A new challenge I’ve been thinking about for some time: Tracking small negative habits that induce quick dopamine.
My theory is, I can’t stop it if I can’t consciously track it. And matter of fact I thought of this dopamine thing because I wanted to break the loop so bad. I caught myself responding to a whole lot of distracting habits that clearly reflect on how I’m performing through the day to day.
Talking about:
- Junk food
- Junk media
- Phone in bed (before & after sleep)
- Online rabbit holes
I’m sure I read it lots of times that quick dopamine is the devil of the modern age. My alertness & focus are taking a hit because of it, my sleep consistency is affected, and worst of all: I can’t just be mindful about it for 24/7. Sometimes I’m indulged.
The tendency to experience lots of short spikes back to back throughout the day clearly hinders progress for bigger & more important things. Progress for bigger things often require delayed gratification. And these short highs that I get from negative habits often increase procrastination and induce a fog on my sense of purpose. There’s nothing urgent anymore if I can just get momentary happiness from things that do not make sense.
For the next few months, I want to optimize for two main goals:
- Daily Focus (hours of deep work per day)
- Intense Workouts (number of effective lifting sessions per week)
So lately I decided to take on a 100-day challenge through which I will track a set of daily metrics for the purpose of minimizing distraction.
Negative habits I will pay attention to:
- Number of phone pickups per day (available under Screentime on iPhone)
- Time spent on social media, collectively, per day
- Duration of online rabbit holes per day (time spent subconsciously during which I’m browsing a niche topic that suddenly grabbed my interest)
- Amount of junk food per day (saturated fat + added sugar)
- How many cups of coffee per day
- Time spent on phone late at night, and early in the morning
This feels like a great timing to take on this challenge, because as we’re shipping the new journal app Hyperspaces, it’s definitely going to help with these sorts of controlled experiments through daily tracking. The app will have a daily, weekly, and monthly dashboard through which you can instantly look at how you’re performing.
How Hyperspaces makes this possible:
- You can connect your phone & computer screentime directly into your journal, for a detailed breakdown on how you spent your time on your screens
- You can connect your nutrition app directly into your journal (MyFitnessPal, Cronometer, LoseIt), to be able to track your macros intake across time
- You can write down any kind of manual input, so for example you’d want to track some score that isn’t coming from any external app or service (e.g in my case, I’m keeping a “Dopamine Ctrl Score”, a figurative measure that helps me compare how I’m doing across time)
Aim is to simplify tracking as much as possible and help you look into your data to draw conclusions and take actions.
Challenge started this week and ends on Tuesday September 19th.
In the meantime, I’ll be writing about how this challenge is going during the upcoming few weeks.
Stay healthy!
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