Dopamine detox forces one to temporarily avoid pleasurable behaviours and break that cycle of craving, giving the brain a chance to crave other, healthier things, such as exercise, nature walks, or social outings.DrAfter123/Getty Images
The Cult of Fitness column dives into wonderful, weird world of fitness trends and why they endure.
I’ve heard several of my friends’ new year’s resolutions by now and, for the most part, they have been predictable: exercise more, eat less takeout, delete that pesky sports betting app. Then, there was this more alliterative pledge that sounds something like a fringe medical procedure: dopamine detox.
Here is how it works: you temporarily deprive yourself of one or more sources of stimuli that bring you pleasure – such as junk food, alcohol, social media, gambling or sex – robbing you of the ensuing high and ostensibly “rewiring” your brain.
The rationale is that activities such as those ones trigger in the brain the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of pleasure, reward and motivation. When we engage in such habits compulsively, we start to crave them more, gradually raising our baseline for pleasure. Over time, activities that once brought joy no longer feel as satisfying. You know the feeling: it’s like eating the best ice cream cone of your life, only to order the very same cone the next day and it doesn’t satisfy you as much. It’s a key building block of addiction, and one of life’s huge bummers.
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Dopamine detox, in response, forces one to temporarily avoid these pleasurable behaviours and break that cycle of craving, at a time giving the brain a chance to crave other, healthier things, such as exercise, nature walks or social outings.
It’s a resolution that, on the surface, sounds perfectly suited for our times, as notification culture and crack-like social media apps have led hundreds of millions worldwide to become addicted to their phones. At the same time, gambling addiction is skyrocketing, buoyed by a prolific sports betting industry. Obesity is also at an all-time high, and more than 100 million people visit Pornhub daily. Easy hits of pleasure dominate our waking hours. I don’t consider myself to be addicted to anything (except for maybe distance running), and yet my daily phone usage eclipses six hours a day – before calling me crazy for it, check yours.
But is dopamine detox a proper way to break free of this sea of temptation and take control of our lives? First, we should understand where the term comes from, the real psychological interventions that underpin it and also the strange pitfalls it can contain.
Dopamine detox – or dopamine fasting – entered the zeitgeist via LinkedIn in 2019. Dr. Cameron Sepah, a Silicon Valley psychiatrist, posited that cutting off sources of dopamine such as social media or gambling could help us harness these compulsive behaviours and eventually find pleasure in simpler things. Then, the internet did its thing: the post went viral, and soon, stories of people trying to cut out all stimuli began to surface. Hardcore detoxers were spending full days in dark rooms, cutting communication with the outside world, not eating for dangerously long periods of time and even avoiding eye contact with other people. Still today, follow the wrong dopamine detox rabbit hole on YouTube, and you may be duped into living like a vampire for a week.
Aiming to rid oneself of all dopamine, of course, makes no sense: dopamine occurs naturally in the body, and the pleasure and motivation it provides are essential for survival and overall well-being. In fact, a lack of dopamine is strongly linked with Parkinson’s disease, ADHD, memory problems, and depression. Sepah responded to the term’s weird online mutation, clarifying in a follow-up LinkedIn post: ”We ARE NOT fasting from dopamine itself, but from impulsive behaviors reinforced by it.”
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The second half of that sentence is a bite-sized pearl of wisdom. By challenging ourselves to ignore our compulsions, whether it’s by putting the phone on silent for an afternoon or swearing off junk food for the week, it turns out that we are doing ourselves a deeply biochemical favour. In her book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, psychiatrist Anna Lembke writes that pain and pleasure are processed in the same region of the brain and are linked like two pals on a teeter totter. To expand on our previous example, the more ice cream cones we eat, the less pleasure each one tends to bring, all the way until the absence of an ice cream cone begins to cause pain. In contrast, developing the habit of doing something hard – such as, for example, waiting a week between each ice cream cone – eventually makes it easier for us to draw pleasure from the activity.
In other words: that delayed gratification will help to manage compulsive feelings and also increase your confidence in doing hard things. Put that way, dopamine detox is simply a Millennial-style take on ancient stimulus-limiting practices in our world, like silent meditation (whether within the confines of a one-hour yoga class or a 10-day Vipassana retreat) or the Jewish Sabbath.
It’s also just well-documented psychology in disguise. Teaching oneself to be comfortable with discomfort and abstain from compulsively turning to something pleasurable to distract from difficult thoughts is a foundational component of cognitive behavioural therapy: one of the best-known ways to break bad habits and form new, better ones. A more clinical approach to a dopamine detox might involve working with a professional to decide which habit to remove and for how long, and finding a replacement activity, like exercising daily.
So, the key takeaway of dopamine detox has nothing to do with dark rooms, extreme fasts or social isolation: it’s more about breaking bad habits and developing the discipline to form better ones. In fact, under its trendy name and layers of weird faddery hides an old truism that humans have already known for millennia: become comfortable with the uncomfortable. And the thing is, you will need some amount of dopamine to do that.