Body Doubling
bodydoubling.com
bodydoubling.com
After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc.
I can't but think that so many of the malaises that people suffer today, which we ascribe as individual psychological problems, are really just a result of how profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is. (The irony of posting this on the Internet is not lost on me.)
We are a tribal species. We need the company of others in our physical environment in order to feel safe and at home. Obviously, some amount of solitude is important too, but for a communal species like Homo sapiens, being alone or around strangers most of the day is the environmental equivalent of being in a desert with no shade.
This is just a reminder that a lot of the things we find comfortable aren't inherent; they're just a reflection of what the norms where during our formative childhood and early adult years.
The help with childcare is great as well as the extra hands for household chores. The biggest advantage (and the trigger for this) is that we get to spend time with my ailing dad in his remaining months or years (and he gets to know his grandkids). It also allows us to own fewer cars (2 cars in a household with 4 adults, versus 1 car for each adult). I do wish I had bought a house with an extra bed/bath, however. Not enough to make it worth moving at this time.
On HN it always sounds like you are only receiving, but actual deal ia you provide until you are really old or sick.
People have gotten used to the isolation, so they're not gonna enjoy it if you randomly invite yourself literally every day of the week. You'll need like-minded friends and that's not something you can really "just decided" to change.
You don't have to drag your old friends out so much as make a couple new (low stakes, with boundaries at first, if you are anxious about it) friends.
I think it helps to think of our social environment as some kind of ecosystem that has evolved to fulfill various needs and shouldn't be messed with. The results will be similar to if you take a few species from biological ecosystems and just randomly put them together - the result is not going to look very pretty.
My hypothesis is that given the rise of everyone having always connected cell phones, texting, etc, that subconsciously we've all shifted to viewing our physical homes as our form of privacy. Essentially dropping in takes away the last place we feel we can control our interactions with others.
Anecdotal data for another factor: Too much effort is made! I've recently tried to make an effort to build up more of a friend network and turn some acquaintances into friends. I've noticed that we try to make everything so "nice" that it becomes inconvenient. The hosts always spend at least an hour getting their place ready and prepping food. This leads to a "barrier entry" for getting together that makes these events less. I even brought that up one time, but hosts seem unable to reduce the effort they make. Guests commonly bring gifts. Nobody needs the gifts or the super tidy home to visit. Just ring the doorbell, grab a beer and let's just hang! I say that, but I'd never do this either because it would feel like a transgression. The only exception I've noticed is that sometimes we'll end up chatting with neighbors for a prolonged time when we randomly run into each other while going for a walk or something. However, nobody would ever say "let's take this party inside". It seems to have become cultural and I am not sure how to fix this as an individual. I think part of it is that we are always busy now or feel like we should be. Gotta run those errands, work on my side project, etc.
Most of my adult acquaintance friends are like this, but its nice to have a handful of friends that you've known for long enough where you don't feel bad just going to their house uninvited, without bringing anything and they will do the same to you. The problem is making these friends if you don't already have them, or turning the more polite acquaintance friendships into these. I imagine it will only happen after many years of effort. I've not created this type of friend in adulthood, only have kept around the ones I had when I was younger.
People just feel welcome to drop by. The house is usually a total mess because « work » is not allowed, and there’s no gift bringing either because of religious reasons.
I always admired it. Just one day where no one’s working or traveling and everyone’s free to come over and hangout.
Since we are in HN, I feel obliged to ask: how do we fix this?
This is just a real gem of an analogy.
This describes my parents' situation perfectly. We are a family of migrants, my parents were very social and had a big network of friends back in their home country. Even since we moved here, they became insular, and never made many long term friends. In fact, they are pretty much alone and not very happy in their older age.
There's a lot of factors to blame for our feelings of isolation. I tend to look toward the fortress-ing of private homes and the sprawl of suburban developments, which encourage seeking enjoyment through pseudo-socialization with the characters on your screen.
Parasocial relationships were a thing long before Twitch and OnlyFans, only people were attaching to fictional characters so the effect wasn't quite as pronounced until actual humans became the objects of consumption (see: Disney adults, MCU ultrafans, etc.). This probably has to do with isolation from social groups as you describe, particularly as people in general lost community centers such as churches due to the sprawl and pace of modern life.
So I would say yes, a lot less people meet in person [2]
[1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almana...
[2] https://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-t...
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23758087
But life in New Jersey was not working out for Yarima. It wasn't the weather, food or modern technology but the absence of close human relations. The Yanomami day begins and ends in the shapono, open to relatives, friends, neighbours and enemies. But Yarima's day in the US began and ended in a closed box, cut off from society.
I thought about her too reading the comment.
This is the main problem in my marriage, we don't consume the same media - we've tried to find something in common to watch, but mostly spend it on our phones watching our own media streams, edu-tainment YouTubers for me and Netflix/Disney/Facebook watch for her.
You can't make cultural references or have inside jokes if you don't consume the same media.
Our media consumption habits probably aren't the core problem, being able to easily ignore the other person; because the barrier to entry to time wasters is so low, certainly doesn't help.
Media consumption is just a replacement for social interaction. And it exists only because people dont have time and energy left for socialization and other activities after work. Our society is geared towards extracting maximum profits from people. It does not permit them to have any excess energy left at the end of the workday.
Did people not socialize in the days before worker protections demanded worker protections? I just don't think your reasoning covers the causes well, especially in the suburbanite 40 hour week type that travel by car for an hour+ a day to a single family home.
Media consumption exists because technology has allowed media to show up everywhere at all times very rapidly and we have not had a society wide inoculation to its negative effects.
Both parents were working 12 hours a day so many kids were unsupervised from age of 4 whole day. Before that, supervised by one older kid.
Socialization was a luxury that certain segments afford before worker protections. Most families worked, children and all, and after doing what daily chore needed to be done at home, they slept. Socialization happened during dinner etc, which is why a lot of working class families used to give a lot of importance to dinner.
Also anecdotally the best friends are the ones that are constantly making fun of each other. The modern recommendation of speaking in psychologist provided templates don’t lead to close connections, atleast in my experience.
What you praise here is called being lazy. And also it relied on kids being unsupervised which was ok at the time.
For example, I'm a big fan of the Wandering Inn series. Essentially, one of the main characters is a young woman transported to a fantasy-style world who takes over an abandoned inn outside a major city. A large part of her story is about interacting with the locals, just wandering around shops and visiting friends she makes along the way, etc. Very reminiscent of the book you mention.
When I look at a lot of other similar books, they often rely on the same style of small community interactions among the characters.
Makes me wonder if part of the reason such stories are so popular is because we're missing so much of that in our everyday lives.
One thing I like about living in SF is that despite its problems, a lot of the city is based around neighborhoods and being walkable. I see the same folks at the local restaurants and hang out with friends and associates at the local pub each week. So I still get some amount of that traditional daily interaction, and unfortunately some of the drama that comes with it.
Closest analogue to this in modern life is... your co-workers in the office. That chat you have with Maru on the way to sell your wheat in the store is equivalent to that chat you had with Frank from accounting on the way to give your report to the manager upstairs.
Therein, perhaps, lied the magic of countryside/pre-industrial socialization: everyone was always working, but always next to each other. The whole village was the office/plant.
And yes, I strongly agree! Just hanging out was the thing people did.
Kind of miss that. Time to maybe fix it some.
It's basically the only place I can muster the energy learning new programming-related things (not an IC anymore).
- both me and my in laws are buying estate and I found it curious how to both of us (and most friends too), cameras and alarms were priorities
- leaving my old flat me and my SO realized we knew no one in the building
- went back to where my grandma lived in Poland. Classic but beautiful (really) soviet style neighborhood with parks, swings, etc. In the 90s it was so alive, children playing anywhere, women and men speaking on benches, there was a terrific super safe community. Going there it was just sad: no one around, most of the benches and trees taken down for endless waves of cars "progress" brought.
If you could replace a typical home-cooked meal which cost $3->5 in materials and at _least_ half an hour in personal labor with a pill that costs $0.03->0.05 and can be produced in the thousands per hour, that's a significant win. And if you can build those pills from the byproducts of vats of cheap-ass microbes (rather than through ordinary (or -worse- factory) farming), then that's a massive win for both the environment and animal welfare.
So where do you want to spend that money, time, and resources instead?
• Making really tasty food for the foodies, rather than meh food for everyone (including people who don't appreciate it).
• Art
• A really big Minecraft server
• Doing something about the fact that populated islands are sinking into the ocean and some biomes are changing classification multiple times a year and we're all just sitting at computers and manufacturing thneeds.
Pretty much anywhere else, really. Wasted money, time and resources are wasted money, time and resources. If we could replace food with magic pills – and somehow ensure that the money, time and resources saved weren't just snapped up by the already-wealthy, leaving everyone worse off – why not do it?
Also cramming 2000 calories into four or five pill sized spaces is practically violating the laws of physics, is it not?
I'm aware, yes. That's what a nutritionally-complete pill would enable you to do.
I mentioned "home-cooked meal" for a few reasons.
1) Some people seriously underestimate the cost and labor that goes into small-scale commercial cooking. Such folks will _usually_ have a better understanding of the details of in-home cooking.
2) Some people have decided that all food that one gets at a restaurant is inherently unhealthy.
3) If you plan well (and/or have a large surplus of time and energy) you can totally set things up so that you can eat home-cooked meals every day. That's what leftovers are for.
> ...cramming 2000 calories into four or five pill sized spaces is practically violating the laws of physics, is it not?
I very much doubt it. I has been decades since I studied any physics, but I'd expect that there are many examples of substances that pack at least 2000kcal of energy in four or five pill-sized spaces. As mentioned elsewhere, it's a biology problem, not a physics problem.
I'm born late 1980s and I've never seen so many people out in the streets just chatting outside of parties and village fairs.
Even though it’s super nice (basically resort-quality), there’s probably only a half dozen regulars, while there’s hundreds (200?) apartment units here.
Your comment reminded me of this video about how life for a baker used to be much better before the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution didn't do much good for bakers. I can only hope our future generations will get to live so much of a better life than us so they can look back at us and try to feel empathy for us.
That doesn't mean everybody else had it easy. In fact, at some point, it seems like one in four(?) babies didn't survive beyond age five[1]?
[0] https://www.fostersbakery.co.uk/victorian-bakers
[1] There is a common misunderstanding about life expectancy, as though it is the age at which most adults could expect to die.
In fact, the mean length of life can be heavily skewed by infant mortality. For example, in 1850 in England and Wales life expectancy at birth was 42, but over 25% of children died before the age of five. For those who survived, life expectancy rose to 57. Moreover, 10% of people born in 1850 lived to over 80.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/aug/18/misunderstan...
We're actually building something just for this ( https://doubleapp.xyz ) and it can be for any sort of activity - cooking, running, working, studying, etc.
If it is that button I’d suggest some sort of soft sign up flow. It’d be really nice if I could join a double immediately, give an email or some identifying info, and that’s it. After my first session make me finish the sign up.
To answer your question: yes, once you hit "let's get going" you should be brought to a soft sign-up. After that, you'll be redirected to a page that let's you join a Double community immediately via the "start now" button.
Of course we had schedules but there was very little "planning". Everyone was just there almost all of the time. Anything you wanted to do, someone like-minded was just there. We played cards in the winter, football or frisbee in the shoulder season, ate, hung out, socialized with guests, and of course, studied together. It just worked.
I can still think of a hundred things I regularly did in those days that I haven't done since.
Now I'm an empty nester, tired of pandemic living and tired of working so hard to recreate what came so naturally back then.
Nice to see someone trying to use the technology that displaced so many of us to bring us back together. Best wishes. I think you'll need it.
This post is about body doubling, which happens far more in offices. That is a fact. Your reply makes it seem like that’s not the case. But, I agree with your gripes about in office work, which is why I work from home :)
Edit: my point is that what’s best for you, me, and other individuals may not be best for organizations. Do I care about organizations more than myself? No, but it’s at least something to recognize because I still care for some of them.
I was dragged back into the office for a couple months in 2021. I was stupefied by how pointless it all was. From the time and resources wasted driving to and fro to the office every day to the meetings which were still largely done online (since we were a distributed team.)
I had to go 5 days a week. The company bled people. Most the people who were sticking around as I was leaving confided to me that they weren't happy about it. The company struggled to hire new workers. That's probably all abated to some extent since then. With a flexible hybrid schedule, I think they could have found a sweet spot.
I also prefer remote (and have been remote probably 75% of my career). I’m also ADHD, and while I’d never even heard of ”body doubling” by name it’s something I’ve found helpful sometimes, under some circumstances.
For the minority of my career spent in office, it’s ranged from wildly productive (great team fit, good balance in favor of focus time) to hilariously counterproductive (excessive meetings and process ceremony, continuous interruptions whether ostensibly work-related or social, unbearably noisy).
For the times I’ve worked on mixed remote/office, I’ve generally felt my own and my teams’ productivity is great except when leadership found the arrangement objectionable (self-fulfilling prophecy I guess), or when team communications became challenging at scale (eg we found it hard to do “standups” with ~15 people in office and ~10 people on a screen; but realistically we shouldn’t have had that many people in any meetings).
As someone else with ADHD, I've found that one of the downfalls of "body doubling" is that it works both ways. Productivity can lead to more productivity because the body double can help me overcome the urge to research woodgas vehicles or the history of bread in Mesoamerica. But the double's lack of focus (e.g. being social, or forced meetings) destroys all focus because it's already enough of a task to manage my own executive functioning in a good environment.
The best balance I've found is remote work (so I am my only distraction), maybe with occasional in-person focused work sessions (à la hackathon), and occasional remote "body doubling" sessions with a friend or internet stranger.
TLDR: Solo remote work is better than attempting body doubling in an office environment, but remote "body doubling" is also occasionally helpful.
At home, I am within a few seconds from my wife (since she is working from home too), which allows for a significantly more rich social environment for myself and her, than having to be in the extended physical proximity of those in distant social tiers (e.g., loose ties, or "work friends").
I value the time I have been able to spend at home so much more than any social connections I may have made at the office; in fact, I focus on getting my stuff done even more quickly precisely so I can return to the quality time that I have to focus on those who truly matter to me.
I am no longer at the age where I care to go for a drink afterwards with work friends. For those of us who have richer social home lives than work lives, remote work is a godsend.
Not true for me!
If anything the reverse is true!
With my ADHD I also get a form of rejection sensitivity dysphoria, so worry I’m being judged or watched.
Not with everything. Just somethings, and mostly my desk based work.
I like silent rooms away from people.
Any distractions at all with detail me for possibly hours!
On a related note, my office is currently doing a sort of ad-hoc, informal hybrid work schedule, so some days of the week there's very few people in the office. On those days, I find I'm so much more productive just due to the fact that there's less commotion and fewer people talking. WFH was great for my productivity as well, of course. Anyone else notice the same?
In many ways the pandemic was the best thing that happened for me!
I got to work from home, and then transitioned to running my own consultancy from my home office!
I’m fortunate and have a nice home and work well with my wife.
At an office I used to find an empty meeting room and work on my own, and this was seen as anti social…
And I was like, so which is it?
Shut up and do you work, or chit chat in the office?
Apparently it all depends and the unspoken unwritten rules of social conduct in offices prove that companies are not families and culture is about who the majority like and nothing to do with do embracing diversity.
Anyway….
"Distraction-free productivity Focusmate virtual coworking helps you get things done."
I used to study at the student center on campus (Rutgers New Brunswick) for this reason. I tried the library a few times, but it felt off to me for some reason; too quiet, perhaps.
FWIW, this helps sometimes: https://coffitivity.com
Interestingly, I noticed that whenever I switched to a desktop without those eyes, I instantly felt a small but noticable twinge of loneliness. So I thought, if this silly application can help the monkey part of my brain feel at ease, it might as well stay open. And yes, it's slightly embarrassing to be a human, so posting anonymously.
Human needs are weird. Years back I noticed clearly that I'd go insane after only a few days without human interaction. However, after only a couple of hours of low quality smalltalk, which I dislike, with people I find uninteresting and didn't have much respect for, the crazy went away.
I had the same experience, and arrived at the same conclusion. I just need some minor socialization each day and everything runs smoothly in my brain.
The productivity thing may vary based on the individual.
If there's stuff going on around me, I can't focus. I want to be in a quiet place alone (pandemic has been easy street for me, sometimes I don't leave my apartment for weeks on end).
If there are people around, I have at least several mental threads running monitoring their state. It doesn't matter if they are present physically or digitally - nor whether I can see, hear, or smell them, see message notifications from them, or am simply aware of their presence. It's incredibly useful in many situations - but means that I only achieve focus in complete solitude.
Basically body doubling with 4-5 other people over 60-180 min sessions. Works really great.
Does adding a third person (or more people) affect it?
How is it different from, say, sitting in a cafe with another person? Do you have to know each other? If there is a difference what criteria determine that difference? Can one "pretend" that one is "body double"-ing with a unknowing stranger? Or does each person have to know they're doing it?
If you really want to investigate this IMO you're going to have to look at everything from near-field EM to Ramana Maharshi (who often taught in silence), you should study Cybernetics (by which I basically mean read "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby), you should take high-speed video of people doing this and then analyze it for e.g. unconscious synchronization, etc...
You seem to want to treat it as some sort of physical field or force. IANAP (I am not a psychologist), but it seems fairly self-evident that the effect arises from the awareness of being observed, which leads to you observing and mediating your own actions. Based on that, I would predict that physical distance is only indirectly relevant. The strength of the effect is going to depend on how many of your activities are theoretically knowable by the other person. If they are physically present but farther away, you can "get away with" doing more things without them knowing, so you'll omit such behaviors from the self-monitoring loop. If they are virtually present, I would imagine that the strength of the effect depends on how clearly you can observe them (because we can't see how they see us, but we'll assume that it's roughly the same).
Which would make for an interesting experiment: do body doubling with very asymmetric visual quality, size, and latency but without informing the participants that they are seeing anything different. My guess is that the one who sees a better quality signal will experience a much stronger effect.
Like many things in psychology, though, there are tons of confounding variables. Your relationship to the person matters—specifically, how much you care about their opinion of you and your actions. I would imagine body doubling with a dog would work temporarily and then the effect would fade away as you got comfortable with goofing off in front of them.
Anybody you double with, you'll place on a scale from somewhere between "dog" and "attractive person I am desperate to impress". (And the latter end of the scale can be paralyzing, so this isn't a small→large effect scale.)
Of course (I'm a rational materialist) it's "some sort of physical field or force", there's nothing else it could be, eh?
How much of the effect is due to power (in the physical sense) and how much due to modulation (communication)?
(Not to be coy, I'm a rational materialist but I'm also a Reiki Level III Master and I would really really like someone somewhere to do science to that. If I can influence these folks to take a more scientific materialist tack on their investigation they might discover something relevant to my own curiosities.)
Having this kind of content plentiful and available 24/7 is really helpful.
Objectively, I think they're fairly similar. It really does come down whether you value even participation or the chance to participate in a lottery that will may propel a few individuals to stardom (and leave a lot more disappointed) more, which is ultimately subjective.
Don't underestimate the force of this, I reckon it's similar to precommitment (eg, announcing to all your friends that you're giving up smoking), for which there's evidence that it's an effective tool to drive behavioral change.
Another thing that works is setting a not so exciting but also not so boring tv series playing on your mobile next to you and do work while it plays on. Again no clue how or why it works. My pet theory is that adhd brains just like multi tasking and keeping a portion of extra bandwidth zoned out is helpful in not getting distracted.
It makes sense. Really wish this sort of stuff was around when I was in college.
With my spouse I just call it like, "Could you be there for moral support while I rake the leaves / open bills / do whatever I don't wanna do"
Haha, I do the same. Joke I need a supervisor.
I had to do a double take there to make sure this wasn't parody. Being more productive with another person in the room? But they don't actually do the work? And they help through an "invisible power"?
That's unexpected.
If you were hooked up to an MRI and asked to do a coding challenge, but were prohibited from talking/regulating, I'd bet your amygdala would be more engaged compared to your control.
> “While there’s not a lot of research on ADHD and body doubling, anecdotal clinical reports seem to point to its utility,” Roberts says.
Shame this stuff isn't backed by research. Hopefully it gets looked into. I wouldn't be surprised if it's helpful for some people though.
We're really looking to push this phenomenon into the limelight and accelerate its research because there's definitely something powerful here. Speaking from personal experience, body doubling is almost like magic with how it works.
Because you don’t really need a study to figure out if it works for you. Just try it! Because I can literally feel my understimulation block fade when there’s another person around — it stokes a little guilt and anxiety to get you started and then they act like a pace runner providing some artificial forward momentum.
It’s not one of those things where you won’t be sure whether it’s working or not.
Is it actually effective at all? Who is it effective/ineffective for? Why is it effective or ineffective for them? How effective is it? How can its effectiveness be optimized? In what other ways can its effectiveness be achieved? What other types of problems can this be used to help with?
Maybe I try it and find that it works, but maybe that's simply a placebo, the way someone might find that crystals or charms help them. It's easy to say it shouldn't matter so long as it works for someone, but I think we'd agree that its better to have things properly researched and understood.
Maybe I try it and it doesn't work but could have with some modifications to accommodate my needs or situation. Maybe a sort of digital avatar or AI works or can work just as well for a body double as a real person! Maybe it even works better than a real person in some cases! How great would it be not to always have to coordinate schedules with another person or impose on their time to get those same benefits! Maybe employers could benefit from pairing people for work in certain tasks!
It's all idle speculation, theory, and guesswork until people put in the time and effort to research it all properly. The anecdotal evidence is encouraging, but only the start.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/what-gives-people-feelings-of...
I think more accurate would just be something like "silent work partners".
It's also bizarre that people seem to think that having trouble concentrating for a significant period of time on something tedious means you have ADHD. It's not at all abnormal to struggle with this at times. It's really more extreme cases that should be considered ADHD.
About 3% of population have ADHD. And it is quite easily recognizable and distinct from just "troubles of concentration".
Glad I know about the term “body doubling” now though and that there are services available, this is great!
This is not a "phenomenon" with "invisible power" and it doesn't need a litany of semi-awed, near mystical, and pseudoscientific testimonials. That's just nonsense branding.
This isn't new or magical and there are other services that do just this with less BS.
I run way faster with other people than by myself based on that effect.
It's definitely a mental/adrenal response.
Assuming they were not all fake. But since they're clearly posting a price (competitive with psychotherapy) and not pretending to be dates on a dating site, I doubt they're spam.
An office set up for body doubling would be pairs or small groups of people from completely different teams sharing an semi-isolated space.
It's the rest of life that I struggle with, and I've had friends literally come to my house to veg out in front of the TV while I clean. And then, once the kitchen is clean, it's suddenly easy to cook a meal. It's honestly quite embarrassing to need that as an adult, but by making it win-win, I've managed to convince myself to do it. Cool to see that other folks do this.
My problem is that “focus” music is often pretty repetitive. It can drive me nuts if I listen to it for 8 hours.
My productivity skyrockets when my wife is around, especially for tasks involving physical labor.