How to Lock in

The Generational Lock-In protocol for hyper-productivity

The success of your bloodline will be governed by the actions you take right now. Not trying to scare you here but its true.

We no longer live in a world where you can just “coast”. The social contract of Go to school, get a job, buy a house has been broken for a long time now. We are witnessing a hollowing out of the middle class. Wealth is being consolidated, jobs are being automated, our currency is being debased at unprecedented rates.

These are the facts. The mass adoption of AI agents will be the nail in the coffin. If you do not differentiate yourself now, you may just find yourself trapped in the permanent underclass. Zero upward mobility. No skills, just sentient enough to consume algorithmic content and pay taxes.

Just lock in man

Whats the antidote to this harrowing fate you may ask? Its simply to LOCK IN. Not in the incel monk mode sense, but in a balanced, strategic, and tactical fashion.

Hard work is no longer a differentiator. Its all about working smart. In order to work smart you must be smart. But we live in a world that actively makes us dumber. The food you eat, the water you drink, the content you consume. Its destroying the fine fabrics of your brain. The ones that dictate critical thinking and capacity for deep work.

No pressure, but you need to lock tf in. Right now. There’s a million ways to skin a cat, but I want to show you how I, an individual with crippling ADHD and more concussions than a fullback, lock in.

This is protocol will cover everything from behavioral interventions, productivity tools, and full cognitive enhancement stacks, all for the sake of hyper-productivity.

THE GENERATIONAL LOCK-IN

Our brains are highly adaptive. Thats what makes humans special. Put a panda in the desert and its fucked. Put a shark in an aquarium and it dies immediately. Put a human anywhere on this planet and it adapts.

This adaptability is great, literally our secret sauce. But what happens when you put a hooman in a cushy, sedating environment? Shocker, it adapts. Consumption becomes the norm. Why work hard when you’re perpetually flooded with everything you could ever possibly need?

Wall-E was tapped in

What we’re seeing is widespread attentional fragmentation. It takes 23ish minutes to fully recover from an “interruption” of flow state, the average knowledge worker is switching tasks every 3 minutes. Your smartphone is delivering the same variable ratio reinforcement as a slot machine hundreds of times per day.

Your biology is savvy. It will not adapt if it doesn’t have to. Why waste energy on testosterone production when you have no need for competition? Why sharpen your cognition when you have zero cognitive demand? Why burn fat when you have no energy expenditure? The same applies to neural circuits. It will prune them if you don’t use them.

It also adjusts to inputs. An apple doesn’t taste very good if you housed a sleeve of Oreos beforehand. Reading a book is torture if you just spent an hour scrolling TikTok.

Understand adaptation and use it to your advantage. Otherwise you will be taken advantage of. By manipulating inputs (neurochemical precursors, environment design, strategic supps etc), you can force upregulation of the exact systems you need to generationally lock in.

Don’t Force It

The best results come when you stop caring too much. Hyperfixating on locking in will likely inhibit you from locking in. Such is the nature of energy flow (the universe does not reward neuroticism).

Instead of fixating on the “lock-in” I want you to slow down, realize that this is a marathon, not a sprint (technically its a marathon of sprints). Focus on the INPUTS, worry less about the outputs. Just do the things and have conviction that your goals will come to fruition. Write down your goals, visualize them, then let them go. One day you’ll wake up and realize you’ve accomplished all of them without even trying.

If you want to go deeper into “resetting” your baseline, check out these two posts:

Lock-In Hours

We have our analogue hours; time where we do literally nothing. We also have our lock-in hours, time where we do just about everything. We live in the era of leverage. You can and should be getting a days worth of work done in a few hours. I do not believe in grinding 24/7. Relaxing, exploring, and enjoying hobbies is a part of my work schedule. I’d rather have a few hours of 110% output then 12 hours of 60% output. This is how you make STRIDES, avoid burnout and accomplish your goals without letting the rest of your life go to shit.

The most obvious time to lock in is the morning. You have effectively dopamine fasted for the last 8 hours. Your stimulatory threshold is at a 24 hour low. Your mind is clear, your thoughts are crisp. The morning is sacred.

Locking in Starts the Night Before

You may be saying to yourself “but Noah, I wake up groggy and tired”. Well what does your night before look like? This is the prelude to the lock-in. Don’t screw over future you.

Lock in. Ritualize your nighttime routine:

• NO bright lights, use incandescent or red bulbs

• NO stimulating content. Zero scrolling, zero phone in bed

• Brain dump as much as possible before winding down. Get your worries out of your subconscious

• Stretch, specifically your lower back and hips. Secret cheat code to a good night’s sleep

• House some GABAergics: Magnesium glycinate, L-theanine, glycine

• Have a glass of 1/2 tart cherry juice 1/2 Gerolsteiner water to avoid nighttime hypoglycemia

Your glymphatic system (a cerebrospinal fluid drainage pathway) is only active during sleep. Poor sleep means poor drainage means more inflammation means less cognitive capacity. If you wake up particularly groggy/puffy, take NAC or liposomal glutathione before bed to open up intracellular detox

Prime your Morning

You don’t go the gym and immediately bench your max. You ease into it. Same should apply with mornings. Wake up, immediately get sunlight. Even if its cloudy out, go outside. If you wake up before the sun, get a happy light. Signal to your body that its daytime. This will help you fall asleep too btw.

Get some movement in, specifically lymph work (big 6 is great here). Your lymphatic system is the waste highway of the body. If it gets stagnant, toxins accumulate locally, especially in your brain and gut. Inflammation ensues. And an inflammed brain is a dysfunctional brain.

Hydrate effectively. mineral water with added magnesium, potassium, and sodium. You lose 0.5-1.5 liters of water overnight via breath, sweat, and urine. Hydrating first thing in the AM gets those aformentioned detox pathways moving, boosts circulation, and reboots digestion. You don’t need coffee, you need electrolytes. Added bonus for including trace mineral drops or shialjit

AM Tech Abstinence

Stay analogue as long as possible. Minimal tech exposure until you absolutely have to. The SECOND you get on your devices, you are flooded with distractions. Social media, messages, notifications. No reason to send your CNS into sympathetic overdrive right off the bat.

NO PHONE. You simply do not need it for the first half of your day. Your phone is a total energy suck. Just being in the proximity of it nukes your focus. Leave it far far away (its noon and I still haven’t gone on mine)

Keep this device AWAY From you

Do not go on your computer until you have a clear game plan of exactly what you want to accomplish. Zero room for deviation. Write it out: “I am going to open up Notion, do x, y, and z. I’m going to send a message to ____ and finish up documentation for _____”. Putting this on paper prevents you from deviating course.

This article has all the tools you need to prevent social-media-induced distraction

Go insofar as to preemptively block distracting sites/apps. Use OneSec of BlockSite extensions to make this easy.

Intentionality is the key here, which brings me to my next point. Find the ONE Thing

The ONE Thing

We live in an era of abundance. When you have the option to do anything, you often end up doing nothing. Success is about doing the ONE most important thing and disregarding everything else. Instead of scattering your attention across 10 priorities, just pick the single highest-leverage action that makes everything else easier or unnecessary. This is how you build leverage. Decision fatigue becomes a non-starter. You align with your true goals.

So ask yourself: What is the ONE thing you want to accomplish this year? What is the ONE thing you must accomplish this quarter to hit that goal? What is the ONE thing this month? This week? Today? Right now? Start there and stay the course.

Your lock-in period is for this one thing. Zero distractoins. No multitasking, full intensity.

LLM-Leveraged Brain Dump

Blank your slate. I want you to dump Everything and anything on your mind into a Claude bot (or LLM of choice). Tell it what you’re stressed about, all tasks you have to do, every project you have. Anything and everything. Then ask it to organize into

• Project

• Urgency

• Importance

Incomplete tasks create intrusive thoughts and persistent mental chatter until they’re either completed or offloadeed. Bluma Zeigarnik spoke about this briefly at length. You are burning your biological RAM by backend ruminating. Stop it.

Treat this like your executive assistant. Tell it to break down your tasks into smaller and smaller parts. I will be sharing my ProductivityBot Prompt in my next post.

THE LOCK-IN STACK

Now that you have your tasks, time to lock in. This is where we bring out the big guns (nootropics). The goal here is 2-3 hours to produce work that would normally take a full work day. Sprint then rest format. In short, you want to enhance your:

• Dopaminergic Pathways for motivation and reward salience (the drive to get things done)

• Cholinergic System for attention intensity and learning (the ability to “lock in on one thing)

• Noradrenergic System for arousal and mental energy (sharp alertness with cognitive endurance)

Dopamine to care about the task, acetylcholine to focus on the task, norepinephrine (adrenaline) to have the energy to get the task done.

Bonus: Modulating the GABAergic system can act as a buffer if going over your stimulation threshold (jitters, too wired, etc)

Other Cognitive Requirements:

• Oxygen and nutrient delivery to the Prefrontal Cortex (where executive function happens)

• Ample fuel in the form of glucose and/or ketones (your brain is an energy hog)

• Optimized mitochondrial function to turn raw energy substrate into ATP.

Fueling the PFC & Optimal Brain Networks

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is responsible for working memory, cognitive flexibility, and impulse inhibition. Glucose and oxygen consumption increases 20-30% during sustained cognitive work. The PFC is the first thing to go offline under stress (hypoglcemia, inflammation, sleep deprivation etc). This is why you doomscroll, switch tasks, and fall back into dopamine seeking behavior.

Optimizing dopamine and acetylcholine shifts your brain from its default mode network (DFM) to the task-positive network (TPN). DFM dominance leads to daydreaming, mental drifts, and general distraction. TPN dominance leads to LOCKING TF IN.

Combining optimal neuromodulator support with strong glucose and oxygen delivery to the PFC creates what can only be described as “giga-brain mode”. Sprinkle in a little mitochondrial support and you might as well be Bradley Cooper from Limitless.

Finding Which Levers to Pull

Everybody has different neurological optimization requirements. Some may need more dopamine support, others more acetylcholine, maybe even GABA. By experimenting with precursors of each neuromodulator, you can identify what “state” optimizing each of these pathways gives you.

Enhanced Dopamine: L-Tyrosine (225mg) + DL-Phenylalanine (225mg) + Caffeine (100mg)

These are two precursors for dopamine synthesis (tyrosine → L-DOPA → dopamine). They’re non-addictive, safe, and have a predictable onset time (45 min). Take these as you start your work on an empty stomach, combined with caffeine (increases dopamine indirectly via adenosine receptor antagonism).

Start small, work your way up. I take about 225mg of L-tyrosine and 225mg of DL-Phenylalanine from LifeBlud. If you take with Yerba mate instead of coffee, you may experience a heightened dopaminergic effect due to Yerba’s mild MAO-B inhibiting properties (inhibits the enzyme that breaks down dopamine).

Enhanced Acetylcholine: Alpha GPC (300-600mg) + Huperzine A (100-200mcg)

Alpha GPC crosses the blood-brain barrier and rapidly converts into acetylcholine, the learning and memory neurotransmitter. Huperzine A prevents the breakdown of ACh, meaning it stays around in the synapses longer. Combining the two means more synthesis and less degradation, a steady and thorough state of heightened cholinergic activity. Choline deficiency is highly common in ADHDers, and gives me a narrow beam focus that no dopaminergics ever will.

Cholinergic activity has a golden window, go over it and you can feel really really bad. I incorporate a microdose of nicotine with this stack, I’m talking 1-2mg for further ACh receptor agonism via a different mechanism. Once again, START SMALL. Find your goldilocks window. Its entirely possible that your brain doesn’t jive with higher acetylcholine activity, and thats okay. The goal here is to find out what pathways are in most need of optimizing.

(note: Huperzine A should not be taken daily. It has a 24 hour half-life)

Enhanced GABA: L-Theanine (200-400mg)

If you are prone to overstimulation, GABA may just be what you’re missing. L-theanine is unique in its ability to increase GABA without causing sedation. Any time I get overstimulated from coffee, nootropics etc, I pop a couple hundred mg of L-theanine. Best stacked with caffeine in a 2:1 ratio (eg 200mg theanine 100mg caffeine). It can be used more frequently without tolerance.

If you really want to feel the GABAergic handbrake effect, try stacking with magnesium glycinate.

Enhanced Adrenaline: Caffeine + Cold Exposure

Caffeine is a reliable adrenergic. Often too adrenergic. But if you really want to feel that adrenergic boost, rip some caffeine, some black ginger and get COLD. Ice bath, cold shower, dunk your face into a bucket of ice water. This is for those that get groggy or have a hard time “waking up”.

An Ideal LOCK IN Stack

I’m currently working on a whole cognitive enhancement guide, but here’s what we’re looking for to LOCK IN

• Zero mental drift

• Tasks feel effortless and rewarding

• Time distorts (hours feel like minutes)

• External distractions don’t even register

• High cognitive output, zero fatigue

30 min BEFORE max cognitive load:

• Alpha-GPC: 300-600mg

• L-Tyrosine: 225-500mg

• Huperzine A: 100mcg

As you start your work:

• Caffeine: 100mg

• L-Theanine: 200-400mg (if you get overstimulated)

• Glucose + Electrolytes (literal brain fuel)

After your Session:

• 200mg magnesium glycinate

• Carb & protein heavy meal

Remember, start with each of these individually, at small doses. You don’t want to overshoot your stimulation threshold otherwise you’ll feel like a tweaker and won’t get any work done.

This is obviously a very baseline stack for these specific neurological levers. But they will absolutely help you LOCK in. I am about to go deep on cognitive enhancment, sharing with you all the peptides, bioregulators, and advanced tools you can use to upgrade your biology. If this interests you, make sure to join my private newsletter.

Advanced compounds I’ll be covering next article:

• 4’-DMA-7,8-DHF (miracle-gro for your neurons)

• Bromantane (long-term dopaminergic upregulation, without a crash)

• Semax/Adamax (rapid onset BDNF maxxing)

• Exogenous Ketones (Esters and salts, alternative brain fuel)

• Cerebral bloodflow agents

• And much much more

LOCK IN