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I don't think listening to or watching something entertaining while doing something unpleasant or boring or uncomfortable is an example of dopamine stacking. It's just a distraction technique that helps you take your mind off the aspects of it that you don't want to think about or be aware of.

Listening to music or a podcast while you work or exercise is a completely normal, non-dopamine stacking, thing to do. In the past, before radio and recorded music, people daydreamed or sang to accomplish the same goal.

> In the past, before radio and recorded music, people daydreamed or sang to accomplish the same goal.

Call it pain avoidance or dopamine stacking, they're probably both apt, but there's a difference in degree between the level of control and personalization and dependence between humming a tune or listening to a stationary giant radio and the current state of not being able to do anything remotely unstimulating or arduous like standing on a train or going to sleep without a distraction; how normal it is seems like logical fallacy, It's also pretty normal for people to spend 5 hours a day looking at their phones, not have made any friends in adulthood outside school, or have any romantic prospects.

I find it funny/depressing that I've been asked at least 3 times why I don't wear headphones at the gym. If you can pull a lever or click a button and take your mind of something you've never let become less painful, how important is the distinction?

Daydreaming and singing to yourself is not entertaining. It's just something that an unstimulated brain does. To get to that destimulated place is the object imo - where what you're doing is so habitual that every step seems like a breath, and you only notice the ones you miss.

I remember before I learned the basics of cooking how hard everything was, and how much I had to concentrate. These days I'll spend 20 minutes cooking something, plate it and go to the bathroom, and have forgotten what I cooked before seeing it again. I remember when I was learning Spanish, and every successful paragraph I read merited a celebration, and now I sometimes can't remember whether something I read was in Spanish or English an hour after I've read it.

My biggest improvement in writing came after I stopped listening to music while doing it. Get it over with, then listen to music. Once you get into the habit, it's like taking a nap not having a party. I remember a factory I worked at in my 20s where I got up to doing 76 hour weeks with no days off because I was so good at what I was doing, I entered a timeless place. There was no time to get bored in. I'm sure I might have hummed, but I wouldn't remember. I certainly wasn't thinking about anything important; those machines could have ripped my hands off.

>Daydreaming and singing to yourself is not entertaining.

This is such a case study of a HN comment.

Not to take away from your meta comment but there's something to be said about the mind originating content from a place of wandering versus having content blasted at you from an external source.

There's a place for both. Sometimes I listen to music and dance around while I crank out tasks that require some thought, but not a ton.

And other times for really menial tasks like cleaning I'll zone out cause my mind can truly wander during those moments (cause putting the dishes away is full autopilot, where things like... writing some tests might be a bit more... autopilot, a bit of thought, autopilot, etc). There is an absolute ton of value in letting your brain wander.

And finally, for certain tasks, it's either very quiet classical or none at all cause it's just fully focused thought about larger problem spaces that need to be fleshed out.

And I think, if you listen to the same library or playlists a lot, your brain may start to associate it with working. But I really have no idea what I'm talking about, so who knows!

The same library or playlist is good - I used that trick for time tracking when I was training for the marathon.

Had a eclectic playlist where I would start with some quite chill Mozart because I would always start too fast and needed to pace myself for example then after the 2/2.5 hr mark is when I'd usually start to fade and some prog rock would come on to boost my spirits.

Funnily I have banned listening to classical for most coding but that's a me problem because I end up listening too closely and analysing the music and performance too much. But that's just because I'm a classical nerd

"You can't make money dreaming, or I'd be a millionaire" https://youtu.be/RKemw7plB2g

New startup idea!

>Daydreaming and singing to yourself is not entertaining. It's just something that an unstimulated brain does.

That's not even remotely true. People also do it for entertainment and are entertained when they do it, like all the time.

I think singing is fun.

I've never worked 76 hour weeks though.

I've never been able to write (code or prose) while listening to music. I get too distracted.

OTOH, watching a TV show (or listening to music) really helps with exercising (both starting, and pushing myself).

YMM (and probably does) V.

> Daydreaming and singing to yourself is not entertaining

Wow. I couldn’t disagree more daydreaming for me is very powerful and actually too entertaining.

I can space out on a ten hour flight literally only daydreaming, no media needed.

(Although now I at least hold an iPad as a few people have remarked upon how creepy it is me starting into space hahaha.)

It’s my favorite activity and actually a bit maladaptive.

> The off-ramp is learning how to derive dopamine (aka "motivation") from the actual activity itself

So, just start liking the things you don't like? Sure, ideally that's the solution you want, but it's not exactly actionable advice.

People are adaptable. Likes and dislikes and comfort zones are all malleable. I never liked working out in the slightest. Never stuck to any sort of "gym routine" more than a few days. Did most of the Couch to 5k program in college but never kept running. Just...never liked it. I had lots of friends in high school and college who ran Cross Country, and was always a bit baffled about the appeal. It seemed terrible, honestly.

When my friend randomly suggested that we try a very ambitious hiking route, I knew it would absolutely suck if I didn't train for it. I got a gym membership and told myself I'd at the very least set foot in the gym 7 days a week for the first few weeks, just to build the habit of going. I was motivated to make sure I didn't slack off and ruin the hike for the group by being undertrained. A few months of that and the hike went great.

When we got back, though, I found it felt weird to not go to the gym in the mornings before work (as a decidedly NON-morning person my friends and family looked at me like I'd grown a second head when they heard me say I was working out before work). I started running outside on days the gym was crowded, and it felt good! In the nearly eight years since then, there have been only a handful of weeks where I didn't go for a run—I genuinely really enjoy it, no motivational tricks required.

I feel like the gym example isn’t really applicable because your body releases dopamines after working out. So while the exercise can be painful there is joy to be gained from it. This doesnt happen for all tasks.

Another thing is that we must distinguish between listening to music and eating a donut as reward. One helps people foucus while the other makes you gain weight..

My 2 cents : I make it a game or I find beauty in it.

As a more concrete example, as soon as you learn to enjoy learning as an activity, it becomes fun, whatever you are studying. So you only need to learn to have fun while learning. Start with simple things, make it a game, find beauty in what you are learning.

If you want actionable advice, forget about motivation and stick to discipline instead.

Absolutely. But you can combine motivation and discipline. Over time I've made my morning exercise into "just what I do" in the morning by having discipline as best as I can. But it sure does help to have a good show or the next part of a movie to look forward to while I do it.

I feel that way as well. When I'm thinking about what I like and dislike, it just makes me procrastinate and feel miserable. Life is much more enjoyable when I think about duties I have and how to fulfill them.

That is almost guaranteed way to fail and burn out.

Nope. Burn out is an orthogonal issue and has nothing to do with discipline versus motivational techniques.

Can you expand? What's actionable about it?

It isn't, and it especially isn't for people with ADHD. "Just do it" is like "Don't be sad"

This 100%

Do you want to do it or not? If you actually want to do it you should be able to obtain some satisfaction from getting it done, however distasteful the task itself. Sometimes it's as simple as that: either realising you really do want to do it or realising you really don't and reconsidering why you're trying to make yourself do it in the first place.

But sometimes the problem isn't motivation. Sometimes it's energy. Sometimes you really do want to do it, to the core of your being, but you're just too fucking tired. That's a very different problem.

Yeah, the ancient stoics made a whole philosophy about it.

I'd also worry that the association of a fun activity with one you don't like can reduce the amount of fun from the first activity even when you stop doing them together. This is obviously not a scientific experiment, but I always struggled to wake up in the morning even with alarms (which I've since improved at with better understanding of some specific sleep conditions I have), and in an attempt to try to make it less annoying, I tried a couple times over the years to pick a song I liked as an alarm phone rather than a typical alarm sound. It never helped make waking up any easier, but it completely ruined both of the songs I tried for me in the short term, and even now years later I don't really enjoy them nearly as much as I used to. Hearing the opening notes of either of them just reminds me of the annoyance I felt waking up years ago.

I’ve got colleagues who have to grade CASM (scrolling through images and classifying them as category A, B, C etc.

This can take literally days and the first thing they are told is don’t listen to music they enjoy while doing it, because they will never again be able to listen to that music.

> further reading: youtube

turn on subtitles, i guess?

it's more about the source, not the format

Off topic, but I'm guessing your username references the M4 Sherman tank? Kinda clever and funny.

Firstly, Huberman has turned into a hack, and this video is a great example of his drift into "just trust me bro" pop science. Secondly,

> You can see this pattern in people who exercise only with some combination of pre-workout, caffeine, music, phone scrolling

Where do you see this pattern? I would wager nowhere, even if it sounds like it "could" happen. I've worked out with a lot of people. I listen to music while working out, as do many people. I would enjoy working out less without it. But I'm not in some Dopamine spiral where I need to stack more stuff on top just to keep working out. I've been doing it for years.

I've noticed a lot of health influencers like Huberman, who need to make content frequently, have been honing in on gut-feeling conclusions derived from novice science facts you can expect anyone to know about. He casts a wide net with a Psychology Today level concept, and he builds an audience of people that can't separate the lazy conclusions he makes from the objectively true but elementary facts he bases them on.

Look at the comments, where people are accusing each other of being dopamine hijacked because they eat and read at the same time. Give me a break. Your reward system is not a fragile thing that is easily broken. The actual causes of dopamine hijacking are things like spending all day playing video games, not having a coffee before working out.

> who need to make content frequently

I think this is a major issue with so much of the "creator community". When you make this thing your job, you can't just not show up to work for a few months at a time. But, if your content is "information regurgitation", like reading health studies and reporting them to your audience, is there really enough out there to make it a full time job? Doubtful. So, you'll end up either rehashing yourself over and over (your viewers will get bored and leave), or start going to the fringes of your field where there is far less basis for your statements than what originally brought your audience in.

It's a cruel cycle with YouTubers- they run out of stuff to say/stuff they can authoritatively talk about, but are basically forced to continue coming up with more content in order to stay relevant and keep their income going.

I really enjoyed Veritasium for a while, but it seems like he's fallen into this trap. Click-baity, cookie-cutter videos.

On the other hand, while I didn't follow Tom Scott particularly closely, I always enjoyed his stuff, and when I learned that he called it quits, I was legitimately happy for him AND his followers -- better to quit while you're ahead than to wear out your welcome.

It's funny you mention Veritasium in particular, since he hates the clickbait as much as anyone, and made a video specifically about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng

tldw You're basically forced to structure your thumbnails and titles that way if you want your videos to actually be seen. Blame YouTube's recommendation algorithm, not the creators.

It seems more like he's using it as a platform for other producers under some narration bumpers. Probably smart way to build out the channel. I don't see a quality drop but there is the varying style from the differing 'producers'.

Your reward system is a fragile thing that is easily broken. Just look around you next time you go anywhere. We live in a society of smart phone addicts. That said, the examples OP gave of tunes while exercising seem pretty benign compared to superstimuli like social media or drugs...

We are in agreement. When I say it's not fragile, I mean it takes more to mess with your reward system, like using your phone all day. It does not take listening to music for 20 minutes.

Seriously - always thought the guy was one step up from a grifter. His education has little to do with what he talks about and of course like many he has something also to sell

Huberman was a hack from the start of his podcast. It was a bit baffling what people were seeing in him.

Person with severe ADHD here. At least for me, it also helps because many hard activities are not stimulating enough for the effort they require, and persisting through understimulation is HARD.

Really, deeply misguided? It's "deeply misguided" to listen to music while coding? I find that hard to believe.

You probably like music and coding, and friends and food, and singing and hiking. OP was talking about blending activities you like with activities you don't like, as a way of getting you to do the thing you don't like.

I generally agree. Some of the things I don't want to do are actually pretty complex and require my full attention so I wouldn't be able to listen to a podcast or music with lyrics. Maybe I'm in a weird situation that requires some kind of shift. On the other hand, I am sure I can do 30 minutes on an "assaultbike" without having to distract myself with a TV show.

I’m kind-of the opposite: I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on a TV show while exercising.

So, where does the evidence come from? I don't buy the explanation, and I can't find any article published by Huberman on dopamine.

I think people use "dopamine" in quite a loose sense to refer to reward centres in the brain and habit formation, not literally the hormone (though it's related). You might have better luck digging around those topics.

I think I've found ways to dodge the problems you describe. I am a person who is has been addiction-adjacent in my search for novelty for an absurdly long time. I've been quite devoted, however, to physical exercise very much like that described in the article for around 20 years, with favorable results. Throughout this time, I have listened to audio recordings while exercising, and it has always been my favorite aspect of the routine. But I have switched between music, audiobooks, and podcasts a few times during the 20 years, and the novelty of the various genres and topics available is enough to keep me going. For the last few years I've been doing the podcasts, and these seem to keep my interest. I've got a 32 GB mp3 player, which allows me to select from 15 or so roughly hour-long episodes of 15 or so podcasts, some of which take in a wide range of topics and most of the rest are put together by people who embody novelty in their deepest vesicles. I spend an hour or three every month or three searching out new episodes of the podcasts that continue operating and archives of old podcasts that arouse my interests. And I like doing that, too.

The "treat yourself to a donut" suggestion got me. Sure, eat a donut, completely negating the caloric burn of the 30 minutes of aerobics you're motivating/rewarding yourself for.

For plenty of already-in-shape people, the calories expended during the exercise are largely incidental, with the goal of exercise being to enhance or maintain some other property of their physical capacity.

You'll still have improved cardiovascular fitness even if you aren't losing weight.

Any ways, a lot of studies have shown your body has a variety of methods that attempt to counteract excess calories burned, like reduction in non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

I'll disagree slightly, though clearly you are correct that if your goal is to offset calories, then eating a donut negates the benefits of the exercise activity.

My disagreement is that I think exercise should not primarily be about calories - it should be about fitness. And almost all of the fitness gains from exercise persist even if you replace the calories with a donut.

Exercising for 30min and then relacing those spent calories with donuts is FAR better than not exercising and forgoing those extra calories.

Exactly - and on top of that being super extra lean (for vanity purposes) is often actually detrimental to real world performance anyways. There's a balance to everything.

Of course this assumes that in addition to the single donut the rest of your diet is decent - if you're eating shit all day then you are asking for an injury

that not how it works. that's not how any of this works.

the aerobics build up muscle that will always be burning calories by merely existing. a donut here and there won't make a negligible difference, as long as the weekly aerobic activity level is maintained.

Muscles don’t burn that much calories, only like 13 kcal/kg/day. So if I suddenly gained 10 kg of muscle, I could theoretically burn half a donut per day. Plus the extra calories spent moving those 10 kg of muscle around. But it’s not a free meal.

Agree 100%. The data on this is pretty depressing. There isn't much you can do but eat less. Even huge bodybuilders quickly get fat when they go off season. All that muscle evidently doesn't work enough to offset the appetite.

Gaining 20lbs of muscle, which would be quite a visual change, would only burn about an extra candy bar.

When I was mountain biking heavily I could eat whatever. You just need a Huuuuuge amount of cardio, haha.

Men with a lot of muscles in fact can and have to eat more to maintain their weight then men with less muscles.

That extra food in fact does include cakes and treats.

Eeeh. Exercise doesn't spend enough energy for high calories foods to be worth it. If you want to lose weight that is. A donut is a lot of exercise and muscle building leads to a small but not sufficient calorie spend. The majority of calorie spend still comes from the organs and general body maintenance

> Exercise doesn't spend enough energy for high calories foods to be worth it. If you want to lose weight that is.

Tell that to all the lean 150 pound / 68kg runners stuffing their faces with high calorie foods all the time.

You're replying to a person saying "exercise doesn't spend enough energy [...] if you want to lose weight" by referencing "lean 68kg runners".

Do you think they want to lose weight?

I wanted to lose weight. I ran a lot (only 5 hours out of the week), ate the same high caloric foods, and lost a lot of weight. Clearly GP's assertion isn't correct, because enough exercise does lose weight.

_Athletes_ are completely different from the normal people looking to exercise. Can you spend 4 hours of your day exercising?

Try only 4 hours a week of exercise. Most lean runners are only getting that amount of time running in and still eating high calories, because 4 hours of running is ~2,500 extra calories burned every single week.

If most people really wanted to I think they could. Split it into multiple blocks

Even most professional endurance athletes rarely hit 28 hours per week of actual training time. That would be like a peak week in a training plan before tapering leading up to a race.

Even more contrary to GP's claim, the top American marathoners are only doing ~13 hour weeks of running before their races. It's public data on Strava.

If you are single and short commute, it is doable. People spend hours watching TV, looking at phone.

I don't think it's reasonable. That becomes basically the only thing to do outside of work. Highly unlikely at the very least.

endurance athletes are laughing

Athletes are not the same as normal people, who have 1h or so a day to exercise.

You can't outrun a bad diet is a common saying around my parts.

plenty of endurance athletes are pudgy, not lean at all . Usain Bolt is leaner than many endurance athletes. Training for endurance and being lean are different. Some runners get a nice toned body, but this far from the norm.

Yes, the literature on this bad. It's even worse than that. Metabolic adaptation means you may think you burned 400 kcal with a long run according to the tracking app, but maybe your body, on net, only burns 100-200 kcal, so this throws off the math.

Now you're just making things up. On any training plan, a long run would be a minimum of 6 mi / 10 km. No adult is going burn less than 400 kcal over that distance, it isn't physiologically possible. And any metabolic adaptation will only be a few percent at most: running economy only improves slightly with training.

Meh..not as much as you hope or expect. There is a popular channel on youtube @ErikTheElectric who does these huge food challenges, but also tons of cardio like marathons and 100-mile bike rides, to try to offset it. He weighs 170. At his height I weigh 15 lbs less, simply from eating less despite doing much less cardio than him. The body is very good at increasing its efficiency in response to exercise. You will be working your ass off doing cardio, but the weight just not budging much beyond water fluctuations. Many people report this. They will do 20-thousand steps and stop losing weight after a few days.

As for muscle, a pound only burns 11 calories/day. You'd have to gain 20 lbs of muscle, basically become a bodybuilder, just to offset a KitKat. The math is pretty depressing.

In my experience, full body sports (krav maga in my case) are the exception here. It's super easy to stay lean if you eat normally and do this kind of thing. My explanation for this is that the body adapts very well to using a single set of muscles because it expects to have to do it for a long time, like when hunting or gathering, but full body means you are fighting for your life. I think this is also why lifting heavy works so well too. (I have no credentials or training in this area, just my own xp, so treat this as wild speculation of course.)

That's a common misunderstanding but efficiency doesn't actually change much based on exercise. You can verify this with metabolic tests that measure inhaled and exhaled gases.

Ha my pre-workout is ibuprofen and redbull