Being a programmer, I thought I'd be clever. Redirected Reddit's domain to nowhere in my DNS file. Worked great until I'd just... open the file and undo it 20 minutes later.
So I made it irreversible. Locked the DNS file so it can't be edited unless I boot my Mac in safe mode. And if I do that, there's a script that instantly locks it again. Haven't used Reddit since last year.
Problem solved, right?
Wrong. I just replaced Reddit with Twitch and YouTube. Started keeping streams running in the background while I coded. This went on for almost a year.
It killed my ability to focus. If you know about dopamine, you know your brain releases it when it wants you to repeat an activity. The constant background streams destroyed my dopamine baseline. When I tried to code without anything running one day, it felt genuinely weird. Hard problems that used to be interesting just felt like grinding.
I tried blocking Twitch and YouTube the same way I blocked Reddit. But I actually need YouTube for learning. I watch programmers on Twitch I learn from. I couldn't just nuke them entirely.
So I built something smarter.
The first version was terrible. Blocked things it shouldn't, let through things it should've blocked. Really buggy and annoying.
Then I added AI. I tell it what I'm working on, and it blocks anything unrelated to that task. This was the breakthrough. I need YouTube for tutorials, but I don't need 3-hour video essay rabbit holes. The extension knows the difference now.
It reminds me in the moment. Not after I've already wasted an hour. Right when I'm about to click into the distraction, it stops me and makes me think: "Is this what I'm supposed to be doing right now?"
The result: I actually enjoy hard problems again. Turns out I wasn't burned out, I'd just wrecked my brain's reward system.
Then I had to market this thing, so I started using Twitter. And oh boy, Twitter is addicting. You post something and wait for the notification to light up. I had to install my own extension on my Twitter Chrome profile. It's wild how effective it is when something reminds you "you're here to market, not scroll" right as you're about to fall into the feed.
It's still hard sometimes. Your brain will try to disable it. But having something that catches you in the moment before you lose an hour makes all the difference.
It's a Chrome extension, currently at beta v1.0.43: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/memento-mori/fhpkan...
It's free, no signup, no payment. Just install it.
Fair warning: it's still in beta. There will be bugs. But it works well enough that I use it daily, and it's helped me get my focus back.
Built this to fix my own problem. Figured other devs might be in the same boat.
Question for HN: Anyone else dealt with this? The programming with streams thing destroyed my focus for almost a year before I realized what was happening. What worked for you?
netsharc•3mo ago
Dare I ask for scientific studies (and not just pseudo-ones) about why "dopamine bad"...
(1) https://soundhealingcenter.com/store/frequency-infused-water...
ccallanan•3mo ago
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
georgefrowny•3mo ago
AI-flavoured emoji-heavy copy notwithstanding, this really does resonate as someone who recently has allowed YouTube to get in behind my braincells.
anon7000•3mo ago
For things like hard drugs, your dopamine receptors are stimulated to a huge degree more than “normal life.” Since dopamine is essentially a physical “reward” mechanism for your body, and you can’t get that level of reward through normal life, you end up chasing the high through whatever it is you’re addicted to.
Lots of things trigger dopamine, including scrolling social media. You train your brain to physically desire high levels of dopamine from short-term sources. Since the dopamine given by completing a long, complicated task is a lot harder to get, you have a physical tendency to just get the easy source of dopamine, social media, instead.
Dopamine isn’t bad. The problem is addiction. When you’re addicted to something, any task that takes a lot of effort and doesn’t have much payoff will be very difficult to accomplish when you can simply turn to a quick dopamine source.
People experience this differently — for example, dopamine is a big part of why ADHD is hard to deal with on a physical level.
- https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/how-an-addicted-brain-work...
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31905114/