Why Do A Dopamine Detox?
A dopamine detox is the voluntary abstinence from high dopamine-stimulating activities, with the goal of re-setting the brain’s reward system and increasing dopamine sensitivity. For example, most people will undertake a dopamine detox if they feel that they’re over-stimulated and experiencing urges to consume social media and junk food, rather than completing the important tasks they have to do that day.
Unfortunately, over-stimulation is extremely common in the modern world, as society is becoming more focused on stimulating people’s reward systems to get them ‘hooked’ on certain products. This can create addictive tendencies towards stimulating activities and substances like sugar, Instagram, pornography, watching tv, shopping, and many more.
If you’re feeling over-stimulated yourself, and have lost the motivation to practice healthy habits and productive work, you’re likely to experience many benefits from a dopamine detox.
Benefits Of A Dopamine Detox
The benefits of a dopamine detox can include; reduced cravings for stimulation, increased motivation and productivity, and increased mental clarity and mindfulness. It also results in the person needing less stimulation to produce the same amounts of dopamine, also known as improved dopamine ‘sensitivity’.
Let’s look a bit closer at each of these benefits, what causes them, and what they might look like in your everyday life.
Reduced Cravings For Stimulation
One of the most common reasons people will undertake a dopamine detox is to reduce their cravings for highly stimulating activities such as consuming social media or highly processed foods. Most of us have experienced this inability to feel satisfied without frequent stimulation from these pleasurable activities.
This state often occurs when we have started to over-indulge in these behaviours, and now the brain has begun to rely on them to produce the same healthy amounts of dopamine. Therefore, without this stimulation, we now begin to feel uncomfortable and may even experience withdrawal symptoms. In this state, a person is likely to crave highly stimulating activities or substances just to make them feel normal again.
A dopamine detox; a period of abstinence from these stimulating activities, allows the brain time to ‘reset’ its reward system. Over time, the brain will slowly start to produce healthy amounts of dopamine without the need for highly stimulating activities. This results in the person feeling satisfied by simple, everyday activities which reduces the cravings for more and more stimulation.
This is a result of a deeper and more foundational benefit of dopamine detox; dopamine sensitivity. Read to the end to understand how this works and why it’s so essential in reducing cravings and treating addiction.
Increased Motivation And Productivity
Another common motive for people to complete a dopamine detox is when they find themselves feeling unmotivated and procrastinating on the important tasks they need to complete in the day. This is also often a result of overstimulation. When you have been spending time watching tv and going out drinking with friends, your work will usually feel boring and even painful in comparison to these highly stimulating activities.
As a result of this contract, you’re likely to feel a lot of resistance to doing difficult things, because you’ve become so comfortable in your over-stimulated life.
A dopamine detox can increase motivation and productivity in two ways. Firstly, as you reduce your need to stimulate yourself and your dopamine sensitivity increases, you’ll experience more positive stimulation from your difficult tasks like working on a project or working out at the gym. You’ll also have fewer cravings for other stimulating activities that would previously take you away from your work.
Secondly, many people report being surprised by how much free time they have when they cut out all the useless things they do to entertain themselves throughout the day. With more time on your hands, and few other things to do with it, you’ll likely find yourself completing 10x more productive work throughout your day, with a lot less effort needed to stay focused.
Increased Mental Clarity And Mindfulness
A great and often unexpected benefit of a dopamine detox is that it can increase feelings of mental clarity and mindfulness. In other words, you can really feel grounded in the present moment, with a mind much less busy with random thoughts. Many people report experiencing this benefit during and even after a detox.
This likely occurs because our thoughts are usually influenced by all the external stimuli we encounter throughout the day, such as things we’ve seen on tv or social media. Without all of this external input, you’ll probably find that you don’t actually have that much to think about. This can be an incredibly peaceful and liberating feeling.
Additionally, when we don’t have so many thoughts about the future and the past, we feel much more in touch with the present. It can be quite shocking once you do experience this presence to realise how much of your life you’ve been living on autopilot whilst giving most of your attention to your thoughts of what you will do in the future, and what happened to you in the past. As well as doing a dopamine detox, many people will practice mindfulness meditation in order to train their minds to spend more time in this state of presence.
If you’re feeling inspired to start your own mindfulness practice, make sure you read my beginner’s guide to practising mindfulness!
Improved Dopamine Sensitivity And Balance
The ultimate goal of a dopamine detox, and the most often sought outcome, is dopamine sensitivity and the balance of the brain’s reward system. To fully understand this benefit of dopamine detoxing, we need to learn a little bit of neuroscience.
In her book ‘Dopamine Nation’, Dr Anna Lembke explains how our brains’ reward systems can become unbalanced due to overindulgence in pleasurable activities.
Dr Lembke uses the metaphor of a see-saw to describe how pain and pleasure influence our behaviour. She explains that pleasure and pain are processed in overlapping brain regions, which means they work in a balance. When we experience pleasure, dopamine is released and the see-saw tips to the side of pleasure, and vice versa when we experience pain.
However, in order to sustain ‘homeostasis’, or balance, the brain wants the see-saw to remain level. Therefore, every time the balance tips towards pleasure, powerful self-regulating mechanisms kick into action to bring it level again. This unconscious, evolutionary response will ‘press down’ on the pain side of the balance to regain equilibrium. This is known in neuroscience as ‘the opponent process theory’.
Unfortunately, when the pleasure of the activity begins to wear off, the weight on the pain side of the see-saw remains and we begin to feel pain. This then causes us to crave more pleasure and dopamine to relieve this pain and feel normal again. Therefore, we place more weight on the pleasure side, but the brain continued to compensate for this with more pain. This begins the vicious cycle of craving and addiction.
So, how do we escape this cycle and reset the system? The answer to this question, Dr Lembke suggests, is abstinence.