MeBurger!

Dopamine is the get-shit-done neurotransmitter. Our brain’s dopamine system is broken. Normies complete a task and get a satisfying feeling of accomplishment, that’s dopamine. You complete a task and get nothing. When you did those tasks before, and got no dopamine, your brain labeled them as useless. Your brain is literally telling you that doing nothing is better than the tasks you need to do. Better to be lazy and save calories for important tasks. You’re not procrastinating, that’s something normies do, you won’t ever do those things. You’re not putting off an unpleasant task, you’re conditioned not to do them.

You need to condition your brain to expect a reward when you complete a task. Figure out what things do give you dopamine, and reward your brain with them.

Clean the house - play video games for 15 minutes.

Do laundry - 15 minutes on social media.

I’ve had varying results combining activities, like cleaning while listening to my favorite podcasts.

It also helps me to spend a moment being mindful of the results of the task. “Look how much better this room is now that it’s clean. I’m proud of myself for accomplishing this task.” It sounds dumb but it works.

I have a carbon steel wok that I love.

I tried to buy a BifL non-stick pan and found that it doesn’t exist. Everything marketed as non-stick has some coating that will wear off and become useless. “But what about {brand that says it’s not PTFE, PFOA, or PFAS}?” Yep them too. Look up sol-gel non-stick coating if you have ceramic non-stick. If you don’t want to have to buy pans over and over again, you have to go stainless, cast iron or carbon steel. Cast iron enamelware is pretty good too, but isn’t really non-stick. I’m in the process of finding stainless/cast-iron replacements for all my non-stick pans.

Dinner tonight was one of my favorite meals, BFMC. Bread, fruit, meat, cheese. A loaf of fresh bread, a hunk of tasty cheese, a little bit of cured meat like salami, and some fruit. If you want to get fancy you can add some nuts and olives.

That’s how I found the word, I saw that diagram.

I don’t want to constantly have to fight against my ADHD just so I can be average. Can you imagine any other disease getting this kind of treatment? “Yeah, you have cancer, but it’s not killing you so just deal with it.”

I prefer positive reinforcement. If I do a task, I reward myself with a dopamine hit. I play a game or hit Lemmy or Mastodon for 15 minutes after.

A couple reasons off the top of my head, 1.) You can’t let 20-30 kids loose without it ending in pandemonium, but you need kids to practice time management skills before college. Homework is a time where kids can learn to manage a workload, outside of the controlled environment of school. 2) Kids can’t candle a 9 to 5, they need recess and art, and music, and gym to give their brains a break. In the 7.5ish hours that kids go to school, there’s probably only 4 hours of work done. (but Bob, I only work like 30 minutes of any given day, and I’m an adult…)

Am I the only one who feels like productivity/organization tools for ADHD people is like bicycles for blind kids? Like, “yeah I can see how a functional person could find this useful, but what the heck am I going to do with it?”

Hot take: you shouldn’t subscribe to an ism.

You know what my political affiliation is? I’m an engineer. You want to solve a problem, you break it apart and fix the broken parts.

Abortion? Sure.

What’s the problem? Women are pregnant and they don’t wanna be.

Well how’d they get pregnant? They had unprotected sex, or they got raped(including all kinds here). Teach people how to use birth control and make it easy to get. Teach men about consent. Fund sex crime policing.

That takes care of the input side of the equation. What’s next? Oh yeah, they don’t wanna be pregnant. Why not? Because it could kill them, or wreck thier bodies. OK, well let’s fund research and support for maternal mortality issues (including post-partum). If a pregnancy is likely to kill a woman (like double the normal mortality rate) she should be allowed to abort, even if she’s not in immediate danger. You can’t force somebody to risk their life.

Any other reasons? Because the fetus is severely deformed and will die in pain if allowed to make it to full term? Abortion, no question. Honestly any other position on this one is fucked up. I’m sure of very little when it comes to God, but I’m sure it doesn’t want preventable suffering.

What else? Families can’t afford a kid? Free high quality childcare for everyone. Free healthcare for kids and post-partum mothers (probably for everyone but that’s a different topic).

What about adoption? Well, as they say, adoption is the answer to a different question. Just to cover all cases though, let’s fund high-quality adoption services, including counseling for the birth mother for as long as she needs.

How do we pay for it all? Taxes. Taxes are good for society. Shut the fuck up and pony up your fair share. If you use our stuff, eat our food, drink our clean water, taxes are what you owe.

These are just off the top of my head. The real answers are probably way more complicated, but it’s going to take work to figure it all out. This is how you fix a problem though. Lots of hard work to understand the whole thing, soup to nuts, and then you fix it all.

Does that make me a leftist?

Am I the only person who was always skeptical of registering a localized domain in a localization that I’m not actually in?

These are the things that keep me from anxiety and depression.

Maintain high-quality relationships with people who enrich your life.

Get good sleep. 7.5 hours of solid sleep every night.

Watch your diet. Don’t eat too much processed food. Keep meat and dairy to 1/3 of what you eat.

Take care of something. Dogs and cats are great but so are reptiles, fish and even plants.

Find work that challenges you in ways that keep you engaged, but doesn’t punish you for being neurodivergent.

Coffee, one cup in the morning. Try to get your focus work done in the first half of the day, while the caffeine is still pumping. If you can handle it, have a 2nd cup before noon, buy only if it doesn’t keep you from going to sleep at a good time.

It depends. If I get into a really interesting book, and then spend several hours reading, I sometimes feel like that. Like I got so sucked into the world of the book that I left this one. Sometimes at the end of a really long, really good movie I feel the same. It doesn’t feel as bad as you describe though. Just kind of disorienting.

If I get into a flow state at work it feels fantastic. At the end I feel tired, but in a good way. I can relax and usually kind of revel in whatever was created during the flow state. It feels so good, I have to be careful not to overindulge. If I don’t watch it, I’ll ignore all the boring work that’s not likely to get me into a flow.

I highly recommend anyone with ADHD to look into flow state theory.

I was just listening to The Hidden Brain, they talked about an experiment. Scientists bioengineered rats to have no dopamine receptors. If they put food in the rat’s mouth it would eat, but if they put the food even one body length away, the rat would starve to death. I have never felt so much sympathy for a rat.

I get routines that, once I get started, it’s hard to stop.

For instance, take a shower, brush teeth, go to bed.

If I get really dirty and have to take a shower at noon, I have to actively remind myself NOT to brush my teeth and yes, even not to get into pajamas.

I was trying to find the video where the guy actually solved the problem, and I stumbled on to this https://youtu.be/mokllJ_Sz_g

Apparently there are more, The Expert videos and they’re all spot on.

Office Depot sells printers at very low (or even negative) margin, and then inflates the margins on cables, paper, ink, and warranty. If you want the best deal, get the printer from OD, and everything else you need somewhere else. That $20 USB cable they sell costs them $1 and you can get the same or better online for $2.68.

If you don’t do the important things in life you’ll die. Your genes built the dopamine system to make sure you’ll do those things. Your dopamine system doesn’t function correctly. When you do a life sustaining thing, your broken dopamine system says, “meh, that was a waste of time, don’t do that again or you’ll die. Do something that does give dopamine.”

Here’s my hack. Give your brain dopamine. Figure out the things that engage you and make you feel good. If you’re engaged and feeling good, it’s because the dopamine is flowing. I like reading, video games, TV, and interesting complex problems. Right after I do a boring task, I reward myself with some dopamine. I play a game or I work on an interesting problem. I treat my brain like a labrador. Good boy have a treat. The bigger the task the bigger the reward.

Slightly less helpful but still good is affirmations. When you do something good, take a moment to recognize it, just to yourself. “I cleaned my room, which is good. I should feel good about it.” It sounds corny, but it helps.

Or my favorite, “here let me show you how to use a calendar.”

Great, next maybe you could teach a blind kid to ride a bike.

Here’s me in 6th grade, reading at a college level, learning algebra, picking up coding because it’s fun, and you think the problem is that I don’t conceptually get calendars?