Here‘s a great video of some general life advice we all need for living in this age: it‘ll help us lead a more fulfilled, successful, and happy life.
- Pleasure without prior requirement for pursuit is terrible for us
- Those who will be successful are those who can control their relationship to pleasure
- The proximity and availability to pleasure is a huge danger
- There‘s a huge increase in prescription and OCT drug use, and much of this is driven by dopamine
- Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure
- A good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure, especially those thing that bring you pleasure through motivation and hard work
- If you can experience pain and continue to be in that zone where you exert effort, the rewards are going to be so much larger once they arrive
- A lot of what people think is ADHD is actually people just consuming what brings them pleasure from various sources, like TikTok, Instagram, Netflix, YouTube, porn sites
- Context switching: the human experience has mostly been that we‘d walk from a field into a house, or one room into another room, but now we can get 10,000 context switches within 30 minutes of scrolling through TikTok. And this plays tricks on our minds
- When you‘re feeling low, maybe you just saturated the dopamine circuits and you‘re now in the pain part of things. What you need to do next is to replenish dopamine. How? You stop to engage with this behavior that usually gives you pleasure.
- Even the things we really love but we indulge in too often can turn into traps.
- Example: parachuting. Doing it every once in a while feels fantastic. But the people who do it over and over and over again often die from other things: they become drug addicts, etc.
- We can get addicted to anything. The key is to regulate the behavior.
- For the first hour of every day, don‘t use a phone. You work through a lot of emotional things during sleep. You‘re reshaping your brain in sleep. That‘s where neuroplasticity occurs. And when you wake up in the morning, you‘re in a perfect position to „receive the download“ of all the work your neurocircuitry has been doing the night before. But if you immediately go to a rich sensory experience like engaging with your phone, you actually missing the information you processed at night.
- You process things that happen during the day at night. Example: the upsetting comment you got on twitter doesn‘t seem like such a big deal after a good night‘s sleep. Because when you reexperience things but your body can‘t secrete adrenaline, it‘s basically an internal form of trauma therapy. And that‘s why people who don‘t get that sleep get easily agitated and feel like the world is crushing down on them.
- Tune up that no-go circuitry
- Many times a day I actively refrain from doing something I impulsively want to do.