@anatcrypto.eth

REGULARLY REWATCHING MOVIES HAS BECOME A TRAP FOR ME I’ve noticed a habit of rewatching my favorite movies. Before, I didn’t attach any importance to it. When you feel bad, you just turn on a favorite film to get familiar feelings and emotions. But recently I was sent some interesting materials on near-psychological topics, and I looked at the issue in a new way. I rarely drink alcohol. I definitely haven’t had beer for more than 10 years. And yet this desire to “relieve stress” with alcohol sometimes doesn’t bypass me either 😅 But today I realized that it’s essentially the same scenario, just dressed differently. When we relieve stress with alcohol, we immerse ourselves in sleep while awake. When we rewatch Harry Potter or Lords of the Rings, we fall asleep in exactly the same way. Or, for example, my favorite thing — rewatching my own stories and reels with favorite music from trips. I can get stuck there for an hour, falling asleep while awake. The same goes for music playing on a speaker or in headphones. The same playlist every day? It strongly reminds me of the movie Groundhog Day. In these moments, I clearly see myself from the outside as a character in The Truman Show. It’s the same phenomenon that different authors call patterns, reflexes, imposed motivations, pendulums, scripts, dopamine loops… Besides draining a huge amount of useful time that could be spent on expanding one’s worldview, watching not an old but a new movie or a podcast, you also create positive reinforcement of unpleasant events. I took this concept from psychologist Albert Safin: if you meet friends to drink alcohol because of a problem, you train your body to repeat problems — you positively reinforce problems. Since sweets, alcohol, and endlessly rewatching movies in a loop are all the same dopamine loop, rooted in not accepting the world as it is and not valuing your life enough. As a result, even without consuming alcohol or sweets, I still fall into the same trap and drain my attention away from where my goals are. Managing my attention is what I want to focus on in the coming months. And the first thing I’ll do is stop rewatching what I’ve already seen — with the exception of psychological film analyses and public screenings with feedback.

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