Oh, what a perfect opportunity to shout out this video by an actual neuroscientist. :) Not saying that it contradicts to your video, but it's a great one if you're interested in the topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU

Yeah the Huberman is a good one

will watch! If you have some sort of well-formed view feel free to share - I'm well used to appreciate contrary views so it wouldn't devolve into a fruitless discussion.

I also found this one pretty good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3svaOilIis

+1 for Andrew Huberman, really interesting podcast

> Wondering if someone's gone down this path at some point? Somewhat. I have suffered from depression for quite a while until about four years ago and pretty much always had severe issues to keep track of mundane task and maintain motivation and focus. It was only since I recovered that I started to slowly but steadily drill in habits, sometimes similar to what you describe. Reward based motivation is something that sometimes works well. But I don't typically do immediate/direct rewards but rather try to associate work/errands/etc. with success and progress. For example I would set small goals like: • I'm going to cut the time between getting up and leaving for work by 15min. • Every day I do a small kindness for my GF without her asking for it. • Whenever I have to fix a bug, I write down and maybe discuss how it happened. By setting achievable, small goals and then celebrating progress (allowing myself to feel good about it, sharing my joy with others etc.) I kind of trick my brain into thinking that it's all just a fun game. --- But generally a much bigger factor for me personally was to realise that I need to balance my motivation spikes. Seems counter intuitive but I have the tendency to get very excited and interested in a thing and dive into it in an obsessive manner, completely draining my motivation after a few weeks or even less. Since I figured out to do regular, smaller steps, even when highly motivated and excited, I started to become more steady and sustainable. --- Other than that I can point to dog training (we have 2 dogs), which is pretty much 99% reward and motivation based. Look up operant conditioning and classical conditioning for two methods that associate positive experiences with specific behaviours.

Based on the Huberman talk, my decision of whether or not to listen to a podcast on my walk will now be decided by a coin flip. 🙂

> I also found this one pretty good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3svaOilIis Watched ✅ . Very refreshing and useful - thanks. Fortunately I don't find my original plan/worldview particularly contradicted, but these insights will definitely also guide me.

I'm a bit more hesitant about Huberman's 2h podcast - probably I'd need a few more hours to properly comprehend that much info. anyone has a tldr (tldw / tldl)?

I listened to it this afternoon and my main take-aways were: • Be careful about layering (his word) or combining dopamine-inducing stuff with your main activity, it will eventually lower your enjoyment/happiness of the main activity you want to be doing. His example was choosing for himself to keep his phone (with music and texts and social media) away from workouts. The more general suggestion is to carefully watch what you do or ingest before and during your activities. • You can hijack the same intermittent reward strategy that casinos and boy/girlfriends and gamified apps so effectively use and apply it to yourself. So maybe you do allow some of those dopamine-inducing layers to be a part of your activity, but not a regular part. Allow them in only intermittently. His example was flipping a coin to decide if you listen to music during your walk. (And that prompted my joking comment earlier today about podcasts during my walk). • Trying to trick yourself with a reward for an activity you just don’t like will not make you learn to like it, nor produce the long-term result you want. Instead of putting the focus on the reward, focus on the ‘friction’ (his word again) of the challenge/difficulty and focus on your self talk. Instead of moaning how much you hate the activity, tell yourself something like ‘Yes, this is hard, yes at the moment I’m not liking it so much, but I’m determined to do this and I know I’ll reap the long term benefit’, and over time you can train yourself to increase dopamine from the effort and challenge itself and not from the ice cream sundae you’ve promised yourself afterwards . He gave the example of folks who practice intermittent fasting and how they learn to relish the pain/discomfort because they understand the benefits of what they are doing and how it increases the enjoyment when they break their fast. • It’s a balancing thing. We don’t want our dopamine to be too low, or too high. There is a real ‘crash’ that comes from overdoing it. • One of the best ways to increase our baseline dopamine is to cultivate meaningful relationships. That was my attempt to capture what Dr. Huberman was saying, as far as I understood his terminology and examples. My more internal learnings, or things I’m going to try to do more of or pay more attention to, are along the lines of fasting. I already fast regularly as part of practicing my religion, but I think there are other, non-food, areas where I might over-indulge or waste time or let myself get over-stimulated and I’m going to do some experimenting about restricting myself and see how that helps increase my happiness and motivation levels. I’m generally pretty happy, but sometimes my motivation seems to wane. Curious to hear what others learned from it.

Thanks much! Those sound reasonable. > We don’t want our dopamine to be too low, or too high. Yeah it seems from a few sources that it's like that. Another way to word it is that dopamine neither 'good' or 'bad' - instead it's something to thread carefully with. > Trying to trick yourself with a reward for an activity you just don’t like will not make you learn to like it I also think this. I specifically think that tricking yourself into liking non-likeable stuff is bs 🙂 I think that work that feels like work has to be part of life (and of daily routines). That 'pain' is what makes later achievements so enjoyable.

> boy/girlfriends what was meant about this? I never heard of couples intentionally applying casino-like tactics to each other :thinking_face:

The Huberman episode inspired me to go winterbathing (described in the episode as a good way to increase one’s baseline levels of dopamine). Fantastic practice.

An important insight for me was that dopamine is something you spent, not something you produce when doing activities that create a so called dopamine-hit.

@U45T93RA6 the boy/girlfriend comment was a reference to his example of a relationship where one partner is manipulating the other by stringing them along with intermittent rewards (of affection or attention). Definitely not a positive example, but a real thing that you might find out there unfortunately.

Oh, hold on. Turns out, Dr. Huberman was on the Knowledge Project podcast, and I loved that episode. Only now it registered with me that it's the same guy, heh. https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast-transcripts/andrew-huberman/

> • It’s a balancing thing. We don’t want our dopamine to be too low, or too high. There is a real ‘crash’ that comes from overdoing it. For what it's worth, I can personally confirm this. Realising and applying this was probably one of the biggest factors in improving discipline and productivity.

You should get at least 512mb ram, maybe 1gb

Ok. That’s not too bad….

few hundred k per month is like 1 every couple of seconds. Requests are not evenly distributed throughout the day though so worst case it’s gonna be like a couple requests per second - minimum size of server is going to be enough

If it was me, I'd pick 1GB: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets 512 MB might be a bit too small for the OS and the app together. Bear in mind that very small cloud instances tend to suffer from other performance problems like network speed, disk speed, more multi-tenancy issues, etc. (but that could be about the same for both these options). In AWS, we had micro instances (1 GiB ram) for a couple of years and it worked reasonably well