What I Learned From My Dopamine Detox

And why it may be equally important to you

With each passing day, we routinely overload our brains with whirlwinds of stimuli. We check our phones once every couple of minutes, we consume content while we eat, we use mind-altering substances on a daily, and we never shy away from doing it all again the next day.

But what if, for a brief moment, we decided to say no more?

Instead of remaining underneath our comfy dopamine blanket, what if, for a short time, we decided to re-discover what raw human existence feels like?

This was the premise for my personal experiment, otherwise known as a dopamine detox. Essentially, I aimed to reduce my brain’s release of dopamine as much as possible for one day, to alter the way I perceive rewards and pleasure.

Now, I’m not very fond of personal development stuff. I find most of it rather cliche and redundant. And I especially don’t believe that “life hacks” or “new habits” are enough to turn one’s life around, financially or mentally.

But with the dopamine detox, I was frankly intrigued. I wanted to know what lies beyond the overstimulated mind of the 21st Century person. So, I set out to do it and ended up with a realization that I want to share.

In short, a dopamine detox is not supposed to alter your brain’s dopamine delivery system. So, it’s not detox in the traditional sense, as you would detox from, say, nicotine.

Instead, it is a way to increase your brain’s self-awareness and sensitivity to dopamine by reducing your daily stimuli. It can be a rather mild process, in which you only give up things like social media time or a substance you consume on a daily basis.

Or it can be a much harsher, but shorter process, in which you have to give up everything that releases dopamine. This is the option that I went with.

As the perfect template for an overloaded person, I had to give up quite a bit of thing. For starters, cigarettes and caffeine were a no-go. These two substances were how I usually started my day, so I knew that it was going to be rough.

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