Imagine you’re trying to guide a chariot. With your hands gripping the reins, you peer into the distance excited to make it down a long dirt road flanked by a futuristic Italian countryside. In the distance you can see the visual representation of what it will be like to completely lock in and make progress on that diet you said you’d do, all those habits you’ve been trying to implement, and achieve those lofty goals you set for yourself. The only tricky part is that the chariot has 8 sets of reins and they’re all made out of eels. Most of these reins are unnecessary and don’t actually help you control the horses. As you’re trying to figure out which reins are actually useful, you’re wildly swerving from side to side and you drop as much speed as possible to avoid crashing. Then, you look to your side and see another guy briskly passing you on his chariot in a perfectly straight line. The jerk has this smug look on his face. He’s only got 4 reins and they’re not made of eels but full grain Italian leather. He’s even got grip-enhancing gloves on. What the hell?

Hot Cheetos, ice cream sandwiches, onion rings, triple bacon cheeseburgers, a Dunkin’ Donuts pumpkin swirl frozen coffee with 185 grams of sugar.
Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon prime, Youtube.
Twitter, Reddit, Instagram reels, Youtube shorts, TikTok.
Pornhub, Onlyfans, Instagram ass girls, gym girls wearing skin tight leggings.
Fortnite, Smash Brothers, DotA, Tekken 8, Factorio, Lootbox Arcade 2024.
Spicy political video clips, enraging clips, cute clips, funny clips, memes.

The world is filled with distracting, desire generating stimuli that tug at your eyes, stomach, crotch and brain and make it a little harder to keep our focus on the more meaningful stuff.

1/9

@FlurkFellows

Going back to our chariot - the reins represent desires. If we could just ignore all the unnecessary reins, then we’d have won half the battle for controlling the chariot and achieving all of our goals. This is why the maker of Ozempic is now worth $500 billion dollars. Why are so many people willing to risk side effects and pay their hard earned money for it? Because it’s supposed to make you not want to eat. That’s it.
Want to lose weight? Just don’t eat. It works. If you can not want to eat then you can’t fail.

Want to be more productive? At all times during the day, just want to work more than you want to do anything else.

This time, another simple concept that can be very powerful if you fully accept it is: the nature of desire. So we’ll look at:
(1) how desires are made and strengthened
(2) how they are weakened (and sometimes eliminated)
(3) the approaches to achieving (2)
(4) They say mindfulness reduces cravings, but why exactly?

2/9

@FlurkFellows

We are constantly inundated by desires. Some researchers (who were reluctant to take the Buddha at his word) published a paper in 2012 noscriptd Everyday temptations: an experience sampling study of desire, conflict, and self-control. They estimate that the most “conservative” estimate is that “people feel some desire about half the time they are awake.” What’s unfortunate is that almost half of those desires (47%) were conflicting with the “person’s other goals, values, or motivations.” So half of our waking lives we are experiencing desires and half of those desires we wish we didn’t have to deal with.

・‘This paper is due tomorrow morning. I wish I didn’t want to want to go out and drink with my friends.’

They note in the paper that people are pretty good at using their self-control to resist these unhelpful desires. However, they note that when people are resisting desires, 17% of the time, they fail. This “indicates a nontrivial amount of self control failure in everyday life.”

Our minds are constantly pestering us with desires. Like the 8 eels on the chariot, there’s too damn many of them and they’re slippery.

We make a decision to totally throw away all kinds of bad habits, but when your typical trigger to do the bad habit arises, your brain suddenly becomes a master debater and logician. It comes up with the most compelling argument for why ‘just one more round of this online game couldn’t hurt.’ Other greatest hits of your brain include ‘here’s all the reasons why one drink is fine, even though we swore off alcohol last weekend’ and ‘forget that diet, we actually need these donuts because we need to carb load for the run we’re doing tomorrow.’

3/9

@FlurkFellows

What was interesting about the 2012 paper on desire was what they found in regards to how different personality types process desires:

(1) Perfectionists

Perfectionists had strong desires and felt very conflicted about having these desires and pushed themselves hard to resist these desires.

Perfectionists [are] highly motivated persons (a.k.a. tortured souls) who experience powerful impulses that frequently clash with their other goals and values.
[Perfectionists] certainly seemed to lack the [ability to] avoid problematic desires. …[they] squander self-regulatory resources by pursuing unrealistic standards and suffering greater motivational conflict…

This means that for example for a perfectionist on a low carb diet, instead of not going to the donut buffet with their friends, they will go and just grit their teeth as they sip on black coffee. It sounds like perfectionists lead a very stressful life.

(2) Ennoscriptd Narcissists

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people with a high sense of ennoscriptment didn’t have stronger or weaker desires, they just didn’t feel conflicted about their desires. Highly ennoscriptd people figure that if they want something, that’s good enough reason to do it. The authors note that ennoscriptd narcissists may have trouble getting along with people because they’re not swayed by whether people find their desire fulfillment problematic.

(3) People with high self-control

People thought of as having more self-control are not better at resisting desires. Rather, they are “less likely than other people to encounter the sorts of desires that are generally regarded as problematic (by others).” They simply avoid situations that would trigger desires. The guy with high self-control isn’t resisting the cookies in his fridge. He just doesn’t buy them.

By avoiding dangerous temptations and problematic desires, they avoid having to struggle and resist. The result is not a desire-free life. Au contraire, the result appears to be that they mainly have desires that they [are comfortable with satisfying].

So clearly, the habits of the people with high self-control is what we should aim to emulate.

I discussed the high self-control strategy in detail in my 2020 video Willpower is for Losers, but we’ll take a different angle today.

4/9

@FlurkFellows

The more you get, the more you want.

We often bargain with ourselves like ‘OK I’m just going to play Tekken for 20 minutes and then I’ll get to work.’ You might logically assume that’ll satisfy your desire for Tekken and then you’ll be able to totally focus on work. Except, there are two potential side effects to this: (a) If you’re really in the zone on Tekken, it’s probably harder to not play at the end of that 20 minutes than just not playing from the get-go. (b) You’ve set the stage to where the next time you need to work, you’ll want to play 20 minutes of Tekken first.

Getting stuff is great, but like Ozempic, it has side effects. Getting leads to wanting and the more you get, the more you want. No experience is truly satisfying in the way eating a Ferrero Rocher chocolate ball doesn’t mean you’ve permanently quenched your desire for chocolate. We may delude ourself into thinking otherwise, but while eating chocolate temporarily quenches your desire now, this will lead to more craving for chocolate in the future. Often, eating one chocolate ball makes you want another chocolate ball right away.

I have seen this play out time and time again as for a long time I’ve been doing fasting and going between a mostly keto diet to a sweeter, more carb-heavy diet depending on what kind of workouts I’m doing. If I have something nice and sweet after lunch, then usually it’s already by the next day that I’ll be wanting and expecting something nice and sweet after lunch.

5/9

@FlurkFellows

In the space of ‘pickup,’ many young men struggle with what they call “approach anxiety.” That is, despite them learning all these secret tricks to suavely and successfully flirt with women, they can’t get past the first step which is to get themselves to actually approach and begin talking to a woman. They’re standing there at the bar with with their new clothes and hairstyle yet when they spot an attractive woman they’re too anxious to get themselves to go up and speak to her. Men will ask each how to deal with this approach anxiety and some guy will start talking about the reason for the anxiety - something along the lines of we get anxious because being rejected is essentially a woman saying your genes aren’t fit for reproduction or something about how dating worked in Palaeolithic times. Except, the simple reason you have approach anxiety is because you … haven’t approached the woman yet.

Studies have found that speaking to an attractive woman raises men’s testosterone. Studies have also found that having higher testosterone causes men to approach women with less hesitation. So whatever the reason for the anxiety on that particular day in the first place, the most practical solution is to approach the woman (or I suppose raise your testosterone some other way, but I doubt that particular woman will be waiting for you at the bar by the time you finish doing that).

Is there a better, more practical, straightforward solution that doesn’t involve discomfort or effort? Besides drugs and alcohol? I doubt it.

This simple advice that doesn’t alleviate the pain you experience may be frustrating, but it’s correct.

Why can’t you stop craving sugar? Because you eat too much sugar.
Why can’t you stop playing video games? Because you play too many video games.
Why can’t you stop looking at porn? Because you watch too much porn.
Why can’t you stop doomscrolling? Because you doomscroll too often.

“One time I threw a candy wrapper onto the street. I didn’t do it like ‘yea… take that shit, street.’ I did it cause I was y’know, shaking, I wanted the candy.” -Louis C.K.

The real hack to cutting down on your sugar intake is to move to Japan. Compared to America, the average sweet isn’t that sweet. Japanese people don’t like super sweet things because … they don’t eat that much sugar. U.S. citizens drink about 154 liters of soda per capita per year. Japanese people drink 30 liters per year.

Once in a while I’ll get something really sweet, usually cheesecake. There are very good cheesecakes around here in Tokyo, but I saw the American Cheesecake Factory brand cheesecake at the supermarket one day so I thought I’d try that. It was too sweet to the point that I just threw it away after one bite. It wasn’t like I was trying to watch my sugar, after all, I was buying cheesecake… it was just not very good.

The point is, I don’t eat less sugar only because things have less sugar in them here, but the amount of sweetness that I prefer is now much lower.

A 2016 randomized controlled trial found that putting people on a less sweet diet for 3 months (less sugar and no artificial sweeteners) had them naturally eat 20% less sugar after the three months were up when they could eat what they pleased.

6/9

@FlurkFellows

A 2010 study found that 6 weeks of online video game playing induced changes in the brain that are reminiscent of those seen in the early stages of addiction. On the other hand, another study also found that just a week of intensive video game playing could alter the activation pattern of certain brain regions, but just a week of not playing started reversing these negative changes.

Not doing the thing simply makes you want it less.

When I’m trying to not do something, I remind myself of two things:
・If I give into this thing I’m desiring right now, I will desire it more tomorrow.
・If I don’t give into this thing I’m desiring, I will desire it less tomorrow.
This simple logic often makes it easier to not do the thing. After all, if I show myself I don’t have the ability to not do the thing today, why should I expect that I will fare better tomorrow when my desire is higher?

7/9

@FlurkFellows

Dopamine: The feedback loop brain chemical

As I’m sure you’ve heard the explanation of dopamine’s role in desire at least 7 times, I’ll make it quick:
・Dopamine isn’t responsible for liking, it’s responsible for wanting.
(1) When you have an enjoyable experience, dopamine is released.
(2) This dopamine induces learning of everything that was associated with getting that thing you liked. This means a trigger could be anything from time of day, to being in the location where you got the thing, a certain smell, to seeing pictures of the thing or a certain sequence of events.
(3) Later, these things associated with getting the thing act as triggers for dopamine to be released and then that dopamine makes you want the thing.

So, dopamine makes you learn and then it makes you want.

You’re far more likely to ‘suddenly’ want a beer if you’re passing by a bar.
You’re more likely to be hungry for sweets if you see a commercial for Krispy Kreme than if you saw a commercial for TurboTax.
Alcoholics can get intense cravings if they just see a beer somewhere.
Drug addicts can get intense cravings if they see an alley where they’ve done drugs before.

Some triggers for porn addicts include: stress, boredom, loneliness, social media, TV, magazines, and advertisements (say an ad for lingerie). Why? Because the addict likely had the experience of feeling those feelings, using that social media, watching that TV etc and then watching porn.

So, why do cigarette smokers crave a cigarette after meals? Because their brain has taken note of the fact that meals lead to smoking cigarettes.
Why do you want to doomscroll after you get home from work? Because you did that yesterday.

“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”—Warren Buffet

What’s interesting is that dopamine isn’t the only thing ensuring that we remain creatures of habit. For example, a hormone called ghrelin makes you hungry and is released in a rhythm. You don’t get hungry at lunch time because a certain amount of time has elapsed since your last meal and you’re running low on energy. In fact, I bet you’d still be hungry at lunch time even if you ate a massive dinner the day before. Rather, you get hungry at lunch time because ghrelin is trained to that particular time of day. If you’re someone who eats at 2PM instead of noon, you can expect to be hungry at 2PM, not noon.

8/9

@FlurkFellows

There are other indirect ways habitual behaviors keep themselves alive, for example multiple studies have associated internet addiction with anxiety. Further, it’s been found that where internet addiction leads to depression and anxiety, depression and anxiety leads to internet addiction. As this April 2024 study explains:

In the literature, three types of relationships have been revealed between anxiety/depression and Internet addiction, namely, anxiety/depression → internet addiction, Internet addiction → anxiety/depression, and the bidirectional directions between them.

The internet rapidly delivers boredom busting content to your face with only the amount of effort necessary to move your thumb. While on the internet, you don’t have to wait more than a minute to shoo away the feeling of boredom. One reason the internet can make you anxious is because it speeds up the anticipatory circuits in your brain faster than the real world operates.

At a restaurant, it takes less time for you to get agitated and annoyed while waiting for a drink than a meal. That is, because we know drinks are made far quicker than meals and we calibrate our anticipation accordingly. On the internet, everything is delivered to you nearly instantaneously. Your brain becomes adapted to that pace and loses the capacity for patience. While not everyone’s anxiety is visible, what does the stereotype of anxiety look like? Along with an uneasy expression,* it’s a person who can’t sit still, they’re glancing around worriedly like they’re impatiently waiting for something to happen. The internet creates this uncomfortable impatience and the solution for this discomfort is pulling out your smartphone to get on the internet.

*Not all agitation is bad - put a huge smile on this impatient person’s face and you’d just say they’re ‘excited.’

The good news is a study found that in adolescents, when internet addiction is resolved, the “depression, hostility, and social anxiety” associated with the addiction also decreases.

9/9

@FlurkFellows