What is 'dopamine fasting' and is it good for you? – BBC REEL

dopamine fasting for me is not using any kind of electronics not consuming any kind of food not communicating with people basically isolating myself from all the things in the modern world that can release dopamine in the last five years or so there's been a trend in silicon valley tech executives to do a dopamine fast when you're doing a dopamine fast you're not fasting from dopamine what you're doing is you're fasting from the substances or the behaviors that cause a release of dopamine in the reward pathway i started this practice back in 2015. it was initially

a confused response from my friends and i think that just goes to show how normalized social media electronics high dopamine activities usage has become i was not necessarily surprised that people were like oh what is this this is strange the world of overabundance is a new and unprecedented human stressor it's very paradoxical because we think oh we've got all these material goods that we ever wanted our lives should be great and in fact what's happened is that we've reached this tipping point where the more stuff we have the less happy we actually are dopamine is

a chemical that we make in our brains it is essential to the experience of pleasure reward and motivation the more dopamine that we release in the specific part of our brain called the reward pathway the more reinforcing or pleasurable that substance or experience is one of the most exciting findings in neuroscience in the past 75 years is that the same parts of the brain that process pleasure also process pain and they work like opposite sides of a balance so for example when i eat a piece of chocolate i like chocolate i get a little release

of dopamine and my balance tilts to the side of pleasure but no sooner has that happened then my brain adapts to that increased dopamine by down regulating dopamine transmission and i like to imagine that as these little neural adaptation gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again but the gremlins like it on the balance so they don't hop off as soon as it's level they stay on until the balance is tilted an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain that's the come down the hangover the after effect

we know that social media engineers are quite literally putting as much dopaminergic stimulation into their products as possible we've never had so many processed foods before ever available to humans pornography is extremely stimulating and you know especially with the use of high-speed internet it's accessible in the way it wasn't even two decades ago modern drugs cannabis has become roughly 10 times more potent than it was 50 or 100 years ago and the the practice of dopamine fasting is to sort of undo some of those hooks when i don't mean fast it happens just for one

day so just 24 hours when i wake up in the morning all i'm allowed to do is meditate journal drink some water walk and think and that's it no socialization no computer no social media and i only do it once a quarter this practice of going outside influence or stimulus is not necessarily new buddhists can attest to the value of that but i think it's actually more important in the modern world because we have the most engineered stimulating factors that have ever existed in human history this primitive wiring for seeking out pleasure and avoiding pain

is adapted for a world of scarcity and ever-present danger it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective right that's a very clever strategy to an environment where if you're not constantly looking for the next watering hole or the next source of food you are going to die but it's an absolutely horrible neurological mechanism in a world where a swipe right or swipe left can get you cocaine cannabis sex video games you name it so now we're walking around with our balances chronically tilted to the side of pleasure such that we need more and more potent forms

of pleasure to feel anything good at all so what are we going to do about it it's very unlikely that our brains our reward circuits are going to change that reward circuit has been conserved over millions of years of evolution and across species the reward pathway in the human brain is pretty much identical to the reward pathway in the lizard brain and every other organism that you're going to look at so instead what we have to do is really change our ecosystem through meditation through journaling while i'm doping fasting that there are some things that

i discover about myself like oh i actually am not really enjoying this job maybe i want to switch jobs or hey i have an idea for for something that i've been putting off and i think i should finally pursue this you can think about this as a productivity tool and like it's a fine way to do that personally i find that it's more of like a self-exploration tool i have found that as i've matured in this practice my body will start to crave it i'm actually dopamine fasting in three days i've already dopamine fasted this

quarter but again as i noticed in my intuition my body was like yeah i could use another one it's not as crazy as it sounds and it's not as difficult as it might sound there is value biochemically physiologically evolutionarily in being bored and being alone with your thoughts a dopamine fast definitely resets reward pathways the problem is what do you do after that right as people then go back to their regular lives i'm a psychiatrist i work with people with severe addictions to all kinds of substances and behaviors yes people can get addicted to behavior

i've seen people as addicted to gambling pornography video games and social media as they get addicted to cocaine cannabis alcohol and nicotine so it's the same disease process and what i've been doing for about 20 years in my clinic is a different kind of dopamine fast where i ask people not to abstain from every pleasurable experience in their lives but rather to identify that substance or behavior that they have a problematic relationship with abstain from your drug of choice for 30 days why 30 days well 30 days is the average amount it takes for those

neuro adaptation gremlins on the pain side of the balance to hop off a level balance to be restored here's the thing about the gremlins they are agnostic to which side of the balance is tilted first if we initially tilt the balance to the side of pain like with exercise for example or an ice cold water bath those gremlins will react by hopping on the pleasure side of the balance which means that we get our dopamine indirectly and that's something that i prescribe to my patients and recommend in my book dopamine nation that the better way

to get your dopamine is indirectly by paying for it up front [Music] you