I Built a Second Brain (Pt. 2) — Then Had to Curate My Way Out of a Dopamine Trap
(or why I stopped scrolling and started selecting what to feed my mind)
Thanks to the Internet Archive anyone can easily read the following from the source:
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
And while no one needs to go as far as Bryan Johnson a.k.a. “the most biologically measured person in history” I truly believe in what, according to Quote Investigator, theologian Charles Francis Potter said:
What you read when you don’t have to, determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
And that's how the more I tracked my attention and the clearer the pattern became, the more anxious I was to make a significant change.
I had already quit social media cold turkey but YouTube seemed to fill the gap. The same platform where I once looked for long informative content was now able to give me senseless short reactions and opinions that didn't enrich me at all.
The cravings found new outlets.
In The Molecule of More, Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long make a crucial distinction: dopamine isn’t about enjoying the present—it’s about chasing the future. It’s not the reward that hooks us, but the next one.
Dopamine isn’t about pleasure at all… it’s about the thrill of anticipation.
So when I finally built space for reflection with my Second Brain, I still didn’t trust what I was feeding it. My thought out combo of Google Keep + Notion was basically worthless.
In Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke explains this cycle well: the same neural circuits that process pleasure also process pain—and they exist in balance. The more you bombard your brain with quick hits of dopamine, the more pain it feels when they stop.
We’ve created a world in which we need to use too much just to feel normal.
It was time for a full reset.
Step 1: Curate Inputs 📬
The first thing I did was curate five “brain vitamin” newsletters, each serving a different part of me:
🎨 Art: The Cultural Tutor — miniature journeys through music, painting, literature, rhetoric and architecture—wake up wonder on sleepy mornings.
🧠 Philosophy: Philosophy Break — not preachy, just smart. like coffee with a calm professor.
🤹♂️ Creativity: Experimental History — punchy, hilarious deep dives—high idea-density with a side of surprise.
💼 Business: Idea Surplus Disorder — idea-packed, with a fine-tuned BS detector for real-world thinking.
🌌 Astrophysics: [TBD]. Still searching. Open to recs that don’t assume I have a physics degree.
I limited myself to one newsletter per domain, once a week. These became my new go-tos for those idle five-minute windows — public transport, café lines, moments when old me would’ve scrolled anything “just to kill time.”
Step 2: Watch with Intention 🎬
I created a living list of Top 20 Critically Acclaimed or Highly Divisive Films & Series, mixing Kurosawa and Kieślowski with 2020s award darlings and arthouse indies.
I use them:
To reward myself after deep work sessions.
To connect with friends, family, or my partner without defaulting to phone-glow silos.
To challenge my taste (sometimes I hate them — which is half the fun).
Step 3: Build a Bookshelf 📚
Ever been too awake to sleep, too tired to focus, and too anxious to just “do nothing”? That’s when I’d reach for some algorithm-fed spiral.
Now, I reach for paper.
I built a dynamic list of 52 books, mixing:
🧬 Foundational (On the Origin of Species, Wealth of Nations, Principia Mathematica)
📖 Classics (War and Peace, Don Quixote, One Thousand, One Nights)
🌌 Sci-fi & Fantasy (The Lord of The Rings, Dune Messiah, Snow Crash)
🧠 Pop science (Why We Sleep, Superforecasting, Under a White Sky)
💥 Surprise entries from random airport bookstores or friend recs.
Some live on my Kindle for travel. Some are physical copies next to the bed. They're there for when the insomnia creeps in or I’m stuck on a hours long bus or plane ride.
These are all sources of dopamine but the structure changes the game.
As Lieberman and Long highlight, dopamine’s obsessive love of novelty, abstraction, and infinite possibility explains why scroll-based platforms feel impossible to quit: they promise more, forever.
From dopamine’s point of view, having things is uninteresting. It’s only getting things that matters… The dopamine motto is ‘More'.
So How Did This All Fit Into My Second Brain?
Here’s where Tiago Forte’s CODE method met real life:
1. Capture:
On mobile? I use Google Keep, quick and dirty.
On desktop? Notion. Beautiful and structured.
Yes, they don’t sync easily. But I want the habit to work more than I want it automated. So I manually review my notes every Sunday and paste them into Notion.
(which I'll probably automate with an iPaaS such as Zapier or Make eventually, but no rush…)
2. Organize:
I follow PARA loosely.
Projects = Career; Fitness; Mindfulness; Learning; Hobbies; Investing…
Areas = Myself; S.O.; Friends; Family; Work; Fun…
Resources = everything I consume and want to revisit
Archive = digital retirement home
3. Distill:
I’m still figuring this one out—especially when it comes to books. No perfect method yet—but I’ve realized that if I don’t make some note, the idea disappears. So I’m prioritizing consistency over completeness, trusting that clarity will come with repetition.
4. Express:
This. Writing to you. Sharing ideas I used to keep private. That’s the final and most rewarding step.
What Changed?
After a few years of rewiring:
I feel less hijacked.
My Second Brain is healthier: less “productivity porn,” more reflection.
I feel closer to people I care about — and more present when I’m with them.
My content consumption no longer feels like an escape. It feels like growth.
As Lembke argues: creating friction and tolerating discomfort isn’t a punishment—it’s medicine. It's how we rewire our system to value effort and presence over easy, compulsive pleasure.
The key to finding balance is not in chasing less pleasure, but in creating more space for pain and effort to exist.
Knowing what I know now how would I have approached it?
Well, Anna Lembke has the D.O.P.A.M.I.N.E. protocol (americans love their acronyms) applicable to any high-dopamine substance or behavior that is consumed in excess, for too long, or with which one has a problematic relationship.
She even applied this method to her own maladaptive consumption habits:
D - Data: Investigating what the individual is using, how much, and how often. For Lembke, this step helped her realize when reading romance novels (yes, really) began to consume hours and days, signaling a potential problem.
O - Objectives: Understanding why the individual uses the substance or engages in the behavior. Reasons can range from fun and socialization to alleviating boredom, fear, anger, anxiety, insomnia, depression, inattention, or pain. In her case, they were an escape a painful life transition and to cope with the sadness of not having another baby.
P - Problems: Identify the downsides or unintended consequences of the use. High-dopamine substances and behaviors invariably lead to problems—health, relationship, or moral—if not immediately, then eventually. Recognizing even small negative consequences can be a leverage point for initiating change.
A - Abstinence: This is necessary to restore homeostasis (the brain's natural balance) and, with it, the capacity to feel pleasure from less potent rewards. She suggests a minimum of four weeks to reset the brain's reward pathway, though the time needed may vary. However, it is not recommended for severe cases of alcohol, benzodiazepine, or opioid dependence, which require clinically monitored tapering due to the risk of fatal withdrawal.
M - Mindfulness: Observe your own thoughts, emotions, and sensations, including pain, without judgment. It is vital in the early days of abstinence when painful emotions may surface. Practicing mindfulness helps to tolerate discomfort and can transform the experience of pain, leading to new and rich insights.
I - Insight: Dr. Lembke observes that the simple act of abstinence for at least four weeks provides clarifying insight into one's own behaviors, which is not possible while consumption continues. For example, one patient realized that cannabis was causing her anxiety, not curing it, after a month of abstinence.
N - Next Steps: Following the period of abstinence, this step involves discussing goals for the upcoming period, whether to continue abstinence or to return to use in a moderate way, as some people with less severe forms of addiction can return to controlled use.
E - Experiment: The final is to re-engage with the world with a new dopamine set point and a plan to maintain it. This is a gradual process of trial and error to discover what works. The question of how is increasingly important exactly because of the ubiquity of high-dopamine goods, such as digital ones.
Got your own system? Still lost in the doomscroll?
I’d love to hear from you.
Next post in the series: how I redesigned my approach to fitness without becoming a monk or a masochist.