In which Wolf discusses listening for productivity. Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/sXbBHvxEJqA
The mind is complex, and that's an understatement. And I think we perform best as human beings when we integrate all of our faculties: at one extreme there's our ability to think rationally, objectively, and symbolically; and at the other extreme we have our ability to access our intuitive, creative, emotional, and imaginative nature.
Right now I want to talk about something sort of in the middle, something that can help support the entire spectrum of whole mind thinking: taking control of what comes into your ears.
We know that focus and single-tasking are critical to personal productivity. And our aural environments are often polluted with distractions: people moving around, talking, music that’s engaging or annoying.
Our phones and headphones give us the tools we need to not only eliminate distractions, but create an optimal aural environment for what we want to accomplish in the moment.
The idea is to create a state of flow that is highly conducive to productivity.
There are different things you want to accomplish everyday: exercise, work or study, meditation, sleep, and they require different mindsets.
I love spoken word podcasts and music with beautiful or clever lyrics (check out Tim Minchin, he's amazing), but I find such content “completely engaging”: it leaves me with no bandwidth for other mental tasks, because they compete for my language processing facilities, whether I’m trying to write code, or engage my mind-body connection before a set in the gym.
So the vast majority of the audio I listen to when creating flow states has no lyrics. In fact, ambient audio, whether it is musical or not, is designed to not be listened to intently, but to fade into your mental background and create a “space” in which your mind can operate.
In this video, I'm going to give you some examples of what I’m talking about. I’m not claiming that any of this is “great music.” What I love to listen to musically is quite different than these examples. I’m going to be talking about music and other audio that is useful for creating and sustaining productive mindsets.
It’s not everything I use, and it may not work for you at all. I encourage you to use this as a starting point for your own explorations, and discover what works for you. If you discover something cool, or have something you already like for creating flow, please tell us about it in the comments!
A number of the YouTube channels I use and recommend publish mixes of audio that range from an hour to eight hours, or even live streams that go on for days. This is important because you don’t want to have to think about particular songs or playlists, because that’s also a distraction.
For cardio I prefer fast walking and tempos from around 120-135 BPM work very well for this. I recommend the progressive house mixes of Miss Monique, she's an amazing DJ.
For stretching and yoga, I like the chill downtempo sounds of Lofi Girl, I also like to use this as music for therapeutic massage, and many people also like to use this music for study.
For lifting I like something with a driving beat and harder edge, but still no lyrics. The publisher Aim To Head fits this with their hard, dark techno mixes.
I also have a personally curated list of music I love to lift to on Apple Music.
I spend a lot of time doing deep work: coding, research, and writing. For this I need music that puts me in an instant state of flow; that trancelike state where problems get solved and time passes before you know it. The music has to flow like water and tick like a clock, but not be so engaging that I either want to get lost in the musical storytelling or get up and dance. PsyChamber creates mixes of "Psybient" music, which is a portmanteau of "Psychedelic" and "Ambient."
Another great one is Chill Music Lab. They publish mixes of deep house and chillstep tuned for deep work.
Finally in this category, I have another personally curated list that gets me in the flow on Apple Music. The link is again in the description.
For me, "meditation" isn't this light and airy new-agey activity. It's about deep, personal transformation and working with the deepest parts of my psyche including my shadow. Well, dark music for dark work, right? CryoChamber is the premier publisher of "dark ambient" music. One friend told me that dark ambient sounds like "a horror movie soundtrack without the jump scares, like something really scary is always about to happen." Personally, I don't see it that way at all. I know I'm going to sound a bit like Walter White when I say this, but when I'm meditating, the only monster lurking in the dark is... me. As Jordan Peterson famously said:
“You should be a monster. An absolute monster. And then you should learn how to control it.”
When I'm ready for sleep, I like field recordings with a strong white noise component like rain or surf, and I like to switch between several channels for this. But the one I'll highlight here is Cozy Rain which publishes field recordings that go on for many hours, you can listen to it all night as you sleep, and their accompanying video is of original artwork of beautiful imaginary places that make you want to just step inside the screen and curl up with a book or someone you love.
I also want to mention a few sound sources that are more software based an on demand.
If you have an iPhone, iOS has a built-in "Background Sounds" feature that generates various forms of white noise, including Ocean, Rain, and Stream. You can adjust it play at different volumes depending on whether you have other media playing at the moment. This is great when I'm in environments like the gym that play their own music, and their soundtrack is still leaking into my own despite my noise canceling headphones. Just turn this on, set the volume, and you can be in a world of your own.
MyNoise.net is a web site, a mobile app, and a desktop app that includes over 300 algorithmic sound generators aimed at various uses from creative inspiration, to meditation, to masking tinnitus, to lulling babies to sleep. Truly worth the subscription price to be able to fine tune your aural environment.
Endel (at endel.io) is a generative music app that creates personalized soundscapes to match your activities, and provides preset modes for relaxation, focus, sleep, and walking, and reacts to the time of day, weather, heart rate, and location to create unique compositions. I particularly like their "sleep" program, which starts with a series of light melodic chimes you play while you're getting ready for bed, to kind of induce you to get ready to sleep, and then plays you to sleep with gentle ambient music. When you wake up, it's still going, but has calmed down even more to the point where it has become a gentle tapestry of sound like distant wind, or someone running a vacuum cleaner in the far distance, or far away automobile traffic. It's actually very beautiful.
Every thing I've just shared with you is in some way or other "ambient." It's not music and sound that you're supposed to sit and listen to: it's atmospheric in the sense that it's like the air you breathe. You can choose to notice it any time you want, but in a minute you forget its there even while it's sustaining you.
But what do you think? Let me know in the comments, and if you’re interested in raising the bar on your own thinking and helping the world become a more thoughtful place, please consider subscribing.
See you tomorrow!