Dopamine detox – How to take back control of your life

Team Sunsama April 10, 2023

A dopamine detox means voluntarily barring yourself from doing activities that trigger dopamine releases.

In a world where every single thing is a stimulus to your dopamine receptors, a dopamine detox resets dopamine back to healthier levels.

After successfully going through a dopamine detox (aka dopamine fasting), you can expect to have greater motivation and higher energy levels. It is a great solution for busy professionals who feel like nothing excites them anymore, and are feeling disconnected from their normal life experiences

Before you go ahead and plan a dopamine fast, it is important to understand the science behind it.

The science behind dopamine detoxes

Contrary to popular belief, a dopamine detox is a very simple process. However, the myths about dopamine steer people the wrong way. To practice dopamine detox in a safe and beneficial way, you need to first understand what dopamine is and how it works.

What is dopamine

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that affects movement, motivation, and drive. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that affect how neurons interact within each other and with other cells.

Dopamine helps us pursue things that are valuable and important for survival and well-being. For instance, our brain releases dopamine when we go out to look for food as it is necessary for survival.

However, there are two rumors about dopamine and its function that are widely accepted:

Dopamine is responsible for pleasure: It is widely believed that dopamine is the “pleasure chemical” that gives us the feeling of euphoria when released. Actually, it is serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin that cause us to feel pleasure.
Dopamine is addictive: When pursuing activities that give us pleasure, the level of dopamine increases in our bloodstream. This creates a lasting memory of that event in our brains giving us the illusion that dopamine is addictive.

Now that you have understood what dopamine is and its function, let’s understand how it works.

How dopamine works

Dopamine is released when our brain wants us to do something that will give us something of value that is necessary for our survival.

It should be understood that it is not the activity itself that produces dopamine. It is the anticipation of the result of that activity that triggers it. For instance, our brain doesn’t release dopamine when we eat, but rather when we are taking steps towards it.

So, our brain releases dopamine whenever it anticipates that we are about to take part in an activity that will reward us. Dopamine is not the reward, rather it motivates us to go after it. The reward is the happy hormones that give us a pleasurable and euphoric feeling.

There are three levels of dopamine:

Baseline level: This is the level of dopamine in your bloodstream when you are not pursuing any activity that will reward you in any way.
Peak level: When you are just about to get the reward while doing something. It is the “euphoria” before you take a bite of ice cream that you have been craving all day.
Valley level: After you reach the peak, your dopamine level soon plummets down below the baseline level. The bigger the peak, the deeper the fall.

We experience the valley level as the amount of dopamine in our bloodstream decreases after the peak and our body needs some time to reset it to the baseline level. This is the reason the second bite of the same ice cream doesn’t produce the same level of euphoria as the first.

In order to replicate or surpass the initial peak level, we need to pursue an activity that promises us a larger reward as the concentration of dopamine has decreased due to the previous peak.

This is the reason you need to eat a whole jar of ice cream to get the same peak as you would have gotten after the first bite. As we continue to chase the peak, the level of dopamine in our system continues to decrease.

Even if it is terrible in the long run, we continue to do it as the peak level of dopamine is followed by a release of happy hormones such as serotonin and endorphins. Dopamine is a biological currency in exchange for which we get happy hormones.

What happens when we run out of dopamine

The bigger the peak, the bigger the concentration of happy hormones released into our system and that is why we continue to chase it. However, bigger peaks lead to deeper valleys and it will take even longer for our body to reset the dopamine concentration to the baseline levels.

Consequently, you will feel less motivated and driven than usual.

Continued pursuance of pleasureful activities to deal with valleys deteriorates the baseline level even more. This begins a toxic feedback loop in which you keep on pursuing activities that give you transient pleasure just so you can get to the peak.

Drugs, ultra-processed food, alcohol, and social media are some of the sources and activities that are pursued by affected individuals for that peak.

People who “work hard, play hard” also fall into this trap. This is because big wins and celebrations result in higher peaks leading to deeper valleys. It is more dangerous as it is much slower and doesn’t manifest itself until it’s too late.

Furthermore, our body builds tolerance towards substances and activities that stimulate the pleasure center of the brain too much to save energy. For instance, you won’t feel the same kind of excitement on your 100th sky-dive as you felt on your first.

But since we want the peak that gives us the happy hormones, we continue to up the ante. For instance, consuming a whole jar of ice cream instead of a small cup. In other words, the magnitude of the substance or intensity of the activity that gives the peak keeps on increasing.

The toxic feedback loop as we mentioned earlier proceeds to become a downward spiral of addictive behavior. Addiction is a state in which an individual continues to chase the peak through destructive means despite knowing the long-term consequences.

If unchecked for long periods of time, it results in chronic depression and burnout.

Since dopamine controls movement, motivation, and drive, you are more likely to lay on the bed, mindlessly scrolling through your phone, and procrastinate without any motivation if your baseline level is exceedingly low.

This is where a dopamine detox or dopamine fast is really effective.

How a dopamine detox works

The objective of dopamine detox is to restore the baseline levels of dopamine. The desired consequence of this process is to have the same level of motivation and drive for movement as before the addictive downward spiral.

When you quit indulging in activities that give you those peaks, you start to “save” dopamine which restores your baseline level.

Here are the steps that will help you get started right away:

Removing all forms of digital entertainment and activities.
Becoming more physically active through yoga and other exercises.
Taking up a hobby that requires focus, such as reading and gardening.
Get more social, but not virtually. Go outside and talk to people.

However, it is easier said than done. Busy professionals cannot take a hiatus from work on such short notice and live in “monk-mode” until their baseline level climbs up. More importantly, as everything is digital, it is difficult to entirely eliminate digital devices.

The ideal way to go about a digital detox is by using a virtual assistant that will guide you every step of the way as you get better.

Sunsama, a daily planner aimed at helping people maintain a healthy work-life balance, is a great solution that will help you maximize the impact of dopamine detox.

How Sunsama helps with dopamine detox

While taking a week or a month off to spend without external stimuli might not be a luxury everyone can afford, there are three key things you can do in your day-to-day to keep your dopamine levels in check. Sunsama makes these easier for you.

By taking care of these fundamentals daily, you accelerate your healing process and create a more sustainable solution.

1. Remove distractions by bringing your tasks to one place

Distractions from your current flow results in tiny spikes in your dopamine levels. For instance, when you are reaching for your phone because you hear a notification, you get a spike in your dopamine levels.

It happens because the distraction offers an opportunity to get a hit of the happy hormones.

Therefore, to make the effects of a dopamine detox more pronounced, you need to keep distractions at bay. But this can be challenging to do so as we tend to work with a lot of apps while going about our day.

Sunsama reduces that by bringing all of them to one place. Sunsama integrates with Notion, Jira, Google Calendar, Todoist, Trello, Asana, and many more. Now, you don’t have to jump in between multiple applications while planning your week.

Then, as you go about your day, you can turn on the “Focus Mode” which will hide the tasks for the remainder of the week.

Want to put these tips in action? Claim your free access to Sunsama and make it happen!

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2. Setting time for shallow work

Urgent tasks that take a short amount of time to get completed and don’t require too much focus and attention are shallow tasks. Improper prioritization of tasks is one of the leading causes that people find themselves spending a lot on shallow tasks, ignoring the important ones.

Another reason why it happens is that after completing each shallow task our brain releases a dose of dopamine and happy hormones as a consequence of that. Due to this, individuals are more likely to keep on completing tasks that are urgent, but not important.

For instance, replying to text messages, or doing a load of laundry over reading a book.

Sunsama helps solve this by adding channels to tasks that signify their level of importance.

Also, after you create your daily to-do list, you can drag tasks across it to prioritize them. This way, you can easily club the shallow tasks together.

3. Keeping your days manageable

Earlier we had explained how the “work hard, play hard” mindset from the hustle culture can lead to burnout and depression by depleting your baseline dopamine levels. Hence, it is crucial to keep your workload at sustainable levels.

While planning your day, it can be easy for you to lose track of how many hours of work you are setting yourself up for.

Sunsama warns you when you have set an unrealistic workload. You can set the number of hours you aim to work for and you will see a message like the one below when your day demands more than that.

Furthermore, you can drag and drop tasks onto the calendar to have a better view of what your day looks like. This will help you to get short breaks in between tasks.

Summing up

Dopamine affects movement, motivation, and drive. It is the currency that we exchange for happy hormones such as endorphins, serotonin, and oxytocin. Whenever we plan to and/or do something that gives us rewards our brain releases dopamine.

However, if we constantly indulge in dopamine-inducing activities, our brain develops a tolerance for that as a defense mechanism that saves energy. Consequently, in order to get a similar peak, we have to increase the intensity of such activities.

This also occurs in busy individuals who work hard and play hard.

When unchecked, this develops into a state of lack of motivation and drive as the baseline levels have depleted completely. The ideal solution is to frequently undergo a dopamine fast or detox until the baseline levels of dopamine are restored.

But it can be challenging for you to pause your busy life and eliminate digital devices altogether. Sunsama, a daily planner and virtual assistant, can guide you by delivering three key benefits: