I have had success working around ‘Ugh’ reactions to various activities. I took the direct approach. I (intermittently) use nicotine lozenges as a stimulant while exercising. Apart from boosting physical performance and motivation it also happens to be the most potent substance I am aware of for increasing habit formation in the brain.
I like this idea, and might even adopt it myself. But I feel I should emphasize, for anyone who considers adopting this strategy, that it absolutely requires proper bookkeeping, a predetermined rate limit, and predetermined blackout periods. The rate limit protects you if a change in schedule increases the chem-reward frequency by too much. The blackout periods ensure you’ll find out if any sort of dependency forms.
Respect for the process is important, and ‘proper bookkeeping’ sounds like a good theory but I know that this suggestion would ‘absolutely’ make the process counterproductive. Trying this would utterly destroy my exercise programming rather than helping it. Ugh! The opposite of what would work.
Cycling (drugs, especially stimulating ones) is important, both to prevent withdrawal effects and to ensure continued usefulness. But I’ve learned that it is best to do things in a way that works for me.
How about if it were handled by a button in your phone’s UI, which would log the event, roll dice to determine whether you get the reinforcement that time, and enforce rate limits automatically?
That is something I would do. In fact, by preference I would spend a day coding it up instead of two hours in aggregate manually bookkeeping. “Flow” vs “Ugh”!
I should note that the role nicotine lozenges are taking here is not primarily as a training reward, like giving the rat electronically stimulated orgasms when it presses the lever. Nicotine isn’t particularly strong in that role compared to alternatives (such as abusing ritalin), at least when it is not administered by a massive hit straight into the brain via the lungs. No, the particular potency of nicotine is that it potentates the formation of habits for activities undertaken while under the influence by means more fundamental than a ‘mere’ stimulus-reward mechanism. Habits that are found to be harder to extinct than an impulse to take a drug. This is what makes smoking so notoriously hard to quit even with patches and makes the use of fake cigarettes to suck on useful.
In a different thread I’ve been discussing nootropics that enhance learning via the acetylcholine system. Half of those acetylcholine receptors are called nAChRs (Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors). This is not a coincidence.
The other fascinating (to me) fact regarding nicotine is that it has the opposite effect on the sensitivity of the brain’s reward mechanism than other stimulatory drugs of abuse. Where abusing meth, cocaine or coffee will make all rewards you experience in life less salient when you stop medicating, the reverse occurs with nicotine. The systems get downregulated but that mechanism is itself countered with the addition of more receptors leaving a net boost. This means that if you stop using nicotine food starts to taste really good (and you may gain weight!)
How long do you have to do it for before that becomes noticeable?
I have never noticed myself gaining weight, I have noticed food tasting great! In regards to weight gain I can only refer to the experiences of those who quit smoking, although even then the process of quitting smoking provokes all sorts of other complications.
I can say that if you use ritalin every day for one month then stop you can expect everything to seem somewhat dull for a week, like the contrast has been turned down. With nicotine you can approximately expect the reverse. I cannot tell you whether that is good or bad for you in particular.
Pardon me, that was what I was getting at with the ‘dull’ and the reverse. It applies to all your senses and taste is perhaps the most obvious of those. You could try three days then one day off. That usually makes things taste good. But to be honest I’m not sure that would be the counter-regulation of dopaminargic receptors. It’s probably just being hungry after a few days of stimulant based appetite suppression.
To expect to experience significant withdrawal effects after one month you would need to be using it most days. Within-week cycling slows that down.
I find this to be an intriguing idea, especially having had a lot of difficulty maintaining any kind of exercise regime in the past. Can you explain in more detail the kind of bookkeeping required, and also the effects you personally feel as a result of having developed the habit of exercising?
I find this to be an intriguing idea, especially having had a lot of difficulty maintaining any kind of exercise regime in the past. Can you explain in more detail the kind of bookkeeping required, and also the effects you personally feel as a result of having developed the habit of exercising?
I am not the best person to ask. I’ve always been a health nut and I’ve spent years at a time training for marathons (ie. addicted to running), doing various martial arts and soccer. What I was doing was reforming a running habit after letting it slide in favour of being a gym junkie with some mates. Once I got used to associating exercise with socialization it was amazingly hard to get back into the solo running habit. This is even though I know the time alone in a state of flow, with all the hormones associated with intense cardio, is extremely important to me. It is great for stress relief and gives my brain a chance to think things through, solve problem and occasionally write code in my head.
I like this idea, and might even adopt it myself. But I feel I should emphasize, for anyone who considers adopting this strategy, that it absolutely requires proper bookkeeping, a predetermined rate limit, and predetermined blackout periods. The rate limit protects you if a change in schedule increases the chem-reward frequency by too much. The blackout periods ensure you’ll find out if any sort of dependency forms.
Respect for the process is important, and ‘proper bookkeeping’ sounds like a good theory but I know that this suggestion would ‘absolutely’ make the process counterproductive. Trying this would utterly destroy my exercise programming rather than helping it. Ugh! The opposite of what would work.
Cycling (drugs, especially stimulating ones) is important, both to prevent withdrawal effects and to ensure continued usefulness. But I’ve learned that it is best to do things in a way that works for me.
How about if it were handled by a button in your phone’s UI, which would log the event, roll dice to determine whether you get the reinforcement that time, and enforce rate limits automatically?
That is something I would do. In fact, by preference I would spend a day coding it up instead of two hours in aggregate manually bookkeeping. “Flow” vs “Ugh”!
I should note that the role nicotine lozenges are taking here is not primarily as a training reward, like giving the rat electronically stimulated orgasms when it presses the lever. Nicotine isn’t particularly strong in that role compared to alternatives (such as abusing ritalin), at least when it is not administered by a massive hit straight into the brain via the lungs. No, the particular potency of nicotine is that it potentates the formation of habits for activities undertaken while under the influence by means more fundamental than a ‘mere’ stimulus-reward mechanism. Habits that are found to be harder to extinct than an impulse to take a drug. This is what makes smoking so notoriously hard to quit even with patches and makes the use of fake cigarettes to suck on useful.
In a different thread I’ve been discussing nootropics that enhance learning via the acetylcholine system. Half of those acetylcholine receptors are called nAChRs (Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors). This is not a coincidence.
The other fascinating (to me) fact regarding nicotine is that it has the opposite effect on the sensitivity of the brain’s reward mechanism than other stimulatory drugs of abuse. Where abusing meth, cocaine or coffee will make all rewards you experience in life less salient when you stop medicating, the reverse occurs with nicotine. The systems get downregulated but that mechanism is itself countered with the addition of more receptors leaving a net boost. This means that if you stop using nicotine food starts to taste really good (and you may gain weight!)
How long do you have to do it for before that becomes noticeable?
I have never noticed myself gaining weight, I have noticed food tasting great! In regards to weight gain I can only refer to the experiences of those who quit smoking, although even then the process of quitting smoking provokes all sorts of other complications.
I can say that if you use ritalin every day for one month then stop you can expect everything to seem somewhat dull for a week, like the contrast has been turned down. With nicotine you can approximately expect the reverse. I cannot tell you whether that is good or bad for you in particular.
I was more interested in the food tasting really good part.
How often during that month would you have to use it to get that kind of response, in your experience?
Pardon me, that was what I was getting at with the ‘dull’ and the reverse. It applies to all your senses and taste is perhaps the most obvious of those. You could try three days then one day off. That usually makes things taste good. But to be honest I’m not sure that would be the counter-regulation of dopaminargic receptors. It’s probably just being hungry after a few days of stimulant based appetite suppression.
To expect to experience significant withdrawal effects after one month you would need to be using it most days. Within-week cycling slows that down.
I find this to be an intriguing idea, especially having had a lot of difficulty maintaining any kind of exercise regime in the past. Can you explain in more detail the kind of bookkeeping required, and also the effects you personally feel as a result of having developed the habit of exercising?
I am not the best person to ask. I’ve always been a health nut and I’ve spent years at a time training for marathons (ie. addicted to running), doing various martial arts and soccer. What I was doing was reforming a running habit after letting it slide in favour of being a gym junkie with some mates. Once I got used to associating exercise with socialization it was amazingly hard to get back into the solo running habit. This is even though I know the time alone in a state of flow, with all the hormones associated with intense cardio, is extremely important to me. It is great for stress relief and gives my brain a chance to think things through, solve problem and occasionally write code in my head.