I want to react to something that has been going around the internet recently. So I'm actually going to share something on the screen here. So again, this is the deeplife.com or youtube.com/calnewportmedia to watch this episode, episode 262. I've loaded up a YouTube video. I won't have the audio on, but I have closed captioning on.

All right, so this is a video from Better Ideas, a popular channel. It's 2 million subscribers. And the title of this video is "How overstimulation is ruining your life." And we see there's a young man on screen here in the woods looking earnestly at the camera. And I have the closed captioning on.

So I'm going to play this and read you a little bit of what he's saying. He's saying, "During certain periods of my life..." Oh, that... Remember when I said the volume was off? The volume was very much on. Let me turn that off here. Sorry about that. All right.

"During various periods of my life, I have a very difficult time focusing on pretty much anything important or difficult. During these periods, it seems almost impossible to break out of the social media limbo where you're just constantly switching between tabs, refreshing pages, kind of waiting for something interesting to happen, like for someone to post a cool photo or Instagram or something.

You're kind of waiting to be entertained. But if you actually have to apply yourself, it's extremely difficult, borderline painful to do so. And I'm pretty sure almost everyone can relate to this problem. I'm sure you've seen a lot of videos on YouTube giving you little tips and tricks as to how to better focus, including my own channel.

But there are very few videos kind of diving in, talking about why it's so difficult to focus on hard things. You know, like what's the deal? Why can't we just sit down and do something important with very little strain?" All right. So that's the start of that video on better ideas.

And he goes on to get into some of the neuroscience of why we're distracted so easily when we're trying to work on something hard. And it's a neuroscience explanation you may have heard before, but essentially our dopamine system which generates that urge to do something that's going to generate a reward.

Keep in mind, we often get that a little bit wrong. I think in common parlance, we often think about dopamine as being a source of rewards. The dopamine itself is what makes you feel a lot of pleasure. Dopamine is what gives you that urge to do the thing that you think is going to give you the reward.

It's when you have an addiction, it's the dopamine that makes it so irresistible to grab that cigarette because it wants the other rewards you're going to get when you actually smoke the cigarette. So what is talked about in this video is this common neuroscience explanation that the dopamine system is firing up to get those quick hit rewards of seeing the video that's really interesting, seeing the post that's a little bit scandalous, seeing the like number jump on something you did earlier, which gives you this big burst of people like me, they really like me.

The dopamine system likes rewards. It wants rewards now. The internet has many rewards lined up. The system kicks in the play and you feel this irresistible desire to click, click, click. You do not get a similar dopamine push for I'm working for our 900 of 10,000. It's going to take me to finish this really big project because the reward's not proximate.

And so what's going to win then? The complicated deep thing, part of your slow productivity push to do something big over a long period of time or Instagram or TikTok. And he said, yeah, your brain is wired to go for that. And that's a very hard, that's a very hard challenge to win.

And now what I learned from this video is that, yes, he is right. There are lots of videos that talk about this same thing, quote unquote overstimulation. People are really feeling it. And I think young people are feeling it harder because they have more targets for their dopamine systems.

They've more acclimatized their mind to all of these various rewards. They're very good at these various rewards. There's so much pulling at them that young people in particular are really finding. Yes, this is ruining my life. I can't do anything long-term, deep, cognitively useful. I'm getting bad grades at school.

I can't advance in my job. I can't produce something that I really want to produce. Those of us my age or older maybe say I distract myself too much and it slows down me doing important work. Young people really do feel like it's ruining their lives. So what should we do about it?

Well, I thought, well, I can offer my own advice here. I mean, this is something I've studied and written about for a long time. I kind of wrote the definitive book on the power of focus and why you should cultivate it. I've been thinking and writing articles and books about this for a long time.

So I figured let me review here on the podcast my own very complicated multi-part system for combating online overstimulation. So get a pad of paper ready because you don't want to miss step nine or 10. There's a very complicated explanation for how you're going to have to very carefully navigate the online world.

All right, so it's going to be very complicated. Are you ready? Okay, here it goes. Here's my solution. Don't use things that cause overstimulation. All right. I'm being a little bit facetious here, but honestly, the answer is as simple as that. Dopamine system is powerful. So don't give it the targets that it's going to fire up for.

You have to actually remove most of these sources of overstimulation from your life if you really want to start thinking and producing original thoughts at a high level. There's not these complex habits and careful ways of navigating your notifications and when you use this and when you don't use this.

I'm telling you this as someone who thinks for a living and studies people who thinks for a living, the more sources of overstimulation you eliminate from your life, the easier. And we of course know this type of abstention approach is effective because we see it with other things that historically have hijacked the dopamine system and caused a lot of trouble.

We do not tell people who have an issue with smoking, okay, we need to build a complex system of where you have cigarettes and where you don't, and you don't want to have it in the car, but you will have it here. And we're going to have an app that keeps track of how many cigarettes you've had and then try to restrict, then during certain periods, there's a time lock that locks off the cigarettes and you can't have it during that period, but you can't have it on this period and we do a week on, but you don't smoke on Saturdays.

No, we just say you got to quit smoking. As the same with a lot of other addictions like this that people have trouble with, but we resist applying that type of clarity and abstention to online overstimulation. So let me get a little bit more granular about this. Social media, this is a big source of it.

You got to just basically get this out of your life. If you have to have some social media for professional reasons, it should not be on your phone. It should be on a boring computer. It's something you should do on a schedule or hire someone to do on your behalf.

It should never, ever be something you go to when you're bored. It should never be a source of distraction. It should be, I'm an author and I set up my Instagram post in a shared document on Google Drive. Here's the photos, here's the text, and I have someone who posts it Fridays and Mondays.

Or if I have to do that, I log in the thing on my computer, I post it, and then I shut it back down again. All right? So if you have to use it professionally, it's on a computer, it's boring, you never use it as a source of entertainment.

You don't scroll online news. Look, you're not an editor at Gawker. You just get out of that world of online news and discussion. You don't have to be a part of it. How do you keep up with stuff in the world? We talked about this earlier in this episode where I gave advice to Reading Guy.

You know, subscribe to some email newsletters that you read when you can that gives you interesting perspectives. Listen to podcasts, maybe listen to a daily news roundup podcast if you want to be kept up with more current events. Or listen to something like Sager and Crystal's, their Breaking Points podcast where they go through 10 stories about what's going on in the world.

Podcasts are fine, right? Because it's something you have to turn on and listen to. It's not a knee-jerk distraction that your dopamine system is going to kick into. No one is like trying to write and halfway through writing, they're like, "Ahh!" You can quickly turn on a podcast. TikTok can do that.

Online news can do that. Twitter can do that. Podcasts are fine. Newsletters are fine. Maybe even print out the articles you like and read them when you get a chance. That's fine. You'll be informed. You got to get rid of all that online news. What about YouTube? YouTube is tricky.

Why is YouTube tricky? I think video is the future of independent content creation, but the recommendations and sidebar on YouTube can make it into one of these dopamine-inflamming sources of distraction. When it comes to something like YouTube, you have to use it one way and not another. This is maybe the place where I come closest to the navigation lines that you hear in a lot of these online videos.

I do think YouTube is a source of information. YouTube has become more a source of entertainment, high-quality entertainment that rivals what you would get on TV, but it's also a giant source of distraction. How do we make sense of YouTube? Here's my YouTube strategy. In order to preserve YouTube as a way to look up instructions for things, which I think is a great use of YouTube, how do I change the oil in a Honda Odyssey?

Look it up on YouTube. You can see a video of someone doing it. It's better than trying to find an article. To preserve that use of YouTube without it making a dopamine-inflamming system, get one of these plugins for your browser that you use YouTube on that gets rid of the recommendations.

So what you can do is you can search for something. You can see the search results. You can click on a search result. You can watch it, but there's no, "Here's what's coming up next," or "What about this and what about that?" That one type of plugin alone makes YouTube into a fantastic library without it being something that you can use as a source of knee-jerk distraction.

Because again, when you're working on something hard, if you have blocked YouTube, you go, "Oh, I should go to YouTube.com." You don't see anything. You have to search for something and find something. It's not a highly salient source of distraction. Now, what about entertainment on YouTube? Because again, I think this is actually important.

I'm a believer that video trumps audio. The future of independent content is going to be video. I mean, this is like radio became a big thing until television was around, and then television just smashed the market share of radio. It was just so much bigger because humans like to see faces.

Humans like to see visuals. And I increasingly believe watching a high-quality interview show on YouTube is better than 99% of the stuff that's on television or that's on non-unscripted streaming services. And I think that gap's going to close more. So how do you, for example, watch a show like mine?

Or maybe you're a Lex Fridman fan. You want to watch his interviews. How do you watch these type of programming as a substitute for lower-quality television with, again, not having YouTube be a rabbit hole? And my answer here is television sets. I learned this from our YouTube guide, Jeremy, that increasingly televisions are becoming one of the most common devices on which this style of YouTube video is watched.

So if you're going to look something up, you have a browser with a plugin that blocks the recommendations. If you're going to watch "independent high-quality content" on YouTube, you have it on the YouTube app and your Apple TV or Fire Stick on your television. And you watch it like you would any other television show in the same circumstances where you would watch television.

I'm sitting down with a lunch break. I take out my remote. I turn on the TV. I go to the YouTube app. I search for the latest episode of whatever, and I put it on the TV. There's a lot of friction in using a television. There's also a lot of routine and ritual built into televisions where that's not part of your dopamine cycle.

When you're in your home office trying to write something, you don't rush downstairs and turn on the TV and go to Netflix and select a show and turn it on. That's too much overhead. The television you think about, "Oh, I'm going to have a meal. I'm taking a break." It's a big production to get it going.

So you move high-quality independent media consumption to the television and looking up to a browser-protected, a plugin-protected browser. Now you don't have to worry about something like YouTube in your life being a source of distraction. Also throw in place better, less dopamine-susceptible entertainment sources to fill the gap that the highly salient distracting content is probably filling right now.

And get back into music. Go see good movies and read about them before and after. Read much more books. High-quality streaming content. High-quality podcasts. Get your mind used to other sorts of much higher-quality content for the entertainment and distraction. The lower-quality stuff will begin to seem less palatable. Same thing happens with food.

You eat a lot of junk food. It's really addictive. "My God, I just need chips and cookies and this makes me feel better. What else would I want to eat?" You stop doing it for a while. You start eating better food. You start cooking yourself. You go to the farmer's market.

You're using high-quality ingredients. Everyone will tell you this. You start eating well. A Snickers bar or a Chips Ahoy seems weird. It's cardboard. It's fake. It's too sugary. You don't crave it anymore. So you don't break this connection to junk food by just white-knuckling and eating less. You replace it with better food.

So that's the final part of solving overstimulation is introducing flooding the zone with much more quality stimulation so that you lose your taste for a TikTok video. You lose your taste for an inflammatory online article that someone tweeted and that you're scrolling through and then clicking the other links.

So again, this is how I think you solve overstimulation. If you're serious about it, you get rid of most of the sources of overstimulation. You stop using social media, you stop doing online news surfing, you put in a lot of high-quality content and in the few places where you might need to encounter these worlds, YouTube looking things up or high-quality independent media, you have to do some limited social media for your work.

You do so in a way that makes it so far from being a source of knee-jerk distraction that your dopamine system forgets about it. So anyways, I appreciated that video. Overstimulation is a problem. I'm glad people care about it. But let's just get blunt. Stop doing the thing that's ruining your life.

Stop smoking. Stop eating the junk food. Replace it with something better. Let's not get too cute about this. Let's not get too fine grained. Life without the overstimulation really is a deeper life. It really is a more intellectually engaged life. It really is going to be a more successful life.

You are going to produce ideas that astound you.