How to Improve Your Life with Dopamine Detox | The Science Behind
In this episode I’m traveling from sandy Dubai, the place where I live, to snowy Finland to see what Dopamine Detox can do for me. And here’s why this might interest you.
Have you ever felt agitation or nervousness when you can’t find your phone? 73% of people feel this type of anxiety, which makes sense when you consider that we spend on average 2 to 4 hours tapping, typing and swiping which adds up to 2600 daily touches.
The unpleasant truth is that every day we are being bombarded by dopamine stimuli. Text notifications, social media, shopping, a pause for pleasure eating, maybe porn, maybe sex, and then back to some new technology. All this is giving us every day unprecedented amounts of dopamine. And just the idea of not having access to it, makes us feel stressed or depressed. Like when you can’t find your phone.
Dopamine is a chemical produced by our brains that plays a major role in motivating behaviour. It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after a good exercise session, and when we have successful social interactions!
So when you hear the sound your phone does when receiving a text, you get this dopamine hit. Because this sound signals the potential of a successful social interaction. But when you open the text and see it’s the credit card statement from your bank, your excitement immediately drops again.
The Challenge of Dopamine
We constantly hear how dopamine is a good thing and that raising its level will help make us happier, more fulfilled human beings. And who doesn't want that?
However, too much of a good thing can actually harm our overall health and happiness in the long run. Seeking too many activities for that dopamine "hit" lowers your baseline dopamine level in the long run, which means that your motivation drops—a LOT.
Too much Dopamine is linked to being more aggressive and having poor impulse control. In other words, it can lead to binge eating, binge watching, gambling, infinite Instagram scrolling, and many other addictions.
My day looks like this. I wake up, I walk for 30 minutes, I make breakfast and by 9 I start work. I have a 9 to 5 job and many days I don’t finish till like 6 or 7. Then I pause for a workout and then back in front of the screen to study for my psychology degree. If I’m not studying, I’ll be working for my side business, Design Thyself, writing my new book, exploring business ideas, or creating content, like the video you’re watching right now. I have a link below for designthyself.com in case you want to check more on this.
In this busy schedule, the moments of delight in my daily life will usually be instagram reels or a Netflix show after work.
This lifestyle makes me spend roughly 12-13 hours a day in front of a screen. Full of digital stimuli and dopamine hits. And lately, I’m really feeling the downsides of it.
A couple of weeks ago, I took a short break from work as my eyes couldn’t focus on the screen anymore. I went out for a walk by the canal and noticed the reflections of the water on the bridge. I looked around and everything seemed as if it was unreal. Fake. Like a dream or a simulation. I took my phone out to take a picture of the reflection and when I saw my phone’s screen, it felt real. I really don’t know how to explain it, but whatever I was seeing on the screen looked real, while the real world around me felt like a dream. Have you ever felt the same? If yes, leave a comment below with your experience.
That’s when I realized that I am addicted to the screen and all the stimuli I get through all the screens I use daily. And they are many. I have my work laptop for my 9-5 job, I have my personal laptop for my studies and side business, I have my work phone for work meetings and calls and I have my personal phone for being in touch with friends family, and social media. Plus the TV and my iPad.
That's where dopamine fasting comes into play.
Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, told an audience of Stanford students “I feel tremendous guilt. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works”.
I definitely feel affected by this and I really want to change my relationship with dopamine.
My experience with dopamine fasting.
In the same way that you do intermittent fasting when it comes to food, you can do intermittent fasting for dopamine.
Dopamine fasting, or dopamine detox, means significantly lowering your dopamine intake, making it less habitual. This can look like taking a break from the internet and spending time in a place that has considerably fewer stimuli.
But instead of just researching and writing about it from a purely theoretical perspective, I decided to try it myself.
I decided to do a 7-day dopamine detox and hopefully inspire some of you to change your relationship with dopamine too.
I took some time off, booked a plane ticket to somewhere quiet, and set some rules for those 7 days.
No social media
No Netflix, YouTube or any other digital entertainment
No sugar
No alcohol
Actually, Iet's go all in. No digital device for the next 7 days. I’ll only keep my phone for the booking confirmations and plane tickets. That’s it.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s try to understand dopamine first as there are many misconceptions about it.
So before we explain how dopamine fasting works, let’s take a closer look at what dopamine really is and how it operates in the brain.
What is dopamine, and how does it work?
To understand how to influence this neuromodulator we call dopamine, we need to understand its origin and its release mechanism in our brain.
Believe it or not, dopamine is not only responsible for the pleasure you feel after eating that delicious ice cream. Or after throwing a big party for your accomplishments.
Dopamine’s central role is in motivation, drive, AND craving (yes, I know you're still thinking about that ice cream).
Dopamine can also have a role in time perception and movement - for example, people with Parkinson's disease have significantly lower dopamine levels in their brains.
We hear that a low level of dopamine coupled with a low level of serotonin can mean that you're depressed and that increasing dopamine will make you happier. But it's not quite that simple.
So let's spend a couple of minutes to get into the science of it all. Don't be put off by all the terminology; I promise you it will make sense in the end.
Dopamine has two main pathways.
The first one is the mesocortical limbic pathway, and it's mainly responsible for reward processing behavior and executive functions. This is basically the reward pathway and it has been shown to be dysfunctional in cases of addiction.
The other pathway goes from the substantia nigra to the nigrostriatal pathway, and it is primarily responsible for movement.
So the first one makes me understand that something is rewarding and the other makes me move towards it.
Dopamine has two main modes of communication.
Dopamine can be released locally or more broadly.
A local release is synaptic (from one neuron to another), and a broad release is volumetric (dopamine release to thousands of cells).
The Release of Dopamine
Neurons can communicate through ionotropic connections, which is a fast way for neurons to communicate with each other; something like fiber internet.
But dopamine has slow effects because it functions through G-protein coupled receptors. Those receptors exist on the surface of cells and their job is to convert outside signals into cellular responses. Including responses to hormones, neurotransmitters, as well as responses to vision, smell and taste signals. And those responses are the ones that affect our motivation, our pleasure, our cognition, our memory, our learning, and our fine movement control.
Communication through G-protein receptors is a slower process, which means that effects take a longer time until they occur– but what this also means is that they last for longer.
Dopamine never acts alone.
Dopamine just contributes to pleasure; it's not the star of the show. The primary neurotransmitters responsible for pleasure are actually serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin.
Dopamine also cooperates with adrenaline and glutamate (the primary component that stimulates neurons).
How does dopamine really work?
Now let's bring all of those things together and see how dopamine circuits actually work.
After you have a peak in dopamine (say, like when you win a football game that you've been training for a long time, or when the presentation you worked on so hard is accepted by your client, or after your first kiss with someone you really like), what you experience then is a heightened state of enthusiasm, like an overflow of feel-good emotions.
It's important to mention that you still have dopamine in your system when you don't experience that dopamine peak; dopamine is never missing from your brain.
However, after you experience a peak, your baseline level drops. Because what goes up must, eventually, come down.
This process is the so-called "tonic and phasic release of dopamine."
So there is this pleasure-pain balance in our brain. Every time you experience something amazing and highly pleasurable (e.g., the peak), you also experience an equal drop - because the brain has to "even out" the considerable pleasure you just felt.
This is called homeostasis, and it is a natural inclination of our brain. To want to bring balance to our system.
And when your dopamine level is medium, your actual level of dopamine will modulate according to the one you had a couple of moments ago.
Remember when I told you about the two modes of communication (synaptic & volumetric)?
Essentially, when the difference between the peak and baseline is smaller, what happens is that both these modes are released (this can happen when you take certain supplements that increase dopamine)
What happens when you have too many dopamine peaks?
When you experience these dopamine peaks too frequently, the threshold slowly increases. With every new height, it grows further.
And the more the threshold rises, the harder it is to find joy in the things you used to find joy in. So you start to lose your overall interest and motivation. Sounds familiar?
But how long does it take for dopamine to recover?
The thing is, it takes a significant amount of time for dopamine to get back into "motivation" mode after experiencing a peak & drop.
I believe the problem in today's technologically polluted world isn't so much that we people aren't connected, but that we no longer feel that drive to engage in the things and activities we used to enjoy before; and a lot of it is due to this compulsive seeking for the next best thrill.
What is dopamine fasting and how does it work?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions about dopamine fasting.
Let's get our facts straight. We must establish what dopamine fasting does.
Fasting doesn't lower the dopamine per se; instead, it reduces the threshold. A true dopamine detox, in a sense, is not possible because dopamine naturally occurs in the brain.
Ideally, a dopamine detox implies a random intermittent release of dopamine and reward schedules, essentially reducing that chase for the peak as much as possible.
The end goal shouldn't be to potentiate the activity you abstain from after the actual fasting period. The end goal would be to balance out the threshold. So that you don't have a significant crash every time you enjoy something too much.
So the purpose here is not to eliminate dopamine from our system. The goal is to reduce harmful behaviors. In essence, dopamine fasting works like addiction treatments via reducing exposure to stimuli that cause harm. It's not surprising, given that dopamine has a role in addiction and essentially acts like an opioid.
This technique is called stimulus control, and it is widely used in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)
The actual addiction is to the internet or social media, not to dopamine itself. Dopamine is just a chemical released when engaging in these activities. And when you engage in them compulsively, you develop an addiction.
So the purpose of a dopamine detox is to step away from harmful behaviors and regulate that overflowing release.
Traveling to Finland
So here I am. In beautiful snowy Finland. Away from social media, away from notifications, away from screens. Lost in my thoughts, somewhere in the Arctic Circle, where even the sea is frozen. And in this vast white nothingness, I’m trying to regulate my brain and find reality in the things that are actually real. Feeling relaxed.
Exposure to nature, whether it's a walk in a park or a day spent hiking in the woods, has been linked to several benefits, such greater focus, reduced stress, better mood, lower risk of psychiatric diseases, and even increases in empathy and cooperation.
And it feels so calming to have replaced my 6 screens with the company of a good book. Instead of feeling consumed, which is what I feel after using my screens, now I feel more present. And every time I look around me, everything feels real again.
A dopamine detox is when you abstain from those unhealthy habits for long period of time, which is what I did. But the thing with what I did is that it’s not sustainable. I could only do it because I combined my vacation with the dopamine detox I wanted to do.
Now back in everyday life, I do have to work and I do have to study and I do want to continue making videos like this, so please hit the like button, it really helps me continue doing those videos, so ideally what I will need to do for this to be more sustainable is to do dopamine fasting. Which is to abstain for shorter periods of time within my daily schedule.
In the beginning of the year I created this weekly schedule thinking it would serve me. I have my 9-5 job then a short break, then back to either study or working on my side business. But after 3 months of doing it I can see that it’s not working for me. So I need to create some breaks in between to allow myself to unplug and reset.
Final thoughts
In these times and days, technology can undoubtedly become EASILY addictive.
All these "hits" that we get from our devices and the internet soon start to fall short, weakening the response in our brain's reward center decreasing the reactivity to the stimuli. And what are we left with?
Well, we're left only with the craving. And at the end of the day, too much is never enough.
However, we keep engaging in these harmful activities repeatedly in the hopes that it will make us feel something.
We live in a fast paced, distracted, disconnected digital world. It's hard to even imagine a world devoid of technology. And we definitely shouldn't; that's not the point.
Given that there is so much external stimulation, the human brain is more overwhelmed than ever before. Therefore, it's more probable that our dopaminergic systems are overstimulated.
The thing is, there are still some things that haven't changed in our brains. It's still very primitive in some ways.
A lot of what we can call pathologies nowadays can essentially be explained as a mismatch between the native architecture of our minds and the artificial environment in which we live today.
According to a quote from a beautiful scientific article, "Our modern skulls still house a Stone Age mind."
That means that in a constantly changing world (and at whooping speed, I might add), you can't force the brain to behave adaptively every time, because it can't always keep up with the novel architecture of the world outside.
If for nothing else, it will do us well to remove ourselves from this artificial world for a bit, engage with nature & live closer to the way our ancestors did. This is more in tune with our brain's natural chemistry.
And nobody can deny that reducing social media from our lives has beneficial effects on our mental health - so many studies prove this.
Now that we understand dopamine fasting better, what should we do after using it? What can it teach us?
Here’s what this journey taught me. Dopamine’s most crucial role is to seek. It's a forager and a driver of action.
The sweet spot should be the effort and the process - that's where dopamine truly shines.
Back to that ice cream: it's not only the ice cream that matters; the thought of the ice cream - specifically - the craving, matters just as much.
The motivation to do what we do just because we like the process of doing it, is the epicenter of every success story that I have ever heard. Enjoying the journey just as much (or close to) the actual achievement is what makes life, well... life.
“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.” — Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
So it's worth looking for balance by seeking intrinsic motivation instead of quick external rewards. This gives us the power to control dopamine overflow, not to chase peaks, and not focusing only on the wins.
Because guess what? Dopamine is not only there; it can be everywhere!
So hit the like button to give some dopamine to the youtube algorithm to promote this video to other people too. It’s a small act you can do that means a lot to me and to the future of this channel. And make sure to hit subscribe too. I share videos on how to live a well lived life.
Im Dimitris, I hope you got something out of this video and always remember to question why you want the things you think you want?