But in this article, We’ll do something entirely different.

Because this is an anti-guide on how to do the exact opposite of what we usually discuss:

How to achieve absolutely none of your goals and thoroughly waste your potential.

The Approach

We’ll be using the same cognitive-behavioral approach we discuss every time since it’s the strongest, most versatile science-based framework for psychological and behavioral change.

Classic example: WOAH! A SPIDER (thought) -> Fear (Emotion) -> Runs away (Behavior).

We’ll be deeply discussing 3 ideas (aka elements of cognition) that you should integrate into your psyche to skillfully ruin your work ethic and throttle your progress.

1- Romanticize Progress as a Fantasy not a Reality

You could say progression has 2 types.

The first is fantasy progression, the one you see in movies, series, and fiction novels:

The hero has been stuck in a bottomless pit for long enough, but he’s sick of it.
He’s suddenly driven to make a killer comeback.
He’s deeply motivated.
There is background music.

He starts re-aligning his priorities towards his goals.
Everything fits into place.
He’s improving, quickly.
His ex even wants to get back to him, can you believe that?

He’s getting closer to his goal.
The background music intensifies...
And so on and so forth...until he successfully achieves what he set out to do.

The second type of progression is Real Progression

Real progression is....well, nevermind. We won’t need it.

Because what you need to do in this step is to obsess over the fantasy type of progression.

Here’s how:

1- You should wait for the PERFECT opportunity with the PERFECT conditions before you start a new endeavor

The desk must be clean and tidy.

You must be well-slept.

The room must have that exactly perfect amount of sunlight.

You must wait for reality to obey you, as if it’s a force that serves to romanticize your life, giving you the perfect sequence of events for you to progress towards and achieve your goals.

Always know that you’re entitled to luck and synergy, and require them as absolute necessities from the universe before initiating any endeavor.

You’re the main character. Never forget.

2- You must have all the knowledge in the world before starting

Because what in hell if you stumble upon an obstacle you can’t immediately navigate through with the endless knowledge you curated before taking any step?

Google it? Ask Claude?

Nah, leave that for losers.

Know EVERYTHING, and never start until you do.

3- The progress itself should feel glamorous and flawlessly smooth.

Don’t sit down to work unless you feel perfectly motivated, energized, and deeply connected to what you’re doing.

You’re entitled to the work unlocking something metaphysical within you that magically connects you to it.

That frees you from the responsibility of having to use discipline, or “placing your phone away.”

If you’re feeling even slightly de-motivated, bored, or overwhelmed, stop working immediately.

How about when it’s exactly 7:00? I mean, who the hell starts working at 6:54? That’s so uncool!

If you drop one day, then drop the whole endeavor - as well as any other endeavors on the side.

It’s all useless if even a blemish taints the perfect, flawless image of the fantasy of progress you’ve worked so hard to bring into reality.

The Psychological Impact

I promise you that if you manage to develop such an ideology, you’ll have installed a system of hyper-efficient self-sabotage.

This belief system will construct a reality where an unachievable fantasy is the “bare minimum,” rendering the real, actual progress as something that is so lowly that it doesn’t even register on your mental radar.

In other words, your mental filter of what counts as an opportunity of progression won’t even register the actual opportunities:

• The imperfect days

• The 53 minutes of free time

• The 2 weeks of vacation you’ll doomscroll through anyway

This is called selective attention, and is kind of what happens when you think about buying a red corolla so you see red corollas everywhere, but we’re doing it in a harmful way.

You now only see the perfect opportunities to start an endeavor or make progress due to virtual barriers you brainwashed yourself are there when they’re just arbitrary constructs.

Beautiful Hypocrisy

Here’s where the real beauty of this step shines:

You’ll waste away your life and potential, make very little progress, yet still not feel guilty or ashamed.

Why?

If such a belief system was framed as an “unpractical, fantasy-seeking work ethic,” you’ll notice its devastating effects and reverse them too soon.

But it’s actually framed to give you a false subconscious impression that you’re a perfectionist and have high standards for the progress you make, so you’ll hold onto that belief system like it’s a part of you.

Obviously that’s not actually true, but it’s a great manipulative, self-sabotaging framing that maximizes the efficacy of this step.

2- Big Plans & Big Results

In a previous article, I’ve discussed a psychological protocol that maximizes the reward’s circuitry dopaminergic, rewarding sensation associated with work.

In this step, we’ll do the exact opposite: sabotage the reward circuitry, such that dopaminergic salience (aka the pleasurable sensation of having achieved something) is essentially unreachable throughout your endeavor.

Here’s how:

1- Make B I G plans.

Wanna start working out?

Start with a 5-day per week program...for 6 months.

Uninterrupted and unbroken.

Wanna start reading? A book a week. No less.

Don’t make plans such that you can execute on them in the future.
Make plans that make you feel achieved and fulfilled in the present from the virtual projection of the possibility of having made such progress.

I repeat:
Don’t make plans such that you can execute on them in the future.
Make plans that make you feel achieved and fulfilled in the present from the virtual projection of the possibility of having made such progress.

You’ll fail at executing on them, feel guilty, and want to redeem yourself.

So you’ll make even bigger plans and stay in that cycle forever. Good.

Alternatively, you could delude yourself by making “modest” goals that are still too ambitious compared to your baseline but feel like a compromise to not be unrealistic.

“4 books a month might be too much for me, how about starting with just 3?”
~ A person who’s read 2 books in the last 7 years of his life

2- Await results from day one

You should set out to finish the project in one sitting.

Working out should produce results in a few weeks max.

Reading should make you a genuine intellectual after 3 books max.

The same applies to any endeavor or work session - short term or long term.

You’re entitled to progress and results from day one.

If you don’t make results, you guessed it…you should drop the thing completely.

Psychological impact

Big Goals

Big plans create high expectations that aren’t delivered, creating disappointment & de-motivation that lead to goal disengagement very effectively - since expectations are the main cornerstone in the formula of dopaminergic release.

In other words, what we’re doing here is ridding the goal of any neuro-psychological element that could ease actual progress towards it, like dopaminergic salience in this case, by modifying the psychological parameters we can for self-sabotage.

Outcome-fixation

Fixating over outcomes over the work itself does something very similar, attaching dopaminergic reward to the result and not the process.

You see, your reward circuitry isn’t an independent entity. It’s directly subject to your conscious thoughts.

When you consciously fixate over results, you give your reward circuitry a blueprint to work with:

• Results are all what matters, and they’re the proof that I’m doing well.

• Work itself is unimportant.

This seems innocent, but it actually blinds your reward circuitry to the fact that it’s the work that leads to the results.

And when your reward circuitry doesn’t register that, it doesn’t register work as a dopaminergic, valuable, event.

That’s why work feels like torture, and results feel good theoretically, but you never actually produce them.

You’ve effectively blinded your reward circuitry by setting the marker of progress to be something that is arbitrary, conditional, and outside your locus of control: outcomes.

So now the process of work itself is in a blind spot according to your reward circuitry, keeping you stuck in stasis.

All of this is mostly subconscious, which makes it much more effective.

If this summary is confusing, you can read my full article about the algorithm of the reward circuitry for a comprehensive, fuller picture

A layer of hypocrisy

To make matters better (by making them worse - this is an anti-guide remember?), we’ll also mask this practice by a seemingly positive yet actually wicked appeal.

You can always mask the destructive effects of big goals and outcome-fixation with delusions of being ambitious and having high standards just like the previous step.

This in turn blinds your conscious mind to the true devastating harms of this set of beliefs.

Beautiful, top-caliber psycho-modulation.

3- Consume Endlessly

This one is the cherry on top.

After installing the 2 previous beliefs, this one ensures you stay stuck in that throttled state for eternity.

In my article about the neuro-psychological effects of overconsumption, I’ve mentioned how the harms of overconsumption aren’t limited to decreased focus or a ruined attention span, but in the very capability of engaging with depth and complexity.

Overconsmuption conditions cognition to exclusively contend with superficial ideas and concepts which aren’t deep enough to create psychological change:

• shortform mini-tutorials

• random tweets and quotes

• hyper-edited ‘motivational’ reels

• quick tips and tricks from tiktok

It’s the deep, rich sets of ideas - in the form of books, lectures, article series, etc. - that are truly capable of changing your cognition, and therefore your emotional and behavioral alignment, for the better.

We don’t want that.

That’s why you must consume so much that you lose the ability of contending with a deep idea for long enough that might - God forbid - actually change you for the better or revert this protocol.

And the dark, twisted irony here is that this article was originally double this size, with 5 sections not 3.

I have cut it down to half its size, removed some hard details and left in the core concepts such that it’s easier to read and consume, appealing to the dark philosophy of this anti-guide as a form of ironic self-honesty.

Girly, “aesthetic” tips and tricks...

“Time management” productivity guru advice

“Deep” philosophical perspectives or motivational quotes

A million different frameworks from a million different angles, but for some reason, none of them works.

You try out notion for a while

A scheduling tip from here

A to-do list app from there

A self-help book on habits from here

A “mega-ultra-final comeback for real this time” from there

Yet still, nothing sticks, and you’re unable to make a deep, lasting impact to your behavioral patterns.

You can’t make progress towards the goals that matter to you despite your deep ambition and burning desire to excel.

This sensation of being stuck is pure self-torture for someone who’s deeply ambitious.

I know that because I’ve been stuck in that loop for years myself.

Luckily, among all of that noise and commercial recycled advice, there is indeed a scientific approach that provides a solid, concrete methodology for deep, impactful behavioral change, which is what we’re going to discuss in this post.

The value of behavior

If you master such art and science of behavioral engineering - what makes you execute, what makes you procrastinate, how to manually shape your behavioral scheme - achieving your most ambitious goals becomes a matter of time.

“The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.”
~ Aristotle

The most ambitious of goals are mere results of consistent, efficient behaviors.

Building an Instagram-level physique is the result of a behavioral set (efficient, consistent working out & nutrition)

Building a fearsome knowledge base is the result of a behavioral set (consistent reading and self-education)

Building a $10k+/month business comes down to a series of consistent actions constantly being improved.

If you have mastery over your behavioral scheme, you can navigate through your goals with grace and fluidity.

Because you’re no longer a result of your behavioral impulses, but are now their engineer.

In this guide, I’ll show you the dynamics and protocol for hard-wiring behavioral patterns / habits into your neural circuitry.

As a showcase example, we’ll be using the framework around building my 2 favorite habits that I recommend to anyone and everyone:

• Reading: the beautiful endeavor of understanding yourself and the world

• Working out: the beautiful endeavor of carving a primal physique and a confident identity

I’m Hamed, a neuro-psychiatry intern helping the ambitious who’re struggling with productivity become consistent, goal-achieving machines through top-caliber neuro-psychology frameworks.

If that seems interesting, I’d love to welcome you to the Psycho-Modulators.

Subscribe now

The Framework Principles

The self-help industry is riddled with tips on “building habits”
“make it easier & more satisfying”
“make it more obvious and attractive”
“reduce friction during work”

Such tips could have utility, but are just very superficial overall.

They address behavior directly & very superficially, disregarding how it’s a part of a bigger psychological makeup underneath.

A framework that’s actually effective and impactful addresses the whole psyche, including what drives behavior not just behavior itself.

Alfred, pull up the CBT model.

As always, this is the cognitive-behavioral illustration of the human psyche portraying how your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors work in synchrony.

Classic example: WOAH! A SPIDER (thought) -> Fear (Emotion) -> Runs away (Behavior)

But if I reminded you that you’re actually wearing a VR headset, and that this is a spider simulator game, you’ll not perceive the spider as a threat anymore.

Therefore, you won’t be scared, and consequently you won’t need to run away.

I changed your cognition - or perception - of the spider and therefore your emotion and consequently your behavior.

In short, to make deep, lasting change to your behavior, you have to start from within, from cognition, and only then will positive, attuned emotions and consistent action follow effortlessly.

In that light, it’s easy to see how internet “guides” that solely target behavior - like basic habit building - fail 99% of the time.

The Cognitive-Behavioral Approach

But, let’s say you want to workout consistently and read books like mentioned, what exactly do you modulate in your cognition to engineer such behaviors? And how?

Alfred, zoom into Cognition.

If we want to create behavioral change that is as deep and impactful as possible, we address the deepest layer of our psyches to create that change: Core beliefs.

This is your value system and your self-conception.

It’s how you perceive the world and, more importantly, yourself at the most fundamental level.

The power of Self-Conception

A political radical will get very angered (emotion) and fight back (action) against anyone who opposes their view simply because they threaten the political ideology they identify with.

A veteran tri-athlete will find fast, processed food disgusting and repulsive despite everyone else being addicted to it because they’re not that person anymore.

These are 2 very basic examples of how your self-conception and value system shape:

• Your lens of perception of what’s good and bad

• What drives you forward or repels you

• The actions you find yourself effortlessly doing

“You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.”
— Maxwell Maltz, Author of Psycho-Cybernetics

Any other attempt that doesn’t consider self-conception will feel “unnatural” and “artificial,” and you’ll recoil to your old behavioral scheme within days or weeks, because you didn’t start from the base - the underlying infrastructure of your identity.

And how do we do that, you ask? Through behavior.

The loop of the psyche

“Come on now Hamed, didn’t you just tell us behavior is changed through identity?”

“And now that we’re discussing how to change identity, you tell us it’s through behavior?”

“Are you putting us in loops or what?”

Yes. Exactly. It is indeed a loop.

You see, the pyramid-shaped cognitive-behavioral model of the human psyche I showed earlier is more of an illustration for simplification.

How the psyche actually works, is more like this:

The 3 elements of the psyche - thoughts, emotions, and behaviors - function as endless open loops, constantly influencing each other.

The Loop of Social Anxiety

As an example, people with Social Anxiety Disorder (yes that’s a psychiatric disorder, and no you probably don’t have it just because you’ve gone through a few embarrassing situations that you recall and cringe every once in a while) tend to have an eccentric worldview and identity:

Their thoughts usually look like this in social situations:

• I’m being judged by those around me

• Everyone can see how anxious I look

• I’ll lose control in some way and get really embarrassed

• People will think I’m weird and creepy if I stutter or fumble

Naturally, this leads to an emotional state of extreme anxiety and tension in social situations.

Ironically, this consequently leads them to actually do messy behaviors and stumble, heavily embarrassing themselves in front of others.

People do look, see how anxious they are, and it ends up as yet another embarrassing situation encoded into their self-conception / identity.

This in turn makes them even more anxious in the future, increasing the likelihood of such an instance, feeding the vicious cycle further.

Depression, many forms of bipolarity, personality disorders, and many psychiatric disorders generally work with the same dynamic: a negatively self-reinforcing psychological loop.

We’re going to exploit the same insanely powerful psychological phenomenon, but in a positive way.

We’re going to create a cognitive-behavioral loop in which both the desired identity and its concurrent behavior reinforce each other endlessly.

A beautiful showcase of psycho-modulation. You love to see it.

Finally, here’s the actual framework, taking reading and working out specifically as examples:

0- Don’t throttle neuroplasticity

“Neuroplasticity is the brain’s adaptability to learning and new experience, and it is a magical neural property that we all have....”

Wrong.

As mind-blowing as it sounds, neuroplasticity isn’t a feature that we all intrinsically have.

What decides whether or not you have it, or to what extent it’s active...is your belief in it.

This is perfectly explained in Pragmatic Thinking & Learning:

“According to Carol Dweck [pioneer of the research comparing fixed and growth mindsets] students who believed they could not increase their intelligence in fact couldn’t.

Those who believed in the plasticity of their brains increased their abilities easily. In either case, what you think about the brain’s capacities physically affects the “wiring” of the brain itself.

Just thinking that your brain has more capacity for learning makes it so.

It’s do-it-yourself brain surgery”

In short, it’s a beautiful intersection of psychology and neurology in which an abstract thought unlocks a physical neural property.

Step 0 (zero because it’s a requisite for next steps) is to actively let go of any limiting self-conceptions of yourself, like not seeing yourself as a reader or a fit person - or that this isn’t like you.

I know you might’ve failed at this a lot.
That doesn’t mean you’re broken.
Go easy on yourself and keep trying for as long as you’re alive.

1- Repetition

This is what you probably read on all self-help guides, but most people completely mess this up, paradoxically leaving them more stuck.

The logic seems flawless:

Repetitions leading to concrete progression indeed make undeniable, concrete proof of one’s change.

This is the core of the cognitive behavioral loop: consistently reading and working out (behavior) reinforces your identity of someone who reads and works out (cognition - identity).

This identity then reinforces the behavior further, reinforcing the identity yet again, and so on.

In essence, this is true. HOWEVER, it isn’t necessarily that smooth and effective in all cases.

There’s a very common trap in which you get motivated after being in a rut, make plans for a comeback, but eventually fail and slip right back into your old life.

This paradoxically reinforces a negative, twisted, broken subconscious self-image of someone who “can’t and won’t make it.”

We want to avoid accidentally steering the cognitive-behavioral loop into such a negative direction, which is what steps 2 and 3 optimize for - they’re the missing puzzle pieces.

2- Salience

There’s a reason social media, pornography, and marijuana are addictive, while staring at a rock isn’t.

Such activities are engineered for neurological salience: the quality of being particularly noticeable, important, or prominent.

Neurologically, salience is determined by the neurochemical weight of an event.

For example, an extremely distressing event will cause massive releases of norepinephrine and cortisol - engraving the experience into memory in the form of trauma or causing PTSD.

An extremely pleasurable action will cause massive releases of primarily dopamine - and possibly serotonin and epinephrine - causing deep learning that possibly leads to compulsive repetition - aka addiction.

Salience is the strongest factor of neuroplasticity and reinforcement of psychological change.

Neurochemically, staring at a rock causes....well....nothing. It has zero salience.

We don’t our repetitions of the behaviors to be like that.

We want them to be salient - obviously in the pleasurable not the traumatic way - to induce neuroplastic, high-magnitude behavioral and identity change on autopilot.

Salience Engineering Framework

We’ve discussed this in deep detail on my biggest and most complicated article yet: How to exploit your reward circuitry for optimal, smooth goal achievement.

If you’ve read it, this complicated section will sound much simpler.

But in short, what we’ll utilize from that guide is Salient Goal Framing which is done by:
1- Consciously making the goal Behavioral Initiation - or just starting with no explicit goal in mind.
2- Consciously and actively appreciating whatever progress you’ve made upon disengaging

In short, consistently initiate, and actively appreciate however much progress you happen to make no matter how negligible it is.

I know you might’ve heard the classic “start small, build mini-habits” a million times elsewhere, but please hear me out because this is entirely different.

This is a framework that specifically modulates the loop to be salient and automatically re-engage the circuit, almost like an electric current that keeps flowing in a closed circuit.

Infinite reinforcement glitch. You love to see it. The art of psycho-modulation is truly an intellectual beauty.

What most people do is the exact opposite: attaching salience to a certain, rigid form of progression - like 5 workouts per week at a certain time with the perfect nutrition - or reading 35 pages a day religiously before sleeping.

This makes salience conditional, harder, and rarer, cutting off the circuitry of psychological reinforcement - what I call psychological self-sabotage.

Step 3: Splitting of output

It gets even more complicated and dense, so concentrate.

A massive psychological roadblock with starting small and appreciating small progress is the ego’s tendency to sabotage this whole process, especially for perfectionists or those struggling with a negative self-image desperate to fix it (Asian parents syndrome.)

The idea of gradual baby steps feels subconsciously irritating to a lot of us, especially when there’s little progress to motivate us.

Upon a surgical psychological dissection, this emotion is as always built upon a thought - a cognitive element - which is:

“This isn’t much progress.
1 or 2 pages isn’t much.
1 or 2 sets of pushups isn’t much.
How much do I keep doing this for?
This is stupid and pointless.
I perceive the value of this to be miniscule.“

But that’s simply because you’re approaching this framework completely wrong.

The Golden Reframe

THIS FRAMEWORK IS FOR THE ENGINEERING OF A BEHAVIOR, NOT FOR AMPLIFYING ITS OUTPUT.

This is not at all the stage at which we “make insane progress everyday.”

What we’re doing here is the building of an infrastructure of a self-conception and its behavioral pattern through a loop involving both - not making massive progress and output from day one.

Building a behavior and amplifying its output are 2 different stages of behavioral engineering.

It’s one thing to read consistently...

And another thing to read consistently for 6 hours daily in a flow state with the perfect technique

It’s one thing to train consistently...

And another thing to workout 6 days per week with perfect form and progression while maintaining hyper-optimized nutrition.

Internalizing this cognitive shift deeply calms down your ego and inner monsters and fixes your value perception.

You’re more attuned and in harmony with the process psychologically because the narrative changes to:

“What I’m doing with this primitive, mini-loop is way beyond the value of what I do upon mere initiation. I’m creating the cognitive infrastructure and identity that naturally develops this behavior as a part of me to nurture massive output in the future.”

I’ll be dedicating a future article on output amplification (i.e. working for more hours / exerting more effort, etc.), so stay tuned.

Step 4: Identity Work

Since behavior and identity are inherently connected, identity work on the side augments this very well, but yet again when done right.

This guide is already very long, so I’ll be creating a separate article on Value System & Identity work in specific to complement and amplify the cognitive-behavioral loop discussed here.

I’ll link it here once I create it, but for now know that anything that moves your identity towards the direction of the desired behavioral scheme harmonizes the process and reinforces the loop further.

Till then, hope this adds valuable knowledge to you.

Hamed out ♥

I see a reality way worse than that.

Over-consumption rids you of the ability to change your psyche, while hypnotically washing away your personal, social, and spiritual values.

I know that might seem extremely exaggerated.

“How would scrolling tiktok lead to the loss of my personal and “spiritual” values or whatever? It’s not that deep...”

Trust me, if anything, the claim I just made is an understatement.

Let’s talk about why that is the case and then I’ll propose what I believe to be the only true solution to this crisis

I’m Hamed, a neuro-psychiatry intern helping the ambitious who’re struggling with productivity become consistent, goal-achieving machines through top-caliber neuro-psychology based frameworks.

If that seems interesting, I’d love to welcome you to the Psycho-Modulators.

Subscribe now

1- Psychological Stasis

In his book Sapiens, Yuval Harari makes the argument that a turning point in the history of evolution of humans as a species was when they developed abstraction.

Once humans had a capacity to create, communicate, and interact with abstract concepts and thoughts, they could conjure stories and myths that they then spiritually shared and could therefore co-operate better.

Deep belief in a supernatural entity that upholds a set of noble values will motivate me to uphold these values myself, act in accordance with them, and co-operate with those who also believe in that entity and share those values.

That’s a supposed biopsychological driver of the evolution myths and legends throughout history, and why we very easily link our identities to our religions, waging bloody wars over a difference of beliefs.

“Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or fund a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins.”
~ Yuval Harari, Sapiens

Thoughts: The Core of the Psyche

That is an extensive example of how thoughts - in the form of a philosophy, mindset, or beliefs are the cornerstone of what dictates the identity and behavior of both the individual and the collective.

Modern psychology is built upon the same foundation: Emotions, behaviors, attitudes, and all other aspects of a psychological makeup are mere extensions of cognition, or thoughts.

You wash your teeth because of a habitual thought that says “washing teeth is healthy and is part of who I am” (or the opposite of that if you don’t wash your teeth)

You sometimes feel embarrassed, anxious, or regretful over a merethought of a negative past experience without re-experiencing it.

You might not be aware of it, but every emotion you experience and behavior you do - stems from a conscious or subconscious thought, from cognition.

Therefore, cognition is also the channel through which one can mature, change, or develop throughout the various domains of one’s psychology.

Reading books, pondering over philosophies, listening to biographies of great people, etc. are all forms of a cognitive process that impacts the rest of the psyche if it’s deep enough.

The value of depth

But why do people read whole books over weeks or months when they can just read the book’s summary in 15 minutes?

Why don’t philosophers “summarize“ their worldviews in an essay instead of writing an exhausting 500-page manifesto?

The reason is simple. A deep, extensive medium of knowledge (like a book or lecture series) and its superficial one (like an AI summary) are two entirely different entities, with completely different impacts upon consumption.

One is skimmed, pasteurized, and devoid of any depth or distinct element.

The other is rich, extensive, deep, has elements of vividness, emotionality, and storytelling, all of which are precisely the reason it is deeply impactful, changing one’s worldview, and therefore behavior & identity.

The Medium is the Message

This is exactly what Marshall Mcluhan meant by “The medium is the message.”

When was the last time a shortform reel (or a tweet) impacted your life? Probably never or very rarely.

That’s because depth is a hallmark of thoughts that are impactful enough to bring about change of behavior, identity, or any aspect of the psyche, and there can be no depth in a 30 second reel.

If you look back at any event, book, or advice that deeply changed you, it’s because it’s either inherently deep or you have developed it in your own cognition, giving it personal depth over time with experience and reflection.

The Extinction of depth

Now what happens if you’ve conditioned yourself to exclusively engage with superficial, quick ideas in massive volume?

Johann Hari answers this question in his book Stolen Focus:

Your brain sacrifices depth to keep up with the massive amount of data it’s fed, switching to “skim” mode.

So, not only do you not engage with deep thoughts anymore, you literally can’t.

There could be a book, lecture series, or academic piece that you KNOW will add so much to you, but you literally can’t consume it because its medium is too deep and unstimulating.

How many substack articles, youtube lectures, and books are in the “saved” section somewhere, yet you never actually go back to them (and probably never will) despite their value?

Congratulations, you’ve achieved Psychological Stasis.

You’ve practically broken your cognition, the channel of psychological development across behavior or identity.

What that means is, dear psycho-modulator, you are stuck with your current behavioral scheme, identity, and worldview.

The Wicked Loop

I am kindly asking you to take a moment to ponder over such a disastrous state of being psychologically stuck.

Just kidding, you probably lost the ability to ponder as well.

You see this is not just mere state, but a wicked loop.

Because not only can you not engage with abstract thoughts that could help you change as a person, but you also probably can’t engage with material that can deeply explain this phenomenon in itself.

Ironically, you might be struggling to make sense of this complicated idea in itself right now and be itching to close and go read something lighter or doomscroll.

You are choosing to be cognitively locked in a cage that is locked in another cage which is locked in another cage, infinitely. A surreal state of self-sabotage.

2- A Devolved Brain Engine:

To make matters worse, that cage undermines not just psychology, but neurology.

There’s this network / part of your brain called The Default Network.

Without getting into too much detail, it subconsciously makes sense of and extracts meaning from what you’re exposed to, jumping from childhood memory to fact to observation to help you construct and maintain a clear, coherent vision of the world.

(fun fact: random “aha” moments are thanks to this network)

It essentially constitutes the vast majority of your processing output, but it’s not consciously directable, so you don’t really control it directly like the rest of your motor functions.

It just works by default when you’re unoccupied, hence the name.

Simply put, it is the subconscious, mega-engine running at the back of your brain, making connections, working on your problems, and developing every part of your psyche:

• “Maturity”

• Sense-making of the world

• Pattern recognition

• Value system

• Personal Philosophy (conscious or subconscious),

• Overall, your internal compass.

Like, it’s a pretty big deal, BUT....you guessed it...you probably have it completely clogged and broken.

That’s because the one condition it needs to run is to be unoccupied: no conscious activity, no stimulation, no consumption.

And since you’re almost never unoccupied, this mega-engine is essentially broken down waiting for a signal to run again, but it never receives it.

It’s easy to see how catastrophic the consequences of such an impair can be.

It’s a completely different aspect of cognitive stasis in which your sense-making, meaning-making, pattern recognition, values, personal philosophy, and internal compass are either arrested or gradually wasted away.

You spiritually, philosophically, and psychologically devolve.

You forget who you are, what your mission is, and life just feels weirdly absurd.

With those 2 disastrous neuro-psychological harms in mind, no wonder Yuval Harari, the author I mentioned at the beginning, meditates for 2 hours a day.

The Solution

Okay, enough misery. How do we get out of this? What’s the solution?

We all already know what the true solution is, but at the same time it never works...Why?

“Put down the phone.”
“Do slow, unstimulating activities like reading and walking without distractions.”
“Stop consuming.”
“Learn to focus.”
“Embrace boredom.”

No shit sherlock. Why didn’t I think of that?

This “solution” is everywhere, and it doesn’t work.

Well, it actually does, but at the same time it doesn’t...

Why?

Cruel Optimism

In his book Stolen Focus, Johann Hari discusses what he calls “cruel optimism:”

Offering simple, individualistic solutions for complex, systemic issues, which ultimately sets individuals up for failure and self-blame.

He gave a few examples:

• Proposing “meditation” as the solution to stress to an immigrant single mother in financial debt with 3 children.

• Proposing “screentime reminders” as the solution to facing a mega-industry engineering attentional hijacking frameworks funded by billions.

• Proposing “eat more greens, and less processed foods” as the solution to obesity in the US when a McDonalds is 10 times easier to find, visit, eat, and is cheaper than organic unprocessed foods.

The same could be applied to the generic “solutions” to modern overconsumption.

You simply don’t learn to “focus” or “embrace boredom” that easily when you’re in a society that is economically, spiritually, and culturally built upon hyper-consumption.

Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products — contributing to economic growth twice over.
~ Yuval Harari, Sapiens

The real solution

In that light, the solution lies in not what to do but how to do it.

The classic brain de-stimulating advice in itself works, but at the same time it doesn’t work for 99% of people because they use the wrong approach: the casual one.

The industry of social platforms and digital consumption is immoral, infiltrative, and psychopathic.

They don’t care about your mental health or well-being.

They systematically fund billions to refine their already-addictive algorithms to get an even tighter grip of your brain with zero moral consideration.

And you will NEVER be able to face such a RADICAL, hyper-aggressive behemoth of an industry with a casual approach like the cruel optimism examples mentioned above.

You have to be just as radical, if not more radical, than what you’re pushing against. It’s pure Newtonian physics.

You’re both fighting for the same territory, your reward circuitry.

One is using cutting edge addiction engineering science...

And the other is using........I don’t know....a screentime reminder? Or “charging it away from the bed?”

And you seriously wonder why you’ve failed at “digital detoxing” a thousand times?

The radical approach

I’ll be dedicating a whole future article on this subject, but for now, know that a radical approach looks something like:

Completely deleting your social media account(s)
Switching out your smartphone for a dumbphone
Blocking every singe social media or distracting site and app on your PC...forever
Buying an old, used phone that barely opens google to hate its experience

You get the point, and I’m not here to beg you.

I’m cutting all the fluff and telling you what actually works based on years of personal and professional experience with productivity systematization.

I’ll dive deep into the mechanics and obstacles of such an approach and how to address them in a future article....

But till then you need to understand that any approach that isn’t radical is pure cope to mask the fact that you do want to stay in this consumptive state.

The splitting point

If you think we’re in the darkest age of over-consumption, you’re completely wrong, because it’ll only get darker.

Imagine the current algorithms, as addictive as they are, being replaced with hyper-intelligent AI ones, like a Claude agent behind the screen manually picking every post for pathologically obsessive engagement.

Imagine how things will be when media creation is decentralized, and anyone is able to create a Hollywood-production level movie, TV show, or anime using an AI prompt.

Imagine when creation, distribution, and algorithmic recommendation of media to consume is done through both a hyper-intelligent and a hyper-creative AI agent with limitless capability.

A format as addictive as shortform isn’t the pinnacle.

It’s the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Know where you stand before it’s too late.

The rats were then placed in a cage with a lever that allowed them to self-administer a tiny, painless electrical jolt to these specific brain areas.

The rats would ignore all of their basic biological drives. They would entirely abandon food and water, ignoring nearby palatable treats, and press the lever at astonishing rates - up to 7,000 times an hour.

That’s a press every 0.514 seconds. Moreover, if the scientists did not manually remove the rats from the wires, they would continue self-stimulating to the point of total physical exhaustion and eventual death by starvation or dehydration.

With a mere glimpse, it’s very easy to see how our state doesn’t differ much from these rats, if at all.

The Neurological Life Force

The reward circuitry is unarguably the one main driver of human progression through civilization. It inherently possesses the goal-striving mechanism that fuels seeking and progressing.

It’s the neurological synonym for what’s abstractly called “life force” or “life energy.”

Though that life energy comes as a double-edged sword: Like all other forms of energy, it cannot be created or destroyed, but rather MUST change into another form.

So if you don’t harness it for your own goals, another entity will harness it for its own gain at your expense in the form of a doomscrolling marathon, fast-food dependence, a pornography addiction, you name it. All of these are examples of industries that get a better hold of your reward circuitry - your life force - than you do.

“The world economy and it’s entire, historic economic production has been fueled by one thing and one thing only – sex. Specifically, men’s desire to have sex with young and beautiful females.”
~ Aaron Clarey

I still remember the days of 4th-year finals back in med-school when I had 10+ lectures to study and revise, but couldn’t physically let go of my tablet watching useless YouTube drama. I was well-aware of how I was precisely the rat in the cage of the experiment above, yet I still couldn’t get myself to do what I needed to, almost like I lost my free will.

Taking Control

This is not about generic “lowering your dopamine baseline” or “fixing your attention span by being bored.” This is a dense, detailed “how to take your neurological mechanisms into your own hands,” because if you can deeply understand the algorithm of your reward circuitry, you can channel where your energy output goes with full agency and control.

You can break free of the rat-cage dopaminergic slavery and learn to channel it into feats of output and consistency for your personal gain, rather than into a making few more cents for Mark Zuckerberg’s heavy pockets.

In this post, I’d like to discuss uncommon, unique approaches on how you can consciously modulate and tweak your reward circuitry, manually adjusting its responsiveness and sensitivity to:

• Make high-friction, hard work enjoyable and fulfilling

• Amplify the sensation of accomplishment and pleasure during work

• Easing the Initiation of tasks to beat procrastination

• Develop consistency in a psychologically harmonious way

But firstly we have to understand 3 principles of the reward circuitry’s algorithm that build on top of each other:

• Principle 1: The Circuitry Rewards Progress and nothing else

• Principle 2: Perception of progress is subjective

• Principle 3: Perception of progress is prone to cognitive influence
  They seem complicated, but they’ll completely flip around your understanding of your behavioral anatomy.

Principle 1: The Circuitry Rewards Progression and nothing else

We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value.
~ Jordan B. Peterson

All animals need a system to motivate them towards biologically progressive behaviors - like food, sex, and shelter - and to reward them for it such that the behavior is reinforced and repeated in the future.

Even ants & cockroaches have reward circuitries to do that job. (They also have the same neurotransmitters, including Dopamine.) Otherwise, they would be in vegetative stillness until they die because they have no compass of what to strive for - much like a car without an engine.

Likewise, your reward circuitry motivates you towards what’s biologically progressive, and that progress is then REWARDED with dopamine.

Dopamine is therefore not the molecule of motivation / pleasure directly, but rather *the molecule of progress*, which it rewards with pleasure as reinforcement.

If an activity is dopaminergic, then it’s because your mind perceives it as progress even if YOU, as a conscious observer don’t think so.

A fatty, juicy big mac will always be biological progress due to its high caloric and fat content - even if you’re no longer in starvation-prone caveman times and are 40 pounds overweight.

A doomscrolling session will always be biological progress because you’re ingesting data about your environment and tribe members - even if those “tribe members” are actually The Kardashians and you live in Madagascar.

“Damn Andrew! You just copulated with 23 super-hot, young, fertile women in one sitting! I’m so lucky to be the reward circuitry of such a biologically competent individual!”

Says your reward circuitry as it showers you with dopamine, unaware that you were looking at virtual imagery on a screen in your mom’s basement.

All of these are examples of what you could call virtual hyper-progress.

When you’re doomscrolling / playing video games / watching netflix, you’re not procrastinating. You’re carrying out your exact biological mission: progression - just in a virtual, artificially optimized domain.

Principle 2: Perception of Progress is Subjective

Such progression, to most animals, is hard-wired to the core pillars of survival and reproduction, and is inflexible beyond that, so they can’t really go out of script. You’ll never find a tribe of cockroaches going through a renaissance period or an industrial revolution.

Humans, on the other hand, could live in a very complicated environment, in which progression relies on hand skills, knowledge of certain plants, hierarchial status, or a mix of all of those as specialties divided among tribe members.

Therefore, we’ve been blessed with a versatile reward circuitry adapted to our sophisticated cognition, in which progression expands to individual, subjective domains.

In other words, the adaptability of our reward circuitry enables it to subjectively weigh and value seemingly normal things that serve as markers of progression based on our novel contexts and circumstances. For example:

• If you’re an elementary grader, having your classmates and teacher clap for you for a smart answer is progressive and therefore dopaminergic

• If you’re a soccer player, putting a ball in a net is progressive and dopaminergic

• If you’re a software engineer, a piece of code running successfully is progressive and dopaminergic

• If you’re a stock investor, a mere number going up is progressive and dopaminergic

None of these instances is inherently, globally progressive like the food-sex-shelter trio. They are all different scenarios in which the reward circuitry has adapted to understand what form progress takes depending on the context.

Putting a ball in a net is very progressive if you’re Lionel Messi because with that indirectly comes more fame, money, and status, which the reward circuitry is able to understand by proxy.

I personally love reading about neurobiology so much and love my major of neuro-psychiatry. Any rich book about such topics would feel very pleasurable and salient to read for me, but not necessarily for someone else who prefers philosophy.

Without this aspect, we wouldn’t’ve been able to build civilization as it is. This is the property that allowed that “life force” of humanity to diverge across multiple disciplines and domains, compounding multi-dimensional progression across all possible areas of knowledge and conquest.

It’s also why you enjoy what you enjoy, finding pleasure in what’s sometimes deeply personal and hard to convey to others. Be proud of your unique dopaminergic blueprint, fellow psycho-modulator.

Principle 3: Perception of Progress is subject to cognitive influence

This is where it gets seriously dense and deep, and where you can learn to manipulate your own reward circuitry.

We’ve already established that perception of progress is subjective and differs from person to person based on their contexts.

However, two individuals can be in the SAME context, exposed to the SAME reward / stimulus, yet have an entirely DIFFERENT dopaminergic response.

An example would be 2 college students that have just finished a hard lecture (which is progress) that they’ve been studying all day:

Student A is happy, fulfilled, and feels accomplished.
Student B is irritated, dissatisfied, and feels disappointed - because person B is a perfectionist. He wanted to do much much more throughout the day and sees that lecture as “not enough.”

The difference in reward sensation wasn’t due to a different unit of progression (which is the same in both cases: one hard lecture) but a different cognitive architecture.

Alfred, pull up the CBT diagram.

This is the cognitive-behavioral illustration of the human psyche. As displayed, cognition (thoughts) are at the core of the psyche, giving rise to emotion and consequently behavior.

Example: WOAH! A SPIDER (thought) -> Fear (Emotion) -> Runs away (Behavior)

The whole reward circuitry with its wires and plugs are located in the middle within Emotion, along with 6 other emotional systems according to neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp.

Therefore, if we want to modulate and control our reward circuitry, we have to do so through its underlying layer: cognition / thoughts.

Alfred, zoom in onto cognition and dissect it.

This is a more elaborate illustration of the levels of cognition. The deeper a principle lies among the levels, the more profound the impact it’ll have upon the rest of the psyche as we’ll see in a minute.

There are 3 principles of such cognitive influence we need to understand before proceeding to how we can leverage all of that to our favor:

We’re getting denser and deeper into the juicy parts, so concentrate.

1- Expectations (Reward-Prediction Error)

As weird as it sounds, dopamine release has a mathematical formula which Daniel Z. Liebermann discusses in his book The Molecule of More.

Reward Prediction Error = Actual Reward - Expected Reward

The reward prediction error (RPE), which is the gap between the reward you expect and the reward you get, is the direct parameter of how much dopamine is released. High expectations rig the formula against your favor and vice versa.

If you 100% expected to pass a test, you won’t really be “elated” if you actually pass, but will definitely go crazy if you failed it, and vice versa.

In the example we mentioned above, student B had perfectionism as a part of her core beliefs about herself (identity - deepest part of cognition) and therefore had a profound impact on the way she differently perceived positive progression: underwhelming and not enough.

That’s because she has “high expectations for herself” by nature. Many people romanticize this and view it as a virtue, when it literally clogs the reward circuitry as we can see. Reversely, the practice of “undershooting” as we’ll see in the upcoming practical steps section optimizes it.

2- Value Attachment

This one’s extremely critical.

People subconsciously attach progressive value to different markers of progress. Imagine you’re a young, professional boxer, for example. The “reward” or “achievement” you attach progressive value to could be anything among:

• Having a good training session in which you’re performing well

• Having a bad training session in which you’re getting humbled and are learning

• Having a training session in general

• Having FINISHED a training session so that you can get back to your life

• Winning the fight

• Holding the championship belt

People can have very different perspectives or angles of how they want to “do” something as we can see.

They therefore subconsciously assign value to different stations of a goal according to their unique natures and temperaments.

For example, superficial, status-obsessive people who care too much about standing out and having something to brag about will tend to place massive emphasis on the end-goal or the concrete, visible achievement they can post on Instagram - so they’re heavily end-goal oriented. (as compared to someone who values the training sessions themselves (process-oriented.))

In the mentioned example, such person would fixate on winning the belt, or having one training session just to cut out a clip and post it, etc. Each of us knows at least a few such desperate show-offs in our lives, and how they love to talk the talk but rarely walk the walk or achieve any concrete, valuable progression in their lives.

You’ll understand why in a minute, as well as how not to fall in that trap.

Another example would be a medical student (DEFINITELY NOT ME A FEW YEARS BACK) who wants to get done with the lectures so that he can feel satisfied and guilt-free for tomorrow’s test. That is also goal-oriented to an extent.

The danger of end-goal obsession

I still remember the good old days when I wanted to master chess not out of actual interest but to gain that “aura.” Chess grandmasters just have that very exceptional aura moving the pieces quickly and signaling deep intelligence in a very impressive manner. I wanted that. I literally don’t know why, but I randomly wanted that because I just felt like it’d be impressive to....I don’t know, I didn’t even have friends that commonly liked chess or a crush to impress....My dumbass just wanted to see myself in that Magnus Carlsen pose for literally no reason.

Needless to say, I dropped the whole endeavor. My chess.com account currently has an ELO rating of like 250 or something (you start at 400.)

Fixating over the end-goal is obviously a terrible approach. It emphasizes the end-goal as the only valuable progressive marker, which as we’ll see in the practical part makes the process itself feel like torture and much harder to maintain. We’ll also discuss how to reverse that completely and leverage it to our advantage.

Visualizing the end goal can be a great motivating force, but fixating on the outcome while disregarding the process is a recipe for failure.

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
~ Ursula K. Le Guin

3- Conscious Control

My favorite part in this whole discussion. Last point before we jump into the actionable framework.

You can consciously change both of the previous factors - value attachment & expectations - with conscious thought, resulting in a different emotional response - literally more dopamine for free.

Recall with me that cognition / thoughts lie deep to the emotional systems like the reward circuitry and therefore dictate their response.

For example, perfectionistic Student B could’ve found much more satisfaction and pleasure in having finished the hard lecture that took him the whole day if he could reframe his perception of progress to match student A.

It’s not necessarily that simple, because a mere thought of “It’s okay you did good. You don’t have to be perfect.” wouldn’t fit into the cognitive architecture of someone who is deeply perfectionistic and has it as a reinforced value for 2 decades.

Though the point still holds: thoughts have direct influence over emotional systems. That’s the whole point of CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy) to start with.

A great example is mentioned by Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky in his book Behave:

• When you’re watching a movie and get too sucked into its events, you can feel genuine sadness for the death of a favorite character or even a dog

• In that moment, you can remind yourself “Hey wait a minute....This is a movie, with a cast, and cameras. That didn’t actually happen. That’s just acting and that person didn’t actually die.”

• On a neurological level, what happens is your rational brain (mainly the neocortex) communicates with your emotional brain (mainly precortical,) telling it “Hey, this is just acting. Calm down.”

• And YOU DO CALM DOWN....

Likewise, when you finish a heavy project you’ve struggled so much with, do a great killer workout, study for exceptionally long and pick back up on your curriculum, you “feel good.”
You “feel pleasurable” and achieved.

Where in hell do you think that “pleasure sensation” comes from?

It’s because you subjectively perceived that “outcome” as progress, and that thought got interpreted as a signal of progression, releasing the dopamine.

IT’S THE THOUGHT OF PROGRESSION AND NOT NECESSARILY PROGRESSION ITSELF!

Alright Hamed, so if I have the ability to direct my reward circuitry using thoughts, what thoughts do I actually generate? How do I consciously direct my reward circuitry for the best possible results?

This is part of what we’ll discuss in the actionable framework, which I’ve refined to the optimum after having read every book and listened to every podcast I could get my hands on about the subject like a basement dweller.

Actionable Protocol: Dopamine-Maxxing

Mega-industries engineer hyper-addictive products that hook you through their knowledge and exploitation of your reward circuitry’s mechanisms.

We’ll do the same.

We’ll engineer a framework that hooks us to making progress towards OUR goals.

In this section, we’ll synthesize a framework that employs all of what we just discussed to provide:
1- The Short Term: Easier Initiation, more pleasure, & higher-output during work sessions
2- The Long Term: Better Consistency and smoother engagement with work over longer periods, avoiding burn-outs

1- The Fundamentals

Needless to say, none of what we’ll discuss is going to work on top of a rotten infrastructure. You need a de-stimulated brain, at least moderately enough to count as a homo sapien, and a basic productivity system.

One core principle I haven’t mentioned about the reward circuitry is its mathematical nature. All nervous systems are deeply mathematical by nature, and it makes sense. Why would a monkey choose one single banana over a whole bundle of bananas?

Likewise, even the most meaningful and crucial life projects you have in life are only slightly dopaminergic when compared to artificially hyper-enhanced stimuli. The brain doesn’t consider “relevance to your philosophy / life mission” or “meaningfulness” as concrete parameters. It pragmatically and exclusively rates choices on a “Dopamin-o-meter,” so the doomscrolling session will almost always be chosen over the 2-hour work session.

Please understand that, again, your brain doesn’t conceive of such things as “distractions,” but as a more salient, more meaningful progression in life.

You’ve read a million times in a million places about how you’re being exploited and hacked by modern pleasures. You also probably have a rough idea of what to do about it.

Nobody can help you if you’re actively choosing to be the mouse in the cage pressing the dopamine lever till you die. Know where you stand, and know that nothing can outweigh a rotten infrastructure.

2- Attach Value to the process, not the outcome

Throughout your whole life, you’ve been associating “THE FINISHING OF TASKS“ as the trigger for progress and therefore pleasure, that’s why you only felt pleasurable AFTER a task, but terrible THROUGHOUT.

In a society obsessed with numbers and output, an economic market hyper-fixated on arrows going up and numbers being green not red, and a capitalist system in which effort is invisible and only results count, it’s only natural that we’d be conditioned to exclusively find progress in outcomes and never in the process.

But this is extremely counter-productive and burdening on the reward circuitry, because subjectively attaching value to the outcome exclusively makes the process feel like torture, and delays the reward sensation to only after having reached the outcome / finished a project / reached a specific milestone.

Alfred, pull up the goal-oriented dopamine chart.

This is what the process you’re creating neurologically looks like: a painful work session in hopes of a reward or an outcome of having finished afterwards.

Naturally, this makes initiating the process and sustaining it feel like reward-less torture, which sometimes creates so much friction that you don’t start at all or find it very hard. This leads to a lot of procrastination and poor consistency.

Attaching reward to the PROCESS

What we want to create, instead is a process in which work itself is rewarding.

To do that, you’ll simply associate progression with triggers that are almost always a true marker of progress and are always present in hard work: pain, friction, and micro-progression.

First off, Pain & friction while working are the emotional feedback that you’re advancing. That you’re progressing, because any growth is always effortful.

Secondly, micro-progression is the most raw, authentic form of progression. It’s the one page you get through while reading. The one question you solve while revising. The one section you finish while writing.

Just like atoms make up all matter and are the only component of the universe, micro-progression is the only real, fundamental constituent of progress.

When you consciously attach your subjective perception of progression to those triggers - which are pain, friction, and micro-progression, you’ll be rewarded throughout the process - just like I am being right now while writing the script.

Wait a minute Hamed, so you’re saying that I can just generate a thought of “I am experiencing pain / friction” or “I made a micro-progression” throughout work, and that shifts the dopaminergic reward sensation to be spread throughout the process instead of concentrated at the end?

YES! THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I’M SAYING!

As we said, you can literally reframe what you attach progressive value to using your thoughts, and with some initial conscious modulation and effort, this soon becomes reinforced as the new natural through what’s known in psychology as associative conditioning.

The new association of reward becomes wired to those 3 triggers and not a specific outcome.

“When friction becomes the reward, you can pass from an idea and a goal no matter how daunting, to successful completion of that goal while experiencing what will essentially feel like pleasure the entire time.”
~ Dr. Andrew Huberman, Huberman Lab, Episode 39: “Controlling Your Dopamine for Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction”

You love to see it. You love to see the art of psycho-modulation. If there was a science that could count as art. It’d definitely be neuro-psychology.

On a side note, this poses an important lesson on a much bigger scale: You can literally choose to reframe your perception. Of anything. Concrete perception is never a choice. If you see an apple as red, you can’t just CHOOSE to see it as green. It’s hard-coded sensory input.

Abstract perception, however, is always a choice. You can always choose to see your parents as annoying, authoritative figures or beautiful souls whom life my have not been very kind to. Neither is objectively right or wrong. You can choose to see life as an unfair, wicked test of patience or a beautiful gift from God with hardships that give it meaning. Neither is objectively right or wrong, you just need to know where you stand.

This is why, generally, thoughts can only be nested within a greater philosophy. It has to be part of a greater picture. This is also why perfectionists sometimes find it hard to overcome their perfectionism with just a thought of “That’s enough work. I did well.” like the example we mentioned. Sometimes, it just doesn’t fit into the bigger scheme of their identity or their worldview, so it doesn’t integrate within the psyche as a thought. (That doesn’t mean perfectionism is incurable. It definitely is.)

3- Do Not Attach Value to an External Reward

“To stick to your habits and work schedule, reward yourself with something you enjoy afterwards!” is about the worst productivity advice you can hear. It definitely works in some contexts, but if you’re basing your work ethic entirely on the idea of a post-work reward, that’s a recipe for failure.

Going back to value attachment, this isn’t even end-goal oriented or outcome-oriented like we just discussed, but attaches value to a reward that’s completely separate from the whole process with its outcome, which is even worse.

This creates extrinsic motivation, in which you’re motivated to perform a task for something outside the domain of the work (like a teenager cleaning his room just because his mom told him to.)
It reinforces the idea that the process itself is naturally supposed to be torture, and does exactly what outcome-oriented thinking does, if not worse.

In a 1973 Stanford study, preschoolers who loved drawing were promised a reward for it; weeks later, with the reward gone, they drew about half as much as kids who’d never been promised anything.

This is an example of a reward that was supposed to reinforce a behavior but completely demolished it instead.

External reward definitely works in some cases like if you follow up a healthy diet with a moderate amount of fast food to balance things out and not burn out and in many similar contexts. However, having this as the cornerstone of your productivity and work ethic in general is very counterproductive.

4- Attach Reward at the Initiation

This is where psycho-modulation gets into the deep, beautiful intricacies. Since we can now consciously modulate where and when to attach reward throughout the process, why not put most of it at the beginning?

I mean, starting is always the hard part, and we all know it. I have it as a personal philosophy, as well as a philosophy I teach to my students:
“Getting the wheel to start moving is the hard part. The first 5 minutes are actually 80% of the work. To keep the wheel in momentum is easy work: the rest of work, even if it went on for hours is still only around ~20% of the actual “work.“

I really hope I made sense with that, but if we want to reinforce the habit of initiation and beat procrastination, why not also condition ourselves to attach genuine progression to the initiation part, because it is indeed the bigger part of the work?

In that case, the chart would then look something like this:

The reframe

Notice what we’re doing so far? We’ve literally flipped the process around. We started consciously modulating the process to reward initiation and progress rather than outcome and results, completely reversing the outcome-obsessed mindset radically enforced by a madly capitalist society.

Workaholism is actually a live demonstration of the result of adopting this protocol. Workaholics develop very deep attachment to the process - to work - that they dissociate from the outcome completely.

They can get all the money, fame, and status in the world, yet still be in it only for the process itself. They have neurologically abolished the destination and fixated on staying in the journey.

They don’t even care for the outcome anymore. They’re hyper-fixated on the work. In other words, they have unawaringly applied this very protocol we’re discussing without conscious intent.

Again, if you think using mere thoughts and cognitive affirmation to modulate your own reward circuitry’s response is humpty dumpty pseudoscience, wait just until you try it for some time.

5- Hacker Move

Needless to say, you’ll still enjoy the pleasure of achieving something, from a single annoying task to a whole hyper-productive day or week.

But here’s the twist: don’t. I know this sounds too extreme. But literally don’t.

What this does is it channels ALL the reward EXCLUSIVELY to the process. This is essentially the engineering of an addiction to the core of the process. A workaholism slider that you can manually modulate.

This is next level technicality. The beauty of Psycho-modulation. You love to see it. God bless psychology.

But how? Through the exact same mechanism: using thoughts to modulate emotions. You’ll “feel” that accomplishment upon reaching an outcome, like finishing a set of hard tasks.

Stop it. Just close the drain literally. You can do that. You can stop dopamine from signaling with such a thought on its own. I am dead f** serious.

6- Undershoot

The same capitalist culture which heavily emphasizes output and efficiency is naturally one that sanctifies hyper-ambition in the form of inflated goals, both short term and long term.

How many times have you set out to plan “the perfect week / month” and scheduled in your activities with a will of steel to “redeem” for your underperformance?....Only to not stick to it and fall back into the same rut?

That is the phenomenon of “overshooting.” Simply put, you create goals that are too big for your capabilities. If we go back to the reward-prediction-error formula, this high expectation of oneself heavily rigs the formula against your favor.

No wonder you can’t stick to such ambitions. Neither did I, for like a hundred times until I learnt how to be realistic.

The solution isn’t to tense up further and create even bigger hyper-ambitious plans to redeem one’s guilt and shame, but is paradoxically the exact opposite way: smaller, self-compassionate plans.

Undershooting (deliberately setting modest, minimal goals) and actively choosing to consciously approve and suffice with them does wonders.

This isn’t always simple. It has to be nested within a wider, deeper philosophy of genuine self-compassion and acceptance of the dynamics of reality as it is: slow and gradual.

The cognitive infrastructure of beliefs and thoughts of someone who’s deeply perfectionistic and is uncapable of accepting themselves unless they excel will hardly accept such a practice.

Go easy on yourself for the love of God. I know the internet is making everything feel like a race, but you’re doing yourself no favor by pressing yourself into a more sabotaging paralysis masked by “big ambitions.”

7- Macro-Goal Framing

A lot of Substack writers, content creators, and ambitious students & professionals fail to be consistent because they fixate over results outside their control.

This is very similar to attaching reward to the outcome, with the difference being that here, the outcome isn’t even finishing the task, but getting likes, follows, or metrics that are purely by chance or under the mercy of some random algorithm.

Needless to say, this is pure self-sabotage. Here, you’re subconsciously attaching cues of progression to a random process completely detached from the actual work.

This makes your reward circuitry uncapable of understanding the context!!!

Remember how we said that perception of progression is subjective and that your reward circuitry understands the context and what is progressive & dopaminergic in your unique case as a football player, stock investor, etc. ?

What you’re doing here is the exact opposite: you’re giving your reward circuitry a marker of progression that’s completely separate from the core of the work itself.

Your reward circuitry is now technically blind. Congratulations, you played yourself.

This might seem like a small shift to the negative, but its impact is actually very substantial.

It makes the work itself dreadful and ineffective, and you’re overall in a state of agony overthinking about grades or metrics outside your control - usually you end up at point zero in a rut of procrastination sooner than you realize.

Worry not brethren, I have the solution.

1- Consciously shift your “goal” to something within your direct locus of control

I’ll use myself as an example. I’m fairly new to Substack. I’m very knowledgeable on what I’m writing about, but that doesn’t mean I’m entitled to any form of success necessarily, nor do I have any number as a goal.

My goal is Write one article per week, making each one more valuable, rich, and amusing than the one before.

My goal is NOT Get X followers / subscribers / views or Get higher likes on each article than the one before, etc.

2- ACTIVELY DETACH from any metrics of success

Stop checking metrics every few minutes. Actively prevent yourself from doing that.

Stop checking your physique in the mirror every 30 minutes. Relax Arnold you’ve just started working out 2 weeks ago.

You can let yourself feel proud and achieved after having achieved concrete results but be wary of being attached to them.

3- Nest your goal within a bigger, more meaningful goal

This one’s optional and isn’t always available, but it does wonders.

I’m currently writing to nobody. I’m not necessarily doing it for views or subscribers. I just want to synthesize my knowledge into creating a mega-library of how to holistically become a goal achieving machine, ascending into a hyper-capable individual.

It’s easy to see how such a compass shift puts the process in an entirely different psychological frame that is more pleasurable, meaningful, and harmonic.

Outside the cage

Go back to the rat, pressing its lever every 0.514 seconds until it starves to death chasing a jolt it never learnt to question.

The rats have no conscious awareness. They don’t have the capacity to understand where they are or ask themselves “what am I rewarding myself for?

You, however, sit above it, watching it fire, capable of reaching down with nothing but a thought and rerouting where the current goes.

Most people never learn this, spending entire lives as passengers to a nervous system running code wired for scarcity, then hijacked by engineers for infinite content, calling the result “just who they are” when it was always just an unclaimed inheritance, a machine left on default because nobody told them the settings could be touched.

The question is simple. Are you okay seeing yourself starve to death pressing a lever?

Hope you were able to ingest this heavy piece and find value in it.

It’s a wide, extensive space with a ton of topics and angles that’re very easy to get lost in.

You have gurus speaking about the new economy, AI, and its skillset.

Entrepreneurs talking about financial freedom and its secrets.

Generic self-help youtubers masking as philosophers or storytellers to give appeal to the 2018 productivity advice they provide.

And many many more...

You’ve consumed so much of it already, and maybe you’ve managed to make some change, but still not as deeply as your ambitions demand.

Among all of that noise and skills to possibly learn, one meta-skill reigns supreme, and provides an insane advantage regardless of your niche, mission, or goal.

It’s not “learning how to learn” or “second-order thinking,” which are indeed valuable, but something way more powerful & deeply transformative:

Psychological Architecture

Because if you can manipulate your psyche with enough intricacy, you can manually shape the mindset, emotional state, and behavioral scheme you desire to reach your goals.

If you understand how to manually shape your thoughts, emotions, and behavior, you can morph yourself into whatever person - or rather entity - you desire.

• You can install healthy addictions and uninstall harmful ones from your brain like it’s a MacBook.

• You can manually dissect limiting beliefs and eradicate them.

• You can manually create an emotional state of tranquility, flow, or focus.

In this meta-guide, I hope to provide you with the definition, principles, and steps of the meta-skill of psychological architecture which you can start implementing today to gain a substantial advantage, a use-case example being:

• Developing Unbreakable Consistency

• Creating a positive emotional state (Confidence)

• Developing a high-caliber mindset

I’m Hamed, a Neuro-Psychiatry Intern. If you’re interested in neuro-psychology based self-mastery, I’d love to have you on my Substack.

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The Power Of Psychological Architecture

Any skill, trait, or feat is a constellation of 3 things and 3 things only: Thoughts - Emotions - Behaviors / Actions.

These are the 3 constituent elements of the human psyche according to modern psychiatry. Learn to engineer them and you’ve learnt to engineer yourself into the person you desire with the capabilities you desire.

That’s why it’s not a skill, but THE meta-skill of gaining skills.

It’s the meta-framework for synthesizing frameworks, and the approach I use for my own, like:

Modulating the Reward Circuitry’s Algorithm For Enjoying Work
How To Hard-Wire Behaviors & Habits

And the list goes on, practically infinitely.

What I’m trying to say is, mastery of this skill is mastery of the essence of psychological transformation across all domains in theory and practice, controlling your own brain’s wires and elements like it’s a machine.

In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products but above all to reinvent yourself again and again.
~ Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

That’s why this guide is dense and deep - for my fellow psycho-modulators - so if you’re looking for “neuroplasticity tips & tricks to trick your brain to work” you’re in the wrong place.

The Origins

What I’m sharing isn’t necessarily new, but rather a re-formulation of a scientific modality that’s been used by psychiatrists for decades to treat:

• Severe mood disorders (depression / bipolarity)

• Chronic addictions

• Behavioral Disorders

• And even personality disorders.

And it doesn’t just provide superficial solutions, it tackles the whole psychology of the individual, creating a deeply transformative, lasting shift.

(Its effectiveness has been proven to compare to drugs in meta-analyses.)

This Modality is called Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, developed by Psychiatrist Aaron Beck in 1967.

The Principles Of The Cognitive-Behavioral Model

The CBT model is quite simple, really. Its fundamental principle, as we said, is that humans are psychologically constituted of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

The basic example of this is what would happen if you see a giant, hairy tarantula spider:

1- Cognition / Thoughts: “Poisonous, scary insect spotted.”

2- Emotion: I am scared / threatened.

3- Behavior: Runs away / Calls for help

This is a classic example of how a thought leads to emotion, leading to a behavior.

But what if you learn to perceive the spider differently such that it’s not really scary?

Or what if you train yourself to modulate that emotion of fear?

Or what if, for once, you don’t run away but actually pick it up, letting it walk across your arm only to discover it’s a cute, pacific insect?

In these cases, you modulate different aspects of the experience to bring about a psychological shift, which takes us to the second CBT principle.

Learn to modulate the 3 elements with harmony, and you can engineer a psychological shift of any kind and depth.

Thought, emotion, and behavior — each affecting the other, with thought being the strongest axis of change.
~ Aaron Beck, founder of CBT

You can regard your mind as a computer, on which you can install positive beliefs, healthy addictions and likewise uninstall negative patterns.

Framing it in such a way reflects the process’ beauty and scientific rhetoric.

With the model basically explained, let’s proceed to the 3 core elements as well as how to modulate each one, finalized by a use-case example.

1- Emotion

the mind is like a rider on an elephant — the rider (reason) can plan and suggest direction, but the elephant (emotion) is far bigger and stronger, and ultimately decides where to actually go.
~ Jonathan Haidt

We would all love to live in eternal bliss, meaningfulness, and fulfillment.

Unfortunately though, Emotions are the only element of the psyche that isn’t directly controllable.

(That’s why it’s called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and not Cognitive Emotional Behavioral Therapy)

Fortunately, it’s still controllable,

But it can only be modulated through the other 2 channels: thoughts and behaviors.

Here is the basic toolset of emotion:

1- Using Thoughts to Modulate Emotion

• Cognitive Reframing: interpreting events differently

  • Used for depressed patients, like a depressed mother who has an exaggerated, twisted perception of being worthless and irrelevant.

  • Re-interprets life events more rationally, creating a different perception and therefore a different emotional state.

  • Very powerful, and has multiple sub-types.

  • Any philosophy / unique angle / perspective / can be used as a catalyst for such a reframe.

2- Using Behavior to modulate emotion

• Behavioral Activation: inducing emotion through action

  • Classic example is “acting without motivation because motivation is the result of action.”

  • Flow state is also an example of an emotional state that is engineered by certain behavioral conditions: challenging task, meaningful, uninterrupted, etc.

• Cognitive-Behavioral Memory

  • The result of previous behavior that led to change in perspective: Like de-sensitization to a phobia after repeated exposure.

    • Essentially, this is cognitive reframing facilitated by behavior (Like not being scared of the spider anymore because you’ve gathered experiences in which it’s peaceful and harmless.

I told you this gets deep and dense, but we’re only getting started.

And remember,
The Cognitive-Behavioral approach to modulating emotion is comparable to drugs, which directly increase neurochemicals that cause happiness.

That’s how powerful the modality is. Let’s proceed to behavior and its toolset before synthesizing all together.

2- Behavior

The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.
~ Aristotle

This is where the gold lies, and what most people target. They want to DO better: be more consistent, focus, commit, perform, and excel.

The tricky thing about behavior though is that it’s almost purely controlled by cognition (thought.)

Something as simple as brushing your teeth is a result of a thought, conscious or subconscious:

• “I don’t want a yellow smile”

• “I want healthy teeth”

• “I gotta do my daily routine”

Something as extreme or radical as a kamikaze / act of radical violence is also a result of a thought or group of thoughts, often charged by emotion as well:

• A philosophy

• A religion

• A cult belief system

I’ve also discussed in The Psychological Map Of Transforming Your Life how a strong, productive, consistent work ethic is a mere result of deep consciousness (deepened cognition) of your “why.”

What I’m trying to say is, all kinds of behaviors, from the simplest and most basic, to the most complicated and radical are essentially an extension of a set of thoughts.

You reading this article right now is an action triggered by a thought of “Hmmm, interesting article“ before you clicked on it.

By now, you might’ve noticed that cognition is the biggest player in the formula, heavily influencing the other 2 elements.

3- Cognition

This is where all the complexity, action, and beauty lie.

It’s what enables humans to be so different, so radical, and so unique.

A different cognition is what gives rise to a different behavioral set, a different emotional alignment, and an overall unique human experience.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the opinions about things.
~ Epictetus

Firstly, here’s the cognition toolset:

• Affirmation / Blunt Statement

  • (Very weak, almost useless when used alone. Only complementary)

• Processing / Attending to a story

  • Hence the emphasis on stories in scriptures and religious texts as a source of morality (behavioral schemes) and acts of religion (behavior still)

• Knowledge in general: concepts and facts

  • (like this very article, changing your cognition in real-time)

• Writing / Reflection

  • (A strong practice that’s as closest to being “manually dissecting shaping one’s cognition.“

• Identity / Tribal Identification with a Group

  • A biologically influential aspect of cognition

• Salient Input

  • (like a speech, lecture, or lesson from a person you actively admire or respect, especially if in an emotionally charged context)

• Environmental Input

  • (you’re a thousand times more likely to accept a statement that’s repeatedly thrown across around you. That’s affirmation with a social element to it.)

• Behavior & Emotion

  • Yes, just as cognition affects the other 2 elements, they also affect it in what’s known as the cognitive-behavioral and cognitive-emotional loops.

  • Harnessing those loops is the single strongest driver of psychological change because it utilizes and activates all elements of the psyche simultaneously, and is what’s mainly done in psychiatric practice.

Being at the core of the human psyche and the main driver of behavior and emotion, cognition has the most complicated and extensive toolset.

It still needs much more elaboration and dissection, requiring a separate meta-guide. I’ll work on it very soon and will link it here once it’s ready to complement this one.

The Art Of Psycho-Synthesis

All of what has been mentioned are tools in an arsenal.

None holds value on its own.

But when integrated and utilized with versatility and deftness, you transcend the classic self-improver.

You become a psycho-modulator, someone who is capable actively wiring their mindset, beliefs, emotions, and actions towards their life goals.

As an example of how the toolset can be synergistically synthesized: let’s say you’re unconfident, have no work ethic, and have a throttled, weak mindset.

What stands between you and being a hyper-confident hard-worker with a killer mindset is a set of tweaks and buttons / levers to bring about that change:

• Manually dissecting and challenging mindset principles, testing them against reality

• Creating a cognitive-behavioral-emotional loop to make work rewarding, meaningful, until it ties into your identity (reinforcing the loop further)

• Creating a cognitive-behavioral loop of gradually exposing oneself to friction in a way that produces confidence, and a cognitive-emotional loop to reinforce and evolve it further.

Obviously this is not a guide, but a theoretical illustration.

The extent and flexibility with which you can employ such a meta-framework are in the most literal sense endless.

Not only can you modulate your psyche, but you can oversee it. You understand the internal processes so deeply and can observe them in action, modulating them as a third-party observant.

You don’t have to be the most skilled with it from day one but it definitely helps to at least acknowledge just how much of your evolution you can actively take into your hands.

Now here’s my practical exercise for you:

What’s the most throttling limiting belief you have?

How do you think you can “uninstall” it?

(You’re allowed to re-visit the toolsets, hehe)

This guide is Part 1 of The Psychological Architecture Series

Part 2:

Likewise, deep, lasting transformations involving the psyche also have a common structure...an anatomy.

Here is my attempt at decoding that structure as well as how to replicate it.

In order to change your life, and specifically achieve your 1-3 biggest goals in the next 6-12 months...

You’ll need to go through 5 stages. I’ll discuss them first, then I’ll discuss their applicable protocols at the end.

1- Hyper-consciousness

He who has a why can bear almost any how

• ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The internet is full of books, guides, and actionable frameworks for transforming your life and achieving your goals.

Like, it’s a big, BIG industry.

But trying to force change solely through an “actionable framework” is a deeply flawed idea, not because they don’t work, but because they don’t utilize the core built-in engines of the human psyche.

“Actionable frameworks” can be taught to and applied by monkeys.

BF. Skinner, the Founder of Behaviorist Psychology even taught pigeons how to perform certain actions and movements through reward conditioning.

Why would you, as a human, treat yourself like a primitive animal, trying to induce change through an “actionable framework,” “productivity system,” or “atomic habits”?

If you’ve tried them a million times and they failed you, there’s a reason.

Imagine a friend buying a $4,000 gaming computer specifically to play online chess.

You’d naturally ask him: “Why? Chess is way better with physical pieces. And if it ever needed a PC, it’d never need a top-tier gaming pc!”

It would just feel weird and wrong.

That’s kind of the same thing you’re doing when you reduce inducing a transformation to following an “Actionable framework” while leaving out the deepest human driver of behavioral, mental, and even physical change: the human capacity for consciousness, what allows one to develop a philosophy, abstract value, and meaning.

The Depth of Depth

What mainly differentiates us from monkeys cognitive-wise is having a higher level of consciousness.

You’ll never find a monkey with a philosophy, a religion, or a cult.

And that is exactly why you’ll never find a monkey going out of script. They’re all playing out a set of if-then commands hard-wired into their DNA: find food, do sex, seek shelter.

We, on the other hand, have the capacity for depth, the capacity for hyper-consciousness, the capacity for interpreting reality in radically different ways, opening way to the idea of philosophies, religions, and belief systems.

This is what then gives rise to the radically eccentric behavioral schemes which VERY MUCH go against the instructions in our DNA.

“We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators [(DNA.)]”

~ Richard Dawkins

What I’m trying to say is: it’s belief that shapes behavior. Perception precedes action.

And The deeper, more intense, more vivid the belief, the more it manifests into your actions, identity, and demeanor..

Monkeys don’t have the capacity to engage with or develop deep beliefs or worldviews, therefore they don’t have the capacity to act out of script. They’re forced to conform to whatever the major driving element of behavior happens to be - which is biology (DNA) in their case.

We, on the other hand, have the capacity to utilize the depth of consciousness, and depending on what domain we deepen our consciousness in, develop an exceptional behavioral scheme and identity, sometimes even wickedly radically and astutely.

Models of hyper-consciousness

David Goggins was painfully consumed by the gap between the abused, obese man he was and the SEAL he could become, and that’s what drove him forward.

Elon Musk was so consciously fixated and obsessed on humanity becoming a multi-planetary species that he poured his entire PayPal fortune into SpaceX and Tesla simultaneously, pushing both to the edge of bankruptcy in 2008 rather than let the vision go.

Rockefeller, raised in devout Baptist conviction, treated the accumulation of wealth as a God-given duty to be executed with almost monastic discipline, driving him to become a behemoth of a capitalistic emperor.

I don’t need to mention any more examples.

You know it yourself, and can simply ask yourself this:

What was the catalyst of major transformations throughout my life? Was it a new plan, technique, or framework that I discovered?

Or was it something else that changed how I see the world, an aspect of reality of which my consciousness deepened?

Was it a new technique or a new philosophy?

2- Radical Shift

In his book Stolen Focus, Johann Hari discusses what he calls “cruel optimism:”
Offering simple, individualistic solutions for complex, systemic issues, which ultimately sets individuals up for failure and self-blame.
He gave a few examples:

• Proposing “meditation” as the solution to stress to an immigrant single mother in financial debt with 3 children

• Proposing “screentime reminders” as the solution to facing a mega-industry engineering attentional hijacking frameworks funded by billions

• Proposing “eat more greens, and less processed foods” as the solution to obesity when a McDonalds is 10 times easier to find, visit, eat, and is cheaper than organic unprocessed foods.

The Radical Solutioon

I don’t want to engage in cruel optimism and recommend advice of that caliber.

Especially when the issue is transforming an entity as complex as a literal human.

That’s why the second phase of this framework is not “Positive Steps,” but a “Radical Shift.”
Upon developing hyper-consciousness, its energy must be utilized to fuel a radical shift.
You must create a change so aggressive and radical that your psyche hard-resets.

Water boils at 100°C. If you put your heart and soul into heating it to 98.84°C, it won’t boil.
The physics of change don’t care about your effort. You’ve already tried a ton of shit that recoiled eventually. Nothing stuck, and you’re essentially the same.

The physics of change - thermodynamically, chemically, and psychologically - only care about whether or not you’ve hit the threshold of change, the 100°C of your transformation.
The aggressive radicality of the shift ensures hitting that threshold.

“At 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212 degrees, it boils. And with boiling water comes steam. And with steam, you can power a train.”

— S.L. Parker

The Sacrificial Nature of the Shift

It’ll be a sacrifice and it’ll feel like one.
In fact, that’s the reason you start with developing hyper-consciousness and not the radical shift right away.
It’s consciousness of what it is you’re working towards that’ll make these sacrifices feel in place, and not a loss or gap you’re creating.
After all, all of these elements you removed had become a part of who you are, so it’s only natural they’d hurt....for a while, at least until you understand it’s actually a bliss (Stage 4)

3- The abyss

When you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
~ Nietzsche

A radical shift is easy to maintain for a few days or maybe weeks.
You’re naturally motivated and driven at the beginning of any attempt to transform, and consistency & output are easily maintainable.
You’ve probably tried it a few times before, and that initial spark is real...

But not for long.

Somewhere along the way, you lose motivation, your pace goes down, and you lose tempo.
“What’s happening? Am I relapsing into the old me?”
“I was doing well. I was consistent enough and actually felt change happening.”
“Not again. I don’t want to fall in this cycle. Not point zero again. I’ve already failed so many times.”

This is the hallmark of the stage of The Abyss: the hardest, darkest stage indeed.

This is where the old identity re-gains its might and pulls you back into its depths.
It’s where even the most radical shifts face resistance and a force to revert to the norm.
Tapping into your hyper-consciousness can provide an extra push, but not enough to push through The Abyss for most people.

You have most definitely experienced it before, and many times: You see yourself dropping your goals one by one, regressing back into your old lifestyle which you swore to erase bit by bit while being powerless about it.

With each such failed attempt, a part of your identity breaks.
You lose confidence in your potential and lose hope for the possibility of change.

You question whether you truly had any potential to start with. That indeed is the abyss.

But does it have to be that way every time?

The Solution

No. It’s not a must.
The abyss is dark and melancholiac, and is indeed the graveyard of the would’ve-been-greats that are walking among us, but it doesn’t have to overpower you.

In psychiatry, we have frameworks and protocols to face, revert, and cure the deepest of disorders and pathologies: drug-resistant major depression, severe PTSD, acute stress disorders, you name it.

Because, as always, the psyche - with all its aspects: emotions, thoughts, and BEHAVIORS, have levers and buttons that you can modulate to shape your identity, makeup, and actions however you want.

The abyss is a psychological state that you can engineer your way through.
Although, the solution to such a state is something that might sound a bit underwhelming: a productivity system.

Really Ali Abdaal?

What you need is not an external habit/cue/notion/technique/pomodoro - based productivity system, but an INTERNAL productivity system.

You see, productivity systems generally depend on “frameworks,” “apps,” “techniques,” and “systems.”

All of that is bullshit. It doesn’t work. Not for long. I could dive in for hours about its cliche, commercial nature but I don’t really need to because everyone has tried and knows their true efficacy.

They can most definitely complement an already strong base, but they’re never an alternative for a genuine internal system.

Most of these gimmicks provide nothing but a recurring shiny object syndrome in which you cycle among different “techniques” before you eventually drop them all together and go back to point zero.

The “productivity space” is commercial garbage being recycled since 2018 Ali Abdaal.
None of that effectively provides what a productivity system is supposed to provide at core: consistent, efficient, output and action towards the goals that matter to you.

This is why I believe the internal productivity system, what I call Neuro-Productive OS, is the silver bullet.
The internal productivity system is not an app on a computer, a technique from a book, or a piece of advice from a guru.

It’s a set of psychological elements installed within your psyche through a CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) methodology, which comprise:

• Cognitive Elements (thoughts / ideas)

• Emotional Patterns

• Behavioral Cascades

Developing those elements creates a platinum-caliber productivity system, not on an app, but inside your neural architecture, and is enough to help you make it through the abyss, hopefully reaching stage 4.

Stage 4: The Singularity

Singularity (noun)
sɪŋ.ɡjəˈler.ə.t̬i/

“a point or state where normal rules of physics no longer apply, making things unique, infinite, or completely unpredictable”

The idea of a “singularity” is common among multiple disciplines: mathematics, technology, AI, and most interestingly, physics:

“At the center of a black hole, the mass, and therefore the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite.
At this point, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and standard laws of physics completely cease to function.”

It is, in the most literal sense, a different reality with different laws of nature.

Throughout your transformation or self-mastery journey, you’ll also eventually reach a singularity.

Thankfully, you don’t need to get sucked in by a black hole and face an astronomical demise.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s a singularity of beauty, flow, and fluidity, in which the rules completely reverse:

• Hard work stops feeling hard, but rather possibly becomes a compulsive addiction.

• You develop deep connection to your goals and mission, almost on a spiritual level rather than a psychological one.

• “Distractions” aren’t distracting anymore because you see them as the superficial filth and disruption they are. You actively don’t seek “entertainment.”

• Your identity re-molds, and your value system differentiates. A new you takes form.

• Hard work, which used to create resistance, is now a flawlessly flowy nature.

• Hedonistic Indulgence, which used to feel like a bliss, becomes a wicked, despicable virtue.

I understand this might all seem like an exaggeration to someone who’s never experienced this, but this is what truly happens: the dynamics are completely flipped:

You no longer EXERT any form of willpower, energy, or life force to propel yourself forward or to “resist” what used to be distractions that were pleasurable and addictive.

This isn’t a casual state of exceptionally enjoying one session of hard work on a good day.
This is a new state of being you develop permanently.
Again, this might seem like an exaggeration, but the psychology behind it is rather logical.

“Becoming” your goals

Motivational psychology maps out a spectrum of why people do things:

• 1- Purely to avoid punishment or chase a reward. This is willpower in its rawest, most exhausting form — you and the task are two separate entities, and one is dragging the other.

• 2- Because you’d feel guilty otherwise, or because it protects your ego. Still effortful. Still an “other” entity.

• 3- And finally, integration — the goal stops being something you pursue and becomes something you are There’s no longer a “you” resisting a “task.” The gap closes.

With enough repetitions of engaging with your goals, with enough sticking to them, they naturally become a part of who you are.

They integrate with your psyche in both a psychological sense and a literal, physical sense (represented by the neural pathways that are known to reinforce through repetition).

Willpower is, by definition, the friction between two selves: the one who wants the goal and the one who wants the couch. Once integration happens, that second self isn’t in the room anymore, and it is only the goal-seeker that is there.

And since it’s a completely new, integrated identity with a new perception, so are its emotional state and behavioral scheme: completely new, and completely aligned with your goals - because what are emotions and actions except for an extension of identity?

In the same way Oppenheimer quotes the Hindu “I am become death” after whatever it is he did, you are also, in a sense, become your goals.

This also explains why distractions curdle into disgust instead of just losing their appeal. When a goal fully fuses with your identity, your brain stops treating threats to the goal as inconvenient. It starts treating them as threats to you.

This is clearly evident in individuals who are beyond the singularity.

Now don’t get me wrong. You definitely sometimes lean towards some procrastination or a bit of guilty pleasure; you’re not a robot after all.

However, that isn’t the norm anymore. The actual auto-pilot for the vast majority of your time is the new, integrated you....

And boy oh boy is post-singularity you a blessing....

But are you driven enough to unlock it?

The Protocol

The practical, applicable protocol to streamline yourself throughout the stages.

1- Hyperconsciousness:

• Each person has his own fingerprint of how he sees life and what the values he reveres are.

• Find yours, and develop hyper-consciousness of them through 2 Things: Reflection and Writing, or rather, reflective writing for a synchronicity bonus, preferably in volume, and with scary depth.

• I’ll soon upload a rough set of questions to induce such a state in a structured manner.

• This stage can span from 1 to 7 days.

• Small tip with big impact: Be extreme, radical, and ruthless. This is an instance in which mercy is wickedness disguised. The deeper you can dive into your psyche, the better you can change it.

2- Radical Shift

Again, the conditions and distractions are different for each person, but the general rule is that you want to remove negative / distracting elements from their deepest roots, and implant positive / propelling elements instead just as deeply:

Delete your social media irreversibly. (Best decision of my life btw)
Detach from any toxic circle
Immerse yourself in a renovated physical environment.
Immerse yourself in a renovated DIGITAL environment.
Follow mentors and prodigies, not entertainers and clowns on long-form platforms.
Cancel the draining bi-weekly hangouts. Forever.
Experiment switching out your smartphone for a dumbphone for 6 weeks.
You get the idea of “radical.”

3- The abyss

The “internal productivity system” is no joke. It’s not a one-size fits all technique or framework and requires some deep work. I’ll dive into different aspects of it in the future, and will link them here, hopefully building up to a meta-guide eventually.

4- The singularity

None. You don’t really need to apply anything here. You can just enjoy the labor of your hard work as a completely new you.

• The Psychology Of Productivity / Goal Achievement

• The Psychology Of Procrastination & How To Beat It

• Value Perception as a Psychological Loophole to Mastering Productivity

• The Psychology of Unbreakable Consistency & How to Master It

1- Why “the psychology” of productivity?

• Because you’ve already tried all the “tips, tricks, and hacks” out there, and none of them worked.

• The Pomodoro, the 2 minute rule, the 5 minute rule, the Pareto Principle, the Zeignarik Effect, Time-blocking, you name it.

• These are all superficial band-aids that provide a temporary motivation boost at best thanks to their novelty.

• They try to make a change to your behavior in an extremely superficial manner, not understanding that behavior itself is part of a much deeper and more complicated process.

• You see, we humans work like machines in a way - with wired patterns.

• At the beginning of these patterns is your cognition: which is the verbal and non-verbal knowledge you have of the world: Your core beliefs, your identity, your value system, and all the lenses through which you interpret the world.

• Essentially it’s how you perceive the world.

• This then leads to emotion and emotion leads to behavior.

  

  
  

• To illustrate this model, picture what happens when you see a deadly spider.

• Your cognition perceives that entity as “poisonous insect.” You then develop the “emotion” of feeling scared and you therefore do the “action” of running away.

But if I reminded you that you’re actually wearing a VR headset, and that this is a spider simulator game, you’ll not perceive the spider as a threat anymore, and therefore you won’t be scared, and consequently you won’t need to run away.

• I changed your cognition - or perception - of the spider and therefore your emotion and consequently your behavior.

• Now to make deep, lasting change to your behavior you have to start from within, from cognition, and only then will positive emotions and consistent action follow effortlessly.

• Trying to adjust behavior itself superficially is like painting a car with a broken engine with yellow paint instead of its blue one and expecting that to fix it.

• It doesn’t work because you’re not addressing the actual root cause.

• Maybe you’re too lazy to check the engine or you know it’s broken but you’re too scared to face the fact that you’ll need to spend a lot to fix it.

• In either case, reality doesn’t care, and the new color paint won’t help.

• This is exactly why “productivity tips and tricks” are NOT the solution to your entirely broken processes: they try to address behavior superficially.

• Mastering the psychology of goal achievement, however, is entirely different, and this is not about “shifting identity” or “manifesting through affirmation” or any of that commercial garbage.

• It’s essentially knowledge through which you can tame your reality just like there’s knowledge out there on how to tame lions.

• It’s pure science of how to navigate with your machine (which is your mind) through the obstacles and challenges of achieving your goals, as well as a deep understanding of how both function together.

2- The Psychology of procrastination and how to beat it

• Starting with procrastination

• I’ve made a full masterclass deeply dissecting the psychology of procrastination and proposing an actionable protocol on how to beat it.

• The feedback I’ve gotten on it is insane, and if you’d like to watch it, it’s currently free on my gumroad.

• For this guide, I’ll just overview some of the relevant key points.

• Let’s start by fixing our cognition of the true nature of procrastination.

  

• Procrastination is not a process in itself, it’s a result or manifestation of an underlying process.

• This underlying process, is one of two.

• It’s important to understand that we shouldn’t be tackling procrastination itself, but those underlying processes.

• Otherwise, we’re doing what cats do with laser beams - they chase the laser dot, unaware that in order to grasp the light, they have to first grasp the source, which is the pointer.
  

  

• We don’t wanna fall into the same trap.

• Now those underlying processes of procrastination are as follows: avoidance and indulgence.

• 1- Avoidance procrastination is a form of procrastination in which you avoid initiating the task completely.

  • You delay it for weeks, months, maybe even years without taking a single step towards it, which is the popular form of procrastination.

• 2- Indulgence procrastination is a form of procrastination in which you can initiate but you barely maintain the activity for a few minutes, maybe 30 minutes max before you get bored or frustrated and get off the desk to go doomscroll or indulge in whatever other thing.

  

• To save time, I’m only going to address some key points about avoidance procrastination since Indulgence procrastination is very well addressed in the masterclass.

• Now, avoidance procrastination is the result of one thing and one thing only: Negative Emotions.

• Humans are partially primitive creatures, and that’s why we’re led by emotion, no matter how rational we pretend to be.

• But if why do we have those emotions to start with? Why do I feel fear, anxiety, or dread from a literal book on a desk, or a project, or a simple task I want to do? I mean it’s not a spider is it?

• To understand these emotions better, we have to resort back to the psychological cognitive behavioral model: COGNITION COMES FIRST.

• Your emotion towards your tasks is only the result of how you perceive it (cognition) and your brain never perceives a task as “just a task that I’ll do.”

• It perceives it as a whole entity consisting of the task and all the negative meanings associated with that task:

  • The guilt of not having started it earlier

  • The frustration of having failed at a similar task previously

  • The fear of failing to produce a perfect result at the end (perfectionism)

  • Fear from a different but associated entity

    • (Like fear from a test that causes you to avoid studying. The book is not scary but it’s associated with a dreadful entity, the test)

  • The uncertainty of not knowing how to approach the task (if it’s a complex or multi-dimensional task)

  • And many more

• Essentially, you perceive that simple task as a massive monster that you have to face.

• Now, there’s actually a methodology to rewire those emotions completely and stop having them to start with, but that’s a very complicated process, maybe for a whole other masterclass or series.

• For now, we can do what’s simpler, and overcome those emotions through a zero-resistance pathway.

• That’s the beauty of productivity engineering. The processes underlying goal achievement are an ecstasy once you master them.

• There’s an alternative hidden pathway within your psyche that you can literally exploit, almost like a cheat code, to negate those negative emotions and break the loop of procrastination.

• You see, negative emotions only exist within a goal orientation.

• In fact, that’s why God blessed us with an emotional system to start with - it’s to give us strong signals of how well we’re progressing towards our goals.

• That’s why winning feels good and losing feels bad.

• Now if you dissociate from that goal orientation, the emotional system deactivates automatically.

• To illustrate this, here’s an example: imagine you’re chilling in your room and you suddenly see a massive tarantula spider running out from under the bed.

• You’re gonna shit yourself. You’ll be so scared and activate emergency mode, maybe grab the closest pair of slippers and call your entire family - your entire bloodline - for help.

• Now what if you were walking down the street, and you spot the same tarantula spider walking around 10 or 20 feet away from you. Would you feel scared? Would you feel threatened or even irritated? Not at all.

• You see, in the first example, the spider was in your room. It was interfering with an implicit goal that you have at all times, which is: maintain a safe and calm personal territory free of danger.

• The tarantula spider that was under the bed interfered heavily with that GOAL you had of having a safe territory or room, so you responded with heavy negative emotions of fear and such.

• However, the exact same tarantula spider on the streets produced no negative emotions whatsoever because it’s not interfering with any goal you have.

• It’s far away minding its own business. It does not exist within a goal-oriented scheme like the first one.

  

  
  

• Now we’re gonna do the exact same thing to the negative emotions that cause avoidance procrastination: we’re gonna remove them from a goal-oriented scheme.

• And how exactly are we going to do that? Through the 3 - 3 protocol.

• I tell anyone struggling with procrastination to initiate the task for 3 minutes once or twice a day for 3 days with no particular goal in mind. PLEASE HEAR ME OUT.

• Don’t underestimate those 3 minutes, I know you might’ve heard similar stuff somewhere else, but this is different.

• I talk about this in detail in the masterclass, but let me just quickly overview the insane power of that seemingly simple protocol

• 1- First off, making the target itself to (GENUINELY - and I’ll tell you why genuinely in a few minutes) just initiate for 3 minutes and that’s it removes the task from its goal-oriented scheme. [Short-Term Benefit]

  • You now don’t want any specific results.

  • Therefore, there’s no goal oriented scheme, and therefore no negative emotions.

  • There are no failures that you fear. There’s no guilt or frustration. There’s no uncertainty about what to do because you have no specific goal in mind. The goal now has absolutely nothing to do with the task itself. You’ll just engage with it for 3 minutes.

  • Studying: a page (or however much) - Thesis as a graduate student (Write however much you can in 3 minutes) - working out - one / two sets

  • Magic: You just dissociated from the goal-orientation, and therefore dissociated from any negative emotion that would’ve otherwise entailed - therefore you’re finally able to act (behavior.)

  • The beauty of addressing productivity from its roots: literally an alternate pathway to initiating (action) by turning that massive monster into one that is virtually the size of an ant at best.

• 2- Very high chance that you’ll continue [Short-Term Benefit]

  • If you’re GENUINE about sufficing with 3 minutes, you’ll most probably continue.

  • If you’re lying to yourself (what people call the 5 minute rule, you’ll most probably not even start)

    • The problem with the 5 minute rule is that if done with the intent of going beyond 5 minutes, it won’t work. You ARE yourself, and you can’t trick yourself.

  • Very paradoxical, but you’ll never get over it if you’re not genuinely honest with yourself.

• 3- Breaks the Cycle and initiates the re-wiring process. [LONG-TERM Benefit]

  • When you initiate the task that your mind perceived as such a massive threat, your mind starts to be convinced that it was truly developing emotions out of proportions and that the task was never that scary.

  • The repetition of this cycle in which you break the emotional barrier is what causes the habit of procrastination to be re-wired into a habit of initiation, which is the most substantial impact of the protocol because it’s a long-term re-wiring process.

Wait a minute...One step back before proceeding to consistency

• Now let’s take a step back and see how we addressed an issue like procrastination.

• This is usually the moment at which anyone I help with productivity advice has their mind absolutely blown.

• You see, what I told you to do at the end of the day is to just do the thing. Just start. That’s literally it, which is what everyone tells you everywhere.

• What we did differently however was on the level of cognition.

• We modulated what’s known as value perception - in which you perceive - perceive = cognition - those 3 minutes of initiation differently now.

• You understand their value because I illustrated their immense power.

• You no longer regard them as a measly “trick” or “hack” from an AI slop video.

• No, you actually understand what such 3 minutes in such a protocol can do on a very deep level and how they can help.

• This shift in the value perception - which is a change on the cognition level - is what then generates enough motivation to do the thing - because obviously we’re humans so we have to actively perceive something as “worth doing” to do it.

• Which is exactly what we did.

• What everyone has been telling you is equivalent to, go lift off that heavy rock.

• Internally, you’re like “Why? What for? Meh. Will that really make my life any better?”

• What we just did is we turned that into “Go lift that heavy rock. There’s a gold treasure underneath.”

• You’d then gladly lift the heaviest rock on earth without asking why.

• It’s the same you, and probably the same rock, but with a different cognition because we’ve modulated your value perception - and therefore different behavior.

• Not only that, but you also (hopefully) now understand procrastination on a deeper level, which makes your perception sharper, and more capable of dealing with it.

• To sum all of this up, the only “actionable” advice I gave you is essentially the 3 minute protocol where you just initiate for 3 minutes for 3 consecutive days, which is what everyone tells you.

• But the real work we did was deeper, on the level of cognition.

• And that’s the beauty of the process. You love to see it. You love to tweak and modulate the dynamics of your own mind with such brilliance and control to get what you want. Beautiful process indeed.

The Psychology of Unbreakable Consistency & How To Build It

• Now let’s talk about how to build unbreakable consistency from the same perspective of neuro-psychology.

• We can’t discuss anything without agreeing on its definition. That’s why before anything, we need to lock in and agree on the definition of consistency.
  
  That’s it: adherence to the same principles / course

  

• What people do, however, is add those at the end:

  • in an uninterrupted manner

  • with a perfect streak

  • with perfect output

  • without missing a day

• It didn’t say any of that, yet people still actively choose to view consistency as this iron-rigid flow that doesn’t break and is perfect all the time, when it’s literally the exact opposite.

• Because come to think about it - why do most people regard consistency as “doing the same thing with maximal efficiency everyday.”

• Why not every hour? I’m serious. Why everyday but not every hour? Why not every week? Month? Why is it usually everyday?

• It’s just a random timing that we attribute to consistency for no particular reason.

• But this is very harmful, and here’s why

• Having this binary perception of consistency - in which you either do the thing daily with perfect efficiency and output or else you miss it and drop the whole thing - is brutally harmful to your reward circuitry.

• Because those high standards you’re setting are causing you to perceive any flaw as a failure, which is very de-motivating, causing you to drop the thing completely (we’ve all been there: the cycle of promises followed by breakdowns)

• The problem is that you probably naively respond to that perceived failure by setting higher standards the next time to make up for that failure, which only makes matters worse.

• You can probably recall a thousand times in which you fell into that pattern.

• I call it the doom loop, and trust me I’ve been there.

• The way to get out of this hell is as follows

• Step 1: Re-define consistency to what it actually is - it’s not perfection. It’s not a perfect streak.

• It is quite simply showing up.

• In fact, we could say that what most people define as consistency is only one form, which is the rigid daily consistency.

• But that’s only micro-consistency. There’s also macro-consistency.
  

  

• If you do something daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly, you’re still “consistent.” Just on an unusual timescale, but still consistent nevertheless.

• If you workout only once or twice a week, you’re still “consistent”.

• If you drop a whole week or two because you got sick and get back on track, you’re also still consistent on a macro-scale.

• It is so important to plant this deep down your cognition: dropping a day, a week, or a month doesn’t necessarily mean you broke consistency. You can still bounce back to the act and maintain “macro-consistency” which is what truly matters at the end of the day.

• Dropping the habit for a day, a week, a month, doesn’t mean you broke consistency unless you make it so.

• This binary perception of consistency as the perfect streak, the perfect plan, the perfect efficiency, whatever it is pure self-sabotaging.

• The more versatile definition of consistency, however, enables you to see how easy it is to develop unbreakable consistency. It’s by simply re-framing how you see consistency and choosing to see the full picture.

• You’ll miss days whether you like it or not. You’ll underperform on many days whether you like it or not. You won’t be able to even show up on some days whether you like it or not.

• It’s about time you accept that this narrow-perspective, daily micro-consistency is a virtual goal that you set to make up for past failures and is simply non-achievable.

• Although it’s hard for your ego to swallow, adopting the macro-consistency mindset is your only way towards self-compassion, realism, and consistent progress.

• To sum all of this up, if you just show up most of the time, you’re consistent.

• I repeat - **just showing up, even if you do the thing for a few minutes.

• Studying for 10 minutes today, 1 hour tomorrow, 5 minutes afterwards, then not studying for a whole week, and then coming back on track to study for hours a day. That right there is the most natural form of consistency.

• How am I going to make any progress by just showing up, though? A few minutes won’t get me anywhere.

• Well, that’s because the true goal of consistency isn’t to make progress. I’ve spoken about that in my last video and will discuss it more deeply in a future guide, but put very simple: in my own model of habit development - the stage of consistency, in which you simply show up, and the stage of output, in which you put in enough work - are different stages.

  

  
  

• I’ll discuss the exact process of amplifying your output in the future: (essentially developing the capacity to show up and do a sh!t ton instead of just show up for a few minutes)

• For now, what you need to know is that I have them split up for a reason.

• James Clear, the author of atomic habits once mentioned a friend of his who spent a whole year just going to the gym WITHOUT exercising.

• He literally put on his gym clothes, went to the gym, and then went back home after doing I think like 1 set - for a whole year.

• He was ESTABLISHING a habit before AMPLIFYING it, and that’s how it should be always.

• You MUST learn to show up first - without waiting for results or outcomes BEFORE you learn to increase your output.

• If your ego can’t swallow this and wants a Rocky-themed comeback in which you flip your whole life around in 2 days, I’m sorry but I can’t help you.

• Now, did you notice what we did with consistency?

• The exact same thing we did with procrastination. We adjusted our perception of the core meaning of consistency, as well as reinforced the value of “just showing up” which is work on value perception to encourage that behavior.

• The only actionable piece of advice I really gave is yet again “Just do the work” but it hits ENTIRELY different because we addressed the root psychology. Magic. You love to see it.

• Hope this guide helped. Doji out ♥