The Definitive Guide to Dopamine Fasting 2.0: The Hot Silicon Valley Trend

Dr. Cameron Sepah
The Startup
Published in
10 min readOct 28, 2019

--

Dopamine Fasting 2.0 has gone viral worldwide! This article has 140K+ views, and the international media from the ABC, The New York Times, BBC, and other prominent media have covered it across the US, UK, Australia, Finland, France, Japan, India, Russia, Turkey, and the Middle East. So what is all the rage about? Dopamine Fasting 2.0 is an evidence-based technique to manage addictive behaviors, by restricting them to specific periods of time, and practicing fasting from impulsively engaging in them, in order to regain behavioral flexibility. Unfortunately, there’s also been a lot of public misunderstanding due to media misportrayals, so let’s start with what it ISN’T.

Here’s what Dopamine Fasting 2.0 IS NOT:

- Reducing dopamine (the focus is on reducing impulsive BEHAVIOR)

- Avoiding all stimulation/pleasure (focuses only on specific behaviors that are problematic for you)

- Not talking/socializing/exercising (actually encourages values-aligned health behaviors)

- Rebranding meditation/asceticism/sabbath (doesn’t involve meditating or not working)

- Vacation (people treat vacations as times to indulge even more in bad habits)

--

--

Dr. Cameron Sepah
The Startup

CEO, Maximus. Med School Professor. Executive Psychologist to CEOs & VCs.