Does it ever happen that you start working, and 15 minutes later you find yourself scrolling on social media or looking for coffee or snacks?
Just when I want to stay focused deep on work, and 10 minute later I feel the urge to pick my phone and check for new messages. Another 15 minute pass by and I’ll be scrolling youtube shorts. Done with one task and gotta transition to another but will spend 20 minutes on social media before starting it. These small spans of 20 minutes multiple times a day makes up few hours each day and days in month.
The problem is not you, it’s not about discipline, it is not having enough willpower. Answer is simple, You’re overstimulated. YES! this dopamine thingy.
Key is understanding how this works, dopamine plays crucial rule in brain reward system, pleasure, feeling good and motivation. But with today’s technology and easy access to overstimulating activities it’s easy to feel distracted, unfocused and procrastinate. If you know how it works, you can make it work for you and feel good while doing hard things without distractions, through what’s called detox.
Naturally you wake up to produce enough dopamine for the whole day, to keep you motivated and reward system to make you do certain things. But overstimulating activities, like music, social media, someone’s message, a like/comment on your post, video games, or any activity which gives pleasure and make you feel good eventually release dopamine but over doing it also overstimulates you, thus making you more distracted and making hard things harder to do. The more you consume dopamine, the more you stimulate yourself, more your brain will crave for it. Eventually the pleasure from same activity will decrease and you’ll enjoy it less than you did last time, making you crave for more stimulation.
Mental maturbation is also a thing which makes you lazier, makes work more distracted. Call it being delusional or having imagination or mental masturbation, it’s imagining your success, outcome or a result as if it already happened. For example, imagining yourself in a position where you dreamt to be will make you feel good.
Subconscious mind don’t know the difference between truth and a lie. If you visualize and imagine a lie, your brain will take it as true and will release dopamine as reward system for achieving it. You’ll get dopamine which everyone loves the most.
Being delusional and visualizing your success is crucial to actually manifest and work towards achieving it, but be careful when it’s overstimulating you and distracts you from actually working.
There’s a simple yet most powerful solution called dopamine detox. It’s simply just fasting or cutting down overstimulating activities, like you can stop listening to music, mental maturbation, video games, social media, or anything which overstimulates you. There’s also a short guide I would recomment by Thibaut Meurisse called dopamine detox, to remove distraction and get your brain to do hard things.
Ali Abdaal, a doctor, youtuber and most followed productivity expert, author of “Feel-Good Productivity” talks about it as, the key to productivity is to feel good about it, to enjoy the process. Which you can’t if your brain is overstimulated. It’s not something you can achieve by willpower if you’re in environment where overstimulation is easy to access.
Psychology says a delay or a mindful moment before users can access potentially addictive apps can be an effective strategy to reduce screen time and app usage. The best way to defeat distractions is to make it harder to react. When distractions is hard to access, you don’t have to worry about willpower.
You just need to make distractions-free environment, which you can design to support your habit and add resistance on distractions.
For me, the biggest distraction I identified was scrolling youtube shorts, which was filled with edits of kdrama/kpop that includes music ofcourse. Itself scrolling such feed is overtimulating and yea, my brain would take it as far as being delusional and imagining success thus mental masturbation mixed with music combo would not let me stay focused on work more than 10 minutes before I crave for another dose of overstimulation. Embarassing, I know!
Being unfocused, procrastinating and not making much of a progress won’t do any good but pours fuel to the fire of stress.
I knew I needed to change environment, add resistance to open youtube and take detox. I searched for home launchers, and found a perfect one called “Flow Launcher”
You can add upto 5 apps on home screen, and has built in focus mode which will stop you from accessing app drawer and you can only access those 5 apps on home. Shows screen time on home with a built in habit tracker.
One feature I loved the most is detox, built inside your phone hell yeah! Altho you need to pay for premium to use detox but it’s worth it. You can can add certain apps on detox and everytime you’ll try to launch that app, it’ll remind you to rethink your action by asking if you really need it and to take a deep breathe for 4 seconds before moving on to next screen. If you pass those four seconds of resistance, it will show some analytics and tell you how many time you tried to open this app today and how much time you spent on it yesterday and how much you could save in whole year if you save it each day. These scary numbers are enough to convince you to put your phone back down.
Now everytime I crave for the dose of overstimulation or that music video I love, I’ll think of the 4 second resistance and the fact I’ll have to take a deep breath and having no answer when it asks me if I really need it and I don’t wanna look at those freaky numbers so I don’t even bother to pick my phone. It made it so much easier and doesn’t require that much of a willpower. While the other method would just make me guilty for not having willpower to resist these distractions.
Overstimulation is most dangerous in the morning, ever since I stopped doing it every morning and added detox, my days have been peaceful, I feel calm, emotionally stable, more focused and motivated to work.
Let the reward system of brain works naturally. Get addicted to good dopamine.
Be productive!

Knowledge by Execution - Breaking Down Tech for the Mango Man (Aam Aadmi/Regular Person) - https://www.sknexus.org/

SK NEXUS

The post explains how overstimulation from activities like social media and music can lead to procrastination, making it difficult to focus on tasks. It discusses the role of dopamine in the brain's reward system and suggests strategies such as a dopamine detox to reduce distractions and improve productivity. Implementing methods to decrease accessibility to distracting apps can help create a focused environment.

Willpower Won't Work, Here's Why You Can't Stop Procrastinating

So, this is how humans these days feel huh?

Hey <a href="https://app.daily.dev/zeystiv" data-mention-id="HdWUhdpT5PYSHPix806B6" data-mention-username="zeystiv" translate="no">@zeystiv</a> , nice piece.
Here’s one recommendation, try to work on readability for your content.
One way you can do that is once you are done writing your post (only do it after, not before or while writing) - paste it into <a href="https://hemingwayapp.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://hemingwayapp.com/</a>
Don’t use any AI or flashy features, just use the basic tool and see where readability can be improved.
Stuff like long sentences, complex structure, overuse of adverbs or adjectives - etc.
Try to aim for a score of 6-7 to begin with.
Once you are consistently hitting it, then don’t rely on the tool anymore and build your own voice.
Think of this as training wheels to get better quality stuff out there. Writing is subjective, but it needs to be accessible at the end of the day.
Hope it helps!