How often do you find yourself mindlessly clicking away on the internet? Bingeing on TV shows? Eating junk food? Eating too much? Blasting music? Masturbating? Drinking Alcohol? Doing recreational drugs?
How often then, do you feel unfocused? Listless? Scatter-brained? Unmotivated? Depressed?
Your response to the first set of questions, I'd venture to guess, is predictive of your answer to the second set. But Why?
Every thinking person knows this intuitively, but
“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” -Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
Anytime you participate in (and even anticipate) an activity that you find pleasurable, your brain releases dopamine along pathways of the brain related to the behavior that led to that activity. This is not to say that pleasure and excitement causes this dopamine release, rather it is the dopamine release.
With larger and more frequent doses of dopamine for a given activity, the brain tends to downregulate the receptors for dopamine along that activity’s pathways. This is a preventative measure to ensure that you don’t get ensnared doing the same activity repeatedly (read 'addiction' - Spoiler: We found a way around that).
In our evolution, this dopamine reward system was very useful as it drove us to pursue the conditions that would ensure survival of our genes. In the paleolithic context, these dopamine triggers were food, water, sex, and general novelty (anything new is worth a try).
Today, dopamine triggers are abound.. In the western world, our lives revolve around foods engineered to be addicting, and the most impossibly entertaining 3D CGI movies and video games with novel worlds to escape to. All of which we now take for granted (thanks, downregulation). The forces of the free market have been catering to our primal dopamine-driven desires - and this has deleterious effects on our mental well-being.
Cocaine has a similar effect in that it prevents neurons from taking dopamine back out of the synaptic gap, which results in a perpetual flood of dopamine that doesn’t go away til the cocaine wears off, which is what produces the euphoric high.
Of course, none of our modern-day dopamine-triggers alone is as potent as cocaine, for instance, but in the aggregate they do leave us feeling to a certain degree like a burnt out coke-junkie: dysphoric, unmotivated, anxious, anhedonic, unable to easily focus or have meaningful emotions.
Engaging in these pleasures is a little like borrowing happiness from the future..
So what to do? Try to avoid these things? No. Unfortunately, willpower is an exceedingly finite resource. You will always cave. The answer is to make these things either physically unavailable, or, after much meditation, convince yourself that they are unavailable. After a couple months of withdrawal, see the meaning start to come back into your life. You will appreciate the little things again, and have a new sense of focus. Start by cutting out anything pornographic or sexually stimulating (except real sex), then cut out mindless TV time, then social media and non-deliberate internet browsing, then junk food, then incorporate fasting and cold showers.
Sounds miserable, doesn’t it? That should tell you something...