The modern world is absolutely full of noise and distraction. For years now we’ve been bombarded by emails, junk mail, social media notifications, text messages, and a non stop barrage of infinitely scrolling feeds and screens psychologically designed to keep us hooked, fry our brains, and inundate us with advertisements.

However, this does not need to be the default human experience, and I will provide some tips on simple changes we can make to re-tune our brains away from this “dopamine overload” and towards action, mental calm, equanimity, and focus.

First we must ask the question — what is it we are seeking by spending hours mindlessly scrolling Instagram, TikTok, etc? What mythical treasure do we think exists at the bottom of the feed? Or instead is it simply a distraction, a means of escaping reality for a while?

Instead of consuming content of other people’s lives and exposing ourself to a constant stream of other people’s thoughts, instead we should take action within our own lives. Whether it’s improving our fitness, actually implementing self-help advice, or starting a business - this is the kind of content that overloads our feeds, but yet rarely actually gets integrated and implemented in our own lives.

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I write this with no judgement, this is a problem I face as much as anyone, and it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time trying to fix.

I think the single greatest means to break out of the dopamine cycle is to spend some time away from screens, visualizing what it is you want to achieve in life, what projects you want to build, what experiences you want to have, what skills to learn, and what goals you are working towards. Some goals, like getting fit or mastering a skill, are not a “fixed destination” either, but a lifestyle that you must adopt and stick with for the long haul (years, decades).

This might sound grueling, straining, and difficult (and yes, it is). However, the joy and happiness of working towards and making meaningful progress towards a goal is far greater than the pain you would feel later by sitting on your couch and neglecting it. The pain of inaction is far worse than the temporary pain of action.

In order to best visualize your goals and plan your future, it helps to be in a calm state. Sit down for 30 minutes and meditate with slow deep breaths, take a warm shower, go for a walk, read a book for a while. Do things that naturally calm down your nervous system. It is easy to be in a state of chronic stress these days, and being mentally or physically stressed is not a good baseline for making calm, level-headed, rational decisions about your future.

So do something you enjoy, do something that’s calming, let your body relax for once, and then sit still, and plan out what it is you would like to work towards.

Some examples might include: moving to a new city, starting a business, learning an instrument, writing a book, building a gym/fitness routine, learning how to cook healthy food, prioritizing sleep and longevity, or building stronger relationships.

All of these things are difficult and require energy and focus poured into them. But the first step to making any kind of change is deciding what you actually want to do, and what you are working towards.

“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”

— Seneca

The only path to a better future stems from right here, right now, in the present moment.

There is no tomorrow, there is no future state where you magically achieve your goals in one day. You only change in your current lived experience. If you continue making the same choices you’ve always made, and you continue waking up and performing the same habits every day, don’t expect anything to change in your future.

Change is slow, steady, and meandering. Pick a goal, become obsessed with it, and you will naturally start making the correct choices necessary to achieve the goal, and to reach the place you are striving for.

Practical Steps

I do not recommend an “all or nothing” approach. If you simply delete all social media, throw out your TV, and try to make radical overnight change, unless you are the mythical 1% of people this approach works for, you’re more likely to fail and slide back into your old habits in a few days, weeks, or months.

The far more practical, and enjoyable approach is to start focusing on one thing at a time.

If you want to spend less time on your phone, disable a bunch of notifications, delete distracting apps, set your phone to grayscale or a black background, and design the digital environment to be less distracting.

If you want to start running, lace up your running shoes, and go out for a jog. Do this a few days a week, and stick to this routine.

This is how nature works, an oak tree does not magically appear overnight. It starts as a small acorn, and over many years it grows slowly and steadily, never stopping, continuing to push forward through rain, snow, wind, heat, and cold.

As you start doing these things, your identity starts to shift. This is a big point James Clear makes in the book Atomic Habits where to make a habit or lifestyle truly stick, it is more than just discipline, it actually requires a shift in your identity, how you view and describe yourself.

A personal example of the “identity shift” — I am not simply a guy who hates jogging and forces himself to run 3 days a week. I am a runner. This is what I tell myself, so even if I’m battling injury, or if it’s a brutally cold winter — I am a runner, so I find a way to go out and run as soon as I’m able to.

As your identity shifts towards whatever the ideal version of yourself that you are building is, it becomes easier. In fact it actually becomes difficult to break your habits. Once you are enjoying the new skill/routine you’ve built, it actually nags at the back of your mind if you haven’t done it. If you are a runner that has been running 3 days a week for years, and you miss a couple days, you have a constant voice in your head that wants to go run. The goal is rewiring your brain slowly away from the “bad” habits (like a constant desire to pull out your phone) to the “good” habits (like a desire to go for a run).

There are plenty of habit tracking apps and tools (I even built one recently, as a fun project to learn SwiftUI iOS dev). However honestly, what has always worked best for me is just pen and paper notes. I write down what it is I want to achieve (such as building this new website/blog was one of my most recent goals), and take notes on what steps are required to get there. Then over time as I knock down each milestone I strike it off on my notebook, and keep moving onto the next item.

The workflow is simple:

  1. Pick your goal
  2. Define the steps to get there
  3. Put in the work every day, mark off the tasks as you achieve them.
  4. Over time, you will reach the goal, and it will become automatic.

After a few weeks or months of doing this it becomes automatic too. It’s good to stay organized, but once you’ve ingrained the new pattern in your life, you don’t need to fret about tracking it too much. It becomes a habit, something you do automatically. And this is good, because it means less mental overwhelm trying to keep track of everything you “need to do” today.

Tying It All Together

This skill I’ve laid out has always been valuable, however, it is becoming even more valuable in the modern world of AI. Nowadays anyone can type “make me a website” into ChatGPT and it will do a pretty convincing job. Yes it’s not going to be perfect, but it can produce websites, code, apps, images, etc. to a pretty good degree fast. So why are humans even necessary at all?

Well, because AI systems do not (currently, maybe ever) have a built in will of their own. There is no problem they are trying to solve, no existential angst they are battling, no deeper questions about life or the world they are asking, no desire to have experiences of their own, and no curiosity to learn how or why something is the way it is.

So if we have access to this tool to do our work significantly faster, the questions we ask and the problems we are trying to solve become more important than ever.

Each and every one of us has an absolutely unique being. The family we were raised in, our DNA and genes, the experiences we’ve had over our lifetime, the people and relationships we’ve formed, the work and skills we’ve built, the problems and anxieties we’ve battled. No other person throughout all of history, nor ever again, will exist that is exactly you.

And there’s something beautiful and powerful in this. You have a unique edge, a skillset and a view of the world that is not exactly the same as anyone else. So ask yourself, what edge do you have? What do you feel like you were meant to do in this life, what is your potential, what ideas and goals seem to stick with you over years? What has always felt easiest and almost clicked instantly?

For me personally, it’s to write. I love writing, and for years now I’ve neglected and not done it (so here we are!) — Ask yourself what you’ve always been drawn to, what you are innately good at, what you are curious about, and what you find enjoyable to do.

The person who truly loves what they are doing and finds it fun will always outperform the person who just forces themselves to do it for the money or the esteem it provides.

Ultimately life is a marathon not a sprint. This doesn’t mean we should sit idly by and allow time to pass without action, however, it does mean we should do things we can stick with for the long haul, and that we genuinely enjoy doing in the moment.

And so to wrap it up — to survive against a world built to keep us addicted, to distract and overwhelm us, to keep us trapped in a system we didn’t design, we must stand against the current.

Define the life you want to live, and take action to achieve it.

Start small, allow positive choices each day to compound and grow over time, and before you know it you will build a great future and a lifestyle where discipline, achievement, and success becomes ingrained in your being.

Thanks for reading!

Gavin