Cold showers, boredom and system design.
“Cold showers” — the most recent buzzword in wellness. CEOs are doing it. Athletes are recommending it. Influencers can’t stop posting about it. The research has also shown advantages equivalent to fat loss, mood regulation and mental resilience. At first, I used to be extremely skeptical about reversing our civilization’s journey towards a pleasant, hot shower every morning. Nevertheless, this skepticism piqued my curiosity, and I took a detour to know how dopamine works. Let’s break it down.
Dopamine. The reward hormone. It results in pleasure and searching for motivation. Once you do something hard: like a workout, mountain climbing a trail, putting yourself in a difficult situation, it’s triggered to make you’re feeling higher. This is nearly an evolutionary way of motivating labor. Conversely, when there may be an excess of dopamine in your system, the other hormone called “dynorphin” kicks in. This hormone acts as an evolutionary guardrail, discouraging over-indulgence in sensual pleasure and helping you stay alert and focused, which is needed for survival. This tango between pain-seeking and pleasure-seeking behavior worked well within the African savannah 70,000 years ago when finding food was a each day struggle and staying alert was crucial even after having your fill.
Welcome to 2023, where there at the moment are countless ways to get easy pleasure, equivalent to fast food joints, all-you-can-eat buffets, pornography, cigarettes, low cost liquor, substances, celebrity gossip, Netflix in your TV, and dozens of apps in your phone.
Nevertheless, it’s vital to keep in mind that spending hours on end reading celebrity gossip on the net or binge drinking can result in negative feelings and anxiety as dopamine levels in your system subside. Your body is telling you to avoid these highs, so it’s essential to be mindful of the impact these easy pleasures can have in your overall well-being.
Cold showers hence could be effective resulting from their natural reverse simulation. They’re the other of devouring Donuts by putting you thru a painful experience that triggers the reward hormone and leaves you feeling good.
While we are likely to view pain and pleasure as two distinct states of mind, it’s helpful to consider our minds as a dynamical system that is just in equilibrium when the 2 levers are balanced. Some amount of pain and labor is needed to feel good, while excessive sensual stimulation ought to be controlled. By striking a balance between the 2, we are able to achieve a healthier mind-set.
Self-help practices equivalent to meditation, journaling, cardio, portion control, and spending time in nature are all designed to assist us establish a disciplined routine that triggers dopamine and signals behavioral change. While we may feel great after a workout, does it match the sensation of indulging in a big cheesecake?
Should you’ve struggled to keep up self-help practices, like me, who made a Latest 12 months’s resolution to go to the gym day by day but eventually made an excuse, the treatment lies in some self-awareness. Discover your source of low cost dopamine (no judgements here). For me, it was excessive Netflix consumption. The hot button is to get your brain bored by cutting off easy sources of delight, like avoiding dark thrillers and pot-boilers for a weekend. Doing so increases enthusiasm for more difficult activities like reading some difficult material, that I’d been pushing aside. By understanding your cravings and undergoing occasional fasts from easy pleasure, you possibly can gain greater control over your life and change into your individual Buddha.
Designing A Local News Reader
We’re developing a “Local News Reader” app for Gotham City, which can feature two kinds of content: a) local newspaper articles and b) public posts from local bloggers on social media. Our objective is to design a customized rating system that may cater to users’ preferences. We aim to attain two primary outcomes with this technique — inform and entertain users, which translate into engagement with content and the sensation of being well-informed.
To attain these outcomes, we want to design levers or models that may manipulate these two aspects. Nevertheless, these objectives can conflict with one another. For instance, an excessive amount of hard news from newspapers may make the app feel dull, resulting in reduced engagement. Then again, featuring an excessive amount of content from amateur bloggers may make the app seem like a trashy tabloid, hurting overall user sentiment. Due to this fact, we want to develop a customized thermostat assisted with machine learning that aligns with our vision of providing healthful local infotainment.
Overall, the system design becomes significantly simpler when we’ve got clearly defined objectives, identified the levers we require, and thought through the relationships amongst these levers.
Controls and tradeoffs
All dynamical statistical systems have controls and tradeoffs. Systems that depend on 1000’s of machine-learning models aren’t any exception and have several mutually reinforcing or balancing controls.
When you understand these controls, when you are an engineer, you possibly can play the system like a harp.
Should you’re a technical leader or product manager, your job is barely more difficult. You might want to take some long walks to reflect and ask yourself if the levers you’ve built align together with your goals. Should you’re aiming for a distinct final result, you will need to consider what form of levers you’ll want to construct.
