> In the past, before radio and recorded music, people daydreamed or sang to accomplish the same goal.

Call it pain avoidance or dopamine stacking, they're probably both apt, but there's a difference in degree between the level of control and personalization and dependence between humming a tune or listening to a stationary giant radio and the current state of not being able to do anything remotely unstimulating or arduous like standing on a train or going to sleep without a distraction; how normal it is seems like logical fallacy, It's also pretty normal for people to spend 5 hours a day looking at their phones, not have made any friends in adulthood outside school, or have any romantic prospects.

I find it funny/depressing that I've been asked at least 3 times why I don't wear headphones at the gym. If you can pull a lever or click a button and take your mind of something you've never let become less painful, how important is the distinction?

Daydreaming and singing to yourself is not entertaining. It's just something that an unstimulated brain does. To get to that destimulated place is the object imo - where what you're doing is so habitual that every step seems like a breath, and you only notice the ones you miss.

I remember before I learned the basics of cooking how hard everything was, and how much I had to concentrate. These days I'll spend 20 minutes cooking something, plate it and go to the bathroom, and have forgotten what I cooked before seeing it again. I remember when I was learning Spanish, and every successful paragraph I read merited a celebration, and now I sometimes can't remember whether something I read was in Spanish or English an hour after I've read it.

My biggest improvement in writing came after I stopped listening to music while doing it. Get it over with, then listen to music. Once you get into the habit, it's like taking a nap not having a party. I remember a factory I worked at in my 20s where I got up to doing 76 hour weeks with no days off because I was so good at what I was doing, I entered a timeless place. There was no time to get bored in. I'm sure I might have hummed, but I wouldn't remember. I certainly wasn't thinking about anything important; those machines could have ripped my hands off.

People are adaptable. Likes and dislikes and comfort zones are all malleable. I never liked working out in the slightest. Never stuck to any sort of "gym routine" more than a few days. Did most of the Couch to 5k program in college but never kept running. Just...never liked it. I had lots of friends in high school and college who ran Cross Country, and was always a bit baffled about the appeal. It seemed terrible, honestly.

When my friend randomly suggested that we try a very ambitious hiking route, I knew it would absolutely suck if I didn't train for it. I got a gym membership and told myself I'd at the very least set foot in the gym 7 days a week for the first few weeks, just to build the habit of going. I was motivated to make sure I didn't slack off and ruin the hike for the group by being undertrained. A few months of that and the hike went great.

When we got back, though, I found it felt weird to not go to the gym in the mornings before work (as a decidedly NON-morning person my friends and family looked at me like I'd grown a second head when they heard me say I was working out before work). I started running outside on days the gym was crowded, and it felt good! In the nearly eight years since then, there have been only a handful of weeks where I didn't go for a run—I genuinely really enjoy it, no motivational tricks required.

My 2 cents : I make it a game or I find beauty in it.

As a more concrete example, as soon as you learn to enjoy learning as an activity, it becomes fun, whatever you are studying. So you only need to learn to have fun while learning. Start with simple things, make it a game, find beauty in what you are learning.

If you want actionable advice, forget about motivation and stick to discipline instead.

Do you want to do it or not? If you actually want to do it you should be able to obtain some satisfaction from getting it done, however distasteful the task itself. Sometimes it's as simple as that: either realising you really do want to do it or realising you really don't and reconsidering why you're trying to make yourself do it in the first place.

But sometimes the problem isn't motivation. Sometimes it's energy. Sometimes you really do want to do it, to the core of your being, but you're just too fucking tired. That's a very different problem.

Yeah, the ancient stoics made a whole philosophy about it.

I’ve got colleagues who have to grade CASM (scrolling through images and classifying them as category A, B, C etc.

This can take literally days and the first thing they are told is don’t listen to music they enjoy while doing it, because they will never again be able to listen to that music.

turn on subtitles, i guess?

> who need to make content frequently

I think this is a major issue with so much of the "creator community". When you make this thing your job, you can't just not show up to work for a few months at a time. But, if your content is "information regurgitation", like reading health studies and reporting them to your audience, is there really enough out there to make it a full time job? Doubtful. So, you'll end up either rehashing yourself over and over (your viewers will get bored and leave), or start going to the fringes of your field where there is far less basis for your statements than what originally brought your audience in.

It's a cruel cycle with YouTubers- they run out of stuff to say/stuff they can authoritatively talk about, but are basically forced to continue coming up with more content in order to stay relevant and keep their income going.

Your reward system is a fragile thing that is easily broken. Just look around you next time you go anywhere. We live in a society of smart phone addicts. That said, the examples OP gave of tunes while exercising seem pretty benign compared to superstimuli like social media or drugs...

Seriously - always thought the guy was one step up from a grifter. His education has little to do with what he talks about and of course like many he has something also to sell

Huberman was a hack from the start of his podcast. It was a bit baffling what people were seeing in him.

You probably like music and coding, and friends and food, and singing and hiking. OP was talking about blending activities you like with activities you don't like, as a way of getting you to do the thing you don't like.

I’m kind-of the opposite: I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on a TV show while exercising.

I think people use "dopamine" in quite a loose sense to refer to reward centres in the brain and habit formation, not literally the hormone (though it's related). You might have better luck digging around those topics.

For plenty of already-in-shape people, the calories expended during the exercise are largely incidental, with the goal of exercise being to enhance or maintain some other property of their physical capacity.

You'll still have improved cardiovascular fitness even if you aren't losing weight.

Any ways, a lot of studies have shown your body has a variety of methods that attempt to counteract excess calories burned, like reduction in non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

I'll disagree slightly, though clearly you are correct that if your goal is to offset calories, then eating a donut negates the benefits of the exercise activity.

My disagreement is that I think exercise should not primarily be about calories - it should be about fitness. And almost all of the fitness gains from exercise persist even if you replace the calories with a donut.

Exercising for 30min and then relacing those spent calories with donuts is FAR better than not exercising and forgoing those extra calories.

that not how it works. that's not how any of this works.

the aerobics build up muscle that will always be burning calories by merely existing. a donut here and there won't make a negligible difference, as long as the weekly aerobic activity level is maintained.