The human mind is challenge-oriented: it is designed to view problems as puzzles and is drawn to solving them. It is also designed to minimize energy consumption, which makes us naturally lazy. These facts are not contradictory; we like to solve puzzles in the easiest way possible.
Your brain, however, is not drawn to solving puzzles. In fact, the instant that you see a puzzle, your brain produces more cortisol, (the hormone most associated with stress), than normal. This is because your brain is no longer looking at puzzles as something to solve, but only as puzzles. These puzzles become like walls to your mind, instead of wanting to solve them you try to avoid them. I’ll give some examples:
EX 1: Student Essays
AI-written essays are a serious issue in modern education. Some of this is caused by outright laziness, (students who never should have gotten into college just using a GPT for all of their work), but I sometimes see one notable exception. That exception is particularly bright students who typically do not cheat using AI to write on complicated or long term assignments. I’ve found this to be even more likely when students are given the option to choose their own topics.
Here’s what I suspect is happening: the student has a complicated but excellent plan for a research paper on a subject that they are interested in. Assuming that they will have the work ethic to write it when the time comes, they draft up complex outlines and request topics which are complicated by their nature. Then, when it’s time to write up the actual essay, they find that they have created a very difficult assignment for themselves. They then procrastinate the assignment until they have little time left, (on a normal assignment this would be fine, but they have designed something very difficult), and find themselves using AI to fill in the blanks or even just to do the research. When you leave the GPT in the links, we can all tell.
What should be happening is students who design themselves challenges, (which I appreciate the drive to do), should enjoy being challenged with writing about a complex subject which they are both interested in and often want their professor to see them interested in too. However, their brain has been taught to view all challenges as obstacles, so it becomes a punishment instead.
EX 2: Paying Bills
This is a more simple example: putting bills or taxes off. I know plenty of people who do this, (including me at times). It realistically takes five minutes to fill out a check to pay a bill, but many will leave them sitting in a pile for days instead of filling them out on the spot. Taxes are similar: I’ve had friends who didn’t do them until the final day of the season. These aren’t difficult or complicated like a research paper is, but they present one of those minor obstacles that pile up in day-to-day life.
Procrastination is somewhat natural of course—like I said, humans are lazy creatures. The thing that makes bills interesting is how insignificant of a task it really is; one could easily pay them all in a quarter of an afternoon. The fact that these are so commonly put off is evidence that many similar tasks are being put off as well. What ends up happening, predictably, is that these small tasks build up into a serious amount of time and effort.
What should be happening here is the accomplishment of small tasks relatively close to when they present themselves. These aren’t fun or captivating in the same way that the research paper example is, instead, these are demonstrations of time-preference: the ability to put in more work in the present for larger benefits in the future. Time preference isn’t the subject of this essay, but it is a symptom of fried dopamine synapses.
What this leads to
What results from this combination of lack of work ethic and low time preference is a general inability to get work done. The individual afflicted with what I will be referring to as “scroll-brain” receives an increased dose of cortisol with every task they are forced to perform and experiences less pleasure when they accomplish it. This decreased pleasure is caused by what is essentially a “dopamine tolerance”, where the individual is getting constant microdoses of dopamine throughout the day rather than infrequent but larger doses. Humans are wired to receive dopamine for accomplishing tasks or partaking in pleasurable, (mostly social), events. By receiving your dopamine through largely artificial tasks which are incredibly engaging but not very hard, (such as video games), or parasocial behavior designed to emulate the real thing, (social media), you are retraining your mind to associate these behaviors with dopamine rather than their “real” counterparts: work or socialization.
Scroll-brain leads to two serious outcomes. The first is a lack of productivity. By “productivity”, I don’t strictly mean work that you do for someone else, (although this is included), but more generally the ability to accomplish tasks in a timely and efficient manner. Tasks can range from one’s actual 9-5 to creating art, it just depends on what one is trying to accomplish at any given time.
The second effect is the inability to consume or produce long-form content. Because your mind is constantly searching for the easiest microdose of dopamine available, it is difficult to focus on content that is long and/or dense. Reading Nietzsche? Nah. Watching a 3 minute short about Nietzsche? Hell yeah. Fuck Substack essays, just scroll through the ‘Notes’ feature, (
please delete ‘Notes’, thank you). Additionally, why create complex essays, artwork or even videos, when you can churn out simpler versions and receive the same little ‘hit’ from that notification number going up?We are all experiencing some form of scroll-brain. Even if you are very careful with the type of content that you consume and how you regulate your dopamine, entertainment is shoved in your face constantly. Even gas pumps have ads in urban areas. Television has shifted to a model which is focused on shorter and more exoteric scenes, even the news. Books have done this too, the fiction that our children are consuming is significantly lower in terms of engagement time for each plot. This is one of the largest causes for the “slopification” taking place across our culture: the shorter attention span of individuals leads to a monetary incentive to create shorter, simpler content. (This is not the only cause nor attribute of ‘slopification’, but it is a notable aspect.)
What is to be done?
Collectively, I have no recommendations. Individually, however, I have developed a fairly efficient method for beating back scroll-brain. I did this with significant input from a friend, but many details are my own work.
I call it “fasting”. It has three principles:
Isolation
Boredom
Struggle
In short, I go into the woods, alone, for a period of 3-5 days, (the more the better, but align it with your work schedule of course). I don’t bring my phone or any easy reading. I try to bring as little gear as I can, I want the tasks of camping and surviving to take up as much time as possible so that my days aren’t totally empty.
As far as those three principles go…
Isolation is key because other people present a source of easy entertainment. Additionally, being on your own in the woods is a good reminder of how able you really are, (or a reminder of how much you need to work on). There’s not much else to that principle, but it is crucial.
Boredom is a side-effect of the lack of purpose-built entertainment. Instead of engaging with recreational tasks for your dopamine, you’ll have to engage in some form of ‘work’. As an example, I do typically bring a book with me into the woods, but that book is something very complex and difficult, (my friend initially recommended a math textbook, for example). This is why the longer you can go the better, you’ve spent 20-30 years wiring your brain to associate work with stress and the lack of work with dopamine, which is a half-reversal from how it was designed. You aren’t undoing that with one ‘fast’, what you’re doing is enabling yourself to have an easier time doing so afterwards. This is the point of the next principle, struggle.
Struggle was something added in entirely by myself, mostly because I like to kill two birds with one stone. Not only do I reset my dopamine synapses, but I also toughen myself up a bit extra. I reduce my calorie consumption, intentionally go out when it is hot, cold or inclement, and break camp and travel every morning. This ensures that not only will I be able to focus for longer and work harder upon my return, but I will also be able to brush off adverse conditions more easily. Lastly, I don’t bring nicotine, caffeine, etc. Having difficulties aside from boredom also lets you focus on things besides how bored you are, which is important.
You can tell if the process is working when your boredom levels drop. Once it becomes fairly easy to get through the day and get work done, I usually push it one more day just to make sure I’m good and ready, but I have the luxury of a fairly lenient schedule at the moment.
Something crucial to this process is that you have to avoid immediately falling back into the same routine upon your return. Much like how gorging after a workout negates any calories burned, immediately resuming the same cheap entertainment routine will immediately bring your dopamine right back into the same circuit. Instead, you have to continue the same sort of circuit that you just rewired for as long as possible. Eventually you will return to a form of scroll-brain; the modern world ensures it. That’s fine, but you want to avoid it as long as possible.
The good news is, if you can keep a steady cycle of fast, work, then fast again, you can go out for shorter times than otherwise. The longer it’s been since you did your last dopamine reset, the longer it will take. I generally recommend with each fast, identify a habit or thing that is unproductive and damaging your focus and cut it out.
Maximizing results
When you return from your first fast, you will probably have accumulated a series of projects that you want to complete or start. I highly recommend identifying one or two that are priority and focusing on them to avoid scrambling your brain. I also prefer to return on a Sunday/Monday, work through a whole week, then maybe enjoy a Friday. If you return and then roll right into a weekend of shenanigans you’ll definitely not get anywhere.
This is not an anti-recreation essay. You want to avoid recreation while you are on a fast, of course, but after you come back it’s okay to enjoy life once in a while. However, it is best if you can change your recreational hobbies to be ones that aren’t accessible at the push of a button and require effort on your part. For a personal example, after my first fast I quit video games altogether and replaced them with boxing 1-2 times a week. As someone who grew up playing video games, this is still a challenge for me a year later; they become such a part of your life that it can be hard to replace them with a similar hobby. I have, however, found that I am much more productive and alive without them than I would be otherwise. You don’t have to go that far, but if you can relegate your ‘cheap’ dopamine sources to scheduled times a week instead of daily six-hour ventures, you’ll find yourself better off.
I understand that the premise of 3-5 days in the woods alone is a bit daunting for some readers. I’m sure there are other methods of accomplishing the same sorts of things out there, but I have not developed them. This is the method that works the best for me, and it is also one which I find pleasant because I enjoy the wilderness. If you develop something that allows you to accomplish the same thing in a different manner, feel free to leave something about it in the comments.
Lastly, I know that I was a bit loose with my usage of the hormones dopamine and cortisol in this piece. I am not a scientist and these terms have become half-metaphorical in common parlance.