Am I Lazy or Overstimulated? | Monday Advice  🔗 **Source:** [Am I Lazy or Overstimulated? | Monday Advice](https://share.snipd.com/episode/892158d1-20e2-495a-8cee-3314080874c5) ## Highlights - **Short Internet Breaks Boost Sustained Attention** - A two-week break from mobile internet improved sustained-attention performance, linking reduced context switching to better focus. - Cal references a paper where participants performed better on attention tasks after abstaining from mobile internet. Transcript: Cal Newport That's why he was quick to point it out. The core finding of the paper that Costa didn't publish found that people performed better on a sustained attention task after taking a two-week break from the mobile internet. Now, if this sounds familiar, it's because back in mid-May, we actually did a whole podcast episode on that paper. But now we can understand this in the context of depletion of context-switching capability, that if you're spending all your time doing mobile internet, you're constantly exhausting Your brain. When you fall out of the habit of doing all this context switching, then your brain has more energy left to actually sustain focus on one target. ([Time 0:07:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c14d3ce9-bfdc-4fcc-be94-d18222edaa14)) - **Batch Communications Notify Less Often** - Batch-check messages and reduce notifications to cut context switching and improve well-being. - Kostadin's research shows batching smartphone notifications improves well-being, though batching email can stress high-neuroticism people. Transcript: Cal Newport So we'll read them, and then I'll give my take and Kostadin's take on is this piece of advice good or bad. And I want to give this a rating. To make this interesting, I want to give this a rating scale. So for each of these four pieces of advice, I'm going to rate it on a scale of yay, meaning I approve, and so does Kostadin, to nay, meaning no, no, no, I don't like this advice. I don't think this is sound, with a third option of meh, meaning I'm indifferent. It's not going to hurt, but might not be as effective as the article says. So we have this yay, nay, and meh scale. You can kind of rate along as I go here and try to guess where I'm going to actually end up. All right, here we go. Advice from the article. Let's evaluate it. The first piece of advice the article suggests is to spend the first hour of your day away from your phone. Let me read you the exact wording from the article. The first hour of the morning should be completely offline. Phone stays in another room, not airplane mode where it's still within reach, actually in another room. The first input of the day sets the baseline for the rest of it. Well, the idea of starting your day without a phone, obviously I'm going to be in favor of any sort of time away from your phone. But this idea that it sets a baseline, that if your day starts without a phone, that this is going to give you these extended benefits as the day goes on because you've set some sort of stimuli Baseline. That sounded a little suspect to me, right? What's the psychology or neuroscience behind that? I asked Kostadin. Here's what he had to say. There is actually no evidence that morning digital detox helps, but it is an appealing idea that deserves more testing. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. Okay, so here's what we got. It can't be bad to spend time without your phone. We don't really know that doing that in the first hour has a bigger impact than doing that at other time, but it's possible even without data. So I'm going to rate this one a meh. All right, strategy number two, batch check your phone and email. Let me read you the exact words here from the Reddit essay. I check messages and email three times a day at set times. Not perfectly. I still slip, but the default shifted from always on to mostly off, and the difference in how my brain feels by early afternoon is significant. So this idea that you must be continuously responsive is clearly, that will be overstimulating. I mean, we've talked about this often on the show, like this idea that I always have to be checking email and Slack on my phone. There's just no way that's good. So a notion of like, I need to bat somehow, which I just take as I don't need to be constantly checking communication channels like that. That feels like it has to be good. I asked Kostadin. He liked this idea too. He said, the recommendations to reduce notifications and batch them is based on empirical evidence. He pointed to a paper he wrote on this topic that was titled sort of informatively, batching smartphone notifications can improve well-being. So he had actually studied this exact effect. Now, there is a caveat I do want to give to this strategy. As I discussed in my book, A World Without Email, which you should read if you haven't already, there's research from Gloria Mark's team that found that batching email in an office environment Can actually increase stress and anxiety for people with a certain personality type. In particular, there's a big five personality trait called neuroticism. And if you're high on that trait, it's actually very stressful if you're just simply batching email because you obsess and get worried and anxious about the messages that you haven't Answered. And it in some sense can make things worse. Ultimately, the best solution is the solution that I talk about in a world without email, which is actually changing your communication processes so that you don't have channels and Inboxes that are building up with urgent messages that arrive haphazardly, that you minimize the messages arriving in the first place of that style, and now you don't have that pressure To have to check these as often. But in general, if we interpret this advice as find a way not to be checking communication constantly, I think we got to give that a yeah or a yay. I'm going to say that, I'll say a yeah. ([Time 0:14:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3d2f70e2-d4fc-408a-89f6-be5cfb6ad669)) - **Morning Phone Detox Is Worth Trying Not Sacred** - Try a morning away-from-phone period but treat it as optional rather than proven; evidence is lacking for a special first-hour effect. - Cal and Kostadin rate the morning-detox idea as plausible but currently unproven research-wise. Transcript: Cal Newport Advice from the article. Let's evaluate it. The first piece of advice the article suggests is to spend the first hour of your day away from your phone. Let me read you the exact wording from the article. The first hour of the morning should be completely offline. Phone stays in another room, not airplane mode where it's still within reach, actually in another room. The first input of the day sets the baseline for the rest of it. Well, the idea of starting your day without a phone, obviously I'm going to be in favor of any sort of time away from your phone. But this idea that it sets a baseline, that if your day starts without a phone, that this is going to give you these extended benefits as the day goes on because you've set some sort of stimuli Baseline. That sounded a little suspect to me, right? What's the psychology or neuroscience behind that? I asked Kostadin. Here's what he had to say. There is actually no evidence that morning digital detox helps, but it is an appealing idea that deserves more testing. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. Okay, so here's what we got. It can't be bad to spend time without your phone. We don't really know that doing that in the first hour has a bigger impact than doing that at other time, but it's possible even without data. ([Time 0:14:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/16512a69-65af-4252-b84d-60726d9623c9)) - **Skip The Ten Minute Brain Rewire Promise** - Avoid relying on microlearning claims like '10 minutes rewires your brain' because brief sessions won't offset hours-long social media habits. - Kostadin calls the 10-minute rewiring claim marketing hype unsupported by the research. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, let me read from the essay here. Research on neuroplasticity shows that consistent daily micro learning, even just 10 minutes, can actually start to rewire your brain's reward pathways over time. Your brain adapts to whatever you feed it repeatedly. If the repeated input is fragmented junk from feeds all day, your dopamine system calibrates to that. But if you swap even a portion of that scroll time for short focused learning, the brain starts recalibrating towards inputs that require slightly more sustained attention. It's gradual, but the shift is real. This sounds suspicious to me. If you feed your brain highly stimulating junk all day, how much can the occasional short doses of learning really matter? Furthermore, the idea of micro-learning seems like a contradiction in terms as far as I'm concerned because non-trivial learning is This almost always an act of deliberate practice. You have to isolate the relevant neural circuit so that you can have a clean firing of those circuits on the new pattern that can then strengthen those connections and make that future Application of thought easier. That type of deliberate practice is not pleasant. You don't just do it real quick. It can take 10 or 15 minutes just to sufficiently clear out your brain that you can even start the hard work of learning something new. So this was a little bit suspicious to me. I asked Kostadin. He also was not impressed. Here's what he had to say. Quote, I'm quoting him here. The claim that just 10 minutes a day of learning can rewire your brain is total marketing hype and makes no sense. If the average person spends hours scrolling on social media, replacing 10 minutes of that with microlearning ain't going to do it. I have heard this claim in commercials, and if you know what study they may have in mind when they are saying that, please do share. But I am convinced that this is not what the research shows. All right, so I think we have to give that piece of advice a strong nay. ([Time 0:18:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9770fa9e-5f1e-48f5-8f3c-6e9b23df4fbd)) - **Fix Your Relationship With Your Phone** - Permanently reduce accessible stimulation by removing attention-extracting apps and creating phone-free contexts for deep work and home life. - Cal recommends landlining at home, separating deep from shallow work, and practicing projects that reward sustained focus. Transcript: Cal Newport I would basically base all of my advice here for this particular issue of overstimulation leading to procrastination to say that you should permanently reduce your stimulation. You need to rebalance your dopamine system and avoid exhausting your brain unnecessarily from too much context switching. If that's really what's going on here, down regulation, long-term, context switching fatigue in the short term, you have to rewire your life so that you avoid that down regulation On stimulation so that you can find sufficient stimulation from things that aren't casino flashy. And in the moment, you need to rebuild your day so that you're not forced to constantly context shift and exhaust your brain temporarily. This would mean, for example, take off of your phone any app that makes money off of your attention. This means, for example, landlining at home. When you're at home, you have your plug phone in the kitchen with the ringer on, and that's where you go when you need to check for messages, look something up, or take or make a phone call. It's not with you as a default, so get very used to doing other activities in your house without that other type of down-regulating dopamine stimulation easily accessible. When at work, you need to separate deep from shallow work and if possible go somewhere different for the deep work, hopefully without your phone. Again, you want to create a different stimulation environment for deep work. You don't want to have to combat other types of stimulation. You want to just make it as easy as possible to sustain focus on one target. And you need to practice getting positive stimulation from efforts that require sustained focus. Your long-term motivation centers in your brain can override to short-term stimulation centers that want you to go pick up your phone if they get regular exposure to long-term focus Leading to more deep rewards. So this could mean, for example, leisure activities, hobbies, projects, practices that maybe are unrelated to work but just help you learn, hey, I got better at this, and then the chair I built was really good, and then I got a deep reward out of that, or I worked on the song until I could perform it, and that was fun, and I got a deep social reward out of that. You want to give ammo to your long-term motivation system so it can win in the psychological war against a short-term variant. All right, so some conclusions here to this deep dive. You know, I think we learned a lot. Overstimulation is different than laziness, but it can make you feel lazy because you're not able to make progress on the things you want. Understanding what specifically happens in your brain is the best way to understand how best to push back on the overstimulation problem. This Reddit essay captured a common style of advice that's given in these cases, which is short-term fixes. Do a morning detox. Micro-learn for 10 minutes a day. These are fixes that sound meaningful, like I could do them, but they avoid the hard thing. You got to change your relationship to your phone. You have to change relationship to your work, right? It's very much like if you have an alcohol dependency, looking for the advice that doesn't involve a step of you stop drinking. That's kind of what I see going with a lot of this internet advice. No, you can still use your phone and do all the apps and be on the AI all day or whatever, but don't pick it up first thing in the morning and micro-learn. It's not enough. And the real solutions are harsher probably. Like you need to permanently fix this relationship. You need to greatly reduce the amount of stimulation that you're exposed to. So there we see. I mean, I think this is a nice symbiosis, right? ([Time 0:21:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a94a3d1c-57ea-4511-a75a-819c666e84d7)) - **Use Projects To Retrain Dopamine For Deep Rewards** - Build hobbies and projects that reward long-term effort to retrain dopamine toward sustained achievement. - Cal suggests maker projects, music practice, or crafts that produce visible skill gains and deep rewards as practice. Transcript: Cal Newport This would mean, for example, take off of your phone any app that makes money off of your attention. This means, for example, landlining at home. When you're at home, you have your plug phone in the kitchen with the ringer on, and that's where you go when you need to check for messages, look something up, or take or make a phone call. It's not with you as a default, so get very used to doing other activities in your house without that other type of down-regulating dopamine stimulation easily accessible. When at work, you need to separate deep from shallow work and if possible go somewhere different for the deep work, hopefully without your phone. Again, you want to create a different stimulation environment for deep work. You don't want to have to combat other types of stimulation. You want to just make it as easy as possible to sustain focus on one target. And you need to practice getting positive stimulation from efforts that require sustained focus. Your long-term motivation centers in your brain can override to short-term stimulation centers that want you to go pick up your phone if they get regular exposure to long-term focus Leading to more deep rewards. So this could mean, for example, leisure activities, hobbies, projects, practices that maybe are unrelated to work but just help you learn, hey, I got better at this, and then the chair I built was really good, and then I got a deep reward out of that, or I worked on the song until I could perform it, and that was fun, and I got a deep social reward out of that. ([Time 0:21:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/230cb805-0a41-4240-b183-857a37e44211)) - **Cal's Teenage Coding Jobs Foreshadow AI Tools** - Cal recounts his teenage jobs coding quick internal tools and microcontroller rewrites that saved firms time and became indispensable. - He uses these stories to explain AI will automate '14-year-old coder' tasks by making quick internal tooling widely accessible. Transcript: Speaker 2 We got layers here. My past newsletter about a past article. Cal Newport I don't know if we talked about my latest New Yorker piece on the show yet. In detail, no, we mentioned it. Right, okay. So let me read her message, and we'll look at the article. I'll do my best to answer it. So Emma said, thank you so much for sharing your ideas this week on the ways that AI is actually transforming the knowledge sector. If you have a minute, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on how those entering into the knowledge sector will be able to learn and scale their skill sets if higher level programmers Consultants are now automating the creation of those quick and dirty tools instead of hiring young people to create them. So the article she's talking about, I'll put it on the screen here, came on The New Yorker on June 5th. It's titled, Instead of Taking Your Job, AI Might Transform It. Now, what she's mentioning is this article actually opens on me talking about a job I had after a summer. We couldn't figure out which summer it was. I didn't remember. But it was some summer in high school. I had a job in which – here, I'll just read you from the article here. Out one corridor. At a desk in some sort of equipment room, I coded quick and dirty database tools for internal use. One of my programs simplified the process of logging hours in the timesheets. Another tracked inventory for the IT department. My role is to find small ways to improve the lives of my coworkers. The reason why I told that story in the article is that I essentially conclude the A section by saying, when I talk to people who are running businesses and using AI, who are not software Development businesses but other types of businesses, one of their major uses is not automating jobs in the sense of like I'm going to replace people's jobs but to build quick and dirty Tools that make people's lives easier like the role I played for that consulting firm back when I was in high school. I then in the article said there was another use I'm seeing, which is something called freestyle work, but that's a little more complicated because it requires you have to use a coding Agent for non-coding uses. And so that might be a longer use case, might be a little bit longer timeframe before that becomes popular. But there is a lot going on now of companies not replacing employees, but building new tools for them. So instead of saying, let's take somethe-shelf piece of software that kind of does what we need and use that, you could just build your own piece of software. It can be kind of buggy. It doesn't have to be super secure, but you can use it internally to make your life easier. And this is what I did for this consulting company because I guess I was a huge nerd. But this was my job, Jesse. I programmed for – I was a computer programmer in high school. So that's what that article was saying. So Emma, my read of Emma, and I got a lot of messages like this, to be honest, where people said, yeah, but AI is automating jobs. It automated your job you had in high school programming. And that's the first step towards these other jobs. So isn't that a problem? And here's what the key point here is. Here's what I was trying to say in that article. The job I had in high school is that's not really a job. That's not a common job, right? There was a weird confluence of things that came together, right? Which was the fact that like, I was a big nerd in the sense that like, I was a really good computer programmer when I was 14 years old. And a family friend I think was head of IT for this consulting firm and was like, do you want to come build tools for us? These are things we don't have time to build, but they would be useful. If I wasn't available, so if we didn't have access to a teenage nerd, they just wouldn't have had that role. So that's not a role that really widely existed of building quick and dirty tools for internal use. Because if you had programming talent that you were paying a full-time programmer salary, you want them building things you can sell or that are more directly tied to income. So we're simulating 14- or 15-year me. That's what we're doing with AI. But there wasn't a lot of 14- and 15-year me. Just most companies just didn't have a 14- or 15-year me. Now a lot of companies do. That's sort of what's happening here. That's kind of the story, by the way, Jesse, of my life, my teenage years. It's what I did after my first year of college as well, because again, I'm awesome and cool. ([Time 0:28:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fbebee31-d6be-4a95-8869-6565cc1e5176)) - **Dumb Calculator Restored Focus In The Workshop** - A listener bought a $10 physical calculator for woodworking to avoid phone distractions and regained focus for most measurements. - Cal notes non-digital single-purpose tools often survive because older users still buy them with large tactile buttons. Transcript: Cal Newport Opposite of jimsy all right michael says hi cal and jesse thought you'd enjoy that i bought a ten dollar calculator for my my wood shop after another woodworker recommended it i've been Using my phone calculator but as you already know that invariably leads to time wasted due to unrelated distractions i still use the phone one for the rare trigonometry needs, but 95% Better. Anyway, thanks for your work. Cheers. All right. And he sent us a picture, right? Yep. All right. We'll see it. Look at that, Jesse. Old-fashioned calculator with big buttons you press. I'll tell you, this is a truism as someone who's had to buy a bunch of like, you know, we buy dumb phones for our kids and stuff like that. The only like old school technology you buy, it always has like giant buttons because it's all made for old people. That's the market that's left for like non-digital, like fancy tools is old people. So it's all like the phones, the flip phones we bought for our kids when they have to take the bus or whatever. It's like big old buttons for 85 year olds to not get confused. ([Time 0:46:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cd48feab-b268-47dc-b70d-2b6894027589)) - **Bluetooth Landline Lets You Keep The Phone Out** - Use a Bluetooth landline phone that rings via your cell for emergencies to keep your smartphone out of key rooms. - Cal approves but warns texts won't ring on such phones, so kitchen charging still helps parents who rely on messaging. Transcript: Cal Newport Kat says, I want to share another version of landlining I think your podcast listeners may find interesting. I used to charge my phone in the kitchen until a family health issue meant I didn't want to risk missing emergency calls overnight. I considered getting an actual landline for emergencies, but then I learned about landline phones that connected to your cell phone with Bluetooth. Instead of paying for a landline, I bought the landline phone, connected it to my cell, and I keep that in my bedroom in case I need to answer a call. Since I already have my cell set to silence unknown callers, the phone only rings when a contact calls. This solution keeps the phone out of the bedroom while giving me the peace of mind that I won't miss an important call. Bonus benefit. Instead of the kitchen, I started charging my phone in the basement beside my exercise mat. So now I'm following through more on my morning workout routine. That's a cool technology. I think that does definitely one-up landlining. I'm thinking this through, Jesse. So here's the problem. So I think if your main concern is keeping you back from landlining, like with CAT, is important phone calls, this works great. You can have an old-fashioned 90s-style phone that rings loudly if there's a call from a contact, and you can go pick it up and talk without having to be distracted by your phone. The issue is I think a lot of people's communication that they're doing with their phone is text-based. And so there, landlining by just having your phone in the kitchen works well because you can go check the text messages or WhatsApp. You got to go in the kitchen to do it so it's not with you. But if your phone was in the basement, then the physical landline phone is not going to ring for text messages. You wouldn't be able to hear them, obviously. So I think that's a cool solution if phone calls is what you really care about. If you're deep into text messages, like if you're a parent right now, that's hard to avoid. Then plugging the phone in the kitchen so it's nearby but not within reach is probably the best solution. Cool technology, though. ([Time 0:47:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/32bbf8ce-f55d-4e4f-99a8-5dc2f3a526fc))