Dopamine Detox: An Essential Neural Reset for the Modern World

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free. – Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

With each passing day, people are becoming more vigilant and more aware about the modern world’s impact on their psychology.

Various sites, YouTube channels, scientific journals, and blogs are spearheading the movement to understand reward-motivated behavior and how many things in this world are manipulating and conditioning our responses in order to create compulsive and addictive behavior.

This has lead many people, especially men, to do what is known as a “dopamine fast” or a “dopamine detox”.

At this point, you either:

• Know what it is and want to drill down deeper
• Have heard about it in passing
• Have absolutely no idea of what it is

No matter who you are, you are going to walk away with a fuller understanding of what it is after reading this dopamine detox guide.

You will then have the power and knowledge to steer your life in the direction you want it to go in, instead of letting it be decided by some social engineer in Silicon Valley (or God knows where).

What the Hell is a Dopamine Detox (Fast)?

A dopamine detox is the act of systematically removing low value activities and replacing them with higher value ones in order to create an intentional life free from or with a minimal amount of mindless, addictive behaviors.

Actually, the term “dopamine detox” is a bit of a misnomer. Some people have referred to it as “dopamine fasting”. A little more on the mark, but still – a bit left of center.

The thing is…you don’t “detox” or “fast” from dopamine.

Dopamine is constantly firing in our brains, as a naturally occurring chemical. No matter what you do, you will release some level of dopamine in response to an activity. Even reading this, you are releasing dopamine.

Some words get a bit “lost in translation” when translated to cultural vernacular.

The intention behind the words “fast” or “detox” in this instance imply that you are “taking a break from low value activities that release a potent neurochemical blend”.

As a result, I will use “fast” and “detox” interchangeably.

What is Dopamine? How Important is it?

There are few things ever dreamed of, smoked or injected that have as addictive an effect on our brains as technology. This is how our devices keep us captive and always coming back for more. – Kelly McGonigal, The Willpower Instinct

As someone who writes about self-improvement and behavioral psychology, it’s important for me to understand why humans do what humans do.

I’ve written about dopamine and how it relates to motivation, addiction, and life in general many times – but here’s an explanation if you’re new to this sort of thing.

In order to set off the chain of events for a certain habit or behavior, your brain fires off and sets up neurochemicals responsible for learning, habit formation, and reward-motivated behavior.

There’s many, but the prime chemical we care about right now is dopamine.

Dopamine is popular as a neurochemical, but it is not responsible for pleasure (as many people mistakenly believe). It’s responsible for craving, seeking, and motivation.

Dopamine is a prime player in what is known as the brain’s reward system, helping to make you alert to things in your environment that your brain flags as beneficial to survival. This has anything to do with:

• Food
• Sex
• Social Status
• “Feeling Good”

Dopamine attaches to what are called “dopamine receptors” and it is how dopamine is utilized in the brain.

Everyone comes into this world with a dopaminergic baseline provided by their genetics. Some people have higher than average dopamine receptors for dopamine to attach to, others have a slightly lower amount, but most people hover somewhere around the middle.

A person’s genetics, environment, upbringing, and socialization create a unique circumstance that will give two people different amount of dopamine receptors and responses to life.

Despite this, everyone generally responds to the same stimuli in basically similar ways with some outliers.

Take a simple behavior like eating ice cream or playing video games.

Most people like ice cream and many people like playing video games. However, some people REALLY love ice cream and some people REALLY love video games. Why? Different dopamine response (in combination with some other things).

You can get addicted to anything, really (I once had a music addiction), but the four buckets mentioned earlier are the main slots your compulsions will fall under. Any addiction you have will be a variant (or combination) of these 4.

At this point, there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that in the modern world, there’s few things out there that will kill us outright.

The bad news is that our brain doesn’t know that. Our brain still has evolutionary programming passed on from our ancestors who lived in a reward-deprived environment.

Most of us (especially in the first world) live in a reward-dense environment. This creates a jarring mismatch between environment and psychology. The result becomes behavior that is “overkill” (i.e. addiction) in proportion to the stimuli.

Someone who has a food addiction would have survived 20,000 years ago because eating too much would be better than eating too little or even just enough due to scarcity of resources. Now, having a food addiction might even get you killed because of eating high quantities of food loaded with sugar, fat, and salt (which are everywhere).

A social media addict would have had the upper hand because they were always alert to newness in the form of status updates and information, even though they lack focus. Now, most work is focus-sensitive. If you lack focus, you won’t be able to complete tasks, which means you’ll soon be out of a job.

A drug addict may have been elevated to the level of shaman due to their ability to occasionally access altered states. Now, they are just a statistic in the opioid epidemic.

And all of this because of a shifting neurochemical baseline triggered by dopamine.

Dopamine Fasting and the Neurobiological Baseline

In a dopamine detox, the main questions we want to know are:

• How much dopamine am I releasing in a response to a stimulus AND
• Is this stimulus something I want to wire my brain to

As stated before, the purpose of the dopamine fast is to withdraw from or completely get rid of activities that produce a good amount of neurological stimulation at low value.

Smoking cigarettes, watching porn, doing drugs, playing tons of video games, going on social media – none of these produce value for others nor do they help you be more productive.

What these do is shift your baseline for “acceptable” even higher.

The first time you take drugs or have sex, the high is unimaginable. You are on cloud 9. You unconsciously spend days, months, even years trying to get a taste of that feeling again.

Addiction is the compulsive response (unconsciously) to recapture that first high.

But you can’t. Why?

Because previously, the brain had nothing else to relate the experience to.

Your brain is a comparative machine which is always making relating this to that.

Things such as:

• This woman is hotter than that woman
• This food is better than that food
• This car is better than that car

In this instance, your brain is comparing and contrasting low stimulation/high value activities (work, physical exercise, reading, learning an instrument) to high stimulation/low value activities (sex, taking drugs, drinking alcohol, watching porn, watching TV, going on social media).

The thing is, the activities that produce high(er) value in the world are often very boring.

Well, they’re not boring, they just aren’t as stimulating as a lower value activity.

If you’re reading this, you most likely have a job or go to school. Is that as stimulating as going out, having a wild night, and hooking up with a cutie? Probably not.

But you go to school so you can learn skills that will make you valuable. You put those skills to work and are paid for your value. It is only after you put in the effort that you get the reward (delayed gratification).

But what happens when you are wrapped up in activities that shift your dopaminergic baseline over time?

Those lower stimulation/high value activities become less stimulating.

The low-stim/high value activities aren’t even a blip on your radar, making you less likely to engage in them.

The high-stim/low value activities then become things are very attractive, making you want to do them more.

When this behavior is compounded over 5, 10, 20 years – you get a life of lapsed productivity and eventual addiction, where you become a slave instead of a master.

You seek pleasure endlessly, but get none of it.

You always wander, but never find.

You become a human ATM in the modern attention economy.

To me? That kind of life? No thanks.

So right off the bat, the dopamine fast sounds like something everyone would do knowing this.

Still, even with knowledge, there is resistance even coming from so called “learned people”.

Ivory Tower Resistance Against the “Fasting Protocol”

You would think that a dopamine detox makes logical sense and it does.

But it experiences resistance from so-called “logical people” who say that it’s nonsense and it doesn’t work.

Exhibit A:

B:

C:

and D:

These are from educated people. As in, people who have college degrees and have gone through the higher learning system. You would think that these people would be the first to jump on it and see the value in it, but nope.

Because here’s the thing: as educational attainment increases, so does over-reliance on “knowledge”.

People who are very educated are often too smart for their own good and distrust or even disparage anything that hasn’t been “proven” by science. These people often lack experiential understanding.

Under the guise of being an elite academician, a person can write off self-help because they think it is bullshit.

But the thing is: everything affects everyone differently.

Self-development is largely concerned with the application of subjective psychology, which is non-measurable. A dopamine detox will have measurable quantitative affects on your life but those only come from internal change.

If your mom or dad dies and I reduce your subjective experience to nothing more than cortisol and brain distress, I trivialize your suffering and reduce you to a delusional person. This is what I call “scientific gaslighting”.

Thus, many people resist the dopamine detox because it lacks quantifiable data. There is no number for you to realize how your social media addiction is affecting you.

Because after all, it is pretty ego-destroying to know that you’ve spent many years of your life acquiring “book smarts” and studying but your life is a mess because you don’t understand the first thing about controlling your behavior.

It’s better off to write it off as “it’s bullshit and I don’t have a problem. My life is just fine” instead of admitting that the biggest room in the world – is room for improvement.

Dopamine Detox and the Quantifiable Benefits

As alluded to earlier, my benefits from this will be different from yours.

We have different backgrounds, physiology, and psychology meaning the subjective effects it has on your life will be part of your own inner world and yours alone. It may be the best thing that you’ve ever done or it could just be “another thing” you do.

Regardless, the dopamine detox will have marked effects on the visible part of your life. Here’s some of them you can expect:

• Greater time management – It’s no secret that you can’t do two things at the same time. When you stop spending time on low value activities, you can then redirect that time, towards something more meaningful and something of higher value.
• Better financial allocation – The saying time is money is relatively true, especially if your time is billable by the hour (salespeople, contractors, etc.). You’ll be able to use the free time to work harder and make more money and you’ll also be spending less (lower Internet usage, not buying social media games, less money spent on streaming video).
• More motivation to accomplish – While this is an intangible “thing” the effects of motivation are visible. When you have less stimulus to latch on to, you will hunger for things to do. You’ll get bored. You’ll then redirect that towards something like reading a book or learning a skill, something that will level you up in life.
• Higher resonance to life – Life in general will start to take on a new meaning. You will get your stimulus from “out there” instead of “in here”, so you’re then forced to engage with other people in order to get your “fix”. You will be interested in conversations with others. You will be interested in connecting. You will be interested in providing value as a citizen of life.
• Increased ability to know one’s self – Part of the dopamine detox involves removal. That is, removal of the pervasive illusions that prevent us from digging deeper and uncovering parts of ourselves that were forgotten or ignored. With less in the way, you can’t hide from yourself. This allows you to know yourself and your motives better. It is uncomfortable but necessary work.

How to Do a Dopamine Detox

Since the dopamine detox is meant to reduce your brain’s reliance on external non-productive stimuli, there is a process on how to do this effectively.

1. Write down all of your bad habits and their origins.

A bad habit can be defined as anything that detracts from goals as a human being and your effectiveness to achieve those goals in the long run.

A major (unconscious) goal that many people have is to “live a happy and fulfilling life”. It’s a vague goal, but it’s still a goal nonetheless. Thus, a majority of your bad habits will be things that take away from your happiness in the short to long run.

If one of your pre-requisites to a happy life is being financially stable, then anything related to undermining that financial stability is a bad habit.

Then we drill deeper. You make money from being productive at work (especially if you’re in something commission-based). Things that affect your work performance such as going on social media, constantly checking your phone, Internet browsing.

Those are your habits you need to get rid of.

2. List your dopamine inducing behaviors from most consequential to least.

These are things that often take up a lot of time and a lot of mental real-estate. These are often things you use to escape.

For drug addicts, their subconscious mind is always focusing on when they’ll next get high and how they’ll get it. This makes you MIA for anything else.

But most people aren’t junkies, so the next major bad behavior is sex and/or porn addiction. Many guys spend much of their time thinking about the next women they’ll sleep with or see naked on a screen, using up mental focus that could be used towards a better life.

Next would probably be something like social media, then the next would probably be video games and so on.

3. Pick the hardest one and go cold turkey on it.

When you figure out the most compulsive one, take it out of our life immediately.

If you have enough willpower, you could probably eliminate a top-level suite of your addictive behaviors all at once.

Hats off to you if you can do it, but more likely than not, this will fail because you are pushing your brain out of homeostasis and it will react by punishing you with intense cravings and withdrawal, feeling as if you are close to dying.

The most lasting behavioral change happens systematically. With a gradual approach, you focus your attention on staying away from the source of stimulus. If this is video games, you just don’t play video games for a specific amount of time. At this point you may ask:

Why not gradually weaning off?

Because by weaning off, you allow room for rationalization and excuses to creep in. You say:

Oh, just one time won’t hurt…

Then you’re back to square one, desperately trying to stop. Except the behavior is now more entrenched and has a tighter grip on you.

So the best solution is to just drop it. No more ifs, ands, or buts. No more means no more.

Note: If you’re an alcoholic and go cold turkey, there’s a chance you could die. However, this process mainly refers to behavioral addictions. If you have a serious addiction to alcohol or hard drugs, I recommend you seek professional guidance.

4. Start eliminating mid-tier pulls.

Next up? The reduction of things that offer stimulation for longer periods of time. These things often take a good amount of mental bandwidth over the course of days, weeks, or months. For most people this will be some form of technology, which is characteristic of the attention economy.

Examples of this are super-involving television series, sport seasons, or week long gaming tournaments. People spend hours and even an entire day watching football. Over the course of a regular football season, that’s 16 games, with each game about 3 hours. Add that up over the course of months and years – you get a lot of time.

Think about gaming tournaments. Spending weeks preparing, playing hours a day. That again is a large time suck.

Add this up with everything else you do in your life and that’s a lot of time not being spent on doing things that move the needle.

This is fine if you’re happy with where you’re at in life (or even retired). But if you’re reading this, chances are that you’re in the process of going throughout your career and doing the things you want to do in life.

You simply can’t afford to get sucked in for long periods of time. You’ve got work to do.

5. Get bored.

After you let go of these things, you will encounter boredom.

Boredom is how you start the wheels in motion towards action. Boredom is a sedentary state and humans always want to be in motion, so we will do whatever to be in motion.

However, with a dopamine detox, the environmental default is now that of productivity and sharpening the person you are. As a result, you will do actions that make you a stronger man now and in the future.

6. Address underlying emotional deficiencies.

Addictive behavior is often a substitute for emotional needs that aren’t met. This can be anything from loneliness, to anxiety, or even anger.

A good question to ask is:

What lead me to this behavior?

You very well may have started your behavior as a child or an adolescent and never stopped, making it a deeply-entrenched habit. More often than not, things that are engaged in compulsively are used to compensate for needs that aren’t being met.

When you take drugs, excessively browse the Internet, or watch porn – that’s a lot of psychological bandwidth those things are compensating for in your life.

Whether it be anything from social anxiety, to a lack of friends or just plain inability to withstand boredom, you need to know what makes these bad behaviors so attractive in your life. Then, make a plan to address your emotional gaps and resolve to do whatever it takes to do so.

7. Start the process to rewire your brain.

A whole point of a dopamine detox is intended to rewire your brain and remove reliance on external low-value cues. As such, this will involve refrain and engagement.

You can do this through a period of relative silence (monk mode), you can do this gradually (one out, one in), or as stated earlier – all at once. Either way, you are going to have to replace engagement with high-stim/low value behaviors with a suite of good habits.

For example, you are unlikely to encounter anything that’s as stimulating and engaging as drugs are in the real day-to-day world. When you remove it entirely, you are leaving a large psychological void that needs to be accounted for. It’s possible to remove it and be “ok” and not have to replace it with anything – but that is not the case for most people. You replace this with a suite of habits that make you more productive and engaging as a man.

Since the dopamine detox is ultimately a habit replacement system, it then begs the question:

How long does it take to form a habit?

The answer to this question varies depending on the difficulty of the habit. A habit such as smoking is easier to start than a habit of meditation.

Smoking requires little to no conscious thought and is immediately pleasurable. Whereas meditation is more mechanically complex to execute and requires time to see benefits.

It is possible to get to the point where meditation is easier than smoking, but in the short-term it is not.

Either way, you want to be focused on creating a combination of habits that replace large bad ones and create definitive lifestyle shifts.

Whether this takes a week or a year, you should be in it to win it.

Conclusion + Wrapping Up

Many things in our modern world interact with our psychology in ways that can create vast amounts of compulsive and addictive behavior. More people are understanding this, so they are choosing to purposefully withdraw from specific stimulating activity either indefinite or for a period of time long enough to reduce the psychological attraction to it.

This is called a “dopamine detox”, but you aren’t actually “detoxing” from dopamine. What you are detoxing from are high stimulation activities that have little to no benefit for yourself or the external world. These often involve activities that offer high amounts of instant gratification for little or no effort. Push button, get good feelings.

Unfortunately, over time, this makes you less effective in the world because you are training your psychology for instant gratification. You won’t be able to compete in the modern world or be an effective person because everything else seems less rewarding than high stimulation, low value activities. Thus, someone engages in the dopamine detox to alter this.

A dopamine detox is done by systematically eliminating top level, then mid level, then low level stimulation activities until motivation for low stimulation, high value activities return. The rewiring process for these can vary, but it ultimately depends on how much of an addiction you have developed to the stimuli, how long you have been doing them, and how much they compensate for needs that are not being fulfilled.

The benefits of a dopamine detox cast a wide net and ultimately make someone who has a functional brain and is an asset instead of a liability.

I want to hear your thoughts on this: what do you think about the dopamine detox? Have you done it before? What were your results? Let me know in the comments.