Cal Newport: Overstimulation Is Ruining Your Life | Hacker News Reader

Cal Newport: Overstimulation Is Ruining Your Life

mindmatters.ai

59 pointsmomirlan67 comments

An insightful podcast from Andrew Huberman: "Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction | Huberman Lab Podcast #39" — https://youtu.be/QmOF0crdyRU

And a clip: "Andrew Huberman - What Overusing Social Media Does To Your Brain" — https://youtu.be/Zh-AcF_4Hao

A bit of background on these people might be important here. Andrew is a neuroscientist, but a bit of a controversial one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_D._Huberman#Reception_a...

>In Time magazine, Huberman received praise for promoting interest in science.[5] However, he has been criticized by other scientists for prematurely applying the preliminary results of animal studies as having potential applications for humans.[5]

>Jonathan Jarry at the McGill Office for Science and Society has questioned Huberman's promotion of controversial supplements. According to Jarry, Huberman Lab has been sponsored by "companies offering questionable products from the perspective of science-based medicine".[14]

Cal Newport is a computer scientist. Zero background in neuroscience.

Lastly, I think it should be noted that while heavy social media use is associated with depression, there's absolutely no scientific weight behind this "overstimulation" rhetoric.

I don’t find Huberman to be doing anything worse than any given scientist or book author from his podcast. He got popular so he gets criticized. Even Stephen Hawking has been criticized!

For all we know Jonathan Jarry is deserving of criticism. Who is he again? Should I trust Stanford or McGill? Both? Neither? Myself? Don’t over think things here. Decide for yourself. Consult resources. Consult your physician.

I cane at it from a less interesting and less well expressed angle. You’ve nailed it.

I do not know enough about Andrew Huberman to be a fan, although I have listened to excerpts from his podcasts and enjoyed them.

I can say that everyone of the “questionable“ assertions you’ve listed are similar to ones that could be dredged up about any public figure, no matter how clean that person is. Everything listed is incredibly mild.

I find it strange that you introduced this as a "bit of background," but then quoted only the sections from Wikipedia that note criticisms, albeit mild, of Huberman, and depicted this as amounting to him being "controversial."

My "bit of background" on Huberman would be something like: "Andrew Huberman is a professor of neurobiology at Stanford. He's made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neural plasticity. Huberman is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow. In 2017, he was honored with the Cogan Award, which is given to the scientist making the most significant discoveries in the study of vision."

I say this not because I'm some huge fan of Huberman, although I have found several of his podcast episodes enjoyable. Rather, I find the approach of searching for "controversies" about someone on Wikipedia to be exceptionally lazy and insincere.

In any event, I don't believe the excerpts from Wikipedia you cited portray Huberman as "controversial", but even if Wikipedia had attempted to present him as a controversial figure, I wouldn't give it much weight, unfortunately. I have concerns about Wikipedia's objectivity and my skepticism towards it has increased in recent years (its co-founder, Larry Sanger, has described it as the "most biased encyclopedia" in history).

Huberman is one of the few reliable names among influencers.. the ‘criticism’ you quote from wiki here is extremely trivial and a non issue in todays time imo. Others with less knowledge/authenticity and more followers have done a lot worse.

I find Cal Newport and the world around him very interesting. He's a CS computer geek that plays arm-chair psychologist in all his popular work. I've often wondered where his abilities breakdown and I think the article nails it:

"While there are many opinions and resources on how to best regulate overstimulation and overcome digital addictions, Newport’s directive is refreshingly simple: get rid of those things that are overstimulating you."

Really what this is saying is that there are many opinions and resources backed by research and psychological study that has complicated answers. And that Newport's solution is so simple is that it almost equates to "feeling depressed? Don't!"

So yeah, while Newport has interesting ideas and can boil things down for us techies to get behind (sometimes), he doesn't fully know what he's talking about. He's not really a trained psychologist and clearly doesn't understand things at a deep level. He's basically talking to people that are like him rather than people at large.

I have no opinion on him.

I can tell you I have gone to probably a dozen therapists and have received precious little to help and quite a bit more that hurt me. Psychology is not even close to a science. You can’t make false a falsifiable assertions and test them reliably.

I would trust his assertions slightly more, perhaps, than those of most psychologists.

Well, he's not a neuroscientist either. Nor a psychiatrist. So GP's main point still holds.

Are the only people qualified to speak on the mental experience of being human neuroscientists and psychiatrists? Seems like you’re completely missing GP’s point.

There's a difference between speaking on the mental experience of being human and throwing around words like "dopamine", and "detox" to support unfounded claims about miracle cures.

Haven’t seen any mentions of miracle cures? But I have barely a passing knowledge of his work.

On quick inspection, his experiments seem to be fairly well controlled. I will venture a guess that they are a little better than average, and we know that only half of studies can be replicated.

Assuming that his data is fairly clean, I don’t see why it’s out of the realm of possibility that he could be contributing substantially to neuroscience no matter what is academic background. The results should speak for themselves.

IMHO academia is incredibly broken anyway, and the tenure system has had the opposite effect of it as was intended. Professors are now so desperate to keep tebure they do nothing to challenge the orthodoxy and everything to crush those who do.

> On quick inspection, his experiments seem to be fairly well controlled

What experiments?

I agree -- in some regards, it's like he's separating conscious thought? Not sure if that makes sense. Like, if it were that easy to just will yourself out of it I'm sure everyone would have quit horrible addictions. The entire point is that the dopamine drives your behavior to a point where it's integrated in everything you do. Sure, with enough effort you can build routines that replace that with more intrinsically beneficial stuff, but I don't think it's just a matter of "simply getting rid of bad things"

Even if he was a trained psychologist I'd be skeptical. The guy who wrote Why We Sleep is, if I recall correctly both a neuroscientist and psychologist and turns out the work was riddled with factual errors to the point of being virtually useless.

There's a lot of sounds sort of correct but has no scientific basis type stuff being published in the public intellectual / life advice genre, probably not surprisingly. Especially all the 'dopamine detox' lingo should set alarm bells off as it is essentially modern day bloodletting.

I agree with your points. Cal Newport's content comes up a lot when people are searching for ways to improve productivity by reducing distractions from the web, and people looking for it are more interested in an easy to grasp solution that sounds scientific enough than more complex answers from scientific studies. By definition the target audience that cannot do deep work also cannot comprehend more elaborate studies anyway.

I followed the advice (sometimes attributed to him) to eliminate social media and it works (for obvious reasons), but it is as good as an advice of not going outside on the rain in order to not get wet. We might as well use some dedicated tool to minimize getting wet while still being able to go outside in the rain.

Cal's podcast and books are a guilty pleasure of mine. Yes, he has a tendency to oversimplify. Yes, he can be a bit cheesy. But I think that his cheesy and simple presentation style is kind of his secret sauce. If you want a nuanced take on how difficult it is to stay off your phone and social media, there are other places you can get that (Stolen Focus by Johann Hari for example).

I really admire his efforts to formalize his thinking about these topics into systems that readers and listeners can implement step-by-step. His emphasis on capture systems, time-block planning, and multi-scale planning, plus the whole "deep work/deep life" thing he's got going on now, have really changed my life and habits for the better in the past year or so. It may not work for everyone, but it works for me.

While depression can be caused by a multitude of factors we don't have control over, we do however have the option to turn off the TV while doing other things, suppress notifications, focus on one thing at the time...

But where are the psychologists to supplant him? And this advice isn't that bad. It's similar to diet advice.

Diet is complicated so experts just say to restrict calories whether that's through reduced carbs, reduced fat or pretending to eat like a caveman.

I'm skeptical of the 'dopamine detox' idea. It sounds too good to be true. I'm not sure how to explain other than writing out what I think it boils down to: "Here's your problem in an easy-to-understand way, and here's a simple-sounding thing you can do to fix it". The over-simplifications and implied promise of happiness and self-improvement sets off the same doubt for me as a lot of advertising and dark patterns.

Huberman on whether dopamine detox works: https://youtu.be/w8pg-4c0j3s and https://youtu.be/xLORsLlcT48

imho there are a lot of steps you can take to make your day-to-day feel better, even if it doesn't give a radical "oh I just turned everything around one day" kind of feeling.

By default, don't have any notifications show on your lock screen unless they're from close family or friends (or you're a SRE whose job it is to deal with problems at 2am, but that's another story). Any app that isn't specifically human-to-human-communication-based probably doesn't need to be sending you notifications at all, ever. Keep track of your weekly screen time notifications from your operating system, and be mindful of having that trend upward.

Set specific times in the day when you're going to look at random communications/email, and stick to those times -- if it helps, set a calendar time for that. The more you can get into that timed routine, the easier it is to reduce the total amount of time spent on distracting things and the more you'll be able to budget your time for deep work.

Social media, it can be really tempting to feel fomo with friends/coworkers/family/etc. You'll feel like you're missing out at first, but that feeling does get smaller and smaller over time. You don't need to cut it out 100%; but what you need to do is eg stop that quick 2-minute refresh of the Gram when it's 10:30am and you really should be more productive.

It isn't a magical self improvement routine, there isn't a promise of happiness, but eg reducing doomscrolling and reading shit comment responses and shit bird app threads and seeing shit clock app videos, it will give you a lot more mental energy.

While skepticism is always warranted, doing a dopamine detox is also a low stakes sort of experiment. Worst case nothing really changes and you go back to doing what you were before, best case you learn of some stimulus impacts you in a way that you might be able to manage better going forward. Why not experiment?

It’s not a real thing, you hit the nail on the head for pop culture talking about chemicals and neuroscience. Dopamine is responsible for many things, and you can’t remove all dopamine from your brain. Here are two separate psychiatrists debunking it but also talking about why (or why not) some things included in a “dopamine detox” can be beneficial.

https://youtu.be/-_K4Uf9smi8?si=z7qBB5sUb7x7N832

https://youtu.be/wK-s2qBU40A?si=wHwzZ7iI12MN63Nt

If you feel you’re scrolling too much? Of your distracting yourself to the point of living an empty life, why not try?

Just for fun, I will defend it.

Let’s break it down into common sense thoughts.

* Dopamine hits feel good.

* Anything that makes you feel good produces diminishing returns when repeated too frequently.

* For many people this can trigger addiction.

* If you get internally hostile to suggestions that you should try quitting such behavior: you’re an addict. Standard example: no one will get angry if it’s suggested that they stop eating cauliflower, but many will get angry if it’s suggested they stop consuming sugary products or drinking alcohol.

Therefore, an experiment where you quit the controversial item is harmless and will tell you more about yourself and just about anything else.

Edit: ”…than just about anything else.”

'mindmatters.ai' being associated Discovery Institute, founded entirely to push creationism in US public education, is not a great sign for the credibility of this article.

Whether it's universally true or not, I personally found an unexpected week with sketchy-to-no internet made a huge difference to my ability to focus.

I realised that my ability to think about things for an extended period of time is derailed by social scrolling. Reading a book (for example) doesn't have the same effect.

So now I'm careful about what I look at online - HN, a mainstream news site, Matt Levine are my only 'entertainment' content.

Perspective in video feel shallow, and reminds kind of content with a lot of, "you just gotta, like, do, man." (hustle porn) [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36766509

On consumerism, screens there is sci-fi perspective in Victor Pelevin's book Homo Zapiens[1]. I recommend to read thru original text. But here I tried to interpret it's reasoning through gpt4 [2] and gpt3[3] with perspective from other works.

  Homo Zapiens term describes individuals in this state of being controlled by TV. It highlights that modern humans spend a significant part of their lives in this condition, leading to a loss of true consciousness and self-identity.
  Wow-factors emerge as powerful forces that capture and monopolize attention.
  Overstimulation, driven by the constant bombardment of visual and psychological stimuli through screens and media, can lead to a range of detrimental effects on individuals' lives, loss of individuality, manipulation of desires, strain on relationships, mood disturbances, and cognitive impairments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_"П" [2] gpt4 https://chat.openai.com/share/863d4a3f-330f-4f88-b53a-d95d90... [3] gpt3 https://chat.openai.com/share/af674cf0-a163-4190-a290-638a0e...

Being connected to the #noosphere does possess a real danger to out-shadow the local world & what one & those around them can and are doing.

I dislike the idea as it's phrased because it's all stick & not carrot. It has "over" in the name which by definition is bad but I feel like people have some really great modes when they are super heavily stimulated, but they need conduits for it to matter, for it to feed into things one can do or learn from or expand from. The danger to me is so much of the stimulation is parasocial, that it doesn't really intersect with our own agencies or agencies we really brush up against, except very very indirectly.

Curating a local locus if high control can be hard when also staying plugged into the firehouse. But I still recommend trying it!!

> Newport also suggested cutting out online news scrolling in favor of a few curated weekly newsletters

As somebody currently trying to find this for US news, I've found that it's much harder than I thought: A lot of focus on summarizing a bunch of things that don't matter, instead of focusing on the things that do. Does anybody have any suggestions?

May not be answering your question but I feel like U.S. news is kind of false value. Do we really need to know what's going on at the Federal level? At least not at any sub-quarterly cadence.

I use Apple News to swipe right and see various happenings on the local level. There's national stuff too, it's not perfect by any means, but point being all of it is mostly a distraction vs actually need-to-know.

If you regularly call your representatives, knowing what's happening at a federal level is helpful. Likewise if you set aside money to donate to causes you value.

Depending on what you're looking for, you could subscribe to the Sunday edition of your local (or national) newspaper.

https://www.readtangle.com/

I have a few I love!

NextDraft https://nextdraft.com is written by Dave Pell. Dave is from the 90’s-era “digerati,” folks like Kevin Kelly and Louis Rossetto. He signs each newsletter “Editor, Internet.” He surfaces the news of the day and provides hilarious and sometimes poignant commentary on it. He has a decidedly “San Francisco left-wing” viewpoint. If that’s your jam, his newsletter is an absolute treat. I truly love that man.

I also love Pirate Wares https://piratewares.com, Mike Solana’s newsletter. Mike has neither really a left or right viewpoint. He’s more of the type to sit above left or right and point out there are multiple other dimensions and forces at work. Covers tech, news, finance, science.

I also really like Bloomberg’s Open and Close newsletters, and I LOVE Matt Levine’s Bloomberg Money Stuff newsletter, though it isn’t so much focused on general news as it is on finance. But again, what an absolute treat it is to read him. Love him.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37397529

Anecdotal, but I removed every social media application from my phone, keeping only the essentials such as email, banking, maps, messaging and RSS. I don't check it anymore. I forget where it is, I feel free.

So something triggers more dopamine in our brain, and that gives us a desired to catch the thing that triggered the dopamine? Is that it?

Could we say that dopamine is what causes us to experience "lust"?

Do we crave for dopamine, or is experiencing dopamine the same thing as experiencing a graving?

Do nicotine addicts have a lot of dopamine in their brain when they crave the next cigarette? Then when they get the cigarette, does that remove the dopamine (-activity) from their brain?

The world doesnt need another twitter

Overstimulation is ruining your life

This guy can only write headlines if he's telling the entire population what is best for them. I couldn't be happier that I give zero fucks about what "cal newport" thinks is best

I honestly would give zero fs about what he thinks is best, except for the fact that Cal Newport is the author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work, two books that changed how I view things and I believe made me understand better what's really going on in the world.

Though I didn't become the Taylor Swift of coding, I think that I ended up in a good place in part thanks to his books.

Another reason why this article probably resonated with many is that they see the issue in their own or their friends life. Some can't just simply work, or be with their loved ones, they constantly need something, YouTube in the background, minutes of scrolling through Twitter/HN/Facebook/Instagram, some addicted to porn, etc, and some started to pinpoint this issue to "overstimulation".

That is awesome he helped you, I'm happy to hear that.

What practices did you adopt as a result of reading his books?

Nothing that sounds immediately impressive, just the small things that made an impact.

I learned to notice when I interrupted my deep work, for example while waiting for the build to finish I'd browse HN, or watch YouTube videos while working, listening to podcasts in the background, etc. I no longer forced myself to work with the pomodoro technique as it intentionally interrupts your focus (it's still good if you struggle to get anything done at all).

I also learned that the relatively small work needed to uplevel from being average to good (so that people in my field know me) is worth it, so organized meetups, gave talks and had a podcast.

Another important point of his book (so good they can't ignore you) was that, paraphrasing, passion is BS, so I learned to push through the initial phase of learning something new and work hard enough to enjoy basically anything as I got better and better.

It's not perfect, I'm not perfect, but it really helped me to stop being a scatterbrain, slightly below average developer.

I truly believe that ~50% of why I was able to make a career transition into iOS programming at the age of ~42 was b/c of "So Good They Can’t Ignore You".

"Just delete tiktok" is like the diet advice "just eat less." Demonstrably impractical and debatably harmful.

Perhaps better advice is to find things that are immediately stimulating but also long-term rewarding (akin to finding food that tastes delicious and is filling but also is healthy).

> Perhaps better advice is to find things that are immediately stimulating but also long-term rewarding (akin to finding food that tastes delicious and is filling but also is healthy).

Do such things even exist? because my ADHD says no.

Sports, hobbies, books, various art forms

People with ADHD are known to pick up a million hobbies, books and art forms but struggle sticking to them, because the initial stimulation from novelty is stronger than anything else. Playing a sport or an instrument is fun, but getting good at it requires strong discipline, precisely because it's not fun. The only thing that truly helps with this is the right type and dosage of meds.

I was just answering the question that fulfilling things exist. I wasn't trying to cure adhd. Of course go talk to a pro and get real coping tools and medicine if needed to use.

Those things aren't necessarily "long-term fulfilling" for people with ADHD. The only things that have been that way for me are chatting with friends and programming. Everything else (and trust me, there's a lot of everything else) I instantly get depressed that I suck, give up, and lose the ability to ever try again.

Well maybe not yet, but there's no reason we couldn't invent one.

I can think of 10 ways to make an app like tiktok that's more social and promotes building relationships with people in your vicinity. I bet you could too.

How would an app build relationships?

People already build relationships through apps that wouldn't have otherwise happened (be it discord or tinder), though neither is really very good at that.

If you want to build relationships with people who live near you the app should have some element of seeing content from people nearby you (presumably within your age bracket too). And also more interactivity from viewers (you can see a moderate amount of interactivity even in youtube communities).

I don't know, Discord is the best for me because I can just talk to people without the app trying to cause something that needs to happen naturally.

Discord totally does encourage creating social connections. It has the idea of "friends", and does things like show you what games people are playing to enable people to join in games together or at the very least chat about it.

I use the friends list to DM people without sharing a server with them, that's it.

Isn't that what friends lists have always been anyway?

You failed when you said "like tiktok" because nobody wants tiktok. Tiktok is a toxic cesspool and the entire premise is flawed. I build relationships on cohost instead.

But arent people using tiktok because its the best at stimulating them? I don’t necessarily think there is something that scratches the same itch but is good.

Its OK to be bored. Our minds latch onto social media, news, video games, etc. like drugs. Not reaching for the screen and finding something physical to do is remarkably like meditation, where you notice your mind latching onto some thought then make the decision to refocus on your breath.

Oh? Since it's demonstrable, please demonstrate how impractical that is.

Once the writing was on the wall for Musk's takeover of Twitter, I quit. After being a daily user for many years. It was not easy, but it was also not impractical. And I'm better off for it.

You picked the wrong analogy. Caloric restriction is both demonstrably practical and beneficial in numerous ways - bmi, longevity, anti-cancer, and general well-being to name a few.

"like the diet advice "just eat less." Demonstrably impractical and debatably harmful"

What are you talking about? That is the correct, and only way, to lose weight.

We are comparing tiktok to eating? You know, eating which we need for survival?

> "Just delete tiktok" is like the diet advice "just eat less." Demonstrably impractical and debatably harmful.

I am 100% sure that not looking at tiktok is going to harm you in any way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com