Addictive Work

It’s very trendy to say stuff like ‘start your day by making your bed and something something life is better’. The general idea, when Admiral McRaven put it in his commencement address, or Jordan Peterson added it into his 12 Rules For Life, is that simple acts like these work as some kind of bulwark against chaos. It sets a productive ‘tone’ for the day maybe, or gives you a fleeting sense of control and order over the turbulence of day-to-day life.

There are certain streams of cognitive and behavioural science that broadly agree with this. You have pop-science authors like Charles Duhigg and James Clear get quite giddy about it in their variations on ‘have you ever heard about habits?’ books, or anyone who’s written literally anything on motivation.¹ You start changing your life by doing small things, and build sensibly upon those small things, and soon you find you’re doing more substantial things, and this makes you feel good. But I don’t want to write more about that, because as I just mentioned, many books have been written to elaborate that rather anodyne fact.

What I want to talk about is how there are some small things you can do that make you want to do more things. There are some small things you can do that make you a thing addict. And, unfazed by a bit of chaos myself, and being no stranger to vices in that domain, this sounds much more my speed. A bit closer to my definition of ‘something something life is better’ than anxious attempts to incrementally fend of the forces of entropy.²

¶Lil addiction neuroanatomy primer

Obviously, we’re going to do some brain science to start. I often say that you can’t learn much about behaviour by looking at the brain. It’s like trying to analyse a microchip to help you type faster or something. But sometimes you can, and our reward and addiction pathways are a pretty good example.

The brain’s best-known reward pathway looks something like this. Something good happens, and seems to make its way in through your senses to the ventral tegmental area (VTA). This is a tiny³ little collection of cells that sits near the top of your brainstem, in the middle of your brain—the place evolution put structures whose job is mostly to take in information and send it all over the brain. The VTA includes a bunch of dopaminergic brain cells: cells which mostly release dopamine into the system. Of particular interest, it uses these to release dopamine into the striatum (among other places).

Still with me? Reward comes in and gets to the VTA, and the first thing it does is release dopamine into the striatum. Now, this is interesting, because the striatum⁴ is one of the regions people like to say is involved in goal-directed behaviour. People actually like to say that about lots of brain regions. But the striatum seems to, among other things, choose what information gets around the brain, based on how valuable it thinks that information is. In particular, when it gets dopamine, it seems to take this as a signal that something quite important is happening, and while it normally mostly inhibits information from passing through (leaving the ‘correct’ choice uninhibited, so to speak), here we often see an increase in the striatum sending ‘go’ signals instead.

It’s more complicated than this, but I’m simplifying to make it clear that the striatum gets very keen when the VTA showers it in dopamine. In fact, if you shower the brain in L-DOPA, a precursor to dopamine, it seems like you get too much ‘go’. You can get these sort of involuntary, rhythmic movements happening, and even sometimes some hallucinations and other positive psychotic symptoms, which themselves are thought to be caused by too much dopamine.

Now, from there, the system loops in a few more regions. It talks to the hippocampus, which remembers the context around the reward. It talks to the insula, which remembers the feelings happening in your body around the reward. It talks to the amygdala, which remembers the emotional significance of the reward. And it walks its way to regions at the front of the brain (the PFC), where it seems to interrupt some of the work the PFC does managing impulsivity, risk-taking, and evaluating how valuable stuff is.

Ok. So. Now pretend that whatever this reward was that activated this setup was good, as rewards typically are. Look at all this infrastructure telling you to do that good thing again! I sit here, trying to focus on writing this article, and my hippocampus goes, “you normally huck your vape when you’re sitting here trying to focus, and you sure do like that nicotine buzz”. My amygdala goes, “oh yeah, and all those good flow emotions also usually come with your vape in hand too”. My insula goes, “yeah, same as when you have all that tension in your shoulders”. And the striatum goes, “Righteo then, go, go go!” and starts preparing my hand to reach for the vape, whether I reach for it or not. And as I reach for my vape, if I were inclined to want to stop, my PFC would go, “fuck it, I’m taking a smoko myself”.

This is why it’s so easy to get addicted to stuff that isn’t chemically addictive. It doesn’t have to just be a chemical that rewards you. It could be any of the context, if the context is clear enough. Feel sad, sitting in your bedroom, and drugs make you feel less sad? Your room is going to do a lot of work encouraging you to do more drugs the next time.

Which leads us to my two little take-aways. First, context matters. Your brain is paying attention to everything around the reward, and the more stuff reminds it of the reward, the more likely you’re going to want to do whatever thing brings the reward into being.

Secondly, anticipation of the reward activates the same machinery as the reward itself. There’s two reasons for this. Anticipation of the reward activates the VTA, kicking off the exact same cycle as reward itself.⁵ But also, because anticipation of the reward is usually coupled with the context around the reward, it’s just as reinforcing.

¶Making habits addictive

Alright, so let’s go back to our ‘making the bed’ example of setting up ourselves for success. It may indeed serve as a bulwark against chaos, reminding you that you can be productive and ordered if only you set your mind to it. But also, if we feel good about it, it could also run roughshod through this reward system of ours.

Completing a bunch of related small, but meaningful, tasks that produce rewards creates this delightful little cycle of fulfilment. A cycle that isn’t really about achieving the thing itself, but about the cumulative impact of doing the tasks that condition the system into craving that little reward hit.

Let me give you an example. A mate of mine, Josh, spoke to me recently about the high he gets from fixing bugs for the open-source software he works on. Sometimes he works on bigger, more complicated bits of code, but he’s always thinking back to the times when he’s doing the little ones.

Now we know why. When Josh closes a GitHub issue, he gets this little jolt of of accomplishment, and the reward system goes. Immediately, the reward system goes harder, because he’s already anticipating the next one. All the while, the system is learning about the context that predicts the little jolt of accomplishment. So, soon the sight of his computer starts to add fuel to the fire, and the room he works in, and the feeling of the chair under him. He usually does this kind of work first thing in the morning, and so he’s increasingly drawn to do it when he first wakes up.

Most interestingly, when Josh was telling me this, I was reminded of a similar story he told me about four or five years ago. He’d started getting interested in this software around then, and to start learning it, he started helping other people like him with their issues using it. But where four or five years ago, he was learning an open-source software, now he’s so good at it, the guy who wrote the software in the first place pays Josh to work on it.

Josh is an addict. He’s addicted to his smaller bugfix GitHub issues. He’s addicted to his work. And it’s working out very well for him.

¶Outro

That’s a techy example, but you could apply it to anything, really. Think of people who are addicted to checking their step counts, or their Duolingo app. Think of how a quick clean of the sink turns into a deep clean of the kitchen. Really anything that can be broken down into small tasks that share a lot of environmental context. Luckily, lots of big tasks can be broken down into small tasks and inherently share a lot of environmental context because they’re actually the same task. When I write these articles, they take hours. But, concentrate on getting a section done at a time, and suddenly I’m getting lots of little moments of satisfaction that encourage me to keep writing the rest.⁶

This is probably a big part of why stuff like the pomodoro method can be so successful. Short bursts of work, punctuated by tiny little breaks. It opens the door to this kind of reward reinforcement.

But it also probably explains lots of why sometimes the pomodoro method is not so successful. For this to work, whatever small tasks you’re doing have to end in a reward. Break a task into smaller tasks, but you’re not feeling accomplished at the end because you’re concentrating on how much is left to go in the bigger task, or the ‘breaking’ doesn’t break at obvious points of accomplishment, and you’re not reinforcing anything productive at all.

So. Small tasks, lots of context, end with reward. Feed that striatum of yours. Become an addict. S’fun.