Dopamine Detox — Hacking your Brain to Work for You
What is a dopamine detox, and does it work?
A few months ago, I came across a video on YouTube that first introduced me to a time management strategy called Dopamine Fasting. The idea is to deprive yourself of as much unnecessary pleasure as possible to combat the excessive amounts of dopamine in our brains. Over the years, I seem to have encountered new ways to make myself miserable, but the idea of doing it on purpose for once intrigued me.
The video goes on to explain how dopamine is an often overlooked and significant factor in our motivation to do things famous experiment by James Olds and Peter Milnerin where rats were given a surge of dopamine every time they pulled a lever and found that the rats would pull the lever over and over for hours on end. When the experiment was reversed and the release of dopamine was blocked, the rats refused to eat, sleep or mate. When it came to deciding behaviours, dopamine levels in the body overrode even basic survival instincts. By the end of the video, I had made a very startling discovery: I had lived my whole life being no different from one of Olds’ and Milnerin’s rats
You see, between how much social media we consume, junk food we eat, and shows we watch, dopamine is released in increasingly high frequencies for accomplishing tasks that aren’t productive. Your brain compares these activities to ones like doing homework or working out and decides that there isn’t a high enough immediate reward for doing them at all. By taking a break from engaging in high-dopamine activities, you allow your brain to reset its pleasure sensors, which lets you identify the root causes of the compulsive need to engage in these activities in the first place.
The Journey Begins
Starting the next day, I began my 30-day Dopamine Detox — from the time I woke up to 9:00 p.m., I didn’t consume any social media, watch any shows/movies, or eat any junk food. I deleted apps off my phone and used tools like iOS’ screen time to regulate my usage of the ones I kept. For the first few days, I became anxious about my friends trying to contact me on social media. After a while of opening these platforms after a long day to zero notifications, however, this anxiety passed. I wrote a list of everything I needed to accomplish and organized it by priority and due date. By the second week, I had begun crossing off a couple of items a day (mostly because I had nothing better to do), but they were still dull and annoying for me to finish.
Things did brighten up after that, though — I lost the constant urge to check my phone because I became used to not getting notifications throughout the day, I had been more productive than ever, and finally felt confident in loosening up my initial restrictions. I realized that there is no problem with engaging in activities that we enjoy, even if they aren’t productive, as long as they are kept in check. By the end of my detox, I could confidently dedicate time for watching movies or take 10-minute social media breaks, knowing it wouldn’t interfere with my work and that I’d only spend a limited amount of time on them a day.
“The key is in not spending time, but in investing it”
~ Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
To anyone struggling with time management or lack of motivation, I highly recommend doing a 30 day dopamine detox; just be sure to adjust and customize to your life and what takes up most of your time!
