Addictions, Actions, Focus

Consciously concentrating on a given task is obviously leading to better external outcomes than just going through the motions – this piece is not about that.
Addictions are obviously detrimental to a person’s life in many ways, it’s also not about that.

Instead, I was personally bothered by having to perform tedious dull tasks routinely to make a living. Having increasingly become intolerably aware of that, the following realization came to me through two distinct sources:
The more focused I am in an effort, the more beneficial to my internal state.

The first source was the Andrew Huberman Podcast, discussing heightened hypertrophic and endocrinological effects of strength training by very deliberately perceiving the mind-muscle connection during an exercise. Therein he also mentioned the open scientific question as to why 6-8 repetitions with heavy loads in strength training generate more secretion of anabolic hormones.

The second encounter with this principle was this:

When a man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man – in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being – an unfocused mind is not conscious.
Psychologically, the choice “to think or not” is the choice “to focus or not”. Existentially, the choice “to focus or not” is the choice “to be conscious or not”. Metaphysically, the choice “to be conscious or not” is the choice of life or death.

-        Ayn Rand, The Virtue Of Selfishness

My hypothesis for the open question regarding why heavy training is more beneficial: it naturally forces the effort to be more focused than just going through the motions for dozens of repetitions with light weight. Through that focused engagement with the exercise, neurotransmitters of goal-directedness are released, which increase the excretion of anabolic hormones. If one were to manage to unconsciously move heavy weights, I hypothesize, the physical changes would be much less than through focused training.

One of the main neurotransmitters that are secreted during activities such as heavy training but also any other sort of focused problem-solving, is dopamine - the infamous molecule responsible for developing addictions to anything ranging from gambling and alcohol to social media use and gaming. The purpose of this molecule is to evoke in the subjective experience a feeling of pleasure associated with goal-directed action. Something valuable is attained, or so the dopamine says. In an addiction, it is perverted or misdirected. The relaxation from consuming alcohol or other drugs of abuse but also the social recognition from likes and retweets on a social media post are leading to the excretion of this important neurotransmitter because the brain cannot distinguish that there has not been any real goal accomplished or worked towards. The relaxation and recognition are markers for meeting valuable ends, but in the cases of classically addictive behaviors these ends are not real like the laying back on the couch after a hard day of work or the praise of a spouse or parent for an outstanding accomplishment. The brain just recognized relaxation or recognition, so some goal-directed positive behavior must have taken place. Dopamine gets released to reinforce that behavior by pleasure. It is an important mechanism to guide a human’s path through life in favor of actions that provide him with the means for survival.

There are many potential sources of “cheap dopamine” in our current environment. Avenues one can pursue that offer a simulacrum of a valuable resource for the simulacrum of a valuable action. In many cases those two have deviated tremendously from real resources and actions while still maintaining neurobiological reinforcement mechanisms. In many of these cases, the perceived emotions of goal-directed activities and feedback through dopamine release are even more exacerbated than by their original evolutionarily useful behaviors. An easy example for this is gaming. One can of course argue for the merits of playing digital games in the sense of providing an avenue of exploring cooperation and competition in a world increasingly bereft of those. Spending energy on creative problem solving or fine-motor tasks is also in itself good. Only that this activity is a reasonable way of kicking back for having fun with real friends as a leisure activity balancing out the otherwise usual grind of daily expended effort on valuable goals is something that can be left to be inarguably acceptable about it.  But nearly never are the skills and communities built in digital games transferred to the real world yet building them rewards one with dopaminergically mediated pleasures which are often greater than those caused by creating real value for the individual.

That is one end of the spectrum – objectively useless (except for occasional leisure) activities that provide intense feelings of goal-directedness.
The other end of this spectrum is a dull task one must semi-consciously perform for innumerable hours in a job that provides no other aspects of pleasure (such as comradery or prestige) but allows for a person to hopefully afford what they sincerely value.

Modern brains are often even used to have their reward mechanisms activated during total inactivity as well. Like watching a tense TV-series with cliff-hangers which one wants to see resolved due to being empathetically involved with the development and problem-solving of the protagonists. Or by sitting on the couch and consuming legal or illegal drugs. How could that dull job ever compete with the short-circuiting of that mechanism whose sole responsibility is to make a behavior so pleasurable that the individual feels the impulse to repeat it often for the sake of presumed acquisition of the means for survival?

Every person who has experienced addiction in themselves knows how daunting a task it is to abdicate a behavior he’s so heavily habituated to. Some interventions focus on substitution and weaning off. Some are based around community. Some around faith.
Many people report that the key for no longer letting one habit negatively impact most or all other aspects of their life is by having it replaced by something more meaningful. When they pursue something with actual merit, the pleasurable yet destructive pattern can no longer live up to the contentment derived from that newfound orientation.

Now, how can an individual turn any activity into something that feels meaningful? There is a way of causing the release of rewarding emotions during the completion of any task. That way is focus.

Our brain is not actually capable of multi-tasking. Of course, one can have an automatic program of movement run on its own without further effort and thereby have their focus on other issues in parallel. For example, one can of course eat and concentrate on the TV or drive their usual commute while listening to a podcast. But when a brain is focused on one thing, it is focused only on that one thing, at least for a moment. Whatever we consciously focus on is apparently the most meaningful object of perception. When a car starts to swerve in front of you, what was talked about on the podcast will certainly escape you. And if you bite your tongue, the TV is forgotten for now.

When one works at that necessary dull job, they have the option of what to focus on. But they can also breed discontent by allowing for their mind to unconsciously ruminate, probably about how unenjoyable that dead-end job is. One alternative to this is focusing the scarce resource of attention on something productive in the mental realm while automatically going through the routine labor, like contemplating interesting useful questions about life, resolving personal problems or constructing something artistic in the theatre of their imagination. The other option is training their mind to focus, keeping their attention as tightknit to that tedious task that they are capable of doing close to just as well in a purely automatic fashion. The latter is a heralding objective because there is no real meaning to that stereotypical boring necessity. As with drugs, gaming or social media acolytes, the brain won’t distinguish between real outcomes and goal-directed behavior. But the goal in that case can be made to be the strengthening of the meta-skill of focus, which is universally applicable to anything from thereon out. The directedness is emulated by the pure engagement one forces themselves to bring into it, especially valuable because of the ease with which one might as well abdicate it at any moment. In addition to developing that meta-skill, the goal could be to perfect the accomplishment of this task ever more, depending on what it is. Constantly innovating variations of how to perform it might also be a valid trick to keep the mind engaged with it.

While developing an iron-clad focus is a valuable goal that could hardly be overstated, because it can improve the fulfillment of any other action, the key to changing one’s attitude away from unconsciously going about such behaviors lies in making them more pleasurable. And that will happen, if maximum focus is applied while performing such a task. No matter whether one mentally simulates or creates something worthwhile or increases his efficacy in this routine or chooses to develop this invaluable skill of universally applicable infinitely powerful focus, the internal state of going about it consciously instead of wasting all that time, unconsciously letting their brain’s patterns deteriorate into increasingly unhappy states, is paramount. If one were to manage breaking through the habit of letting that happen but instead gains back control over their attention with every iteration, their life will incrementally improve indefinitely. Whether exterior circumstances change accordingly will go to show but at minimum the inner life will be fulfilled in an indistinguishable manner.