This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
Why do I watch YouTube?
Sometimes, it’s because there’s some specific thing I’m researching, or some specific interest I’m digging into.
But most of the time it’s for the same reason that I compulsively play phone games, or scroll social feeds, or watch TV, or movies, or even read books, or eat junk food, or any number of other dopamine-chasing activities.
It’s cope. With dope! It’s dope cope.
But what is it that’s driving my need to cope?
It would be easy to broadly identify the problem as “discomfort” — pain, stress, boredom, anger, etc — and this is sort of true, but for me the main thing I use dope to cope with is the feeling of overwhelm. Decision paralysis. Anxiety about all the things I should be doing, or should have already done, and how to manage my time and resources to do those things.
I’ve got all kinds of tools to tackle this problem. I made a big list of them in Nooner #46 - “A clip full of silver bullets.”
But dope cope happens automatically. Most of the time, I don’t fully realize it’s happening until it’s already happened.
It occurred to me the other day that there’s a major overlap between the solution for my problem, and potty training a toddler, which we just did with our daughter last week.
Potty training is classic behavior modification. The strategies you use are all aimed at helping a kid progress through three stages of awareness:
Oh look! I peed.
Oh look! I’m peeing.
Oh look! I need to pee.
So if I want to stop using YouTube (or any other kind of dope) to cope with inevitable feelings of overwhelm (or any other kind of discomfort), I need to go through the same three stages:
Oh look! I coped.
Oh look! I’m coping.
Oh look! I need to cope.
A toddler is potty trained when she recognizes she needs to pee, and then escorts herself to the toilet to take care of business. I will properly cope with discomfort when I am able to recognize my need to cope before I have started chasing dope, and instead use a healthier set of tools.
It took our daughter about three hours to get to stage three. It took our son about three weeks. No matter how long it takes me, one thing’s for sure, I’ve gotta stop peeing on the floor.
Potty training myself, part 1