Dopamine Part 3

Blog Contents

The Third Act

Right then, it’s the third act in the movie called Lack of Concentration & Focus: Revenge of the Redirected Dopamine (come on Netflix, I’m waiting for the call. I think I should be played by Matt Damon, or Brett Goldstein). We had the setup & problem in part 1 which was me struggling to concentrate on learning something new, reading a chapter in a book, and finishing tasks. Then in part 2 we had me struggling to find the problem and root cause, and finding out about how dopamine affects the desire to do things you want to do. Now, let’s get to the redemption part when we think all hope is lost but then at the last minute it all works out. I’ll take you through what I did, and I’ll be honest, still doing. This is not an “overnight quick fix go about your day” thing, it’s something that I need to concentrate on every. single. damn. day.

All of the following is what I have done, this is not a cookie cutter and will not work for everyone, we’re all different, we all have different motivations and drivers. I can’t say for sure that any of what I talk about in this part will help at all. I hope it does. It might sound very simplistic as it’s mostly about limiting usage of devices which leads to distractions, so if you think “well, I know that already” please bear with me as I’ll try and put more context around it. I just can’t limit my usage without there being some reward for doing that, something that tells my brain “oh don’t pick that up, that’s not where you get your dopamine reward from.”

Reprogramming

I want to get a word out of the way first that I see in a lot of reading about focus, reprogramming. It sounds serious, it sounds a little scary to be honest. Reprogramming yourself sounds dystopian and I don’t want to reprogram myself, I quite like myself sometimes. Sure, there are some lifestyle changes I need to make, but does it warrant something as serious as reprogramming? Well, I think of it more as redirecting rather than reprogramming and that makes it a little less scary as it’s about adjustments. It’s about getting your brain to think about things slightly differently and want to reward you for the meaningful things in your life and work that you want and need to do, and not to crave the easy dopamine hits. If in your journey to reclaim your focus you see the word reprogramming, don’t be too alarmed like I was initially!

Discipline & Being Mindful

None of what I put in action would work without discipline and lucky for my logical mind it turns out that being disciplined is also something the brain helps you with in terms of chemical release. My reading on the subject of focus dug up a link between both dopamine and serotonin, where dopamine is the drive and reward system while serotonin is the mood regulator and impulse controller.

In terms of discipline, I found that if I’m disorganised or I don’t have a reasonably clear plan about what the day will bring then I tend to drift and procrastinate. Ultimately the brain likes it when you get meaningful things done, so I needed to help it by at least organising what meaningful things I was going to do. And the outcome of that is a clear list of objectives which should give you a buzz of excitement to get done. Well, “buzz” might be a strong word but the issue here is that dopamine is being used to reward you, therefore you should be anticipating this reward based on the meaningful activities.

So I need a daily plan to make sure I’m focused on what I need to do today. Any of the self-help resources to do with organising or getting stuff done always talks about setting long term goals and while yes I do have long term goals, that’s not going to help me in my immediate future. I need to be able to see what I need to do now so that my brain is prepared for the day. It’s important here to note that I stopped overloading myself with too many tasks, it just doesn’t work. Of course we’d all like to get dozens of highly important and high worth tasks done on a daily basis, but it ain’t happening and you’re just putting unnecessary pressure on yourself. I make a list of what I need to get done at the bare minimum, and those that are nice-to-haves. I prioritise those tasks and lay them out across my daily schedule, same thing people have done for centuries so there’s nothing groundbreaking here but it’s often so overlooked. It’s something I have to be hugely disciplined to make sure I do, rather than just winging it during the day. After all, completing these tasks should lead to that slow dopamine release that’s good for me.

Devices

We have to talk about devices, these are the modern dopamine hijackers. Phones, tablets, & laptops are the easily accessible devices & you’re likely reading this on a phone right now. We carry our phones everywhere, they do everything in our modern lives. I’ll include desktop computers in this too because if you’re sat in front of one then it’s very easy to become distracted too. The problem I found is that it was far too simplistic to just say “well, I’ll just lock certain apps on my phone” or “I’ll put my phone out of reach” or even to put it somewhere extremely inconvenient. But that didn’t work for me, I could easily unlock the apps and I found it extremely inconvenient to not have access to the phone to use vital processes like multi-factor authentication (MFA) to log into work resources. Instead, I had to focus on not picking it up, working on controlling the impulse to pick it up, or if I needed to use it for work then doing what I need to do then putting it straight down.

My phone has activity tracking on, this is across the other devices in the eco-system as well so I can see exactly how much time I’m spending each minute of the day. I would usually have somewhere in the region of 6 hours of activity tracked per day… I set a goal to cut that in half.

Routine

The routine is a bit like the parent here, with the list of things to get done as the children. I fit the things into the routine, it’s the routine that will ultimately help. This is the part that requires a hell of a lot of discipline not to break. I don’t always adhere to it, I’m not a robot… but I at least know what I should be doing and that’s part of the discipline and mindfulness. Here’s the basic daily routine, I won’t include tasks here because it’s interchangeable day to day, weekdays the tasks are mostly around work and at the weekend it’s mostly family time and DIY. Oh did I tell you I hate DIY? You see, I’m not very good at it… I’m not going to put timescales here, or specific times as we’re all different. It’s the process of the routine that matters, it’s what I need to do and not do that’s important. In fact, the not do is probably the most important.

Wake up (well, we all need to start somewhere)
Do not pick up any device as soon as I wake up to check activity. This is emails, social media, WhatsApp, messages, all those things that will hijack my dopamine. I need to get started on the right foot and not get dragged in. If I start the day with a device, it becomes incredibly difficult to redirect my attention from then on.
Do not take any device to the toilet or bathroom, yes really! Come on, admit it…you do it….
Do not pick up a device when with my children. This includes sorting them for school in the morning and then after school. How will it look if they see me distracted on a device? It’s not exactly the best model of behaviour. It also sends signals of “you’re not as important as my device.”
Use the family phone jail. this is a fantastic place to store phones. I bought it when we gave my eldest daughter a mobile phone and when her friends come round, they all put their phones in it. And you know what? Not a single one moaned about it, or in fact mentioned it for hours afterwards. It really helps me to compartmentalise my phone, and I put it there most evenings. I know where it is, and I know I shouldn’t be using it.
Cleaning and keeping work area clean. It’s a task, it’s also a task that might take 5-10 minutes depending on dusting, clearing away plates and cups. But it’ll still be a slower dopamine release activity (more on this).
Creating my daily schedule. I created a daily planner called HaiTime and I put my current day in, no more. Yes, I do have longer term plans and I do have to plan and schedule accordingly, but zooming into a single day allows me to not feel overwhelmed. I also don’t feel like I can enter a flow state without a little planning upfront, it means my brain doesn’t have to think too much about what’s coming up. It also means I can (try) and push things that are coming up in the next days/weeks/months to one side and concentrate on the current.
Do not take any devices to bed that can provide me a route into checking activity. I read my Kindle, that’s part of the meaningful activities list. It takes discipline to pick it up and read a few pages rather than watch one of many retro video game YouTube channels…

Look, as I’ve said this is the utopia, this is the ideal I strive for each day. Do I get there all the time? Do I f**k… but it’s there, and I know it’s what I need to be doing.

Meaningful Activities

It’s not just the technical learning, reading technical books, or work tasks that suffered as well. Many other things that I love to do fell by the wayside, again distracted by non-nutritious device usage. So it helped me to get back to various hobbies and interests because I was surprised to learn that I’d been neglecting them. Personal projects were left unfinished…

So I did think that as part of getting my dopamine redirected, I thought there’s no point jumping straight in and putting unnecessary pressure on myself to try and get what I need done, I’ll just put the course learning and reading to one side for the time being and concentrate on these other meaningful activities. What are these activities? Well, you’d be surprised if I told you I am quite a big retro game lover and I love a good console modification. Guess what…that takes effort and effort getting into a flow state, so by concentrating on a small project I was able to get satisfaction from completing it. And yes, it’s unfathomable to me to think that video games were always touted as the brain rot, the bad influence, the activity that would destroy your brain. Now I’m using video games to get my attention span back!

That’s just a small part though, spending time building Lego with the kids, walking the dog without taking my phone with me (even if I was listening to audio books), DIY/renovations in my house all counted towards getting my focus back. I sound like a bad father saying things like “spending time with my kids building Lego” as if I had neglected this, but to be honest with school and after school activities it’s very easy to let what time you do have during the week slip away…

By getting back into meaningful activities in my life, it then had an effect on my focus when I sat down to read technical content, learning, and work tasks.

I also allocated meaningful activities a doable timeframe, instead of thinking “well, I’ll do this for 3 hours straight” I planned the activity in smaller chunks, no shorter than 30 minutes. This meant that I wasn’t daunted by a long running activity and could “look forward” to it more as it was broken down into smaller chunks.

Doing Something With The Downtime

This is something important when considering how to minimise dopamine hijacking as it’s not about what you do during meaningful activities but what you do in-between. In part 2 I showed a graph whereby I sandwiched 2 meaningful activities around a “reward” , those 2 activities were writing code and the reward (such as it was…) was a scroll through my socials. The effect this had ruined all the good work I had done to build up a slower dopamine release through coding work by then spiking my dopamine through short-form content…then it proved very difficult to get back into another coding session. So the point here is that I abstained from looking at social media in-between activities. I switched the reward out for something that wouldn’t trash my dopamine, in my case I made sure I had plenty of things to read, walk the dog, get up from my desk and get active.

So it’s about helping myself when trying to get going with meaningful activities. I needed to be able to stop myself dipping into those activities that give the dopamine hits. So although I didn’t start by immediately jumping into fulfilling tasks, I made sure that when I wasn’t trying to do those tasks, I didn’t distract myself and hijack my dopamine. I’m not joking when I say that if I was sat at my desk getting some learning/reading/tasks done and stopped for a while, I just sat there in silence with the monitor switched off. Honestly, I’m not joking.

It’s difficult for all instances of downtime, all those little bits of time like waiting in the car for 5 minutes for the kids to jump in from school, or simply waiting somewhere for an appointment. Any situation whereby it’s so very easy to whip out the ol’ phone and start scrolling. And I think it’s because the brain has got used to this “scrolling to pass the time”. My brain was getting agitated if I wasn’t doing something… I can’t tell you what you need to do to stop picking up a device in between meaningful activities, but you definitely should do something.

The Environment

Most of the problems I faced were when I was sat at my desk, it’s unavoidable. It’s where I do all my work, most of my learning as I need things like multiple monitors, space for notepads etc. That space needs to be free of distractions & clutter, and in fact doing cleaning and tidying on a daily basis actually contributes positively to a slower dopamine release. It’s a meaningful activity and will always make you feel better to have done it. It takes me a few minutes to tidy up, take any plates and cups to the sink/dishwasher, a light dusting if needed. Putting things back on shelves like books, blocks of sticky notes. I make sure my work area is free of clutter, I don’t go overboard and just have a keyboard and monitor, but I make sure it’s tidy.

Set Point Theory

I want to touch on something here in a little segue that relates to the reprogramming I spoke about earlier. There is something called set point theory in body weight in which your body and brain work together, sometimes against your own will, to maintain you at a certain weight (homeostasis, exactly like your brain does with attempting to balance dopamine). This is often talked about as a genetic process, in that it’s just in your genetic makeup to be a certain weight. So if it’s genetic then that’s that, right? Nothing you can do. Well, not entirely. You can reprogram your brain and body to accept another set point. But it’s going to take time, which is why you must resist the urge to take the advice of the health and fitness grifters out there who will try and sell you a program to drastically change your weight in 7, 10, 14, 30 days. You know the ones…they’re all over social media with videos like “We start Monday! Come and join me and drop 10 Ibs by the end of the week!” No, don’t do it.

How does this relate to dopamine? Well…set point theory raises an interesting question about reprogramming, if you can reprogram your mind to change a weight set point then you can certainly reprogram your mind to accept other “things” to change behavior like where you get your sustainable dopamine hits from.

It Is Done…Or Is It?

And there we have it. 3 blog posts I had no intention of writing because I never thought to write about focus, attention span, social media, or dopamine in the first place. It was all down to that 2025 review blog post I wrote and the part about my attention span as it got a lot of folk talking about having the same issue. It’s been a real journey for me to try and make sense of the attention span part and put down in words what the problem was and how I’m continuing to deal with it. I had to try and do all this constructively without, well, moaning about it all too much. If that makes sense. It’s a daily mindful process to make sure I pay attention to my focus and make sure I (try) and avoid activities which move me further away from my goals and what I want to do and get done.

I hope that whatever I’ve written in this 3 part blog has made some sense and that some of it is helpful.

Reach out to talk to me about any of this stuff, I’m over here Andy Cutler | LinkedIn

The Third Act

Reprogramming

Discipline & Being Mindful

Devices

Routine

Meaningful Activities

Doing Something With The Downtime

The Environment

Set Point Theory

It Is Done…Or Is It?

Reference

By Andy

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