Inspired by Neuroscientist, Psychotherapist, and YouTuber Dr. Kanojia

I’ve been hearing a lot about detoxes from social media, screen usage, gaming, etc. The idea is to stray away from activities or habits that cause large rushes of dopamine, a form of digital temperance, if you will. This practice and advice have good intentions.

However, dopamine detoxes can cause the opposite effect, sometimes creating potentially destructive side effects.

The Purpose of Dopamine

Dopamine, released by our brain’s nucleus accumbens, is the chemical that helps with motivation. When we engage in certain behaviors or activities, the nucleus accumbens releases dopamine as a signal that triggers feelings of pleasure. This creates a positive reinforcement loop, whereby the brain is motivated to perform those activities again.

Every day you wake up in homeostasis with a replenished supply of dopamine. Throughout the day, when we do various activities, our dopamine gets slowly depleted here and there. This gradual depletion allows us to maintain the drive to perform difficult tasks with sustained effort, meaning we can keep pushing ourselves over a longer period without giving up. However, certain activities cause a rapid release and subsequent depletion of dopamine, which can quickly exhaust our motivation and make it harder to engage in and complete challenging tasks.

Avoid Phone use in the Morning

Have you ever heard the advice to avoid using your phone when you immediately get out of bed? What about the advice to frontload and perform the most difficult tasks first thing in the morning?

Both of these stem from the same idea. Some activities are highly dopaminergic – meaning that they expend our dopamine reserves at a faster rate – making them more pleasurable to engage in. Social media, gaming, texting, and drugs (alcohol and coffee count too!) ALL expend large amounts of dopamine. This becomes a problem because then our daily dopamine reserve gets low. And because productive and/or difficult tasks are less dopaminergic, we struggle to get the motivation after using up a lion’s share of our daily dopamine allotment.

Why not avoid ALL phone use/social media then?

“All of that sounds like justification for dopamine detox? It sounds like you’re advising me to just stop those activities entirely.”

The problem with dopamine detox, however, is that we do not want to have low dopamine levels or sensitivity. Instead, we should aim to have a high level of dopamine. This way, we will get a strong dopamine response even with low dopaminergic, high difficult activities. This pleasure response then feeds into behavioral reinforcement, making it easier in the long run to perform these difficult tasks. By using our dopamine in a mindful way, we are able to find motivation to do both difficult tasks as well as more pleasurable activities; essentially, we can have our cake AND eat it too, provided that eat it in slow, mindful bites.

So no, I’m not advising a complete withdraw from social media, just moderation.

“Dopamine Detox” is a Misnomer

It’s true that your dopamine levels increase from pleasurable activities or rewarding experiences, but they don’t actually decrease when you avoid these pleasurable activities. Rather, taking a hiatus from these activities affects a different part of the brain: the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC).

The PFC is in charge of personality but also executive functions such as planning and decision making. More importantly, the PFC is in charge of willpower, impulse control, and suppressing urges. When one performs a “dopamine detox,” they are actually strengthening the PFC’s ability to resist temptations. Therefore, proponents of dopamine detox incorrectly attribute dopamine as the source and cause of giving in to tempting, pleasurable activities.

Dopamine and Motivation

Dopamine only makes up part of how our brains generate motivation. It’s the pleasure circuit that reinforces good behavior, but there’s no way to alter this cycle (without medication) since this circuit is actually what generates your wants and motivations; you can’t really motivate yourself to not be motivated by pleasurable things. As a result, we MUST rely on other parts of the brain to reduce the power of our nucleus accumbens.

We must find the easiest way to be motivated so that we WANT to choose those low dopaminergic activities OVER these tempting activities with high dopamine release.

We will explore how the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and related brain circuitry will help us alter this motivational drive in the next blog post.

[‘Motivation and our Brain’ blog post coming soon!]

*** References ***

Kanojia, A. (2024b, February 7). The secret behind resisting dopamine. YouTube. https://youtu.be/6CWq8wyS90o?si=TRsS7cmK7zUMABqh