Yay nihilism. /s You can ascribe nearly anything to pleasure and dopamine. Never mind that a lot of people are addicted to facebook content partly because it generates a negative feeling.
Dopamine Fasting
41–50 of 137 posts
Re: Dopamine Fasting
#42Terribly biased hit piece on Silicon Valley, here is my rebuttal: https://medium.com/@DrSepah/why-the-media-lies-to-you-about-...
yes they are violating the recommendation of Dr. Sepah's proposal and make it into a purity trip, a meditation retreat in daily life. "You don't need to “do nothing” or meditate during a dopamine fast (unless you’d like to). Just engage in regular activities that reflect your values: - Health-Promoting (exercise, cooking) - Leading (helping, serving others) - Relating (talking, bonding over activities) - Learning (re…
This is something I came to slowly realize in the search for repairing my attention/depression issues. So far I've been getting good results. It started with giving up amphetamines (adderall, vyvanse), when that didn't do the trick, I removed alcohol and caffiene from my diet. The benefits I experienced led to stop smoking marijuana as well. That one was the toughest to give up, the anhedonia was torturous. It was like my brain forgot how to make dopamine. I couldn't enjoy any activity.
It's been 38 days since I stopped smoking, and it seems that things are starting to improve. I'm able to work on my creative endeavors again in multiple short bursts. I've also massively cut down on porn consumption (from daily to biweekly on average, but trying to get rid of it all). As well as halved my newsmedia consumption (an avg of 10 hours a week down to 5, another thing I want to get close to zero).
I've been reading a lot more, mostly philosophy (stoicism, daoism), but also worked through some other self help books as well as some science fiction. Still playing lots of games but, Im using it as my support system for the time being. Eventually I want to get even games down to just a very select few titles.
It's am ongoing process, tempting to want to rid myself of everything but that would be setting myself up for failure, too overwhelming. Must ease into things. the benefits have been manifold, discipline, concentration, memory, emotional control have all improved, which cascade into fitness, eating better, getting work done, less procrastination, and my favorite: more time. Bill Burr said "a year sober is the longest year of your life" and it's true, the clock passes so much slower, which is great, life is starting to feel plentiful again.
Anyway, I digress. But what I did notice is that is all comes back to dopamine. Some activities seem to give it more sustainably, others supernormally. And by limiting supernormal stimuli, we should expect to see positive effects.
Re: Dopamine Fasting
#43I liked this article. It seems like these guys are seeking some peace of mind during big time life stress. It seems like they might enjoy meditating?
I was feeling mild about the whole thing until the very end where he decides not to talk to a friend long unseen because he's fasting.
Come on, that's just ridiculously pretentious no matter what your goals or intentions are.
Re: Dopamine Fasting
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes they are violating the recommendation of Dr. Sepah's proposal and make it into a purity trip, a meditation retreat in daily life. "You don't need to “do nothing” or meditate during a dopamine fast (unless you’d like to). Just engage in regular activities that reflect your values: - Health-Promoting (exercise, cooking) - Leading (helping, serving others) - Relating (talking, bonding over activities) - Learning (re…
This is something I came to slowly realize in the search for repairing my attention/depression issues. So far I've been getting good results. It started with giving up amphetamines (adderall, vyvanse), when that didn't do the trick, I removed alcohol and caffiene from my diet. The benefits I experienced led to stop smoking marijuana as well. That one was the toughest to give up, the anhedonia was torturous. It was li…
Do intense physical exercise, that’s the missing link in your plan. You’ve got basically all the other key parts in place.
Re: Dopamine Fasting
#45>It consists of a period of abstention from earthy delights like sex, drugs, and, in some extreme cases, talking to other people, for 24 hours or more. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5qb9/dopamine-fasting-i...
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asceticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vow_of_silence
>In many monasteries it is the custom to begin the "Great Silence" after Compline, during which the whole community, including guests, observes silence throughout the night until the morning service the next day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compline
Re: Dopamine Fasting
#46Yay nihilism. /s You can ascribe nearly anything to pleasure and dopamine. Never mind that a lot of people are addicted to facebook content partly because it generates a negative feeling.
what is it about nihlism?
Re: Dopamine Fasting
#47The struggles of first world problems...
This is a very Silicon Valley sort of framing of a problem that is very core to the human experience. I’ve been reading through the (NIV) bible and it’s really interesting to connect a lot of passages to mindfulness (which derived from buddhism, also been around for thousands of years). It’s clear that humans have been struggling with the overactive mind for a long while.
Anyways, knock the dopamine fasting practice all you want, I sure do xD. But it’s not a first world problem at its core, people have had these problems in much less active times in humans history and across different societal structures.
Re: Dopamine Fasting
#48Terribly biased hit piece on Silicon Valley, here is my rebuttal: https://medium.com/@DrSepah/why-the-media-lies-to-you-about-...
I find that graph of media consumption outrageously hard to believe. The average person spends 11 out of 24 hours every day consuming media? People average 4 hours a day watching TV and 1.75 hours a day listening to the radio?
Seems absolutely plausible.
Re: Dopamine Fasting
#49Terribly biased hit piece on Silicon Valley, here is my rebuttal: https://medium.com/@DrSepah/why-the-media-lies-to-you-about-...
yes they are violating the recommendation of Dr. Sepah's proposal and make it into a purity trip, a meditation retreat in daily life. "You don't need to “do nothing” or meditate during a dopamine fast (unless you’d like to). Just engage in regular activities that reflect your values: - Health-Promoting (exercise, cooking) - Leading (helping, serving others) - Relating (talking, bonding over activities) - Learning (re…
> Leading (helping, serving others)
Helping and serving others is not leading at all. And leading is not helping and serving others.
Re: Dopamine Fasting
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bar chart in the rebuttal is pretty damning, though - just look at the gigantic confidence intervals. The real effects can plausibly be negative for all factors but "Healthy Daily Activities". Note that I neither defend the news media here, nor argue against news fasting. This particular study just isn't the final argument in the matter, in my opinion.
The 17% reduction in depression was statistically significant. Healthy daily activities was p = 0.057. I agree it's not the be-all & end-all study, but its promising.
Statistical significance is almost meaningless in this case (or necessesary, but not sufficient). One can calculate the necessary sample size to guarantee stasticial significance before the study even starts.
I just calculated it for this study: With an estimated small effect size (0.1), 95% confidence (α=0,05) und 1 degree of freedom you have guaranteed significance at n=197. Phase 2 of the study at hand had n=167, so almost guaranteed significance from the sample size alone.
The problem is that the confidence intervals are huge and their range covers the negative space, too. In other words: It is quite possible that a reproduction of the study would show negative results.