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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Does this sound familiar to you? You have some sort of significant project that you need to complete, like maybe your passport is expired and you have to figure out how to renew it, or you volunteered to update the text on your organization's website and you're not quite sure how to get started, and you find yourself day after day unable to make progress.
It goes on your list and it stays there untouched. Now, to the outside world, it might look like You're lazy in the sense that you know that there's something you need to do and you're simply not doing it. But you know inside that things are not so simple. You're not just sitting around playing video games. You're constantly in motion on your devices. You're sending and receiving messages.
You're checking in on the news. You're tumbling down potentially productive rabbit holes. And your days are filled with this little P productivity, but not the big P productive accomplishments that actually matter. Well, I struggle with this sometimes, and I'm convinced that technology has made the situation much more common and much more worse.
But what exactly is happening in our adult brains when we find ourselves procrastinating on important projects like this? And once we understand what that is, how might we fix it? Well, it's Monday. which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to tackle these questions. So here's my plan.
I recently came across a Reddit post from the Our Habits subreddit that originally got me thinking about this topic. The title of this post was, You're Not Lazy, You're Overstimulated. And it proposes, this post proposes some answers to the questions that we just asked. So we're going to use that as our jumping off point today.
But then I'm going to bring in the help of a psychology professor that I know. We're going to pick apart what this post gets right about our brains and what it does not. And we will use this updated understanding to identify some advice that will help any of us avoid the overstimulation trap. So if you're always feeling busy, but aren't feeling accomplished, then this episode is for you.
So let's get into it.
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Chapter 2: How does Cal respond to his recent New Yorker article?
As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. All right, to get started, I'm gonna look at this Reddit post. I'm gonna read some selections from it, and then we'll go from there. All right, so I'm reading from the post here. There's a version of laziness that has nothing to do with discipline, motivation, or character.
It looks like laziness, it feels like laziness. You'll call yourself lazy because there's no other word that seems to fit, but what's actually happening is closer to a system overload then a personality flaw. Your brain has a limited capacity for stimulation per day. Not a metaphorical limit, a real one.
Chapter 3: What positive lessons can we learn from Gen Z films?
Every notification, every scroll session, every app swish, every group chat, every autoplay video is an input your brain has to process, evaluate, and respond to. Most of these inputs are low value, but they all cost the same processing resources as high value ones. So what happens when you burn through that capacity before noon is You sit down to work and nothing comes.
You know what you need to do. You can see the task in front of you, but the gap between knowing and starting feels enormous. So you pick up your phone again, not because you want to, but because your brain is reaching for the only kind of input. It still has the energy to process something short, easy, and immediately rewarding.
Chapter 4: What old-school tool does Cal suggest for productivity?
That's not laziness.
Chapter 5: How can we implement a new solution for landlining?
That's a depleted system reaching for the lowest friction option possible. All right, so that's the essay I originally saw.
Chapter 6: What books is Cal currently reading?
And I'll tell you, it feels directionally right. Because we've had this experience where we're jumping around with all these devices and technology, we feel very stimulated, and it's like our brain has seized up or run out of energy, and we just really have a hard time then settling into larger tasks. So it feels directionally right.
But before we get into solutions, we should probably take a moment to look a little bit closer at the details about how exactly this article explains what's happening in our brains. Like this article says we have a limited capacity for stimulation per day. Is that true? Is it true that if we go through a stimulation budget that we'll feel depleted and that's what causes us to stop working?
And if it's not that, what's really happening in our brains? Let's get to the bottom of that before we move on to some advice. So to help understand the psychological reality of overstimulation, I turned to one of my colleagues at Georgetown. He's a professor in the psychology department named Kostadin Kushlev, who directs the Happy Tech Lab.
I sent him a copy of this Reddit post, and I said, hey, this is your area of expertise. Let me know what this might not quite get right. All right, so let me read you what he said, his original thing he said. This is Kostadin here. He wrote me and said, the idea that the brain has an actual daily limit of stimulation is patently false.
If this was the case, people living in New York City or Bangkok would be comatose by noon. All right, let's pause there for a second. I think that's actually a really good observation. Stimulation, that can't be the right word. It can't be just having a lot of stimuli exhaust us, because he's right.
If you're walking through Times Square in New York City, you're bombarded with stimuli, and yet we don't end up out of our stimulation budget and comatose by noon when we're in the city. So there must be something else going on here. All right, let's go back to Costadon's notes. He then says... What is true is people are not good at multitasking.
They simply switch from one task to another, which requires more top-down cognitive effort. That ability to direct our attention can get depleted, though it's still not a preset limit.
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Chapter 7: What advice does Cal give for avoiding overstimulation?
For example, a cup of coffee can sometimes do wonders. So after a day of trying to redirect your attention back and forth from various notifications, you might be less able to focus your attention on what you want. All right, well, that's interesting, right? So what Kostadin is saying is like there are things to get depleted.
It's not, however, a capacity for stimulation, bright lights, loud sounds, things you have to process. It's actually something I've talked a lot about on this show and in my books, context switching. Turning your attention from one target to another is something that is exhausting and can be cumulative.
So if you're doing more and more context switching between this subject of attention to that, you can get a growing exhaust in your brain. It's not like a fixed limit if you're more rested, if you're more caffeinated, if the work is more interesting, if there's like a deadline, you can do more of it. But that can build up. It's the context shifting, not the processing of stimuli, right?
that can over time make it feel like you're having a harder time working. I wrote about this in A World Without Email. There's a neuroscience correlate to this, right? So like, why is that depleting? One of the neuroscientific explanations that I have heard is that turning your attention from one focus to another requires a lot of things to happen in your brain.
You've got to inhibit certain types of networks and processing centers that were related to the first target, and you have to excite different types of semantic networks and processing centers that might be relevant to the new target. This takes time and energy.
And after a while, especially if you switch to one thing and before your brain can entirely reorient to that context and switch to another, you get these overlapping contexts and it muddles up the brain. And eventually you're like, my brain is all over the place. I really am having a hard time focusing.
So there's a neuroscientific explanation for what Kostadin is pointing out from a psychology point of view. Now, it turns out that Kostadin actually published a paper on this effect last year. That's why he was quick to point it out.
The core finding of the paper that Kostadin published 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.
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Chapter 8: What conclusions can we draw about laziness versus overstimulation?
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 you didn't have access to, you know, a teenage nerd, they just wouldn't have had that role, right?
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-old me.
That's what we're doing with AI, but there wasn't a lot of 14- and 15-year-olds me. Most companies just didn't have a 14- or 15-year-old 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.
The job I had after my first year of college is a company in my hometown. they had a device that measured properties of optical films. So it would, using prisms and lasers, you could like shot and precision stepper motors, you could look at the refraction of laser beams coming out of pieces of optical film that measure properties of the films.
And this is, you know, people are at the edge of their seats right now, by the way. They're like, oh my God, I want to hear about this. All right, but this is important to establish how awesome I am, and I'm definitely not a nerd. The machine was run off of computers where they had like a special circuit board plugged into the computer and the computer could like control it.
But the ability to make these circuit boards got expensive and the slots to put them in the computers were disappearing as computer technology advanced. So what I was hired to do, and I gotta say I successfully did this in like a month, is I programmed from scratch in a similar language a microcontroller that could be on the device itself.
And now it could talk to any computer through a serial cable. And now the computer could just send a command, do a measurement, and the microcontroller onboard the machine actually controlled everything and got all the data and did all the precision stuff and then just sent the data back to the computer to analyze. So the computer didn't run anymore.
So I had to understand that program and rewrite it from scratch in a similar language to run on a microcontroller. Kind of similar to your Halloween lights. Yeah. It's similar to my Halloween lights. Yeah. This year's Halloween display is not going to be as popular, but it's going to be really focused on optical refraction properties. How was the pay? It was, you know, I was 19.
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