Dopamine Detox: Worth the hype?
Picture this:
You’re at work.
You see a notification pop up on your phone from your friend.
Before you know it, you find yourself scrolling endlessly on social media and you lose track of time.
Or maybe you’re at home, binge-watching Netflix late into the night.
You grab your phone and order some takeaway pizza, even though you just ate dinner a couple of hours ago.
Or you’re at a dinner with your friends.
Instead of enjoying the moment, you find yourself refreshing your email inbox, waiting for those work emails to ping through.
In an age of compulsive overconsumption, we’ve all become pleasure addicts.
If you can relate to any of these, then this article might be interesting for you.
Today we're going to break down what dopamine is, why it has a bad rep and then we’ll dive into the dopamine detox.
There’s an inner flame that surges through us.
A driving energy that fuels our desire to pursue our goals.
The desire to pursue our dreams.
To reach our objectives.
Dopamine is that inner flame.
It's the intrinsic energy that fuels our longing to push beyond boundaries and materialise our deepest desires.
And when directed appropriately, it can be a powerful tool.
So why would you need to do a detox from this force?
We’ll get into that later..
First, you need to understand what dopamine is and how dopamine works.
In simple terms, evolution has designed the brains of all mammals to reward us for anything that will increase our chances of survival and reproduction.
In other words, searching for food & sex.
Dopamine is the molecule of motivation, craving and movement.
It's a neurotransmitter or chemical messenger, that plays a crucial role in transmitting signals between nerve cells, which are also called neurones.
Dopamine is produced in various parts of the brain but mainly in 2 areas called the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental area.
It’s also produced in your adrenals glands and kidneys.
The simplest way to describe its functions is by describing the 2 key pathways dopamine is involved in within the brain.
The first is the nigrostriatal pathway.
Bear with me.
This pathway originates from dopamine neurones in the substantia nigra and it projects to the dorsal striatum.
Hence why it’s called nigro-striatial.
This pathway is mostly associated with motor control and the substantia nigra is an important area of the brain responsible for regulating voluntary movements.
When dopamine is released from the substantia nigra into the striatum, it helps fine-tune motor control, allowing smooth and coordinated movements.
This actually reminds me of someone I met one morning at medical school.
The hospital was warm and the corridors were brimming with activity.
As I followed the consultant on the ward round, I noticed an elderly gentleman sitting quietly in his hospital bed, seemingly lost in his thoughts.
His hands trembled slightly, and his facial expression appeared masked, lacking the usual range of emotions, but it was 9am after all.
I asked the consultant about the patient's condition.
He explained that the patient had been admitted for pneumonia, so a chest infection, but he also had a history of a movement disorder.
The consultant told me to go and see the patient after the ward round.
Once the rounds were done I headed over and as I approached his bedside, the patient looked up at me with a kind but distant gaze.
I introduced myself and asked if it would be alright to perform a quick neurological exam.
He agreed.
During the examination, I noticed his hand tremors becoming more pronounced as he attempted to perform simple tasks.
His movements were slow and lacked fluidity, as if he was struggling to initiate and control them.
Recognising the potential significance of the signs, I asked about his history.
The patient shared his journey of living with Parkinson's disease, a condition that had progressively affected his ability to move and express himself over the years.
It was quite sad actually - he told me about the difficulty he has now with simple things like buttoning his shirt in the mornings.
He spoke about how his condition had impacted not only his physical abilities but also his emotional well-being.
This encounter always reminds me of the importance of seeing the person beyond the disease.
So, in Parkinson's disease, there is a progressive degeneration of the dopamine-producing neurones in the substantia nigra.
This leads to a significant reduction in dopamine levels in the striatum, causing the motor symptoms associated with the disease, such as tremors, rigidity, and difficulty initiating movements.
The second pathway and the one that we will focus on today is the mesolimbic pathway.
It’s meso because it arises in the midbrain (or mesencephalon) and limbic because it sends its fibres to areas of the limbic system.
The limbic system involves parts of the brain responsible for emotional and behavioural responses.
Importantly, the mesolimbic pathway serves as a fundamental mechanism for motivation, reward, and reinforcement.
As a result, it’s highly conserved across mammalian species.
This basically means that the pathway remains relatively unchanged across different species over time.
Think of dopamine as the universal currency for pursuing our goals.
It ensures the survival, adaptation, and successful functioning of different species.
Dopamine is a critical modulator of learning and motivation.
It’s involved in evaluating the availability of incentives such as asking yourself questions like “is this worth it?”, and then translating the evaluation into some kind of action.
The concepts of reward and punishment are inseparable from motivation.
Rewards are things that we work for or things that lead to a process of reinforced behaviour, because there is a positive outcome.
Repetition of a behaviour indicates that it is rewarding.
Punishments are the opposite.
You avoid behaviours that are punishing.
On top of those dopamine producing actions, you have a baseline frequency of dopamine release, meaning that it’s always being released in the background.
This baseline can increase or decrease based on our thoughts and actions.
Our baseline dopamine levels can be influenced by lots of things like sleep, nutrition, genetics and your dopamine history.
It’s really important to maintain a good and sufficient baseline of dopamine release, otherwise you will find it difficult to sustain day-to-day motivation.
You don’t want your dopamine baseline to be too low, otherwise you’ll lack motivation for anything.
I was sat in my living room at home the day after surgery a few years ago, my arm was immobilised and I was in constant pain.
Because of the surgery I wasn’t allowed to drive so I couldn’t see friends, eat out or go to the gym but the things that bothered me the most were simple acts of getting comfortable for sleep or getting dressed in the mornings which turned into a slow, painful process.
The independence I once had was replaced by a constant need for assistance.
My days were full of frustration and disappointment.
Because my baseline dopamine was low due to my restricted activities and the pain, I struggled to find pleasure in even the simplest of things.
Motivation was genuinely at rock bottom for me.
I just couldn’t be bothered to do anything.
On the flip side, you don’t want the baseline too high either.
Because that can lead to this thing called addiction.
Addiction to things like gambling, drugs or alcohol involves effectively hijacking the brains natural reward system, which we’ve explained that dopamine has an important role in.
Alright so we’ve briefly discussed dopamine’s many roles including pleasure, reward, cognition, movement and our willingness to do something.
So why does dopamine has a bad reputation?
Why do we need to detox from it?..
It you have to detox from something, you typically are doing it for your own good.
This essentially means that dopamine is inherently a bad molecule.
Let’s talk about what happens after pleasure.
We’ve all experienced this.
Whether it’s playing another round of call of duty or reaching for another slice of pizza, we don’t want the feeling of pleasure to fade.
Addiction results from compulsive and repetitive behaviours, which can trigger dopamine release.
This addiction element probably contributes to dopamine’s bad reputation.
Too much pleasure can lead to addiction.
And addiction typically involves developing a tolerance to a substance.
This means that you’ll need to use or take more of it to feel the same effects.
Dopamine plays a role in this process.
And after indulging in these cravings, you can feel empty and restless.
Brain dopamine firing decreases not just to baseline levels, but to below baseline levels.
This transient dopamine mini-deficit state is what motivates us to seek out our reward.
Dopamine levels below our baseline drive craving. This tends to return to normal as your baseline dopamine levels recover.
However, people who escape this “painful” relapse with further dopamine hits can lead to addiction.
Case in point, drug addicts.
This is because consistent drug misuse eventually leads to overstimulation in the reward centre.
Its pathways become overwhelmed, making it harder for it to handle the high levels of dopamine being released.
The brain has a failsafe mechanism and tries to solve this problem in two ways:
By decreasing production of dopamine and reducing the number of available dopamine receptors.
This basically means that there is less of a chance of a dopamine molecule binding to it’s native receptor.
Therefore It will take more of the drug to provide the same level of satisfaction and pleasure.
This is called tolerance.
Even though the craving to use the drug remains.
Dr Lembke explains this in her bestseller, Dopamine Nation.
So we’ve explained what dopamine is and what it’s involved in...
What is a “dopamine detox”?
It’s essentially where you have to eradicate yourself of all the things and behaviours that make you feel pleasure in your life, for a period of time.
More specifically, people tend to avoid or limit activities that provide instant gratification such as social media, gaming, binge-watching TV shows, certain foods and seeing friends.
The idea is that after this period, you emerge as a new person.
Without all the excess dopamine that you’re used to having.
Individuals are also encouraged to engage in calmer and more mindful activities, such as reading, spending time in nature, meditation, journaling or exercising.
Ok so what are the issues?
They tend to stem from a misunderstanding.
The first thing is that you can’t “fast” from a naturally occurring chemical in your brain.
It’s very unlikely that the reward pathway that has been conserved for millions of years will be altered or changed in anyway by doing a one day or one week “detox”
On top of this, people tend go back to their regular lives the day after a detox, so what actually changes?
You can’t really manipulate your brain by eliminating the production of dopamine by doing a detox, that’s not how it works, that’s not how we’ve evolved.
It’s all a bit experimental rather than a proven strategy.
Another flaw relates to what I touched on earlier.
Dopamine is important in other functions like voluntary movement.
You can’t really pick and choose when and where the molecule is produced.
By detoxing from dopamine, you’re placing all negative behavioural emphasis on this one molecule.
In reality, your brain and therefore your behaviours are so much more complicated than that.
Another issue is applying these detoxes to addiction, especially to substances like alcohol.
Immediate withdrawal from alcohol can kill you.
I’ve seen this in the hospital.
It was a busy shift for me, as usual.
A patient was brought in by ambulance, relatively young.
They had been drinking heavily for years.
By heavily I mean a bottle of vodka a day.
He suddenly stopped drinking for a period and was experiencing severe withdrawal.
He had anxiety and restlessness, he was sweating profusely and vomiting.
When I was examining him he was experiencing hallucinations and later on he suffered seizures.
One of the medications we gave to prevent further withdrawal effects was chlordiazepoxide.
This highlights that dopamine fasts shouldn’t used as a substitute for professional help for conditions like addiction or mental health disorders.
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction or mental health issues, seeking guidance from a healthcare professional is important.
So, are dopamine detoxes worth the hype?
Not in the traditional sense.
I don’t think that jumping on a bandwagon of restraining yourself from doing all the things that make you feel better, is going to fundamentally rewire your brain’s chemistry.
Calling it a dopamine detox doesn’t make sense.
Because that’s not really what it is.
So how can we find balance in the age of over indulgence?
Taking a break from overstimulation and unplugging from the online world for example can benefit you.
Here are 5 things that might help:
- I’d focus on engaging in creative hobbies that require skill development over time, with delayed gratification in mind. Remember, the pursuit is the reward.
- Focus on building your relationships with others. We are social beings.
- Practice mindfulness techniques like meditating or journalling, because this can help you to gain better control over your emotions and make healthier decisions overall.
- Set time limits for certain activities like social media or emails.
- Try to distance yourself to triggers that activate negative and over-indulgent behaviours.
It’s good to slow down from time to time.
A quote from a great
Have a dopamine-filled day (just not too much)
Z
Worth the hype?
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