Uninstall Your Mental Bloatware: Or, How to Stop Doing Things That Are Bad For You

I have written a lot on this blog about procrastination, defined as our inability to start doing things - usually due to insufficient motivation. This post does a deep dive into the opposite problem: our inability to stop. The habit is so insidious because under the lens of late capitalism, doing more makes us feel productive. That motivates us to put in more time and energy. Productivity cannot be separated from impact, however, and doing too much is often unhelpful or even actively harmful.

This tendency can take many forms. We beat ourselves up over an embarrassing moment for years after it happened. We spend hours changing the wording in a paragraph to make it 'perfect'. We cannot stop ourselves from checking the news every few hours even though we know it will make us upset. We make decisions and then agonize over them long after we can do anything about it. We overthink and over-engineer and overload ourselves with unnecessary tasks.

None of these actions actually help us, but we still do them. Being busy helps us feel empowered even - especially - when we are objectively powerless. We distract ourselves from uncomfortable thoughts by finding something else to do. We tell ourselves that doing something 'perfectly' can protect us from criticism and we sink hours into tweaking tiny details.

Being busy helps us feel empowered even - especially - when we are objectively powerless.

Then there is the simple fact that the biochemical realities of our minds and bodies determines our actions just as much, if not more than conscious thought. We cannot experience a traumatic event and say, "I would prefer to stop thinking about this now," and walk away humming. Our behaviors, habits, triggers, and neuroses are driven largely by factors out of our control. We learn predominately from our experiences, and that knowledge is not easily forgotten.

We learn predominately from our experiences, and that knowledge is not easily forgotten.

We have all taken on lots of bloatware over the course of our lives. I define bloatware as programs that have become inefficient over time and now waste our precious disk space. Examples include perfectionism, anxiety, and overthinking. In the glitched up Task Manager from the previous post, we can see that the background processes that are eating up the majority of our computational resources are all unnecessary.

To get rid of the bloatware, we must first look at some 'documentation' for how motivation works in our brains - specifically, through the lens of neuroscience.

(There are many types of 'bloatware' that are closer to full, complex programs instead of individual processes - I'm talking about addiction, depression, OCD, etc. There is a lot of overlap when it comes to treating those conditions, but that's not in the scope of this post. I will do a deep dive at some point, however.)

Neuroscience 101

At its core, the goal of modern neuroscience is to write documentation for a massive repository of legacy code - one that was written by interns with zero access to version control. This is, as you can probably imagine, not an easy task.

Our brains are the result of many millennia of evolution, a process that is at once beautifully ineffable and horribly deranged. Each of our codebases is the result of combining the codebases of our ancestors, and then using a random number generator to determine how to resolve every merge conflict. Natural selection determines over time whether a particular line of code is a bug or a feature - in other words, whether a particular pull request is good enough to get accepted into the genetic pool of the next generation.

At its core, the goal of modern neuroscience is to write documentation for a massive repository of legacy code - one that was written by interns with zero access to version control.

We do not know why our brains do much of what it does. In other words, it is difficult for us to find where and how a particular feature is implemented. Difficult, but possible.

In particular, much research has been conducted on the relationship between attention, motivation, and mood. In the following section, I will summarize what we know about the dopamine cycle: the neurochemical process that drives our ability to start and stop doing something.

Case Study: The Dopamine Cycle

Dopamine is the chemical messenger that makes us feel good. It determines whether we feel victorious or defeated, energetic or listless, satisfied or desperate. The purpose of dopamine is to keep us alive, and survival means constant motivation. Constant pleasure is not conducive to that, but mild psychological torment is. The dopamine cycle is a cruel mistress, one that forces us to consistently oscillate between anticipation, pleasure, and pain - ostensibly for our own good.

The diagram below describes the spokes of the dopamine cycle. It is drawn from a paper about addiction:

A summary:

1. We start to want something that we do not have.
   1. Maybe we get hungry, or see a commercial, or get flirted with. Oftentimes, however, we start craving something out of habit or because we are bored.
   2. With the emergence of desire, what had been a sense of fulfillment becomes a lack. In some cases, develops into a gnawing and eventually all-consuming need (cough, addiction, cough.)
2. Once we are made sufficiently uncomfortable, we become motivated enough to seek satisfaction.
3. We begin to anticipate the reward, which gets the dopamine flowing. Thinking about the finish line brings us continual pleasure that keeps us motivated despite setbacks.
4. We find out via a trigger that we are about to get the reward. Dopamine floods the brain - more than at any other point in the cycle.
5. We get the reward!
   1. Because anticipation gives us more dopamine than the reward itself, we are immediately motivated to begin the cycle again.
   2. Great if that's going for a run, less great if that's doing another line of cocaine.

The dopamine cycle is a cruel mistress, one that forces us to consistently oscillate between anticipation, pleasure, and pain - ostensibly for our own good.

There are a lot of ways that this process can go wrong. If there is not enough dopamine to work with, motivation is low and the cycle runs slowly. Too much stimulus means too many cycles are going at the same time; we struggle to prioritize specific stimuli to respond to. When we do not get enough dopamine when we finish doing something, it becomes difficult to close out the cycle and respond to the next stimulus in line.

To complete a cycle, we need sufficient anticipation, a clear trigger, and a satisfying reward. Unfortunately, the rewards for responding to most stimuli in our lives are pretty disappointing, to say the least. This is especially true for those of us working in software. It is difficult to find writing documentation to be more meaningful than an achievement as concrete as saving a life or even implementing a feature. Some of us can choose a livelihood in which the rewards are meaningful and satisfying, whether that is through privilege or hard work or just plain luck. Most of us cannot.

So, what do we do? Given our lack of control over the reward step, we can achieve more impact by focusing our efforts on debugging anticipation and trigger - the steps of the cycle that result in the most dopamine. Let's say sustained anticipation gets us to the finish line and triggers help us cross it. The actual reward - taking photos at the end, maybe a medal - is paltry in comparison to what you feel as you crosses the finish line.

To remove our mental bloatware, which can be thought of as unwanted processes running on our system, we must move the motivation that keeps them going to somewhere else. Or in other words, we must deallocate and reallocate the 'compute.' As we discussed, the out-of-the-box garbage collector provided by our legacy hardware struggles to handle the amount of stimuli that comes with modern life.

We need a better solution, and in this series, I will show you how to build one. I will discuss how manual memory management is done in C and how to use the same logic to manage motivation instead of memory. I will dive into the anticipation and trigger mechanisms within our dopamine cycles, and how we can submit pull requests to update them for the needs of our modern world.

See you next time!

As always, if you have thoughts, do leave a comment.

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