Dopamine Fasting: The Basics and What to Do Next

Dopamine is a popular brain chemistry term, which has recently become a part of our daily language. Produced in the brain, it is a neurotransmitter playing a role in many functions of organisms such as sleep, learning, motivation, memory, movement, and mood. However, dopamine fasting focuses on its one function: The reinforcement of pleasurable behaviors. As using or consuming a pleasurable substance or participating in behaviors that give pleasure releases dopamine, we tend to repeat them, which leads to the creation of certain reward pathways.

Let me explain this with a simple example: You taste a bar of chocolate and are thrilled by its flavor, then you know you get pleasure when you eat it next time. What dopamine fasting claims to be doing is resetting this pathway by making your brain forget that it gets pleasure from certain substances and behaviors to a certain extent. The real need for resetting the reward mechanism lies in the fact that we get used to eating a bar of chocolate gradually and need more bars to get the same level of pleasure. Thus, at some point, we find no motivation in the things we used to do and feel that the acceleration of our threshold for feeling pleasured and motivated needs to stop.

Dopamine fasting has been criticized by some scientific circles as being unproven, oversimplified, or inaccurate. The idea of reducing dopamine to ‘pleasure’ was faced with strong criticism as it has many other functions than just being a 'reward center'. On the other side, pleasure and addictive behaviors may be in the domain of other factors besides dopamine. Another reason why dopamine fasting drew criticism is that it links dopamine release to addiction by presenting mundane activities as potential precursors of addictions. Lastly, some scientists declared that they found the name misleading as it is both undesired and impossible to get rid of dopamine in our bodies because we need it for many reasons. What decreases with dopamine fasting is, in fact, the stimulation level our brains are exposed to and the behaviors triggered by them, not the neurotransmitter.

I have encountered two methods of dopamine fasting so far. The first, published on the YouTube channel called Improvement Pill in 2018, is practiced by abstaining from anything that gives pleasure such as eating, using mobile phones and the internet, watching videos or movies, reading books, drinking alcohol, consuming caffeine, using drugs, etc. Thus, it is a radical form of dopamine fasting during which even talking to people is forbidden. The activities that are allowed during fasting are drinking water, exercising, walking outside, meditating, and writing.

The main aim here is to create motivation for smaller rewards compared to those we have in our routines. In other words, doing nothing but boring stuff for a day or two per year will improve your capacity of enjoying difficult or mundane tasks. There is another benefit of doing dopamine fast with this method: It helps you focus on your problems by depriving you of the tools to suppress or mask them. People quite often escape from pain by pursuing pleasures, which leads them to live with their unsolved and deep-rooted problems. Thus, the first method provides an opportunity to pinpoint those issues and a clear mind to fix them.

The second method is less restrictive than the first as Dr. Cameron Sepah, who coined the term ‘dopamine fasting’ and published its rules on his LinkedIn account in 2019, makes a distinction between the activities or substances that overstimulate our brains’ reward mechanism and those that do not. In the method he formulated, eating healthy food is allowed while meals or snacks containing high levels of sugar, fat, carb, salt, or spice are on the list to avoid. Parallel to this, the faster can do a lot of things during the fasting window such as cooking, exercising, talking to people, reading, listening, writing, and getting involved in some creative work. How long and often the fasting takes place depends on the person’s circumstances: It can be limited to a small portion of the day, one weekend day per week, or one week per year.

Assuming that you practiced dopamine fast or want to give it a try, now you must be wondering what to do next. In other words, how does one maintain the reset dopamine level? When you go back to your routine after fasting, you can easily get accustomed to the high levels of dopamine again. Anna Lembke, the author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, suggests a way out for developing an adaptation to overstimulation. As a clinical psychiatrist who is familiar with patients suffering from addictions, she warns us that there is a link between feeding the dopamine pathways and developing addictive behaviors. Based on the broad definition of addiction, she underlines the fact that addiction cannot be limited to drug use, alcoholism, or gambling. As she illustrates in her book, behaviors that seem innocent and are a part of our normal lives, such as shopping or social media use can become an addiction if the person compulsively displays the behavior and cannot quit it even though he/she suffers.

To get back to our initial question of what to do next after the dopamine fast, Lembke is an advocate for using the working mechanism of “pleasure and pain balance” for the benefit of obtaining indirect and enduring pleasure. As she explains in her book, feeling one of the two emotions leads to feeling the other. In other words, if you get pleasure, a sense of pain will follow and vice versa. However, there is a trick to the mechanism, which is feeling pain at first can result in pleasure taking over and staying longer than the pleasure which would have been felt in the first place through easy-access dopamine-releasing activities. She gives two examples of painful behaviors that ultimately lead to a sense of pleasure that is not fleeting: ice-cold water immersion and exercise. However, Lembke stresses the importance of another activity as a cure for any kind of addictive behavior, and that is “to fully immerse yourself in the life”, or put differently, to be in the moment and absorbed in what you are doing in the here and now. 

References

“How To GET Your Life Back Together- Dopamine Fast.” YouTube, uploaded by Improvement Pill, 10 Nov. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl-44jDYDJQ.

Lanese, Nicoletta. “Is There Actually Science behind 'Dopamine Fasting'?” LiveScience, Purch, 19 Nov. 2019, https://www.livescience.com/is-there-science-behind-dopamine-fasting-trend.html.

Lembke, Anna. Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Dutton, 2021.

Sepah, Dr. Cameron. “The Definitive Guide to Dopamine Fasting 2.0- the Hot Silicon Valley Trend.” LinkedIn, LinkedIn, 8 Aug. 2019, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dopamine-fasting-new-silicon-valley-trend-dr-cameron-sepah/?src=affref&trk=affir_progid%3D8005_partid%3D10078_sid%3D_adid%3D449670&clickid=XRI1Y00LRxyNTln3ItVONx-YUkDRuwyBC0Lsxc0&mcid=6851962469594763264&irgwc=1.

Way, Katie. “'Dopamine Fasting' Is the Newest 'Sounds Fake, but Ok' Wellness Trend.” VICE, 17 Oct. 2019, https://www.vice.com/en/article/vb5qb9/dopamine-fasting-is-the-newest-sounds-fake-but-ok-wellness-trend.