Why Doing THIS Instantly Lowers Your Stress

Talk to me a little bit about low friction activities, because it seems to be that in our culture now, it's really designed and sort of set up that men are just constantly battling off these sort of low friction activities that are really designed to sort of hijack our dopamine, social media, porn, weed, whatever it might be, you name it.

how does a man start to confront some of those things? Like maybe just defining what a low friction activity actually is for the listener.

Yeah.

I mean, I think you're talking about basically all the quick rewarding things we can do that are fun and rewarding in the short term, but that hurt us in the long run.

Yeah.

That ultimately to me is what people get in trouble with.

It's stuff that's like, this feels great now, but I pay consequences somehow later, right? So that could be from my case.

If I have a few drinks, it's like life gets better immediately.

But then the next morning, I'm like, Jesus Christ, Michael, what have you done? Now I have these long-term consequences to deal with.

Could be scrolling social media way too long, getting worked up about nonsense on social, and then you've lost an hour when you could have been doing something more productive.

There's all these different things.

So in my book, Scarcity Brain, I basically looked at, okay, what is like the fundamental architecture behind things that people tend to get hooked on? And so to tell that story, I went in this laboratory in Las Vegas that is a living, breathing, real-life casino.

But it's used entirely for human behavior research.

And I talked to this guy there who's a slot machine designer.

And he was like, look, if you want to get someone hooked on something...

You need it to have three parts.

It's got to have opportunity, unpredictable rewards, and quick repeatability.

So opportunity means you have an opportunity to get something of value.

Something that is worthwhile, gives you short-term pleasure, something.

Unpredictable rewards is you know you'll get that thing of value, but you don't know when.

And you don't know how good it's going to be.

and then quick repeatability, you can immediately retry to get the thing of value.

So if you think about a slot machine, you have the opportunity to win money, but the rewards are unpredictable.

You could play a game and lose.

You could play a game and win a dollar.