DOPAMINE DETOXING
Do you spend hours scrolling through endless social media pages like Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp? Most of us including me, approach such social mediums for a break from the dreary life. Watching non-stop reels in a loop, scrolling through your endless Instagram feed, and that never-ending YouTube shorts where is the latest fad among our generation. At the end of the day do you feel less motivated to take up your daily chores?
Why is it that when we sit up to study our minds tempt us to go check our phone or watch another video? Once you cut out of it, it bangs upon you that you have given away hours of your day and received zero entertainment out of it. All this might seem relatable.
The euphoria of the initial high, we get at the beginning gets drained out in an instant and we end up short of energy and enthusiasm to do any useful work, after such activities. A similar experience will result, after about of computer games, boozing, or consumption of chocolates. We end up regretting our actions, after becoming sluggish in our studies and wasting many hours of our day with no outcome. Who could be the culprit behind this? It’s none other than dopamine.
DOPAMINE
Dopamine is a nondescript chemical in our brain that acts as a carrier of neuro signals. As per medical science, Dopamine is actually a very essential chemical for the proper functioning of our brain. It is used by our nervous system to send messages between nerve cells. It also makes us feel pleasure, thereby developing the craving for things that interest us.
Any activity where we anticipate an immediate reward with the behavior is proven to release more dopamine. Let’s take the example of craving for a plate of chicken biriyani when you catch its smell. The dopamine that is released in your brain on its consumption would bring pleasure to you, even though its after-effects may be contrary.
Thus we enjoy spending endless time watching the screen, having our favorite dish, or spending a long time selecting a dress in a fashion shop these are all dopamine generators. But even without us noticing this is draining all of our motivation and energy. The energy that is bottled up will be lost in this process and we will be left with very little energy to finish the remaining tasks.
So we tend to be tired and distracted, While your mind will be constantly pressing you to give up the task that releases less dopamine (here studying/any productive job) and go on the hunt for those sources for entertainment. Because if an activity releases more dopamine our brain will be motivated to repeat those activities again and again.
Our addiction is not to dopamine but to those activities that increase dopamine. Once you are hooked on such activities, addiction will set in, which can be dangerous.
Taking drugs and alcohol releases high doses of dopamine into our brain causing heightened pleasure, but at the same time, it reduces the natural capacity of the body to make dopamine, thereby making it extremely difficult to come out of such behaviors. Overcoming the addiction to dopamine enhancers can become complicated at times. At the same time, dopamine depletion can lead to inactivity and depression.
According to TED, five to ten percent of internet users are psychologically addicted and can’t control how much time they spend online. Brain scans of social media addicts are similar to those of drug-dependent brains. That is when we need to detox them.
DETOXING
Consider the scenario of a man who rarely drinks alcohol and the one who is an addict. The quantity of alcohol required to get an addict drunk will be about 5–6 times more than what is required for a person who rarely drinks alcohol. This is because their body’s tolerance levels are different. In a similar way, if you normally spent about 3 -4 hours on social media, daily, your brain gets used to having that level of dopamine every day, or that becomes your dopamine tolerance. Thus when you take up your day-to-day activities which release less dopamine than your tolerance level, it appears boring.
So how do we detox it? It starts with gradually bringing down your dopamine tolerance. If we restrict the amount of dopamine released in our body, by avoiding or imposing limitations on our regimes, our body tends to bring down its tolerance level. Cut down on your screen time, junk food, or whatever produces dopamine in your system and utilize that for productive activities.
You will see that your body’s tolerance will decrease and that even those activities that release lower dopamine might seem interesting. Limit the time that you spent on Facebook, Instagram, etc. Maybe you can keep a stopwatch and ensure that you stick to the time limit, for at least a week or more. This is important as we should give our dopamine receptors time to recover and to set a new normal. Thus we can make the dopamine that is released while studying, equal to that released during our entertainment occasions. This makes our body build the desire for doing productive tasks. In this way, we can use dopamine, which we initially considered a trouble maker to be an agent of a fulfilling life.
