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Wellness Wednesday for December 14, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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What are your thoughts on dopamine fasting?

Since the mechanisms of neurochemistry are highly nonlinear and piecewise, I am not even going to pretend I have a working understanding of whether the idea of dopamine fasting is dubious or not.

There are reasonable prescriptions, such as not masturbating twice daily, not scrolling Instagram reels for hours before sleeping, etc. But I have seen people avoiding screen time altogether or not even limiting how much music they listen to, which seems absurd to me. Well past the point of diminishing returns.


Tangentially, what are your thoughts on "eating good"?

Recently I have invested in multiple new kitchen equipment and many high-quality ingredients. Mainly because eating out is becoming less attractive with rising prices, and I have plenty of free time because of WFH so cooking is a good time pass.

This might sound like a weird "problem," but the food I have been cooking and eating recently is too good. With the help of youtube and serious eats, I am pumping out restaurant-quality food daily. I also got a large cabinet freezer so I can buy meat and seafood in bulk at the market for cheap.

This feels kind of "wrong", I am indulging, and I know it. I don't eat like a glutton and exercise a lot (walking 3-4 miles daily and lifting), so I am not concerned about getting fat, but I fell like I have pushed myself up the hedonic treadmill by getting good at cooking. More and more, I wake up and think, "what will I cook for dinner tonight?"

Thoughts?

Dopamine fasting doesn't have anything to do with dopamine, and there isn't good evidence that 'scrolling instagram reels' has 'more dopamine' than playing a board game or going for a run or something. The problem with instagram reels isn't that they're addicting, it's that they're stupid - I sometimes "scroll HN" for an hour, but e.g. yesterday I was reading some exploit writeups for various apple vulnerabilities, from for instance here. This is both more useful and more interesting than instagram (i.e. with no "my desires are broken and I need to engage in talmudic ritual psychoanalysis to fix it")

Tangentially, what are your thoughts on "eating good"?

There's a difference between eating a particularly tasty piece of meat, where it may signal the meat is nutritionally valuable in a selective sense, and eating a well seasoned piece of meat, where the spices probably lack nutritional value and are just confusing taste's selective purpose. But at least in the former case, things tasting good is uniformly valuable, eating complex-flavored salmon and pork is more useful than eating tasteless white bread over and over, and it 'tasting good' is just understanding that!