# The laziness cure you don't want to hear ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Better Ideas - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSNJUgc2PNQ ## Содержание ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSNJUgc2PNQ) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) Let me know if this sounds familiar to you. You just started playing a new video game. Maybe you started playing it because a friend told you it was fun. Or maybe you started watching some YouTube gameplay videos about it, so you decided to give it a try. And at first, it feels kind of shitty. You don't really get it. You're not very good at it, so it genuinely feels tedious to play. The experience of playing the video game is pain. But you stick with it a little bit. You suspect that maybe if you just put a few more hours into it, something will click. And quite often, something does. When that click happens, all of a sudden, what was once tedious becomes addicting. You discover the core gameplay loop. And that core gameplay loop keeps you playing for hours and hours on end until it's cutting into your sleep. You're playing till 3:00 a. m. And your entire family leaves you for someone who doesn't do that. If this situation sounds familiar to you, then you will have no problem understanding the phenomenon of laziness. Because in life, we work hard at various things every single day. We know we're supposed to put in long hours of doing the right thing because we've been told by our parents, society at large, or by ourselves that it's what we should do. But the payoff for doing these things often feels lacking, like we don't really understand the point. And when we don't understand the point or the reward, we won't be motivated to do it. And when we're not motivated to do the good things we're supposed to do, we think of ourselves as lazy. But the fact is, you're not lazy. You have seemingly no problem putting in long hours towards things that you find enjoyable or fun. But when you can't see the point, you can't feel the motivation. In other words, if you haven't discovered the core gameplay loop, you won't be incentivized to play. So, how does a core gameplay loop even work? Why do some things feel addicting and others feel super boring? And what if there was a way to feel that same desire and motivation that you might feel towards video games or watching your favorite show, but towards doing things that would improve your life to a significant degree? Well, there is a way. And the first step is to understand what's going on under the hood. So here we go. You are only motivated to do anything in life not because the thing is enjoyable, but because you think it might be. Now that might sound kind of funny, but it's true. You're only motivated to do something not because it's enjoyable, but because you think it might be. A good example can be found in watching sports. People sit down to watch their favorite sports team in the hopes that their team will win the game. But when your team is getting utterly brutalized, it's not very fun. But sports fans will typically watch anyways. Why is that? Why would you continue to sit there and watch your team get scored on and lose badly even if it isn't enjoyable? Well, it's because it might be. You keep watching because your team might score. It's the hope that keeps you glued to the screen even when the activity itself is in no way pleasurable. This is due to a psychological phenomenon known as reward prediction error. And it's the reason why gamblers gamble, why smokers smoke, and why League of Legends players exist. You expect that the activity that you sit down to do will be enjoyable. And when circumstances don't play out in the way that you expect, this puts you in a state of dopamine deprivation. Your reward prediction had an error and it feels bad. It wounds you and it makes you crave the antidote that might just be around the corner. It's almost like developing a habit of cramming your foot into an extremely tight shoe only to experience the eventual relief of taking it off. We've been gaslit into believing that our return back to baseline is pleasurable. Here's another example. If you and I were sitting on the couch just chilling out together and I show you a funny meme on my phone, you'd probably say, "Ha, that's pretty funny. " And then you'd go about your day feeling kind of the same, maybe a little bit better off because I have a brilliant sense of humor, but also because we shared a little moment of human connection, a little shared experience. But what you probably wouldn't feel is a restless agitation, desperate for me to show you another meme. — Okay, that's good. — Yeah. — Okay, next one. — What? — Next one. Again. — What? — Again. Okay, — but that's exactly how you feel when you're scrolling YouTube shorts or browsing funny memes by yourself. — Even our Chinese made playing cards. — You like that one? — It's pretty funny. Like I think that's funny about it is — just go next. — But you know like China, right? It's a country. — Yeah. China. Oh. Oh yeah. They can't spell. — And the joke is that things that are made in China are not good quality. So it's like it's proving — go to the next. Because when you're caught in a doomcrolling loop, you're sifting through mostly unfunny videos ### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSNJUgc2PNQ&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) which is slightly psychologically painful, which makes you crave finding an actually funny video to ease the pain. The feeling of compulsion, the motivation to keep going, doesn't come from anticipating pleasure, but anticipating the relief of the agitation. The agitation that was caused by participating in the activity in the first place. This is the dopamine illusion and it's the core mechanic in a gameplay loop. It's also the very thing that we need to weaponize in order to make our real life activities more motivating and addicting. Before we dive into that, I just want to thank the sponsor of today's video, AG1, who have recently released a new and improved version of AG1 they're calling AG1 NextG. And along with it, they've released a bunch of new flavors, one of which I really, really like, which is the berry flavor. I don't really know how they did it, but the berry flavor actually tastes delicious. It's so much better than the original flavor, and I already liked the original flavor. And for those of you who don't know, AG1 is by far my most taken supplement of all time. And that's because it's loaded with over 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food sourced ingredients in every single scoop. It's honestly just the easiest way to make sure you're covering your nutritional bases. My diet is far from perfect, and if you're watching this video, that's probably you, too. So, I like using AG1 to make sure that I'm filling in any nutritional gaps I might have that I definitely have. So, if you're interested in joining me and trying out all the new flavors of AG1 for yourself, then if you use my link in the description below or scan the QR code you're seeing on screen right now, when you subscribe, you will get a free welcome kit worth $76, including five AG1 travel packs, a shaker, a canister, and a scoop. So, make sure to take advantage of that exclusive offer by clicking my link in the description below or scanning the QR code you're seeing on the screen right now. And thanks again to AG1 for sponsoring this video. Okay, so how do we develop the core gameplay loop of our lives so that we feel motivated and mobilized to do constructive behaviors rather than destructive ones? Well, basically only one thing needs to happen. We need to feel more dopamine towards the things that we want to do. It's that simple. It's that simple because dopamine is motivation. What if I told you that all of the dopamine that you need in life is already inside your brain? Most people are under the illusion, the impression that things give them dopamine, right? Like they want to play a video game and that thing is giving them dopamine or they want to eat a nice tasty ice cream cone and they lick it and they're getting dopamine from it. But that's a little silly, right? That's not how it works because the dopamine is already inside your brain. Your brain just needs permission to release it. and it releases it based on whether or not you expect a reward. Expectation is everything. If you don't understand the point of what you're doing, if you cannot even anticipate or fathom any potential reward, then you won't feel motivation towards that thing. It's as simple as that. So, if you want to feel more motivated to do your work, you have to ask yourself, what's in it for you? Do you even want to? What can you hope to gain from doing what you need to do? Not just in the future, but now. How would it make you feel to finally sit there and get it done, do what you need to do? Would you feel a sense of relief, maybe some inner peace? You know, asking yourself these questions might sound trivial, but you probably know better than anybody that you don't want to do what do, right? If something doesn't sound fun to you, enjoyable, you're probably going to really drag your feet on it. You're going to procrastinate the hell out of it. So simply sitting there and imagining why it might be enjoyable to do what you need to do, you will get a squirt of dopamine. You will feel motivated to do it. But the question is, will you be able to feel that dopamine? And if you can't, then you have to tackle the other problem, dopamine desensitization. And this is the part of the video that you might not want to hear. If you want to feel more motivated in life, if you want to cure your laziness, then you have to stop doing things that desensitize you to dopamine. Scrolling YouTube shorts is not free. Watching two people you don't know, getting intimate on camera for money while you do nasty things to yourself is not free. These activities that have you constantly hunting and seeking and searching for the right clip are overloading your dopamine receptors to the point where they die off. And that makes you less sensitive to the natural motivation that's already inside you. There's a very good chance that you are motivated to do your job. go to the gym. Your brain is releasing dopamine just fine. You just can't feel it because you're living with dopamine receptor atrophy. And the cure is brutally simple. You just have to stop. And that's what the first half of the video is about. Hopefully, you now know that you're not actually addicted to any kind of reward or pleasure, but merely to the anticipation ### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSNJUgc2PNQ&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 11:00) of reward. Then you'll also know that you're not actually missing out on anything if you stop. By stopping, you're just freeing yourself from a mental prison you never enjoyed anyways. So, how long does it take if you stop engaging with this mental prison? How long before your motivation comes back? Well, in my experience, there's both an acute instant benefit that happens the day you stop, and there's also a long-term benefit of about 3 weeks, but I notice a huge difference between days where I start the day by doom scrolling a little bit and then try to do work versus days where I don't do that. I start my day off a little bit slower and then I somehow have more motivation to sit there and do work. It's like magic. And I think this is because our brain works in contrast, right? If you start the day off with blasting your brain and using all the dopamine that you have in your brain and then try to do something less dopamineergic, more naturally dopamineergic, it feels super boring and tedious. So there's an acute instant effect to not doom scrolling today. And if you can go 3 weeks with this mindset and this new lifestyle of identifying the trap for what it is, then you'll notice that after 3 weeks, your motivation just starts flooding back. Like things that you thought were boring that you couldn't focus on for more than 11 minutes, you can dive into and you're not feeling restless or agitated or wanting to do something else. You're just calm and smooth. When you achieve dopamine reensitization, you won't need little tips and tricks to stop looking at your phone because you won't want to look at your phone. The benefits will be inarguable. Normal healthy things in your life, work, exercise, learning, creativity, socializing will feel exciting and engaging and motivating to do. And this isn't just wishful thinking. It's a biological reality. Solve your dopamine and you will solve your laziness. --- *Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/23984*