Szymon's Zettelkasten
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NSD stands for No Synthetic Dopamine.
NSD is about removing from your life all sources of short-term pleasure activities. What are such activities? Usually, they’re things that make us feel great at the moment but later leave us with regret, such as eating sugar, social media, playing video games, watching Netflix, watching porn, and so on—you get the idea. To simplify, let’s call them bad things.
When you remove the bad things, the things that are left are only the good things (or at least not-bad things). These are activities that don’t give you that immediate dopamine hit at the moment but pay dividends in the future. Examples of such things are reading books, doing sports, eating non-sugary foods, playing the piano, hiking, etc. In short, things you intuitively know are good for you.
If you plotted these two activities on a graph (pleasure vs., time), it would look something like this.
Bad activities. Big spikes with a downward trend.
Good activities. Small spikes with an upward trend.
Good activities vs. Bad activities (in a long time horizon [10+ years])
In sum, in the long term, doing bad things will make you miserable, and doing good things will make you happy. NSD helps you focus on the latter.
Related notes
This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=422w64SsfeI relates greatly to what I've written here because it is about removing external rewards.
Referenced in
TK PN: NSD makes you more creative
NSD is about removing all sources of short-term pleasure activities like sugar, social media, video games, binge-watching Netflix, porn, etc., – i.e., the bad things.
PN: Feed the mind and wait
Nonetheless, most of our capacity as a species lies in the power of our whole being—mind (conscious and unconscious) and body. It's only when you stop thinking, can you access this power. This is where slack, or times of no-mind come into play. (NSD may facilitate times of no-mind.)
P: Avoid unwanted desires by visualizing the consequences
Doing NSD (No Synthetic Dopamine) where you remove high dopamine activities.
PN: Get into deep work
3 P: NSD: No Synthetic Dopamine: nsd may help you in keeping your breaks clean of mindless activities like scrolling social media, video games, porn, etc.
PN: Meditation cleans up your brain
P: NSD: No Synthetic Dopamine: NSD is another method to declutter your brain. More, you can use meditation to help you adapt to a less dopamine rich lifestyle.
tk P: Times of slack/stillness/rest to avoid burnout
P: NSD: No Synthetic Dopamine: combining regular rest with NSD can accelerate the effectiveness of recovery.
P: Greatest writing should flow out of you naturally
P: NSD: No Synthetic Dopamine: NSD helps you "catch" those authentic ideas when they come.