#is it like. nights? does my brain just shut down any level of dopamine response at night? is that it?

[lucyvaleheart]

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[urlneverheardofit]

Over thinking Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Thoughts about Regongar.

1) Hes got crazy hormone issues, similar to our miserable teenage years except its his entire life. Examples: Testosterone overload, he's way aggressive, way hypersexual, etc. Secondly, oxytocin. Oxytocin is the "cuddle hormone" its a large part of the reason why women are more prone to falling in love after sex than men are, men get a huge dopamine rush (which is why they love it so much) whereas women get Oxytocin instead. Tristian comments Reg frequently assumes lust and love are one in the same. This is finely pointed out after the baron/ess seduces Reg, he essientally says "I love you" in more words. However it is possible that for love and lust to be the same concept in his mind if, along with a dopamine high, he got a Oxytocin rush as well. Whether the hormone issues is due to him being a half-orc, a dragon descendent, a result of his time in slavery, a weird side effect to his magic, or a totally regular hormone imbalance caused by (human) genes or otherwise, can't exactly be traced.

2) He's not exactly what most people think of as "Chaotic Evil" he isn't a savage uncaring, unfeeling creature like his orcish relatives, and he is perfectly capable of feeling human emotions, compassion, kindness and the like. However he might have a slight bit of moral window skewing, brain damage and/or some neurological disorder that causes him to not always realize that lighting peoples dogs on fire because it was annoying your gf is frowned upon and uncalled for.

3) The violence he is known for appears to be a attempt to regain some control in his life. This type of behavior (though not usually this extreme,) is common in people who have battled disease, severe financial issues, abuse etc. It's generally a longer form of "the cornered animal" type behavior, most people will fight-or-flight for what they need in desperate situations and then be done. But in long term exposure to having things done to you against your will, being uninformed about huge life desicions for long periods and the like can cause people to lash out for longer to gain the control of themselves back, if people are afraid of you, you can control them. Hence a quick easy way to make your life yours again. At the cost of others.

4) Any of his violence not covered by the control battle, can be attributed to his orc parent, or, more likely, something else behavioral entirely. Most people have situations where the can and will be pushed to that last straw and do things, acts of violence, physically impossible feats etc. If you've ever seen those articles about women lifting cars to save their babies, you know what I'm talking about. So for Reg a huge trigger is slavers, but this extends to traitors, defenseless enemies who he sees as irredemable and even his own companions for time to time. He is rather trigger happy if hes allowed to go from seeing-red to wanting to kill someone for because they cutting him off in traffic (someone needs an anger management class). Further consideration might put him on the autism scale even.

5) He's most likely battled depression for a loooong time. His stupid puns and generally spirited responses (spirited as in violent) hides his tracks well. In a romance dialogue scene the description says "a fresh set of cuts across his wrists are just beginning to heal" or near there. They 'new' implies he's got them and hes had enough of then that are obvious enough for the baron/ess to be able to tell a fresh set (then again, blood is fairly obvious)

6) He has about a -999999 self esteem. This is most likely rooted in multiple places, his upbringing in slavery, his feeling that he can't please anyone because he does it wrong, not even octavia, the fact he was sold into slavery by sheer chance. Plus the stigma against half-orcs anyways. Not a great combination for being confident in oneself. This anxiety of being useless and a waste of space overlaps to his sense of worth as a companion, a lover and a friend, he explains during yet another romance dialouge that he stayed up all night and convinced himself 3 seperate times that the baron/ess was going to dump him and leave him alone.

7) where'd he get time to master his pun-work?

8) Are half-orcs like mules in that they can't reproduce? Or if they can normally did the Technic league fix him so he didn't make 12 billion more angry 1/4 orcs? Maybe Octavia's using a cantrip that serves as a type of birth control. Who knows?

9) Most adults can't flirt to the level he can, where did he learn how to do that?

10) A lot of times, adults, regardless of gender (though it does skew more towards Male guilt more than female) don't handle rejection well. Even if they didn't seriously like the person that much, it can still be a instinctual response to either try again, or to try and bedazzle the badassery at a potential mate, or in extreme cases, try and force themselves on the other person. But Reg isn't guilty of this. If you tell him to back off, he does without question and doesn't bring that particular subject up again, when your other conpanions shut him down, he isn't offended or hurt, which is not only rather mature. But also an indicator he isn't actually chaotic evil in the way most people think about it. This (as was pointed out to me) also goes to not romantic situations, such as in battle or with his jokes.

Feel free to shoot other ideas/thoughts, factual corrections or if you want further explanation or something at me i will talk for hours.

Edit: my god there was so many spelling errors. Fixed that i think. Plus edited some statements that were pointed out to me (thanks!) And learned about him as I progressed in the game with him. Yay!

[sandralmuller]

Social media is killing your creativity

Social media and creativity

Note: This post contains affiliate links. 

Listen to the audio version or read the post below.

Don’t worry, I’m not one of ‘THOSE’ people.

I’m not a social media killjoy. I love it and use it often, every day.

But recently, I’ve been exploring ways to decrease the time I spend waste on Facebook and Instagram (the platforms I use the most) by learning about the impact of social media usage on my brain.

I find that understanding how our brains work inspires me to WANT to change my behaviour. Knowing that I CAN change helps inspire me, too. And intrinsic motivation is the best place for change to come from, right? It’s better than someone yelling at us to get off Facebook.

I was curious about the relationship between social media and creativity. And by this, I don’t mean writing creative social media posts. I mean how social media affects our creativity, so I started researching.

What I found is that there is a feel-good neurohormone in our brain bringing us little bursts of joy. It’s called dopamine. You might have heard the expression ‘getting a little dopamine hit’.

So, what’s wrong with a little joy? A lot, apparently. Those little dopamine hits via social media are killing our creativity.

Now, I’m not a scientist (and if you are, feel free to let me know anything I get wrong here in the comments and if you aren’t, feel free to shut the hell up add meaningful comments to this post) but I’ll do my best to interpret what I found.

What is dopamine?

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, one of those chemicals that is responsible for transmitting signals in between the nerve cells (neurons) of the brain. When dopamine neurons become activated, they release dopamine.

Psychology Today

OK, so dopamine is like a courier in the brain, carrying important messages between neurons, nerves and other cells in our body.

It’s produced in several areas of the brain and is released by the hypothalamus, which links our nervous system to our endocrine system.

Dopamine and social media

How does dopamine affect people?

The minute you take a drug, drink alcohol, smoke a cigarette if those are your poison, when you get a like on social media, all of those experiences produce dopamine, which is a chemical that’s associated with pleasure.

When someone likes an Instagram post, or any content that you share, it’s a little bit like taking a drug. As far as your brain is concerned, it’s a very similar experience. Now the reason why is because it’s not guaranteed that you’re going to get likes on your posts. And it’s the unpredictability of that process that makes it so addictive. If you knew that every time you posted something you’d get a 100 likes, it would become boring really fast.

Adam Alter, New York University professor and author of “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

I haven’t read Alter’s book. I’m afraid it will be like Allen Carr’s seminal book, Easy Way to Quit Smoking and I’ll end up wanting to delete all my social media accounts or deal with the thought of manipulative corporations behind them each time I take a dopamine hit. I’m looking at you, Facebook.

I wonder how much dopamine and ego are in partnership. And how much of this stuff the wealthy corporations behind successful social platforms know this. Very well, I assume. Social media is designed to be distracting. It’s their business to make social media as distracting as possible so they keep us on their site longer and generate more ad revenue off us while we’re sucked into its vortex. I don’t know about you, but the more I’m consciously aware of how I’m being manipulated, the more I want to rebel.

But, if you feel the lure of checking your phone all too often and enjoy that dopamine rush a little too much, know that we have the power to change our behaviour.

And it’s not as hard as you might think.

Rewiring and re-training our brains

Neuroplasticity is your brain’s ability to change during your life. The expression ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ is false. You can teach an old dog new tricks and you can no longer use that as an excuse to put off learning the guitar or studying Mandarin or whatever else you’ve had on your ‘one day’ list because you think you’re too old. We can also train ourselves to not be so reliant on social media for those little feel-good hits of dopamine.

We can retrain our brains by creating new neural pathways. We can retrain our brains by not reaching for our phones during those brief moments of boredom, like at the bus stop or in the queue at the supermarket. The more times we practice and don’t reach for our phones to kill those microseconds of boredom, the better we get at it and we start to create those new neural pathways we need to make it easier to no longer feel the pull to impulsively reach for our phones.

The challenge

The next time you feel the urge during a moment of boredom to check your phone, don’t. Delay. Wait five or ten minutes. Maybe the urge will completely pass.

Decision fatigue and social media

I’m not sure how many decisions we make on average a day, but it’s a crap tonne. It’s one of the reasons Steve Jobs always wore his black turtleneck and Mark Zuckerberg wears his grey hoodie every day. There are only so many decisions we can make before experiencing decision fatigue. Even something as simple as deciding today what we’ll wear tomorrow can help combat decision fatigue.

When we grab our phones or turn on our computers first thing in the morning to check emails or social media or news sites, we’re giving away our best decision-making time to our devices and our social media accounts. Each time we decide to like an Instagram post or comment on a Facebook post, we’re burning through our decision-making energy stores. Same when we choose our socks and decide what to eat for breakfast.

Decision fatigue poisons creativity. Wasting our decision-making ability on transient, unimportant details in our social media feeds crowds out the space we need for creation. Our decision-making ability and willpower is finite and needs to be replenished daily.

To be our best creative selves, we need to give our brains the space they need to be creative. We need to reserve our decision-making for things that matter, not whether to give a like to that highly stylised but yummy looking plate of pancakes with hot sauce or whether we’ll wear the Argyle or plain socks today.

Developing new habits to help fight decision fatigue

There are some simple things you can do at day’s end when your decision-making and willpower well is running dry that will help you the next day:

Write out your to-do list for the following day.

Write a list of all the things you know you need to remember the following day.

Write out your ‘ta da’ list of your accomplishments that day.

Decide what you’re going to wear and set out your clothes ready for the morning. This can extend to other family members who rely on you for their daily clothing choices.

Decide what you’re going to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Pack your bag with anything you need for the following day. If you’re a parent, you can do this for the little people in your life you have to organise.

Develop a shut down routine after you finish working so you’ll stop ruminating about work over dinner or while watching Suits or whatever it is you do in the evening and stop you from further depleting that decision-making well.

I don’t do all of this. I do some, but rarely all each day. But here’s the thing, when I do them, even just a couple, it really does help. I get greater mental clarity and better productivity as a consequence. There’s more focus and I do better quality work.

The challenge

Combat decision fatigue by committing to at least two of the above items for one week, then check in and see if it’s helping you. You can, of course, do them all, but that might seem like too much change to handle all at once. I’m going to commit to 1, 3, 4 and 7.

Reclaiming creativity

When you’re in that sometimes elusive but always utopian state of flow and making connections between ideas, layering ideas and creating good stuff, we must experience a dopamine hit. Lots of micro-bursts of feel-good hits. And how much better for us is that compared to the thrill we get from an Instagram like or three. Pancakes with hot sauce? Meh.

I would much rather experience that state of flow than watch the world flow past in my news feed. But yet I continue to succumb to the lure of my phone during brief moments of distraction. Working with my phone out of the room is helpful. It’s weird, but I don’t feel the urge to check social sites via my computer’s browser – it’s my phone that lures me and where I need to be retrained. But if you do find it hard to resist sneaking a peek at Facie while working, use a browser plugin like Work Mode that will stop access to social media sites via your computer’s browser.

Deep work, by Cal Newport

One of the best pieces of advice I got to reclaim creativity from social media was from Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work. I didn’t get the tip from his book, but interestingly, I heard it when he was a guest on Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income podcast talking about his book.  Cal’s tip related to productivity, but I think it’s equally applicable to creativity.

I don’t remember Cal’s exact suggestion, but I interpreted it as don’t look at your phone for the first hour of the day. This could be your computer, too. Or a tablet, or any other electronic device you use.

I was intrigued by the idea and gave it a go. What better way to avoid decision fatigue than to avoid having to decide whether or not to give the stack of pancakes a like.

This idea was next level choosing socks the night before (go for the Argyle ones, always). I was diligent for a while. And it was wonderful. I spent the morning kid wrangling and getting The Monsta off to daycare and me off on a walk or to the gym.

On the days that I didn’t turn my phone on for the first hour+, I found the urge to check social media declined for the rest of the day. It just didn’t seem that important. I was also more productive.

These days, I give myself about 30 minutes before checking my phone. The exception is when I’m expecting a project catastrophe or I’m in weekend mode – choosing whether or not to like an image of a stack of pancakes is the pinnacle of my decision-making ability in holiday mode.

Truth: I hated this book. I found it repetitive and padded out to create a bloated word count. But its biggest fault is that it came from a place of unacknowledged privilege.  He wrote it for a very narrow audience of men who clearly don’t have to partake in boring household chores or early morning kid wrangling and can swan into their office after a morning run, preferably an academic office, men who are secure enough in their own importance to give the middle finger to the establishment that employs them by dictating the terms of their work arena. If he’d just acknowledged what a privilege this position is, I might not have had such an adverse reaction to the book.

But, if you’re keen to read the book, buy it from Dymocks, QBD Books, Book Depository or Amazon.

The challenge

Level 1: Work with your phone out of the room, or at least out of your eye line and more than an easy arm’s reach away. Silence your notifications. Activate the Work Mode plugin. Don’t check your social accounts for at least an hour, then have a quick break and get straight back into work mode. (Cal would say that’s a terrible idea and you shouldn’t be on social media at all because any connection you make there is completely shallow. Ha! What a stick in the mud!)

Level 2: Don’t use your phone for at least the first hour of the day (or your laptop, desktop or tablet). Go about your normal morning routine, minus checking email and other notifications. See what happens.

Over to you. Do you feel a chronic urge to check social media on your phone or computer? Do you have any strategies for dealing with decision fatigue or for reclaiming your creativity? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

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Social media is killing your creativity was originally published on The Smarter Writer