Dopamine detox; How to trick your brain into doing hard things
Dopamine detox has become kind of a household name for personality development trainers and life-skill educators. The problem with people who aren’t psychologists doing the things meant to be done by a psychologist is that they tend to over-estimate or dramatize certain aspects of our behavior. No offense, but there is a certain limit to the study of human behavior that people without proper education can acquire. Again, I am not against life-skill trainers or PD educators. There is a bucket load of things that they can do to maximize our potential. But I think it is best that they stick to the things that they do best and not meddle with the territory of neurobiology.
If you aren’t aware of what dopamine detox is, it’s pretty straight forward. And if you do know what it is, and you are not quite sure about the source of that information, it is best that you forget it. ‘Dopamine detox’- the term itself sounds sciency. Well, what it actually means is avoiding any dopamine surges in the brain for a particular period of time. It is also called dopamine fasting. To be true, it is impossible to eliminate any kind of dopamine secretion in our brain. And we don’t want that either because eliminating dopamine from our brain can be fatal. Sorry, I forgot to mention what dopamine is; Dopamine is a neurotransmitter- a protein that carries messages in between neurons and it is present throughout our limbic brain.
The concept of dopamine detox arises from the belief that ‘dopamine’ is something that gives you pleasure. This isn’t true in its totality. Dopamine has a positive correlation with highly motivating and pleasure-seeking behaviors. But that doesn’t mean that the sole purpose of dopamine is to grant us pleasure, it is more about desire or drive towards a goal than mere pleasure. However, the concept is fine irrespective of its faulty root. It is true that our dopamine levels surge up when we have food or sex or engage in activities of gratification.
Our brains always compare things. When you are given an option to choose from 7 different types of sweets, you think about the qualities of each of those sweets and make a decision on the basis of those intensive thoughts. However, if you were just offered one sweet, you would have accepted it and you would have been just as fine. To consider another example, suppose you have been fasting for 24 hours and you were given a carrot to break your fasting. I bet that it would be the best carrot you ever tasted. How could something as simple as a carrot be so pleasurable to you? This is because you have been devoid of any other stimulation so that the brain has nothing to compare it with.
These concepts of dopamine fasting and ‘period of abstinence’ were actually taken from drug addiction therapies. By denying any drugs to the body, these therapies attempt to ‘rewire the brain’ so to speak. But does it actually work in real life? It might not be the ‘key to success’ as advertised by life-skill trainers. But it sure is worth a try to enhance your life satisfaction and productivity. Just like drugs, we are addicted to social media (each like or share we receive is a dose of heroin), television (each series we watch are crystals of methamphetamine), and the internet (each site we visit are tablets of LSD). But avoiding all these at once is not a viable option. And neither should we try to erase all moments of pleasure from our life to aim at something that might bring a bigger pleasure. But trying to reduce these stimulating activities might actually trick our brain into believing that the harder things are just as stimulating. For your information, this is also why people were more romantic in the time when there was no porn.
I’d like to narrate a famous Akbar and Birbal story. The king, Akbar once drew a line on the courtyard and asked his minister, Birbal to shorten the line without touching it. After giving it much thought, Birbal drew another line just beside the line drawn by Akbar. A much longer line, making the other line shorter. ‘DOPAMINE DETOX’
