If I Procrastinate, Should I cut out all Distractions and Artificial Dopamine Sources?

so I'm going to answer a question here this is from someone who commented in one of my last videos and it was about the idea in my last video was about not overwhelming ourselves and that being the tendency to do that is one of the the main things that causes us to disengage with our important life goals so I think it's Dan wrote a question here and it's I'd like to say that the problem you describe is totally me I would also tend to say that my disengagement leads to a desire to hyper stimulate dopamine by scrolling through social media which worsens the feeling of being overwhelmed it doesn't recharge my batteries enough to re-engage I fully understand the situation intellectually but applying it in real life is a whole other story and getting out of the disengagement loop that leads to escaping those social media is through social media is difficult do you have any suggestions other than being mindful of the situation doing the minimum to stay engage is a bit vague when the goals you're seeking are important and sometimes have a deadline okay so that stands question so this thing about um engaging with this these activities like scrolling online and it's uh maybe it's like a dopamine release but noticing that actually this doesn't actually make me feel that good it certainly doesn't lead me to relax even or certainly to move forward with your goals so should you just be more strict on yourself and just say that's it I'm not looking at social media anymore you see there can be certain things in life that we determine okay I have identified that that is a problem in my life and it's causing me harm directly and I need to take an approach where it's I need to just cut that out or stop that entirely that is an option and at some point sometimes in life that is necessary to do but that's one approach if we to take that approach with everything which is a viable option the tendency is that we we become this like kind of overly repressed people so maybe there's like sometimes you do that and then sometimes there's another way to handle things like this so I certainly empathize with the person here who's saying Dan saying in the question I'm not feeling recharged by this doesn't make me feel good and that is a typical experience when when we have procrastination as a problem I'm not working and I'm actually not enjoying myself I'm engaged with things that you know typically you would associate with pleasure but I'm actually not enjoying it so you're in this limbo state where you're not making any progress and you're actually not enjoying yourself so one thing I would suggest before we get to the point where you have to decide about cting things out entirely which we could do at some point if that's necessary but first we would look at okay boundaries so playing video games or scrolling social media whatever it might be are we doing it intentionally proactively on purpose or are we falling into it passively as a way to kind of avoid working one option would be to say instead of cutting things out of my life I'm going to do certain things on purpose so now okay scrolling social media it's not about scrolling social media it's whether you have permission to scroll social media so one thing will be okay here's two hours like and you might say look I don't have two hours to spend scrolling social media and here I am here's David telling you to do it on purpose for 2 hours I don't have the time but really look at your past couple of months there may well have been days when it was way more than 2 hours that you spend scrolling 4 hours would go by you didn't move from one position we we all have these things so this is about learning to negotiate with yourself and not seeing everything that we do in life as pathology as a disease as something's terribly wrong with me fundamentally that it needs to be totally cut out and addressed like that now again there are situations when that's doable and appropriate to do but you know I used to have uh I'd watch movies I'd be online when I was struggling with procrastination and for me personally at least it didn't change until I gave myself permission to do it for hours cuz I was already doing it for hours and not engaging with work so I proactively said okay okay this is what Neil Fior and I I refer to as uh unconditional guilt-free play non-negotiable guilt free play so here it is here's that plock of time and I'm allowed to do that stuff in that space the work can come around that but just get honest where you where you are from from this position of like okay right now I'm spending 6 hours a day scrolling okay that's my starting position here what if I could at least say for 3 hours a day I'm allowed to do that cuz we're doing six anyway what if I gave myself permission and no guilt see the reason we feel guilty when we engage with these things is that it's done without permission it hasn't been sanctioned it hasn't been validated it hasn't been seen as a good thing right we use all this language it's like a or a dopamine release system you know people used to call that relaxing again I'm not saying that there isn't certain things in life like it could be potentially and everyone is different on this but some people need to cut out access to certain things that can be a thing but far more often I think the danger with that approach of everything now has to be cut out and I'm trying to control and repress the impulse to do all these various things you're trying to become this super person this super perfect person and again it leads to this repression all the time the truth of it is that what we're trying to do is we're not aiming for perfect you can't be perfect maybe some of you saw online says get rid of video games you know and that's held out as the promise for Perfection instead of perfection what we're trying to do is we're trying to make a series of tradeoffs we're negotiating our way forward here okay instead of bulldozing or using repression so let's say you try that Dan and uh it's like okay I'm going to do this on purpose with permission and then there'll be periods of time in my day where I can I can engage with work but I'm not going to have it as I'm only allowed to work as long as I sorry I'm only allowed to play as long as I've done x amount of work your play has to be not contingent upon the amount of work that you've been doing it has to be non-negotiable okay and let's say did that and you're noticing and you're you're experimenting with this and you're seeing if it relaxes you enough and you become more balanced and then more less resentful towards the work and we're willing to work and you're still having an issue that you just cannot if you're engaged with scrolling no matter what happens or how much validation you give it or how how much permission you give yourself to do it that you still can't disengage from it no matter how you try then you would start to look at okay I need to look at removing this aspect and that can be done and I'd be happy to talk about that maybe in in other videos once you identify something that you know for sure is damaging to you and and you seem to be powerless over it how do you address it how do you say okay I'm done with this so that could be another video but I'm just saying we need to be sure about that that's what's happening that it is this thing that you know is overpowering me and I like like I'm addicted to it or I'm getting this dopamine thing from it I'm not so sure that that's as common as people think it is I think it's much more about finding balance and the psychological processes involved with validating what you're doing and seeing what you're doing is meeting needs that you have so again also in in addition to the video I made recently which was on not overwhelming yourself it's like okay give yourself permission to have the guild free play and only commit to doing small steps and that would be you know these different factors that we're putting together here are going to make it a lot more likely that you will move forward with this there's a few different um factors to play into consistently engaging with your goals so I know like it sounds like I'm I'm not giv an answer maybe or I'm not giving a real straight answer to this but you know there are no simple answers we are complicated people humans are complicated we have different we have we have competing emotional needs so instead of like everything being seen as a pathology and something's wrong with me just get curious it's like okay maybe there's nothing wrong with me maybe maybe there's a reason why I've been playing video games for 7 hours or or scrolling for 7 hours maybe I wasn't shown how to validate myself maybe I wasn't maybe I was shamed for meeting my own needs or asking for my needs to be met when I was younger maybe I never learned to see relaxation time as essential and a necessary requirement to fulfilling my own potential those are those are really interesting questions to answer and explore before we go into pathologizing things it is true too that a lot of online content and you know video games and uh things like this are designed to be addictive to keep our attention and algorithms are going into that and everything else so I'm not denying that but um personally I found it through the validation thing it's actually not that hard to disengage from it when you know that you're not going to have to be manipulative with yourself maybe tomorrow to get to get to the video games well maybe I'm going how am I going to justify playing video games tomorrow in my own mind in the absence of validating it I'm going to have to come up with all sorts of crazy rationalizations how about I just validate it first it's like it's no big deal okay I do it maybe then it's easier to step away from it so whatever you're doing my my sense is that okay the first step should be could could I validate what I'm doing here right now this bad thing that I'm doing I'm not perfect none of us are perfect that is a fact that doesn't exist not in The Human Experience so I hope that that's useful for you I think there's probably a lot more to be said on this issue but um maybe we'll get into that if you've got any feedback or thoughts on this feel free to share them below thanks for joining me as always and guys I'll see you again in the next video take care [Music]