Have you ever found yourself picking up your phone and opening Instagram, without actually making the conscious decision to do it? Have you found yourself still scrolling through reels an hour later? You can thank (or blame) dopamine for this kind of mindless behaviour.
What Is Dopamine?
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter; a chemical that sends signals within your brain. Dopamine was once believed to be the ‘pleasure hormone’, however, it’s now better understood and is known for creating feelings of motivation and craving. This system evolved to encourage humans and other animals to engage in positive survival behaviours like eating food, having sex, and finding important information or resources.
Why Are We Addicted to Sugar And Social Media?
These days, modern companies will exploit this evolutionary mechanism within us for profit. For example, social media is designed to stimulate the most dopamine possible to keep you coming back compulsively and keep you engaging with its content for hours at a time. Food companies employ scientists to find the perfect level of sugar content in a product (known as the ‘bliss point’) that will produce the most dopamine in our brains so that we find ourselves craving it.
When our brain experiences something pleasurable, it remembers this thing for the future, and the more we experience it, the more our brain will keep releasing dopamine to make us go back to it again. This can quickly become a compulsion and may leave us feeling out of control and even addicted to a behaviour.
Dopamine Detox
Fortunately, there’s something we can do to try and reset this dopamine response and regain control. A ‘dopamine detox’, unlike what the name might suggest, doesn’t actually detox dopamine from the brain. It does, however, detox us from the negative behaviours and compulsions that we’ve acquired because of it.
Neuroscientist and dopamine expert Dr Andrew Huberman explains that contrast is the key to pleasure and pain. For example, when you don’t eat any sugar in your diet, fruit begins to taste amazing. However, if all you eat is chocolate, the fruit is unpleasant in comparison.
In a similar way, when you’ve fallen into the habit of scrolling through social media and watching tv all day, studying for an exam or going to the gym seems very undesirable. However, when you stop using digital entertainment for a few days, you create that contrast and reset your mental pallet to enjoy studying and exercise again.
How To Do A Dopamine Detox
To get started with a dopamine detox, we need to decide on two things; what behaviours we want to detox from, and how long we want to abstain from them.
Commonly, people will choose to cut out things like junk food, sugar, social media, tv, video games, pornography, drugs, alcohol, shopping etc. You can choose several behaviours that you’ve found yourself compulsively engaging in.
Next, decide on a period of time to remove these things for. This should be long enough that you can feel the benefits of the detox, but not so long that it becomes an unreasonable target. People tend to vary between a couple of days up to a week or more, so make sure you think about what length of time is right for you.
For more help deciding how long to carry out a dopamine detox for, read my article on the topic here.
When you’ve started your dopamine detox it helps to remove temptation, for example, removing sugary foods from your house or deleting social media apps from your phone. This way you’ll have a much easier time resisting your cravings for them. It can also help to keep a log or a journal of your experience to reflect on in the future. You can use this to document your thoughts, feelings, cravings, and hopefully, your positive results towards the end of the detox.
If you do end up engaging in a behaviour you’ve decided to abstain from, there’s no need to start from the beginning (although you can if you’d like to). Just acknowledge the thoughts and feelings that led you to the behaviour, decide to get back on track, and continue the detox as normal.
Benefits And Possible Results
Decreased Cravings And Bad Habits
After cutting out compulsive behaviours for a period of time, it’s common to experience a decrease or even complete removal of any cravings towards that behaviour. This is because your brain has unlearned the behaviour as a dopamine-stimulating activity. This is why so many people choose to quit something cold turkey for a while, such as sugar, to regulate their cravings or to manage an addiction.
Increased Motivation And Productivity
You’ll also feel a lot more motivation to do other, more difficult things like working on a hobby or getting some exercise. As you will have removed the activities that were your primary source of pleasure and stimulation, and which likely took up most of your time, you’ll find yourself with a gap to fill. Now that you’ve created that contrast, you’ll be motivated to take part in other activities that you may not have wanted to do before.
These activities may even turn out to produce more pleasure in the long term than the original compulsions did too. This is because, although it takes more time and effort to receive a chemical ‘reward’ for completing these tasks, the dopamine release can be much more sustainable than the ones you’ll receive from effortless stimulation.
In a similar way to blood sugar, dopamine spikes and crashes are best balanced for optimal mood and motivation. Using time and effort as a buffer for dopamine spikes, in the same way, fibre can control blood sugar, you can maintain a much more stable and consistent dopamine level in your brain.
Increased Sense Of Presence
With the lack of constant craving and distraction, you’ll likely also find yourself more mindful and grounded in the present moment, which is a great bonus!
Reset Your Dopamine Sensitivity
To use this analogy again, most people will agree that it’s better to eat fruit every day, and only indulge in high-sugar desserts more occasionally. Not only is this better for us and protects us from addiction and negative health effects, but it also preserves the high level of novelty and enjoyment we get from those special occasions.
Having cake at every meal would remove a lot of the pleasure of eating it. In the same way, if we can reset our mental taste buds to enjoy doing the things that are good for us, and occasionally indulge in highly stimulating activities like social media and Netflix, we can maintain a healthy balance in our habits, motivation levels, and dopamine secretion. To read more about the amazing benefits of a dopamine detox, check out this article!
So if you’re feeling stuck in an unmotivated rut, or you’re finding yourself behaving compulsively with little control over your behaviour, give this exercise a try and see what happens. It may be difficult at first but you’ll be pleasantly surprised by home much time and freedom you’ve gained by the end of it! Also, you can keep this as a tool in your toolbox for whenever you fall back into bad habits and laziness in the future!
For a great first-hand experience of what a dopamine detox is like, you can watch this YouTube video by YouTuber Niklas Christl. I think his experience in this video is really inspiring and will encourage you to try a dopamine detox for yourself!
For more information on this topic, I highly recommend the book ‘Dopamine Detox’ by Thibaut Meurisse. In addition to explaining how dopamine detox works, it provides you with a dopamine detox plan and comes with a super helpful workbook that will guide and help you customise the detox to your own personal needs! Get it here!
For more information on the neuroscience behind dopamine and addiction, the best book I’ve come across on this topic is ‘Dopamine Nation‘ by Dr Anna Lembke. Find it here!
For more book recommendations, check out the book list!