Can the ‘Dopamine Detox’ Trend Break a Digital Addiction?
No podcasts, videos or Netflix. No junk food, gambling or porn. Video gaming? No way. Instagram? Forget it. Music? Nope. Lock up your phone and hide your earbuds. It’s dopamine detox time, and it’s going to change your life. That’s the gist of the messages from a large number of posts, blogs and wellness websites out there, all promoting a quick-fix for people’s depressed moods and lack of productivity.
Understanding the Digital Reset
“The idea is to allow our brains a break and reset from potentially addictive things like our phones, the likes, the texts, the beeps, the rings,” said Emily Hemendinger, MPH, LCSW, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. These sorts of things – like the internet, gambling and substance abuse – provide instant dopamine surges, typically unhealthy ones.
According to Hemendinger, the trend involves avoiding overstimulating activities:
- No podcasts, videos or Netflix.
- No junk food, gambling or porn.
- Video gaming? No way.
- Instagram? Forget it.
- Music? Nope.
The Science of Dopamine and Overstimulation
The terms dopamine detox and dopamine fast are really misleading because dopamine is one of our body’s neurotransmitters. It’s a naturally occurring chemical in our brain, and you can’t get rid of it. Dopamine is involved in our body’s system for reward and motivation and learning and pleasure, and dopamine does rise in response to rewards or pleasurable activities, but avoiding those overstimulating activities doesn’t eliminate it.
Our brain’s response to the non-stop stimulation of our phones can be compared to drug addiction. It does create this dependence. Because we are overstimulating it, our brain starts to downregulate our own dopamine production and transmission to bring it back to baseline. And that dopamine deficit can result in feelings like depression and anxiety and all the physical effects of depression, like low motivation, low energy.
Breaking the Scrolling Habit
Scrolling is addictive. The way they have social media set up is really smart, because it keeps us scrolling, and it gives us rewards. So we keep engaging in these behaviors like scrolling on our phones not to feel good and happy but just to feel normal.
As with drugs and alcohol, basically people build a tolerance to scrolling or video gaming and ‘need’ more. So taking a break or decreasing the amount of time on our phones will help, but it’s not going to make you feel a million times better in seven days. Really, what it is, is it’s a repackaged idea of mindfulness and behavior modification.