There are adjacent areas of research, such as "joint attention" and "joint action" that touch upon similar phenomenon. However, for body doubling research it seems that it is still in its infancy.
We're really looking to push this phenomenon into the limelight and accelerate its research because there's definitely something powerful here. Speaking from personal experience, body doubling is almost like magic with how it works.
What’s the question you want the research to answer?
Because you don’t really need a study to figure out if it works for you. Just try it! Because I can literally feel my understimulation block fade when there’s another person around — it stokes a little guilt and anxiety to get you started and then they act like a pace runner providing some artificial forward momentum.
It’s not one of those things where you won’t be sure whether it’s working or not.
> What’s the question you want the research to answer?
Is it actually effective at all? Who is it effective/ineffective for? Why is it effective or ineffective for them? How effective is it? How can its effectiveness be optimized? In what other ways can its effectiveness be achieved? What other types of problems can this be used to help with?
Maybe I try it and find that it works, but maybe that's simply a placebo, the way someone might find that crystals or charms help them. It's easy to say it shouldn't matter so long as it works for someone, but I think we'd agree that its better to have things properly researched and understood.
Maybe I try it and it doesn't work but could have with some modifications to accommodate my needs or situation. Maybe a sort of digital avatar or AI works or can work just as well for a body double as a real person! Maybe it even works better than a real person in some cases! How great would it be not to always have to coordinate schedules with another person or impose on their time to get those same benefits! Maybe employers could benefit from pairing people for work in certain tasks!
It's all idle speculation, theory, and guesswork until people put in the time and effort to research it all properly. The anecdotal evidence is encouraging, but only the start.
I read about influencers who basically stream themselves while studying, seems to be a similar idea with more even participation (and less likelihood of becoming internet-rich).
Even participation isn’t really a good unto itself. Most people can successfully body double to a stream or Youtube video and so one person can provide the “passive” service to millions of people.
Having this kind of content plentiful and available 24/7 is really helpful.
You're presenting it as if there was something intrinsically better or more efficient about streaming, but the millions of people could also be matched in pairs or small groups. There would be a bit more friction, but also more personal touch.
Objectively, I think they're fairly similar. It really does come down whether you value even participation or the chance to participate in a lottery that will may propel a few individuals to stardom (and leave a lot more disappointed) more, which is ultimately subjective.
I've thought about doing this before even if I have zero audience. The "threat" that someone could join the stream and see me slacking off on YouTube might be stressful but I imagine it could help me stay on task?
That's what the streamers in the article I read said - they all pretty much started out to "force" themselves to be reasonably productive (and/or in a small group of friends with the same goal).
Don't underestimate the force of this, I reckon it's similar to precommitment (eg, announcing to all your friends that you're giving up smoking), for which there's evidence that it's an effective tool to drive behavioral change.
Body doubling (or doing something with others around) is an awesome technique to overcome a motivational hurdle for activities. While the term originated in ADHD circles, it is definitely applicable to those outside of the ADHD community as well.
We're actually building something just for this ( https://doubleapp.xyz ) and it can be for any sort of activity - cooking, running, working, studying, etc.
Thanks! And for sure - on the top of the Double page we have Double communities you’re able to join right now instead of scheduling a Double for the future.
Is that the “Let’s get going” button? It’s also not clear to me where I can start doing this right now.
If it is that button I’d suggest some sort of soft sign up flow. It’d be really nice if I could join a double immediately, give an email or some identifying info, and that’s it. After my first session make me finish the sign up.
Thanks for the feedback! We'll keep working to make it clearer for sure.
To answer your question: yes, once you hit "let's get going" you should be brought to a soft sign-up. After that, you'll be redirected to a page that let's you join a Double community immediately via the "start now" button.
Does distant/muffled coffee shop music fall under limited forms? I’m like you but I’ve found lately that this works for me. I’m beginning to suspect the fidelity of modern consumer speakers and headphones are just too good for focus because they seize my attention. It makes me wonder what would happen if I tried an EQ that cut bass/mids.
My problem is that “focus” music is often pretty repetitive. It can drive me nuts if I listen to it for 8 hours.
Whenever I visit for my parents for holidays, they have the TV playing something. However, I've always found the ads incredibly distracting, like they're intentionally designed to get my attention.
It's weird to me to call this "doubling" instead of "mirroring" but anyway, I'm not neurodivergent, but I've always found it nice to sit with someone else in silence, reading or studying. Its a very calming experience.
Mirroring has you copying the other's actions, thus performing the same task. Doubling allows each to work on their own separate tasks, from what I've understood.
I oftentimes want something like this as well. I’m not looking for a taskmaster or someone who could report my work but simply a nonjudgmental human who is just busy themself.
Does the effect fall off with the square of the distance? Is it linear? Is there a threshold?
Does adding a third person (or more people) affect it?
How is it different from, say, sitting in a cafe with another person? Do you have to know each other? If there is a difference what criteria determine that difference? Can one "pretend" that one is "body double"-ing with a unknowing stranger? Or does each person have to know they're doing it?
If you really want to investigate this IMO you're going to have to look at everything from near-field EM to Ramana Maharshi (who often taught in silence), you should study Cybernetics (by which I basically mean read "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby), you should take high-speed video of people doing this and then analyze it for e.g. unconscious synchronization, etc...
> Does the effect fall off with the square of the distance? Is it linear? Is there a threshold?
You seem to want to treat it as some sort of physical field or force. IANAP (I am not a psychologist), but it seems fairly self-evident that the effect arises from the awareness of being observed, which leads to you observing and mediating your own actions. Based on that, I would predict that physical distance is only indirectly relevant. The strength of the effect is going to depend on how many of your activities are theoretically knowable by the other person. If they are physically present but farther away, you can "get away with" doing more things without them knowing, so you'll omit such behaviors from the self-monitoring loop. If they are virtually present, I would imagine that the strength of the effect depends on how clearly you can observe them (because we can't see how they see us, but we'll assume that it's roughly the same).
Which would make for an interesting experiment: do body doubling with very asymmetric visual quality, size, and latency but without informing the participants that they are seeing anything different. My guess is that the one who sees a better quality signal will experience a much stronger effect.
Like many things in psychology, though, there are tons of confounding variables. Your relationship to the person matters—specifically, how much you care about their opinion of you and your actions. I would imagine body doubling with a dog would work temporarily and then the effect would fade away as you got comfortable with goofing off in front of them.
Anybody you double with, you'll place on a scale from somewhere between "dog" and "attractive person I am desperate to impress". (And the latter end of the scale can be paralyzing, so this isn't a small→large effect scale.)
> You seem to want to treat it as some sort of physical field or force.
Of course (I'm a rational materialist) it's "some sort of physical field or force", there's nothing else it could be, eh?
How much of the effect is due to power (in the physical sense) and how much due to modulation (communication)?
(Not to be coy, I'm a rational materialist but I'm also a Reiki Level III Master and I would really really like someone somewhere to do science to that. If I can influence these folks to take a more scientific materialist tack on their investigation they might discover something relevant to my own curiosities.)
I don't know how but personally, this actually works.
Another thing that works is setting a not so exciting but also not so boring tv series playing on your mobile next to you and do work while it plays on. Again no clue how or why it works. My pet theory is that adhd brains just like multi tasking and keeping a portion of extra bandwidth zoned out is helpful in not getting distracted.
The reason that you "all know it" is not that knowing it is a characteristic feature of ADHD. Rather, it is because you are all related and in contact with each other. 100% of your family having ADHD does not make your family representative of the general ADHD population.
My problem is I'd have an overpowering urge to interrupt the other person whenever I was stuck. That and my other mutterings, pacings etc would probably be intolerable.
Everyone on my team, including myself, mutters to themselves like this. I’ve asked some of my team members about it to determine if it bothers them and was surprised to find they feel the same way I do. It’s actually somewhat endearing. Granted, we could be drawing the line at different places here. I just curse under my breath at things that have me stumped, sulk for a moment to collect my thoughts, and then get back to it.
Muttering under your breath, cursing, etc is a form of emotional regulation. That's why it helps you focus, which is very cool.
If you were hooked up to an MRI and asked to do a coding challenge, but were prohibited from talking/regulating, I'd bet your amygdala would be more engaged compared to your control.
Historically, this could be the underlying reason for the existence of various professions: adjutant, batman, valet, secretary, personal assitant - perhaps the main function they provided was just providing a presence?
Perhaps a function but I don’t think I would go so far as to say primary. They also lugged their stuff around and handled all of the boring parts of life, like opening doors, writing letters and so on, that they didn’t want to deal with.
Again pop-sci loves to invent terms and then sell those terms. Psychology is regularly guilty of this.
This is not a "phenomenon" with "invisible power" and it doesn't need a litany of semi-awed, near mystical, and pseudoscientific testimonials. That's just nonsense branding.
This isn't new or magical and there are other services that do just this with less BS.
Yeah, I was pretty turned off by that. I clicked on the link wondering if it was some sort of cloning technology, or perhaps just some sort of video editing/generation technology, but was disappointed to see it's just "co-working" or "physically-present emotional support" if you want to capture the essence of it. Sure, that latter term is a bit wordy, but "body doubling" is IMO just a very strange thing to call this.
This is great. I like how I did not have to sign up for separate account to use this. Instead it just Took me to discord channel and I got started right away.
Cuddling as a service seems to be done in America, too. I searched for "Cuddler for hire in (my state)" or something and got a bunch of results once.
Assuming they were not all fake. But since they're clearly posting a price (competitive with psychotherapy) and not pretending to be dates on a dating site, I doubt they're spam.
Not at all the same. At least not how offices are usually structured. It doesn’t work as well with groups which is why “just go work at the library” isn’t also a solution.
An office set up for body doubling would be pairs or small groups of people from completely different teams sharing an semi-isolated space.
Not me! My chosen field is what I naturally hyperfocus on, which is the typical recipe for high functioning ADHD. The WFH struggle for me is stopping work.
It's the rest of life that I struggle with, and I've had friends literally come to my house to veg out in front of the TV while I clean. And then, once the kitchen is clean, it's suddenly easy to cook a meal. It's honestly quite embarrassing to need that as an adult, but by making it win-win, I've managed to convince myself to do it. Cool to see that other folks do this.
I don't have ADHD as far as I know(which it seems is helpful to those folks), but I still use body doubling. My use of body doubling tends towards tasks that I have an negative emotional response or apprehension towards. For example, paying an unexpected bill, or making a difficult phone call, or writing an email to someone I don't like. You could say these situations are triggering in the sense that they trigger the fight or flight response and arranging to have someone in the same room during those tasks down regulates that response.
I finished my thesis thanks to a group of people scattered over the internet, all agreeing to do pomodoro. In the breaks we'd chat about our day to day lives then get back to work when the bell rang. I'll always be grateful for their presence, getting me through hard times when I'd perhaps have given up if I felt completely alone; or at least not worked so deeply and thoroughly.
It might be a good way to run an office. Define pomodoro blocks in which you cannot interrupt your coworkers. No slacks, texts, phone calls, or conversations until the cycle ends.
I found that am super productive when travel by air, just sitting and working at the gate or mid flight. Now I wonder if that's the effect of all the people around.
I am like that too. I discovered one reason for this was that I was super hydrated - drinking up all my water before going through security had a noticeable effect on my ability to concentrate.
> Now I wonder if that's the effect of all the people around.
I used to study at the student center on campus (Rutgers New Brunswick) for this reason. I tried the library a few times, but it felt off to me for some reason; too quiet, perhaps.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] thread> “While there’s not a lot of research on ADHD and body doubling, anecdotal clinical reports seem to point to its utility,” Roberts says.
Shame this stuff isn't backed by research. Hopefully it gets looked into. I wouldn't be surprised if it's helpful for some people though.
We're really looking to push this phenomenon into the limelight and accelerate its research because there's definitely something powerful here. Speaking from personal experience, body doubling is almost like magic with how it works.
Because you don’t really need a study to figure out if it works for you. Just try it! Because I can literally feel my understimulation block fade when there’s another person around — it stokes a little guilt and anxiety to get you started and then they act like a pace runner providing some artificial forward momentum.
It’s not one of those things where you won’t be sure whether it’s working or not.
Is it actually effective at all? Who is it effective/ineffective for? Why is it effective or ineffective for them? How effective is it? How can its effectiveness be optimized? In what other ways can its effectiveness be achieved? What other types of problems can this be used to help with?
Maybe I try it and find that it works, but maybe that's simply a placebo, the way someone might find that crystals or charms help them. It's easy to say it shouldn't matter so long as it works for someone, but I think we'd agree that its better to have things properly researched and understood.
Maybe I try it and it doesn't work but could have with some modifications to accommodate my needs or situation. Maybe a sort of digital avatar or AI works or can work just as well for a body double as a real person! Maybe it even works better than a real person in some cases! How great would it be not to always have to coordinate schedules with another person or impose on their time to get those same benefits! Maybe employers could benefit from pairing people for work in certain tasks!
It's all idle speculation, theory, and guesswork until people put in the time and effort to research it all properly. The anecdotal evidence is encouraging, but only the start.
Having this kind of content plentiful and available 24/7 is really helpful.
Objectively, I think they're fairly similar. It really does come down whether you value even participation or the chance to participate in a lottery that will may propel a few individuals to stardom (and leave a lot more disappointed) more, which is ultimately subjective.
Don't underestimate the force of this, I reckon it's similar to precommitment (eg, announcing to all your friends that you're giving up smoking), for which there's evidence that it's an effective tool to drive behavioral change.
We're actually building something just for this ( https://doubleapp.xyz ) and it can be for any sort of activity - cooking, running, working, studying, etc.
If it is that button I’d suggest some sort of soft sign up flow. It’d be really nice if I could join a double immediately, give an email or some identifying info, and that’s it. After my first session make me finish the sign up.
To answer your question: yes, once you hit "let's get going" you should be brought to a soft sign-up. After that, you'll be redirected to a page that let's you join a Double community immediately via the "start now" button.
My problem is that “focus” music is often pretty repetitive. It can drive me nuts if I listen to it for 8 hours.
My productivity skyrockets when my wife is around, especially for tasks involving physical labor.
"Distraction-free productivity Focusmate virtual coworking helps you get things done."
With my spouse I just call it like, "Could you be there for moral support while I rake the leaves / open bills / do whatever I don't wanna do"
Haha, I do the same. Joke I need a supervisor.
Does adding a third person (or more people) affect it?
How is it different from, say, sitting in a cafe with another person? Do you have to know each other? If there is a difference what criteria determine that difference? Can one "pretend" that one is "body double"-ing with a unknowing stranger? Or does each person have to know they're doing it?
If you really want to investigate this IMO you're going to have to look at everything from near-field EM to Ramana Maharshi (who often taught in silence), you should study Cybernetics (by which I basically mean read "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby), you should take high-speed video of people doing this and then analyze it for e.g. unconscious synchronization, etc...
You seem to want to treat it as some sort of physical field or force. IANAP (I am not a psychologist), but it seems fairly self-evident that the effect arises from the awareness of being observed, which leads to you observing and mediating your own actions. Based on that, I would predict that physical distance is only indirectly relevant. The strength of the effect is going to depend on how many of your activities are theoretically knowable by the other person. If they are physically present but farther away, you can "get away with" doing more things without them knowing, so you'll omit such behaviors from the self-monitoring loop. If they are virtually present, I would imagine that the strength of the effect depends on how clearly you can observe them (because we can't see how they see us, but we'll assume that it's roughly the same).
Which would make for an interesting experiment: do body doubling with very asymmetric visual quality, size, and latency but without informing the participants that they are seeing anything different. My guess is that the one who sees a better quality signal will experience a much stronger effect.
Like many things in psychology, though, there are tons of confounding variables. Your relationship to the person matters—specifically, how much you care about their opinion of you and your actions. I would imagine body doubling with a dog would work temporarily and then the effect would fade away as you got comfortable with goofing off in front of them.
Anybody you double with, you'll place on a scale from somewhere between "dog" and "attractive person I am desperate to impress". (And the latter end of the scale can be paralyzing, so this isn't a small→large effect scale.)
Of course (I'm a rational materialist) it's "some sort of physical field or force", there's nothing else it could be, eh?
How much of the effect is due to power (in the physical sense) and how much due to modulation (communication)?
(Not to be coy, I'm a rational materialist but I'm also a Reiki Level III Master and I would really really like someone somewhere to do science to that. If I can influence these folks to take a more scientific materialist tack on their investigation they might discover something relevant to my own curiosities.)
Basically body doubling with 4-5 other people over 60-180 min sessions. Works really great.
Another thing that works is setting a not so exciting but also not so boring tv series playing on your mobile next to you and do work while it plays on. Again no clue how or why it works. My pet theory is that adhd brains just like multi tasking and keeping a portion of extra bandwidth zoned out is helpful in not getting distracted.
If you were hooked up to an MRI and asked to do a coding challenge, but were prohibited from talking/regulating, I'd bet your amygdala would be more engaged compared to your control.
This is not a "phenomenon" with "invisible power" and it doesn't need a litany of semi-awed, near mystical, and pseudoscientific testimonials. That's just nonsense branding.
This isn't new or magical and there are other services that do just this with less BS.
Assuming they were not all fake. But since they're clearly posting a price (competitive with psychotherapy) and not pretending to be dates on a dating site, I doubt they're spam.
An office set up for body doubling would be pairs or small groups of people from completely different teams sharing an semi-isolated space.
It's the rest of life that I struggle with, and I've had friends literally come to my house to veg out in front of the TV while I clean. And then, once the kitchen is clean, it's suddenly easy to cook a meal. It's honestly quite embarrassing to need that as an adult, but by making it win-win, I've managed to convince myself to do it. Cool to see that other folks do this.
I run way faster with other people than by myself based on that effect.
It's definitely a mental/adrenal response.
I used to study at the student center on campus (Rutgers New Brunswick) for this reason. I tried the library a few times, but it felt off to me for some reason; too quiet, perhaps.
FWIW, this helps sometimes: https://coffitivity.com
It makes sense. Really wish this sort of stuff was around when I was in college.