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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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).
Jump in the discussion.
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What's your take on dopamine detox?
Everyone's got a story about how they read so much back in the 90's/00's. But they pick up a book now, and... it's just not entertaining. We all know we can dopamine detox and make reading enjoyable again, but the corollary is quitting the hyper-stimulating activities everyone does nowadays. No TikTok, no Twitter, no mindlessly playing games while listening to podcasts. You'll be (roughly) just as stimulated after detoxing, but you'll be disconnected from the root of modern culture. Your opinions on culture will be less accurate because you're simply out of touch, like boomers reading newspapers.
OTOH, dopamine detox has huge benefits. Your mind isn't constantly bombarded with stimulation, so you can perceive subtleties and "flavor" in art more, like when you remove sugar from coffee. You perceive the world in a slower, calmer, more rational, interconnected way. You're around people less, so when you meet people IRL you're much friendlier and happy to see them. There is probably some balance to the dopamine situation, but it's hard to spot, so we mostly stimulate ourselves as hard as possible from FOMO, scared of falling behind the world.
“Dopamine detox” in the sense of abstaining from hyperstimuli and distractions and lesser pleasures is something everyone should do. It’s a spiritual practice in every religion. There are basic psychological reasons for how it works: the mind is limited, so learning something undesirable takes the place of something preferable; the mind is efficient, so it will choose easier pleasures over difficult pleasures; the mind is habit-forming, so it will form habits around easier pleasures rather than difficult pleasures; the over-justification effect will reduce your motivation to do difficult things after satisfaction from easier things; the difficult pleasures in life are vastly more satisfying than the easier pleasures, but we can’t easily grasp this with our limited mind, so we have to accept it on faith until we are
mystically resurrected from the deadpresented with these high experiences.Trivial examples:
two bored kids in a math class, and one can use his phone. The bored and abstaining one will eventually and sporadically have his interest piqued by math, because that’s the only interesting thing going on. The one with the phone has no such motivation to ever pay attention in the classroom.
A man’s friends and crush are on the other side of a mountain, while he sits bored in a cabin. He will, one day, trek the whole mountain out of sheer human need. If he instead has a ton of distractions and drugs, he will never take those steps on the narrow path.
One person’s friends are reputable and wholesome. They give each other attention and affection for their good works. Another person’s friends are disreputable and corrupt. They only have fun being edgy and doing drugs. The former person’s character will change because only prosocial activity is reinforced; the latter person will be dragged down by his comrades, and wind up ”learning” that deleterious things are important — some of his mind is essentially worthless now, those months were a write-off.
One man is captivated by a virtuous crush, and molds his life so that it is aligned with what the crush wants. Another man is captivated by promiscuous women who just want to have fun. The former is going to be better for the longterm character and life of both.
The term “dopamine detox” is misleading, I think everyone here knows that, we can just call it mental purification or something, or mental detox. It’s not so much about longterm lowering of dopamine as purifying and filtering cognitive expenditure for that stimuli which leads to the highest reward. There’s no reason at all to bring in neurotransmitters here especially when we barely understand how dopamine and serotonin synergize.
Agreed. Alas, I must confess that even coffee is a superstimuli which staves off the boredom.
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