Is that change related to CF (I’ve been writing about vegetable oil and other food and health topics) or independent?
A post was merged into an existing topic: Curiosity – Plants vs. Mammals (Energy, Digestion, Broad Conceptual Explanations, and the Lion Diet)
I have heard of dopamine fasts. I have not tried them recently. I do remember in the past I just tried a 3 hour period one day day spent away from my computer and phone and books and just chilling on the balcony, just pacing around in the sunlight and thinking about stuff and forcing myself to be with my emotions and thoughts rather than finding ways to numb them or escape them if they ever got uncomfortable. I sometimes find that I use videogames, social media, youtube videos etc. to escape uncomfortable thoughts and emotions rather than being with them and processing them effectively or taking action based on them, e.g. if I’m guilty I haven’t emailed someone back, just email them back. Instead I don’t email them back because I’m worried about messing up the email, and then I avoid the feelings by engaging in the above activities, and then later before sleep or whenever I can’t just escape the feelings/thoughts, I engage in them again and feel bad – I think this has been happening less often recently though, because I seem to just be taking more action and doing less worrying. Kind of like that idea of: Can I do something about it? If yes, do it. If no, don’t worry about it, because I can’t do anything about it.
I’ve been living that out a bit better than I used to ~6+ months ago, but it’s still not great. I do still worry about things I can’t much about and shouldn’t worry about, or worry about things I can do things about without actually doing the things I can do to effect positive change.
Discord is my main social media and it might be hard for me to function without it before 3pm, but I could try it and see how it feels. Other than that I think this forum is the closest thing to social media past discord. I don’t really use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn (I sometimes feel bad when I check LinkedIn every year or two and see a message from someone that I didn’t respond to in a timely manner, but I guess it’s not a big deal if it’s kind of clear I’m not active on LinkedIn and so they shouldn’t expect a response any time soon), TikTok – Ah shit, I just realized YouTube is totally a social media now, with their community posts, commenting features, and also the algorithm showing me more videos that I can easily get lost in a loop on if I’m not paying conscious attention and going there with a specific purpose.
YouTube is definitely a problematic social media for me. Staying away from it before 3pm could be productive to try, or just in general follow a rule for myself that I will not autopilot to YouTube.com when I’m bored and click recommended/home page videos, and instead I will go there with a specific purpose and for a reason, and then leave the site once that purpose is fulfilled, or at least re-evaluate my reasons for staying once the purpose is met.
I do feel glad that I have stopped autopiloting to reddit.com as I used to do that basically any time I didn’t know what else to do. I’m not sure how/why I stopped as it wasn’t a conscious decision to stop, I think I just got busy with other things and reddit seemed less interesting and valuable compared to other ways I was spending my time and other websites I was visiting often. I did often visit curi.us to see if there were new blog posts instead of typing in reddit.com, and sometimes I’d do site:curi.us if I wanted to read old blog posts about some topic that was on my mind and see what you thought about them in the past. I often learnt new, insightful stuff that way and got fresh perspectives on things that I was taking for granted. I like that even like 15+ years ago you wrote about stuff in a unique way and challenged the status quo with good reasoning. I want to learn to be more capable of doing that in my day to day thinking. Simple answer to that is I guess just learn philosophy and get better at thinking for myself rather than being second-handed about most things like I currently am (I hope I’m using the word second-handed correctly there, I’m not confident in my understanding of it, but basically I think of it like I’m socially influenced and kind of follow the herd with many of my opinions, and haven’t thought them through for myself and decided what fits my own values and goals)
Good to know. I might check out how it works as the idea that it is brain affecting is new to me, but maybe it should have been kind of obvious because the brain is what controls sleep and melatonin affects how the brain engages in the activity of sleep, so it makes sense that having more or less melatonin does affect brain function. I’d be more drowsy with more melatonin in my brain for example, or maybe more alert with less.
I think one argument Gwern made to address the concern that melatonin supplements are unnatural and interfering with our natural biology was like: We’re already artificially affecting melatonin levels with the way we use blue light screens, have bright lights around us even after the sun sets, and use our phones in bed. So using supplements to counterbalance that might be putting us closer to our natural biology rather than taking us further from it.
The first concern that comes to mind for me with that is: there’s a lot we don’t understand about how supplements work, how well these substances are absorbed into our body and used effectively compared to when our body produces the substances ourselves, and how they can interact with the complexity of our body where e.g. ingesting external supplements might cause our body to generate less of the substance itself to compensate/adjust, and that could cause problems, especially if we stop taking the supplement and then the body has trouble getting back what its old normal was for some reason.
Also I remember reading that there were some studies in Canada that tested the concentration of melatonin in capsules compared to the advertised labels and they found wild inaccuracies, so labels aren’t always reliable and I might be under or overdosing because of this labelling problem. I guess that would be false advertising, and that’s particularly harmful with any medical substance
Most of my YouTube viewing is from my RSS Feed Reader (Vienna) or from search results when I’m looking a specific topic up, not from YT’s recommendations or home page. I used to use YT’s notification system and mostly watch based on notifications, but their system sucks so I recommend using an RSS reader.
I did often visit curi.us to see if there were new blog posts
RSS is also IMO the best way to check for new curi.us articles and to follow many other things (e.g. blogs, substacks, podcasts, forums like this one). I talked about RSS in Newsletter April 2022 which includes a link to download some of my subscriptions which you can import as a starting point.
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On a related note, you can’t trust supplements (and a lot of other things) from Amazon. This basically applies to all sellers, even trusted brands, due to commingling of inventory.
I like FPS games and have thought about checking out Overwatch a few times. I’ve played quite a few team combat games like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, Firearms, Team Fortress, Mechwarrior Online.
I have a bit of resistance because I play a ton of different games and it makes it a lot easier for me to manage them all by sticking to only games that I can buy on Steam (I have over 700 games and have finished about half of them). I expect I’ll keep it in my “possible things to try this year” que.
I’ve turned on all notifications for your YT channel so I should get notifications now. I think I saw somewhere you said that YT notifications were a bad way to find out about videos but can’t remember where. You can change from “personalised” (default, bad) to “all” notifications on a per-channel basis on YT, I’ve tried that and it seems to work for the channels I apply it to. That might help.
