- The Tonic
- Posts
- Sunday Insider - Edition #84
Sunday Insider - Edition #84
Controlling addiction, becoming magician, and not worrying about others
Mike Blankenship
January 05, 2025
The Daily Habit For Doers
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here’s some stuff that inspired us this last week.
You get our Sunday Insider emails because you shared The Tonic with a friend. Thanks for doing that!
Listen: A Practical Guide to Controlling Addiction & Dopamine | Dr. Anna Lembke
Psychiatrist and author Dr. Anna Lembke discusses dopamine, addictive behaviors, warning signs and treatment for addiction, and how our brains handle all that pleasure and pain in life. Dr. Lembke is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic.
She appeared in the 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma to discuss the addictive nature of social media, and she is the author of the 2021 New York Times bestseller Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, which explores how to moderate compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine-overloaded world.
Read: Becoming a Magician
One of my heuristics for growth is to seek out the magicians — individuals so skilled that they seem almost magical — and find the magic. Often without noticing, your progress in aspects of life or all of it unconsciously becomes linear. You made a certain amount of money last year, so you aim to make some ‘reasonable’ proportion more this year.
But you are largely using the same tools to get 2x as you used to get x, and so you end up with diminishing marginal returns as you wring the remaining juice out of the initial strategy. The ‘describe the version of you that seems impossible right now’ trick I described above is largely an attempt to bypass that part of my brain that dismisses the work of magicians as crazy and starts allowing it to make the necessary shifts required to become the kind of magician I am envisioning.
Watch: Reasons Not to Worry What Others Think
It’s generally a good idea to care about other people’s opinions to some degree, as they could contain some worthwhile insight. But focusing on them too much to the point that we spend hours and hours dwelling on what people might think can leave us in agony. It’s not only potentially harmful but also unnecessary. This video explains why based on several concepts from psychology and philosophy.
Have friends who'd love our newsletter too? Give them your unique referral link (below) and get an awesome reward when they subscribe.
PS: You have referred 0 people so far.
Learn more about our referral reward program here.
The Daily Habit For Doers
Have friends who'd love our newsletter too? Give them your unique referral link (below) and get an awesome reward when they subscribe.
PS: You have referred 0 people so far.
Learn more about our referral reward program here.
The Daily Habit For Doers
Have friends who'd love our newsletter too? Give them your unique referral link (below) and get an awesome reward when they subscribe.
PS: You have referred 0 people so far.
Learn more about our referral reward program here.