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But the key realization is that your brain doesn't see objective entertainment values. It's always relative.
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A good analogy for this is when you're spending all day outside in the sun, it's a super bright day, and then you walk into a dim room or a store, that indoor space feels super dark.
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You're like, I can't see anything. What is this? And then you see that weird fake sun in your periphery that starts to fade. Everything looks weird and purplely.
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And in a very similar way, if you've been asleep for a couple hours and you have to get up and go to the bathroom, you turn the lights on and it's just blinding.
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It's not that that bathroom is any more bright than it was before you went to bed when you were brushing your teeth, it's just that your brain interprets things using contrasts. It uses comparison.
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So the key is to utterly delete the back doors. The key is to strip away every single option, to sit in a blank room with nothing in it, no phone, nothing.
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Eliminate your ability to do anything other than the thing that you need to do and you will do it.
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And now you might be thinking, oh, it's not that simple. I can just do nothing. Well, you actually won't do nothing. And there's studies to prove it.
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There is a really weird study published in Science in 2014. That was a mouthful, it's not. What am I, a freaking Neanderthal? That's not a mouthful. That was really hard to say.
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So in this study, they got a bunch of undergraduate students to sit in a empty room by themselves with absolutely nothing to do and be alone with their own thoughts.
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But they had one other option. And that was to electrocute themselves with a shocky button.
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And it turns out 67% of the men and 25% of the women decided that electrocution was better than boredom. And some of the students electrocuted themselves multiple times.
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Even the ones that didn't electrocute themselves either strongly considered it or at least lamented as to how miserable the quiet time was and how boring it was.
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You might have heard about this study before, but I think it's a great example as to how much human beings dislike being bored.
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And so the reason why solitary confinement is considered one of the least humane forms of torture imaginable.
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There's this ancient torture method where they basically just throw somebody down a hole under the castle and forget about them for their entire lives.
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That sounds terrible because it's so boring. If you were put in an empty room with nothing to do except one thing, unless that thing is like chop off your hand, you're probably gonna do that thing.
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And while you're doing that thing, that thing will feel so much more entertaining than doing nothing.