kinda clever and funny.

SoftTalker 1y ago

The "treat yourself to a donut" suggestion got me. Sure, eat a donut, completely negating the caloric burn of the 30 minutes of aerobics you're motivating/rewarding yourself for.

watters 1y ago
For plenty of already-in-shape people, the calories expended during the exercise are largely incidental, with the goal of exercise being to enhance or maintain some other property of their physical capacity.
IncreasePosts 1y ago
You'll still have improved cardiovascular fitness even if you aren't losing weight. Any ways, a lot of studies have shown your body has a variety of methods that attempt to counteract excess calories burned, like reduction in non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
Nifty3929 1y ago
I'll disagree slightly, though clearly you are correct that if your goal is to offset calories, then eating a donut negates the benefits of the exercise activity. My disagreement is that I think exercise should not primarily be about calories - it should be about fitness. And almost all of the fitness gains from exercise persist even if you replace the calories with a donut. Exercising for 30min and then relacing those spent calories with donuts is FAR better than not exercising and forgoing those extra calories.
- Melatonic 1y ago
  Exactly - and on top of that being super extra lean (for vanity purposes) is often actually detrimental to real world performance anyways. There's a balance to everything. Of course this assumes that in addition to the single donut the rest of your diet is decent - if you're eating shit all day then you are asking for an injury
stronglikedan 1y ago
that not how it works. that's not how any of this works. the aerobics build up muscle that will always be burning calories by merely existing. a donut here and there won't make a negligible difference, as long as the weekly aerobic activity level is maintained.

idle_zealot 1y ago

> The off-ramp is learning how to derive dopamine (aka "motivation") from the actual activity itself So, just start liking the things you don't like? Sure, ideally that's the solution you want, but it's not exactly actionable advice.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
fapjacks 1y ago
Yeah, the ancient stoics made a whole philosophy about it.
somethingsome 1y ago
My 2 cents : I make it a game or I find beauty in it. As a more concrete example, as soon as you learn to enjoy learning as an activity, it becomes fun, whatever you are studying. So you only need to learn to have fun while learning. Start with simple things, make it a game, find beauty in what you are learning.
macNchz 1y ago
People are adaptable. Likes and dislikes and comfort zones are all malleable. I never liked working out in the slightest. Never stuck to any sort of "gym routine" more than a few days. Did most of the Couch to 5k program in college but never kept running. Just...never liked it. I had lots of friends in high school and college who ran Cross Country, and was always a bit baffled about the appeal. It seemed terrible, honestly. When my friend randomly suggested that we try a very ambitious hiking route, I knew it would absolutely suck if I didn't train for it. I got a gym membership and told myself I'd at the very least set foot in the gym 7 days a week for the first few weeks, just to build the habit of going. I was motivated to make sure I didn't slack off and ruin the hike for the group by being undertrained. A few months of that and the hike went great. When we got back, though, I found it felt weird to not go to the gym in the mornings before work (as a decidedly NON-morning person my friends and family looked at me like I'd grown a second head when they heard me say I was working out before work). I started running outside on days the gym was crowded, and it felt good! In the nearly eight years since then, there have been only a handful of weeks where I didn't go for a run—I genuinely really enjoy it, no motivational tricks required.

johnfn 1y ago

Really, deeply misguided? It's "deeply misguided" to listen to music while coding? I find that hard to believe.

IncreasePosts 1y ago
You probably like music and coding, and friends and food, and singing and hiking. OP was talking about blending activities you like with activities you don't like, as a way of getting you to do the thing you don't like.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

nerdponx 1y ago

I don't think listening to or watching something entertaining while doing something unpleasant or boring or uncomfortable is an example of dopamine stacking. It's just a distraction technique that helps you take your mind off the aspects of it that you don't want to think about or be aware of. Listening to music or a podcast while you work or exercise is a completely normal, non-dopamine stacking, thing to do. In the past, before radio and recorded music, people daydreamed or sang to accomplish the same goal.

pessimizer 1y ago
Daydreaming and singing to yourself is not entertaining. It's just something that an unstimulated brain does. To get to that destimulated place is the object imo - where what you're doing is so habitual that every step seems like a breath, and you only notice the ones you miss. I remember before I learned the basics of cooking how hard everything was, and how much I had to concentrate. These days I'll spend 20 minutes cooking something, plate it and go to the bathroom, and have forgotten what I cooked before seeing it again. I remember when I was learning Spanish, and every successful paragraph I read merited a celebration, and now I sometimes can't remember whether something I read was in Spanish or English an hour after I've read it. My biggest improvement in writing came after I stopped listening to music while doing it. Get it over with, then listen to music. Once you get into the habit, it's like taking a nap not having a party. I remember a factory I worked at in my 20s where I got up to doing 76 hour weeks with no days off because I was so good at what I was doing, I entered a timeless place. There was no time to get bored in. I'm sure I might have hummed, but I wouldn't remember. I certainly wasn't thinking about anything important; those machines could have ripped my hands off.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 1y ago
  >Daydreaming and singing to yourself is not entertaining. This is such a case study of a HN comment.
  - djtango 1y ago
    Not to take away from your meta comment but there's something to be said about the mind originating content from a place of wandering versus having content blasted at you from an external source.

tgv 1y ago

So, where does the evidence come from? I don't buy the explanation, and I can't find any article published by Huberman on dopamine.

bubblyworld 1y ago
I think people use "dopamine" in quite a loose sense to refer to reward centres in the brain and habit formation, not literally the hormone (though it's related). You might have better luck digging around those topics.

Capricorn2481 1y ago

Firstly, Huberman has turned into a hack, and this video is a great example of his drift into "just trust me bro" pop science. Secondly, > You can see this pattern in people who exercise only with some combination of pre-workout, caffeine, music, phone scrolling Where do you see this pattern? I would wager nowhere, even if it sounds like it "could" happen. I've worked out with a lot of people. I listen to music while working out, as do many people. I would enjoy working out less without it. But I'm not in some Dopamine spiral where I need to stack more stuff on top just to keep working out. I've been doing it for years. I've noticed a lot of health influencers like Huberman, who need to make content frequently, have been honing in on gut-feeling conclusions derived from novice science facts you can expect anyone to know about. He casts a wide net with a Psychology Today level concept, and he builds an audience of people that can't separate the lazy conclusions he makes from the objectively true but elementary facts he bases them on. Look at the comments, where people are accusing each other of being dopamine hijacked because they eat and read at the same time. Give me a break. Your reward system is not a fragile thing that is easily broken. The actual causes of dopamine hijacking are things like spending all day playing video games, not having a coffee before working out.

IncreasePosts 1y ago
> who need to make content frequently I think this is a major issue with so much of the "creator community". When you make this thing your job, you can't just not show up to work for a few months at a time. But, if your content is "information regurgitation", like reading health studies and reporting them to your audience, is there really enough out there to make it a full time job? Doubtful. So, you'll end up either rehashing yourself over and over (your viewers will get bored and leave), or start going to the fringes of your field where there is far less basis for your statements than what originally brought your audience in.
bubblyworld 1y ago
Your reward system is a fragile thing that is easily broken. Just look around you next time you go anywhere. We live in a society of smart phone addicts. That said, the examples OP gave of tunes while exercising seem pretty benign compared to superstimuli like social media or drugs...

saghm 1y ago

I'd also worry that the association of a fun activity with one you don't like can reduce the amount of fun from the first activity even when you stop doing them together. This is obviously not a scientific experiment, but I always struggled to wake up in the morning even with alarms (which I've since improved at with better understanding of some specific sleep conditions I have), and in an attempt to try to make it less annoying, I tried a couple times over the years to pick a song I liked as an alarm phone rather than a typical alarm sound. It never helped make waking up any easier, but it completely ruined both of the songs I tried for me in the short term, and even now years later I don't really enjoy them nearly as much as I used to. Hearing the opening notes of either of them just reminds me of the annoyance I felt waking up years ago.

multjoy 1y ago
I’ve got colleagues who have to grade CASM (scrolling through images and classifying them as category A, B, C etc. This can take literally days and the first thing they are told is don’t listen to music they enjoy while doing it, because they will never again be able to listen to that music.

layman51 1y ago

I generally agree. Some of the things I don't want to do are actually pretty complex and require my full attention so I wouldn't be able to listen to a podcast or music with lyrics. Maybe I'm in a weird situation that requires some kind of shift. On the other hand, I am sure I can do 30 minutes on an "assaultbike" without having to distract myself with a TV show.

layer8 1y ago
I’m kind-of the opposite: I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on a TV show while exercising.

Llamamoe 1y ago

Person with severe ADHD here. At least for me, it also helps because many hard activities are not stimulating enough for the effort they require, and persisting through understimulation is HARD.

ge96 1y ago

Ha my pre-workout is ibuprofen and redbull

lucas_membrane 1y ago

I think I've found ways to dodge the problems you describe. I am a person who is has been addiction-adjacent in my search for novelty for an absurdly long time. I've been quite devoted, however, to physical exercise very much like that described in the article for around 20 years, with favorable results. Throughout this time, I have listened to audio recordings while exercising, and it has always been my favorite aspect of the routine. But I have switched between music, audiobooks, and podcasts a few times during the 20 years, and the novelty of the various genres and topics available is enough to keep me going. For the last few years I've been doing the podcasts, and these seem to keep my interest. I've got a 32 GB mp3 player, which allows me to select from 15 or so roughly hour-long episodes of 15 or so podcasts, some of which take in a wide range of topics and most of the rest are put together by people who embody novelty in their deepest vesicles. I spend an hour or three every month or three searching out new episodes of the podcasts that continue operating and archives of old podcasts that arouse my interests. And I like doing that, too.