These days the internet is crowded with videos, articles and hacks promising the route to reset your brain's reward system and rediscover the joy in life's simple pleasures. One method, in particular, has gained traction and is being touted by influencers as a quick fix for restoring focus and lowering your level of stimulation.
It's called dopamine detoxing, and its advocates claim it can quickly help reset your brain's neurochemical balance.
How? They argue that temptations like social media, video games, junk food, online shopping, coffee and alcohol have burnt out your brain's dopamine-based reward system. In other words, we’re so used to the near-constant buzz of these hits that our dopamine levels become depleted, leaving us unable to focus on what matters or appreciate the finer things in life.
The basic idea behind dopamine detoxing is to cut out all the quick and easy pleasures in our lives for a set period, with some programmes suggesting starting with a single day and then building up to weeks at a time. This, proponents claim, will help your dopamine levels reset to a healthier balance.
At first glance, this might seem like straightforward biology, but how much real evidence supports it? Well, as with many pop psychology fads, there’s a grain of truth to the idea, but it’s often oversimplified –sometimes to the point of cartoonish neuroscience.
What does dopamine actually do?
It's true that the brain chemical dopamine is involved in rewarding activities. But it's a huge oversimplification to imply that your ability to experience pleasure and find focus relies on it entirely.
The function of dopamine is complex and nuanced – it interacts with several different kinds of receptors in your brain, for a start. But, to put things simply, dopamine seems to drive us to want things, but it's not specifically involved in the pleasure we experience when we get them.
Various studies have demonstrated this important distinction between wanting and liking. For instance, when neuroscientists blocked dopamine in the brains of rats, the animals’ facial expressions and behaviour suggested they still enjoyed their food, they were just less fussed about seeking it out.
Many other brain chemicals, like endorphins and opioids, also play a role in reward. And this means trying to 'reset' your dopamine levels by avoiding fun but frivolous activities is unlikely to make you any happier.
There's even a drug for Parkinson's disease called Levodopa that specifically boosts dopamine levels, but it’s been shown that it doesn't lead to patients experiencing greater focus or happiness. This undermines the simplistic claim that going on a detox to boost your dopamine will bring more joy into your life.
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That said, there is some truth to the idea that a dysregulated dopamine system can interfere with the ability to experience pleasure. The chronic use of certain drugs – such as cannabis, opioids and nicotine – can alter dopamine function, leading to psychological consequences.
For instance, there's research suggesting that long-term smokers are at increased risk of anhedonia (the loss of the ability to experience pleasure), especially when they try to quit. It's theorised that this is because nicotine artificially raises dopamine levels, prompting the brain to adjust over time – take the nicotine away, and the brain is then left with a dysregulated dopamine system, making it harder to find pleasure in other activities.
One way smokers are given support to quit is by encouraging them to find new, healthier ways to stimulate their brain's reward system. You can see this isn't a million miles from the concept of going on a dopamine detox – which involves cutting out some undesirable rewards and replacing them with supposedly healthier ones, such as exercise and meditation.
However, the detox fad assumes that lifestyle habits, such as social media and online shopping, are rewiring your brain in a similar way to using a powerful drug that directly interacts with your neurochemistry. They're likely not.
As much as we get anxious about aspects of modern life like screen time and social media, they're probably not dysregulating our dopamine systems in that way.
So, are there any benefits to dopamine detox?
The neuroscience used to justify the dopamine detox concept might be a little flaky, but will the practice do you good anyway? Part of the answer comes down to common sense – for instance, if you feel you eat too much junk food, cutting back on it is likely to be good for your health.
But there’s little, if any, rigorous scientific research on the effects of disconnecting from specific individual activities like social media or online shopping. Ideally, scientists would conduct randomised controlled trials to compare the detox approach with other strategies and determine any potential benefits.
Interestingly, some studies have looked more specifically at having a complete digital detox – going on a brief retreat without your smartphone or other devices. One study from 2014 compared a group of pre-teens who went on a device-free summer camp with another group who went to school as usual.
The device-free group appeared to improve their emotional recognition scores more than the control group, presumably because they got back into the hang of real-life communication. However, the lack of scientific rigour in the study makes it hard to make any strong inferences.
With all this said, you might not need to completely throw out the dopamine detox approach. According to the psychology of habit formation, aggressively shunning some behaviours for periods of time may improve your life – even though it doesn't really have anything to do with resetting your dopamine.
Let's say you feel that your social media use is out of hand. Whenever you have a spare minute, you reach for your phone and scroll mindlessly through your social feeds. You could say your behaviour has become habitual, something you do automatically without thought. Habits build over time through repeated association between the behaviour and certain cues or triggers. In this case, the cue might be the sight of your phone or simply being alone.
To break this cycle, you could try to use brute willpower. Whenever you feel the urge, you will try to fight it. But this is going to be really tricky considering you usually start social media scrolling without even thinking about it. The same might be true for a range of other behaviours that you're unhappy about and want to do less of, like eating cookies or online gambling.
Arguably, the framework of a dopamine detox could help you break these various habits by taking the radical step of completely abstaining from social media and other fast rewards for a set period.
There are various ‘blocking’ apps designed to help weaken the associations behind behaviours you want to reduce. The idea is that these tools encourage you to act with more intention, rather than simply responding out of habit.
But this is not cutting-edge neuroscience, and I doubt it will reset your dopamine levels to some fantasy optimal level. But it's a basic productivity and lifestyle hack that might be worth trying.
Just bear in mind that it's not guaranteed to be effective. For instance, you might find that you experience a rebound effect – the experience of watching TikTok memes while bingeing on sweets and fizzy drinks could seem even more intense and alluring.
So rather than going completely cold turkey, try setting a goal to reduce your unwanted behaviours by a specific amount, such as halving them. As a good scientist would, you may need to experiment to see what works best.
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