Your Morning Habits Keep You Miserable. Here’s How You Fix It
~ the more you avoid pain, the less tolerable pain becomes
Last week on my way to work I saw:
A woman scrolling through Zara's website looking for sales
A group of high school kids all hunched, scrolling through TikTok
2 friends having a 28s conversation during a 30-min train ride. One was busy playing Candy Crush. The other was busy listening to music.
Do you know what they have in common?
A need for cheap dopamine.
Cheap dopamine will keep you depressed
People are getting depressed at alarming rates.
And it doesn't matter how good we get at curing diseases. It will continue.
Why?
Because the more comfortable life gets, the more depressed we get:
To be entertained you open the Netflix app
To get food you open the Uber Eats app
To have sex you open the Tinder app
That’s modern life. Move your fingers to solve your basic needs.
It’s easy to understand why it’s so addictive to live like this.
Your brain hates to feel like crap. So it avoids it by using dopamine. It's your brain’s way of telling you what to do, like eating an entire pizza juicy instead of a boring broccoli.
This was great 20 thousand years ago. It kept you away from:
being a loner
protein deficiency
Trying to turn hungry Saber Tooth Tiger into a pet
Things are not like that anymore. We’ve solved most problems. We’re addicted to protein and cats are people’s children. So now our focus has changed. It’s all about avoiding pain.
But as I said above, the more you avoid pain, the less tolerable pain becomes.
For example the kids watching TikTok at 7am.
They fry their dopamine receptors before getting to class. Their brains are flooded with dopamine telling them to “please watch JUST ANOTHER VIDEO”.
Then they get to math class.
Do you think teachers can compete with content creators?
Do you think learning how to take square roots can compete with TikTok?
Do you think a whiteboard full of weird equations can compete with endless entertainment?
Nothing can.
You already know what’s going to happen in class. But you have no idea what the next video might be about. And it shows:
Cheap dopamine makes you feel good for a while. It might help you get through a boring class, a boring 9-5 job, or a boring date.
But the dopamine bill will come. And you won’t feel good when it does.
Your Body Is Always Chasing Balance
When you’re driving, you have to keep your car inside a lane.
You do that by turning the wheel a little to the left, and then a little to the right.
The brain works the same way. It survives on balance.
When you seek pleasure, you’re turning the wheel to the right. Your brain then auto-corrects to the left (pain side). You keep turning to the right because you want to keep watching TikTok videos. Then the auto-correction gets stronger. And then something changes. You are not having fun as you used to. Now you need more videos to feel the same “buzz”
Small pains become unbearable. You can’t wait in line anymore. You have to grab your phone and watch 17 TikTok videos.
You’ll feel “depressed”. But it’s not real depression. It’s your brain adjusting to the excess of “fun” you had earlier.
This is why it's crucial to seek balance in life.
How do you do that?
You chase pain
Give yourself a chance to win the day
I was lying on the couch last Saturday night.
After eating an entire Domino’s pizza and drinking some wine, it seems the most sensible thing to do. My wife passed out in 15 minutes while we were watching a dumb Netflix TV show.
After it finished, I grabbed my phone and opened YouTube (for some reason).
If you ever went on YouTube, you know how easy it is to fall into a rabbit hole.
I was curious about cloud services. I watched one video. Then another. Then another. It was impossible to stop.
I looked at the clock. 11pm. One hour wasted watching videos I’ll forget before I hit my head on the pillow.
I went to bed pissed. Pissed that it’s so hard to control my impulses when I have access to unlimited entertainment.
And I woke up this morning even more pissed at myself because I know how shitty social media can be, and how it screws you up like an addictive drug. And still I fell for it.
This is why I don’t say these things from a high horse. I’m also there, with you. And I know how hard it is to control your impulses.
Because sometimes you want to forget how shitty your day was. Or how crappy your life is.
So you watch 3 hours of Netflix before bed. Or 30 minutes of doom scrolling the latest (and most useless) news before getting up.
Then “sometimes” turns into “all the time”.
It's not your fault anymore. You're on autopilot. You don't think about it. You just do.
The good news is you don’t need to invest years to fix a bad phone habit. You just need to make you phone as crappy and unattractive as possible.
Here’s how to fix your phone
Each of the steps below will help you waste less time. From easy to hard:
Remove icon(s) from the main screen. You can’t resist opening an app if it’s the first thing you see when you unlock your phone. Give yourself a fighting chance. Move app icons from the main screen to a random folder on your phone.
Remove useless notifications. Apps don’t want you to forget them. They nudge you to come back with useless notifications like “XYZ posted something today you might like!” To have a chance to recover your focus, silence all “for-fun” apps
Delete the app and only use the browser version. If the above doesn’t work, try using the web version. It usually sucks because companies want you to use the app.
Use the browser version only in private mode. If the above doesn’t work, make it even harder by making sure you can’t easily go back to your feed.
Remove password auto-fill. Make it harder to login to your account by removing the auto-fill. Now you need to type it every time.
Change your password to something random. When you do this, you’ll need to go set up a new password every time you want to login. That’s a lot of added friction. You’ll give up quickly.
Change your phone to black and white. If everything fails, try changing your phone’s screen to black and white. This will remove the bright red icons and “too-vivid” coloring on apps.
The idea is to add friction to your bad habits (in this case phone usage)
If you don’t, you’ll keep doing it and won’t know why you can’t stop.
Fix your surroundings. Eliminates cues. Add friction.
Then invest all that extra focus and time into something you love.
Sometimes I wonder if it was a good thing that my parents didn't get me an iPhone until I was 18.
Of course it's apparent to me now, at age 29, but now that I'm reading this, and I've been planning on what my parenting style is going to be, there is definitely value in balancing our children's exposure to social media. And as writers and marketers and content creators, it's our job to grab attention. These videos are engineered to spike dopamine. Unfortunately, you're right, the dopamine bill is coming.