Dopamine Fasting

Dopamine fasting, for me, is not using any kind of electronics, not consuming any kind of food, not communicating with people. Basically, isolating myself from all of the things in the modern world that can release dopamine. In the last five years or so, there's been a trend in the Silicon Valley tech executives to do a dopamine fast. When you're doing a dopamine fast, you're not fasting from dopamine. What you're doing is you're fasting from the substances or the behaviours that cause a release of dopamine in the reward pathway. I started this practice back in 2015. It was initially a confused response from my friends, and I think that just goes to show how normalized social media, electronics, high-dopamine activities usage has become. I was not necessarily surprised that people were like, "What is this? This is strange." The world of overabundance is a new and unprecedented human stressor. It's very paradoxical because we think, "Oh, we've got all these material goods that we ever wanted. Our lives should be great." And, in fact, what's happened is that we've reached this tipping point where the more stuff we have, the less happy we actually are.

Dopamine is a chemical that we make in our brains. It is essential to the experience of pleasure, reward, and motivation. The more dopamine that we release in the specific part of our brain called the reward pathway, the more reinforcing or pleasurable that substance or experience is. One of the most exciting findings in neuroscience in the past 75 years is that the same parts of the brain that process pleasure also process pain, and they work like opposite sides of a balance. So, for example, when I eat a piece of chocolate—I like chocolate—I get a little release of dopamine, and my balance tilts to the side of pleasure, but no sooner has that happened than my brain adapts to that increased dopamine by downregulating dopamine transmission. And I like to imagine that as these little neuroadaptation gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again. But the gremlins like it on the balance, so they don't hop off as soon as it's level. They stay on until the balance is tilted an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. That's the comedown, the hangover, the aftereffect.

We know that social media engineers are quite literally putting as much dopaminergic stimulation into their products as possible. We've never had so many processed foods before, ever available to humans. Pornography is extremely stimulating, and, you know, especially with the use of high-speed Internet, it's accessible in a way it wasn't even two decades ago. Modern drugs—cannabis has become roughly ten times more potent than it was 50 or 100 years ago. And the practice of dopamine fasting is to sort of undo some of those hooks. When I dopamine fast, it happens just for one day, so just 24 hours. When I wake up in the morning, all I'm allowed to do is meditate, journal, drink some water, walk, and think. And that's it. No socialization. No computer, no social media. And I only do it once a quarter. This practice of going outside influence or stimulus is not necessarily new. Buddhists can attest to the value of that. But I think it's actually more important in the modern world because we have the most engineered, stimulating factors that have ever existed in human history.

This primitive wiring for seeking out pleasure and avoiding pain is adapted for a world of scarcity and ever-present danger. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, right? That's a very clever strategy in an environment where, if you're not constantly looking for the next watering hole or the next source of food, you are going to die. But it's an absolutely horrible neurological mechanism in a world where a swipe right or swipe left can get you cocaine, cannabis, sex, video games—you name it. So now we're walking around with our balances chronically tilted to the side of pleasure, such that we need more and more potent forms of pleasure to feel anything good at all. So what are we going to do about it? It's very unlikely that our brains, our reward circuits, are going to change. That reward circuit has been conserved over millions of years of evolution and across species. The reward pathway in the human brain is pretty much identical to the reward pathway in the lizard brain and every other organism that you're going to look at.

So instead, what we have to do is really change our ecosystem. Through meditation, through journaling, while I'm dopamine fasting, there are some things that I discover about myself, like, "Oh, I'm actually not really enjoying this job. Maybe I want to switch jobs." Or, "Hey, I have an idea for something that I've been putting off, and I think I should finally pursue this." You can think about this as a productivity tool, and it's a fine way to do that. Personally, I find that it's more of like a self-exploration tool. I have found that, as I've matured in this practice, my body will start to crave it. I'm actually dopamine fasting in three days. I've already dopamine fasted this quarter, but again, as I noticed in my intuition, my body was like, "Yeah, I could use another one."

It's not as crazy as it sounds, and it's not as difficult as it might sound. There is value—biochemically, physiologically, evolutionarily—in being bored and being alone with your thoughts. A dopamine fast definitely resets reward pathways. The problem is, what do you do after that, right? As people then go back to their regular lives. I'm a psychiatrist. I work with people with severe addictions to all kinds of substances and behaviours. Yes, people can get addicted to behaviour. I've seen people as addicted to gambling, pornography, video games, and social media as they get addicted to cocaine, cannabis, alcohol, and nicotine. So it's the same disease process. And what I've been doing for about 20 years in my clinic is a different kind of dopamine fast, where I ask people not to abstain from every pleasurable experience in their lives, but rather to identify that substance or behaviour that they have a problematic relationship with. Abstain from your drug of choice for 30 days. Why 30 days? Well, 30 days is the average amount it takes for those neuroadaptation gremlins on the pain side of the balance to hop off and a level balance to be restored. Here's the thing about the gremlins: they are agnostic to which side of the balance is tilted first. If we initially tilt the balance to the side of pain, like with exercise, for example, or an ice-cold water bath, those gremlins will react by hopping on the pleasure side of the balance, which means that we get our dopamine indirectly, and that's something that I prescribe to my patients and recommend in my book Dopamine Nation. That the better way to get your dopamine is indirectly, by paying for it up front.