Happiness Hacks

This amino acid consistently increases the levels of the "feel-good" neurotransmitter Serotonin, but that's not always a good thing.

I've used 5-HTP infrequently, but this article is mostly going to focus on decoding what the human studies are saying about 5-HTP and how this squares up with the anecdotal experiences of Biohackers online. For more of my personal experiences, thoughts, and comparisons, please see the written and video reviews in the sidebar.

Winter is coming…

The cold season that a lot of people find depressing, you’ll notice your motivation and mood are lagging, you’ll sleep more, and maybe gain some weight. This has a very apt name — seasonal affective disorder.

There are a lot of Biohacks for beating S.A.D., but one mindfulness lifehack that anybody can do anytime is intermittent antidepressant meditation, and it is effective at improving your mood. It also goes by the name loving-kindness meditation, which I think is a really bad name! It makes it sound like a girly, wimpy thing, and it’s not! It’s quite an effective tool for managing your thoughts and emotions.

2025 Update: There is this dumb puritanical advice that older people often give to younger people: "You’ll PAY later in life for all that reckless fun you have in your 20s! I wish I hadn’t partied so much when I was young, now I have all these problems…"
It's dumb advice because it’s ineffective - I don’t think it convinces young people to live more responsibly. It also comes across as hypocritical - I was a hedonist, but you shouldn’t be. Instead, I encourage younger people (and everybody else, really) to be hedonists, but not the same kinds of hedonists those regretful old Gen Xers and Boomers were. Ethical hedonism is the philosophy of choosing the greater pleasure over the lesser pleasure.

This article will dive into the millenniums' old, yet rarely practiced, mindset of ethical hedonism along with exploring its biological implications.

In a radical lifestyle experiment and self-control challenge, I spent over three and a half months completely sober in Medellin, Colombia.

In these +100 days, I experienced meteoric personal development in multiple dimensions. I also partied with some of the coolest, most interesting, and sexiest people I've ever met. [Update: I went on to spend over six months total sober there, and intermittent sobriety was a habit that kept my digital nomad life elsewhere dangerous]

In the TED Talk below, Dr. Daniel Kahneman, Inventor of Behavioral Economics, explains how our happiness is determined and sometimes distorted by what he describes as our two selves.

Actionable Take-Aways...

If you don't suffer from even a bit of "toxic comparison" good for you, but almost all of us do nowadays.

In case you're unfamiliar with the phrase (not sure if I invented it), this refers to the all-too-human tendency to compare ourselves to others and fixate on our failings and where we come up short. Your buddy has a hot girlfriend and you're single and can't seem to get a date. Your sister has a seemingly happy, growing family and you're childless. Your ex-business partner sold a business and is enjoying the windfall profit. Your gym buddy is making greater gains there in the realm of metal than you. Or a guy you went to high school with and stayed connected with on social media now has this fabulous life of traveling the world - posting photos almost every day of them doing fun things in exotic places - and your life in the town you both grew up in now seems terribly mundane.

Comparing yourself to others, you'll often end up feeling like a loser. This is toxic and self-sabotages you in ways subtle and not-so-subtle...

It makes you unproductive, unhappy, and impulsive.

From the abstract of a notable 2010 study on exactly this:

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.

I agree with this, I try to avoid mind wandering most of the time. As an Entrepreneur (trying my damnest to claw my way out of the middle class!), digital nomad, and now an expat and family man, I've never known life without constant struggle and challenge. Personally, whenever I let my mind wander it gravitates to something that worries me. Unless you just have a boringly comfortable life, your mind wandering is going to inevitably lead to unproductive worrying. Meditation certainly helps with this but Dual N-Back training is the best tool I've ever found for mastering one's mind.

I'm finding that for me to really have a productive, happy day I need to do two State Resets.

About halfway through the day, my mind will be kind of like a web browser with too many tabs open; I'll be more susceptible to distractions and I'm more likely to get stuck in the weeds of some menial task. If I do a State Reset about halfway through the day I return to more high-level thinking and am able to more clearly prioritize my efforts and often reach a productive, focused, and creative flowstate as opposed to slumping into mid-afternoon doldrums.

In this episode, we deconstruct and disprove seven common self-help fallacies using the Socratic Method for precise thought.

We delve into why positive, yet slightly erroneous, self-help platitudes may not be as harmless as you think and break down how to extract the most happiness from money. 

In my previous book, I wrote about how…

“I’ve found the happiness that I didn’t give a damn about…”

Here I’ll explain why not giving a damn about happiness makes you happier, quantitatively and qualitatively. To illustrate the principle of “hedonic adaptation” I’d like you to think about going on a vacation...