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Comment by abhisek | Hacker News Reader

I have a simple question. How do I control dopamine in "my" brain so that I can focus on "here and now" instead of HN and GitHub.

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You'll get a lot of pop-science answers when you ask about dopamine. The less popular truth is that focus and self-discipline can't be reduced to a single chemical. It's not as simple as a level in your brain that goes up and down.

Side note: ADHD is more than just dopamine, too. The stimulant medications used for ADHD have strong norepinephrine activity. There are non-stimulant ADHD medications that act on norepinephrine primarily. There are even studies where some non-dopaminergic ADHD medications outperform stimulants in certain measures like memory by modulating adrenergic circuits.

The unpopular take is that you need to realize that "dopamine" is an abstraction for higher level behaviors. It's not "dopamine" leading you to be distracted or focus, it's a behavior that you need to train and develop over time. There's also a big emotional regulation component where it helps to understand why you're seeking distractions instead of doing the work. Is it to provide comfort? Avoid uncomfortable feelings that the work brings up? Perfectionism? Are you trying to recharge during working hours because you're not recharging outside of work properly? There are many angles that need to be pursued.

I would recommend starting with small steps. Look up Screen Time settings or plugins that will limit your time spent on HN if that's a problem. Start with a generous setting and lower it over time. If you slip, start again the next time.

Treat it like something you train. Start small, make a deliberate effort, and work on getting better slowly. If you expect to flip a switch and turn into the most diligent coder you can imagine, you're unlikely to succeed. If you set a goal to do 10 more minutes of work and 10 fewer minutes of HN before lunch, that's doable. Little wins will compound.

Anna Karenina principle oft quoted from Tolstoy:

"all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".

Like with any complex system, there are a lot of ways for the system to fail, and the number of states considered "working properly" is much smaller.

1. Cold plunge - high but transient (last for hours). I do it in the morning, after my shower - start the day off right.

2. Exercise - short-term: increases dopamine, serotonin, and a bunch of other good stuff; long-term: increases dopamine receptor density.

3. Caffeine - while doesn't technically increase dopamine, it blocks adenosine receptors which indirectly increases dopamine signalling. But habitual use blunts the effect.

Other less acute things are: good sleep and lots of sunlight esp early in the day.

Do you have a few references? That reads a bit like bro-science.

Cold plunge is good but keep in mind cold water immersion inhibits hypertrophy (but improves recovery time) depending on time since exercise, temperature and duration.

I have found l-tyrosine also being quite helpful when taken occasionally.

Done occasionally it’s fine. It can lead to crashes and also anger or increased irritability. Things that mess with neurotransmitters can be hit or miss. A better long term strategy is to focus on fundamental things that improve the metabolic health of your cells.

One other “light” supplement that can dampen addictive behaviors or cravings is l-theanine.

Nicotine.

Be verrrry careful. 7 years and very very disregulated from nicotine. Getting better 1+ year later

Nicotine doesn’t really have any good MOAs. Inhalation is very short lasting, addictive, and gross and unhealthy. Pouches are harsh and still don’t last very long, gum (especially Lucy brand) is better but still has the same issues. And patches cause a lot of arm irritation. And all of these are very easy to overdo and make you feel somewhere in between physically uneasy and on edge to sick, that is until you get used to them and then you feel that way when you’re off.

Also personally, it doesn’t even help me with focus, in part because administering it is too distracting. I wonder whether there’s a place for an extended release nicotine pill, although that would probably be pretty rough on the gut.

What do you prefer for focus?

The best I’ve found for focus is simple caffeine. Amphetamines are good for motivation but give me too much motivation to do things other than what I need to be doing. Methylphenidate is maybe a bit better but still a similar story. They also both have considerably worse side effect profile than caffeine. YMMV though, I am an adhd-coded individual and everyone’s brain chemistry is a bit different anyway. Lion’s mane and/or Cordyceps double extract tincture is not bad but I’ve grown to be weary of neurogenic drugs, although that is more of a personal decision.

Get away from screens.

It's hard to focus on the here and now when the here and now is the soul-deadening sensory-less experience of sitting motionless staring at a flat rectangle of pixels.

Go out in the woods. Get your hands dirty. Meet friends at a bar and laugh until your stomach hurts.

It's so much easier to be present in the moment when the moment is actually high fidelity and nourishing.

I recently started doing a 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise, where you look around you and name 5 things you can see, touch and name 4 things you can touch, name 3 things you can hear, 2 you can smell, and 1 you can taste.

I was surprised how different it felt to consciously see and touch things. It's not like I'm walking around my house with my eyes closed normally, but most of the time things aren't really registering. Stopping to intentionally focus for a second on an actual object or a sound I'm currently hearing seems to sort of wake me up, bring me out of a trance a little. Not as well as digging in the garden, but not bad for a few seconds in the middle of the work day.

Screens are awesome. They are the heir apparent to the fireplace. A very old human tradition and very cherished.

Outside, right now, people stay on screens all the time. It's the same stuff. Why even bother?

Humans plan ahead. We look towards the future and the past. Not all the time, but a lot of the time.

This carpe diem stuff doesn't seem like the right way to approach the problem given our current technological society.

Also, I'm not gonna party just because someone told me to.

You do you, but lets say I don't agree with what you say at all. Quality of life and all. Since I do both sides its easy to compare short and long term effects and impact on quality of life and happiness, plus its trivial to look around and see exactly same stuff repeating all over with literally everybody.

Suffice to say parent is correct, and you are not.

> long term effects and impact on quality of life and happiness

Sounds like planning ahead. Exactly like I said.

> literally everybody

It lacks a further explanation. I don't know if you see that if you can't put it in your own words.

Strengthen your prefrontal cortex so "you" have more control over your urges. You typically do this with meditation.

This was an interesting connection to me between meditation and neuroscience. Buddhists talk about the "monkey mind" that chatters incessantly. Well, that's the default mode network, part of your brain that is active when you're not engaged in a specific task, when you're thinking about self, others, past or future. A useful adaptation in our past environment for sure, but overactivity can be detrimental. The Buddhist solution is to mediate, to focus the attention on a singular thing and not be distracted by the chatter. That ability lives in the prefrontal cortex! It's able to override the DMN and it's something that can be trained by just exercising it.

Not recommended if you're depressed/in a bad situation because you can just disassociate from everything instead of fixing it.

You could just as (if not more) easily gain clarity into what you need to fix and how, and increase your ability to act on those insights.

I think that's what therapy is for. No-thought meditation (vipassana) can't help with that surely, since it involves thinking.

Or you could mess up your brain even more, as it is established by zen teachers and scientific literature.

Any special kind of meditation that is recommended?

Basic mindfulness meditation should do the job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness#Watching_the_breat...

While it is literally just sitting somewhere watching the breath it is easy to do things wrong like sitting concentrating hard or being bored instead of observing the boredom. The irony of doing nothing being a difficult skill. Anyone interested probably wants to find some serious mediators to talk to - Buddhist monks are recommended but there are others here and there.

Or you just set a firewall and block these 2 websites ^^ (Welcome to the club)

Your firewall seems broken.

Maybe they are texting from the embedded browser in their car's infotainment system? Never underestimate the creativity of a procrastinator.

They just used a proxy.

"Ora et Labora"

Dopamine levels don't reset until you sleep, roughly speaking.

Don't do highly dopaminergic activities like using electronic devices that provide entertainment or communications

Exercise for time with steady-state exertion has proven to be the ultimate focus supplement for me. Right afterward it is like a very powerful drug. If the exercise isn't at least 30 minutes, I don't feel anything. Somewhere around 38-45 minutes, the music begins to fade in.

My preferred steady state suffering machine is the Concept2 rower. I can keep an eye on stroke/min and cal/hr to stay within a very narrow band of exertion. HIIT and weightlifting are great too, but these are not as strenuous on the brain's "focus for time" circuitry. Lots of downtime and opportunities to get on the cellular device. A straight hour on the rower with the cruise control locked @ 850cal/hr is a totally different kind of animal.

You can try forming other habits in order to break the feedback loop. eg. define a good habit and repeat it. For example, at the start of the day immediately start working where you left the day before, then after lunch break you can check e-mail and read the news.

Give yourself an orgasm right after doing the activity you want to reinforce?

Make an electroshock gizmo that hits you when your browser visits certain domains?

The irony of asking on HN how to not use HN

The best place to help you cope with an addiction are with the people who are confessed addicts.

But just because they are the best doesn’t mean their help actually helps.

The best place to help you cope with continuing an addiction, but not the best place to get rid of an addiction.

If you want to get rid of an addiction, stay away from addicts and everything they produce. Stay away from their artistic creations, stay away from their complicated explanations of the world, and stay away from their gossip. Also, please don't study to become any kind of "drug counselor," get regular person jobs and normal hobbies. You're dying of romance, and you need to figure out how to love the world as it is.

This is good advice and it's worked for other things I've been addicted to.

I guess you can think of this as my retirement from Hacker News. Thank you kind stranger.

This may sound flippant, but one real option is to just quit doing so and not start again.

Maybe it's not obvious to you, but many of your real-world colleagues and role models don't visit HN or anything comparable. And they're still working at the desk next to you, and in the office you aspire to have some day. For all that stuff like this might feel justified or even necessary, it's not. And if you're finding that it introduces difficulties into your life or psyche, you are entitled to and capable of quitting altogether. You don't need to try to moderate it.

(And frankly, I personally don't even know what you're doing on GitHub so compulsively. I didn't even realize that was a thing, if that helps speak to how irrelevant it can be.)

You love dopamine. You don’t love stress.

Advice: love stress. Enjoy it. Feel it. Just don’t ask for it.

Meditation definitely, closer to Vipassana variation

Go see if you’re ADD/ADHD and get on meds (I recommend Dexedrine), then also “join” the neurospicey community spaces where people swap tips, learnings and observations.

Also always go for a walk, touch grass, hug a tree. Pleasant physical experiences are truly effective at getting you into the “here and now”.

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