According to addiction expert Dr Anna Lembke, our smartphones are making us dopamine junkies, with each swipe, like and tweet feeding our habit. So how do we beat our digital dependency?

How Digital Media Turned Us All Into Dopamine Addicts

In her new book, Dopamine Nation, emphasises that we are now all addicts to a degree. She calls the smartphone the “modern-day hypodermic needle”: we turn to it for quick hits, seeking attention, validation and distraction with each swipe, like and tweet. Since the turn of the millennium, behavioural (as opposed to substance) addictions have soared.

Every spare second is an opportunity to be stimulated, whether by entering the TikTok vortex, scrolling Instagram, swiping through Tinder or bingeing on porn, online gambling and e-shopping

Global depression rates have been climbing significantly in the past 30 years and, according to a World Happiness Report, people in high-income countries have become more unhappy over the past decade or so. We’ve forgotten how to be alone with our thoughts. We’re forever “interrupting ourselves”, as Lembke puts it, for a quick digital hit, meaning we rarely concentrate on taxing tasks for long or get into a creative flow.

Global Statistics

She wrote Dopamine Nation because she believes her recovering patients – whether 60-something Jacob who built a masturbation machine to satiate his sex habit; teenaged Delilah, who couldn’t get out of bed unless she was high on cannabis; or Chi, who bought thousands of cheap consumer goods online just to experience the thrill of opening the package – have “acquired a wisdom we all could benefit from"

Why Dopamine Nation

Rather than giving us pleasure itself, as is commonly thought, dopamine motivates us to do things we think will bring pleasure. As the brain’s major reward and pleasure neurotransmitter, it’s what drives us to seek pizza when we’re hungry and sex when we’re aroused. Scientists use dopamine to measure “the addictive potential of any experience,” writes Lembke. The higher the dopamine release, the more addictive the thing.

Understanding How Dopamine Works

With instant gratification and digital media taking heck over us, it's high time we realize that we should control our senses rather some tech gadget controlling it making our lives vulnerable

According to addiction expert Dr Anna Lembke, our smartphones are making us dopamine junkies, with each swipe, like and tweet feeding our habit. So how do we beat our digital dependency, asks Jamie Waters

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Constant craving: how digital media turned us all into dopamine addicts

when we read “Productivity increased in September” we’re confused. Those macro trends have nothing to do with how productive a person is. To me, productivity is a personal measure. Especially in the 21st century where most of us work independently. We’re no longer machine operators. We’re skilled knowledge workers who manage their own time and energy.

The Best Definition Of Productivity  

Based on the above, there are two types of productivity:Workforce productivity: The total amount of goods and services workers produce in a certain period.Personal productivity: The relevant output of an individual in a certain period.

Types Of Productivity

Productivity is the #1 measure that defines growth in the economy and one’s living standards (higher income, better benefits, more free time).

Productivity tools can make your life a lot simpler. They help you to save time, improve focus, and improve the overall quality of our work. However too much technology often decreases our productivity

Welcome to this productivity guide. The purpose of this guide is twofold. First, I will define what productivity is. Too often, we try to improve productivity without knowing what it is. Second, I…

What Is Productivity? A Definition & Proven Ways To Improve It

Debates over the length of the workweek are nothing new. In 1926, the Ford Motor Company standardised the Monday-to-Friday pattern; beforehand, the common practice was a six-day workweek, with only Sundays off.Henry Ford’s theory was that [working] five days, with the same pay, would increase worker productivity, in that people would put more effort into the shorter workweek,” says Jim Harter, chief scientist for workplace management and wellbeing at US analytics firm Gallup, based in Nebraska.. The theory was largely proven correct: in the decades since, the five-day workweek is been commin

How the four-day week evolved 

By the 1950s, however, there were calls from labour unions to introduce a four-day week. “People began projecting, if we take out another workday, it’d be even better,” says Harter. But take-up of the four-day workweek has remained slow: by March 2020, a Gallup study of more than 10,000 US full-time employees showed only 5% worked a shorter week.  L

There are different four-day workweek models: from cutting one workday, reducing working hours and being paid the same wage; to intense working hours, where five days’ worth of work is crammed into four longer shifts. The former set-up is generally the goal; achieved by a combination of the introduction of new tools and operating practices that boost efficiency and result in a rise in worker wellbeing that fuels productivity.

Some workers may resist having a compressed workweek, with potentially longer hours and fewer breaks, imposed on them by an employer. Others may already be working at full tilt, meaning a shorter workweek could make their workload less manageable. “There are some employees who’ll end up trying to cram more work into four days where they previously had greater flexibility to work across five days,” says Harter. “If you get to Thursday afternoon, still haven't finished your work and everyone else has gone home, that can create stress and resentment.”

How five days’ work goes into four 

A shorter workweek is being hailed as the future of employee productivity and work-life balance. Is it that easy to make work better?

The realities of the four-day workweek

Before, after and in the midst of every thing man needs to know one formula, the formula for achieving true manhoodThis Saving formula according to teachings of Confucius is working to establish one's own character and helping others to do the same simultaneously

Character: The Crucial Need Of Man

Granted enough character, our friends will be more Powerful than our enemies, peace more than war, healing more than killing. Our trains will run on time, factories will produce more goods than expected, fields will yield more crop than expected

Character Can Achieve Everything

If we want these things to happen to us and who would not want we have to do one simple thing build our character. Now what is character?Character is what a person truly is and is reputation is what is supposed to be when character and reputation are same, that is the ideal state of being.

How To Build Character

Character is defined as qualities or features by which a person or a thing is distinguished from another the aggregate of distinguishing mental and moral qualities of an individual or a race as a whole.

What you want is character strengthening of the bill continue to exercise your well and it will take you higher this will is almighty. It is character that can cleave through Adamantine walls of difficulties

Education is hardly edifying without provision for character. Character-transmission is the essential mission of education. Those who give their children everything in the world, but fail to give character, give them ‘stone’ in place of ‘bread’. This booklet briefly delineates the means of attaining this crucial and vital aspect in the course of human development. Published by Advaita Ashrama, a publication house of Ramakrishna Math, Belur Math, India.

Back in the wild old days, my best buddy and I used to call going out “looking for trouble”. We weren’t hoping for a punch-up or a little light robbery, but a spontaneous adventure involving music, strangers or just the city at night. All that spur-of-the-moment fun has taken quite a beating since the pandemic began, for many millions of us. First came the lockdowns, social distancing and closed venues, then the cautious reopening when even a trip to the pub or an art gallery had to be booked weeks in advance.

Fun comes so much from spontaneity – doing things and not thinki

We also need spontaneity to embrace change, says the clinical psychologist and writer Linda Blair. “And change is necessary for progress of any sort. Spontaneity makes us happier, too.” In 2016, a team of Austrian and Italian researchers found that people with less spontaneity in their lives experienced greater “psychological suffering”.

Psychological Suffering

The best way forward at the moment, says Blair, “is to turn things on their head and instead of talking about trying to be spontaneous, you say: ‘There is no other way to be right now.’” Now is the time for seizing the day and moving with your heart, or your gut. “You want to go to your favourite restaurant?” asks Blair. “Don’t plan it – go there today, while it’s still open.”

Triggers are things that keep us acting automatically. The cookie jar that makes us think we’re hungry. The phone ping that takes us into a rabbit hole and delays making lunch by 45 minutes. Triggers are not spontaneity’s friends. So Blair’s top tip for starting the day free of our inner naysayers and triggers is to write down all your thoughts first thing in the morning, before you do anything else. This process is called the Morning Pages and was devised by the writer Julia Cameron, originally as part of what she called the Artist’s Way – a method for unblocking creativity.

"the lack of fun that’s available to them. And fun comes so much from spontaneity – doing things and not thinking too much about it, connecting with people, doing an activity and being allowed to take it in unexpected directions.”

One of the barriers is people wanting to stay in their comfort zones, where it’s safe, predictable, ordered and people know how things are going to go. The comfort zone can be useful – especially at the moment, when we need to keep safe, but there’s a danger of talking ourselves out of adventuring.

Next time you catch yourself chickening out of doing something on the spur of the moment, he suggests overruling your critical brain and telling yourself: I’m doing this because it’s good for me. And I like it. It’s fun. Let’s persist through this initial anxiety and see what comes afterwards. Mindfulness will help you enjoy the moment you’re in, Oliver says, but it doesn’t have to be a full-on meditative practice. Just anchor into your feet, notice your breath for 10 seconds, roll your shoulders back, drop your arms and spend some time coming down into your body.

we don’t accurately estimate what the future is going to be like. We usually think it’s going to be better than it is. And we don’t accurately estimate what the past was like, either. We are hard on ourselves and overly critical about what happened – or we romanticise it. But now, you can be happy right now

The pandemic has left our best-laid plans in disarray, but we can still have spur-of-the-moment adventures.

‘Don’t Plan It, Just Go!’: How to Be Spontaneous – and Grab Some Unexpected Fun

A key component of Stoicism is practicing mindfulness. Recognize the events in your life that you do and don’t have control over. If you become frustrated with events outside of your control, you are wasting energy and fostering negative emotion.

1. Attitude Towards changing things outside your control,

Our constant exposure to media and advertising keeps us wanting and seeing better out there — we spend our hard earned money on the latest fad, convinced it will leave us fulfilled until version 2.0 comes out next year. If we strive to want less, our desire decreases and we become more satisfied with what we have.

2: Don’t fall prey to modern society’s materialistic nature

The key lies in gratitude. We must appreciate all that we have and find joy in it. We live in an incredible period of history with easy access to necessities and technology that provides a standard of living that was unforeseeable just a few generations ago. Instead of appreciating this, we take it for granted. One stoic practice is to imagine that you lost some of your valuable possessions. It may sound depressing initially, but by imagining these losses we come to appreciate what we have more. ﻿

3 Pictur Life Without People And Possession You Truly Appreciate

If we desired more, we could allow ourselves to be disappointed. This doesn’t mean that stoics can’t enjoy the finer things in life — it just means we shouldn’t think of them as necessary for our happiness. Only providing goodness to the world through helping people and advancing society — something we each are able to do on a daily basis — can make us truly fulfilled

4. Be Genuinely Cheerful In all your Interactions. 

Stoic philosophy requires a great deal of personal responsibility. It’s not that you should be insanely hard on yourself, but you should understand that every decision that you make throughout the day contains a moral dimension.

5. Practicing your values beats preaching them.

The Greeks put a lot of thought into how life should be lived, from Aristotle to Socrates to Plato, but one of their most practical philosophies remains misunderstood by the majority of people…

5 Stoic Principles for Modern Living

Career Growth = Real Individual Growth

Real Individual Growth Catalyst For Success

Carrer growth is something like that, the more you focus on it, the less effective it is. Instead the more you focus on the deeds which lead to career growth which is real individual growth, the more likely you are to have positive career growth.

About Career Growth

The reason we believe that the time spent walking and sleeping is not experience is because we perform these in a mechanical/thought less way.

Time Spent At Work Doesn't Equal Experience

Walking is not experience for you and me, but for an athelete participating in Olympics aiming to win a gold or silver medal it surely would be counted as experience.For both the Olympic athelete and us, the activity is the same-walking. But the former catalyses that activity into experience with a learning model, while we don't. The same can happen at work too.

Having A Exemplary Learning Model

After witnessing the professional journeys of successful people, one common aspect in their journey is that they all had the opportunity to be an integral end to end part of a very important project or intiative or transformation.A learning cycle is any project, intiative or transformation that happens routinely in companies. Ex: A New Product Launch

Maximize Learning Cycles

A good job, hard work, IQ, EQ, good communication skills-these are all ingredients for a successful life. The presence of these elements alone, however, does not guarantee success. To convert them into long-term success, you need certain stimuli which precipitate or accelerate your growth. This robustly effective book identifies the various catalysts that you can cultivate and how you can leverage them to propel yourself in your work and life. Accessible, engaging and easy to follow, and written by someone who has experienced all this in real life and not in theory, Catalyst will arm you with the right tools to succeed at your work place and get the most out of every moment, every day.

Catalyst

Having enjoyed such fine purveyors of prodporn as <a href="http://www.43folders.com/">Merlin Mann </a>, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20100526043056/http://www.spesh.com/danny/">Danny O’Brien </a>, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20100526043056/http://lifehacker.com/">Gina Trapani </a>, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20100526043056/http://www.davidco.com/blogs/david/">David Allen </a>, and <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20100526043056/http://fourhourworkweek.com/blog/">Tim Ferriss </a>, I’d like to return the favor with the following: the Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity.

Introduction

That may be the case for some people, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve arrived home at night and am at a loss as to what I actually got done that day, despite the fact that I worked all day.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Saketh Bro
@sakethbro

Constant craving: how digital media turned us all into dopamine addicts

What Is Productivity? A Definition & Proven Ways To Improve It

The realities of the four-day workweek

How To Build Character

‘Don’t Plan It, Just Go!’: How to Be Spontaneous – and Grab Some Unexpected Fun

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Saketh Bro@sakethbro

Constant craving: how digital media turned us all into dopamine addicts

What Is Productivity? A Definition & Proven Ways To Improve It

The realities of the four-day workweek

How To Build Character

‘Don’t Plan It, Just Go!’: How to Be Spontaneous – and Grab Some Unexpected Fun

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Saketh Bro
@sakethbro