Last Updated on November 9, 2023 by Fasting Planet
On this blog, when we discuss fasting, we’re usually referring to abstaining from food and/or caloric beverages. Other types of fasts exist though, such as dopamine fasting. Admittedly, this type of fast doesn’t have a lot to do with your diet, although it can affect what you eat in some cases. What is dopamine fasting?
Dopamine fasting involves your quitting activities perceived as addictive and stimulatory that deliver pleasure to your brain, including playing video games, streaming music, posting on social media, and even eating and talking. The rationale behind this fast is that when you’re rewarding yourself less by foregoing these activities, you can change your habits, increase your happiness, and have more time to self-reflect.
In this post, we’ll explore the dopamine fast in greater detail, including a discussion on what dopamine is and how your body reacts to and uses it. We’ll also talk more about whether you’ll want to try dopamine fasting or if you’re better off just skipping it. Keep reading, as you’re not going to want to miss this!
Understanding the Role of Dopamine
Before we get into dopamine fasting, you should know more about what dopamine is and what it does. A type of neurotransmitter and a hormone, dopamine starts in the brain as tyrosine, a type of amino acid. Then, it becomes dopa, another amino acid, and finally, dopa is converted into dopamine.
Primarily, people associate dopamine with feelings of satisfaction and pleasure, but that’s far from this hormone/neurotransmitter’s only responsibility. Many internal occurrences within your body are associated with dopamine, such as:
- Movement
- Processing pain
- Vomiting and nausea control
- Attention span
- Mood
- Sleep quality
- Lactation
- Kidney health
- Blood vessel functioning
- Heart rate
- Motivation
- Learning
- Focus
Besides the above functions, dopamine can also control lymphocyte or white blood cell activity in your immune system. Your digestive system benefits as your internal stomach lining mucus is retained. When your pancreas makes insulin, that’s because of dopamine. Your output of urine, as well as the sodium that’s released when you do urinate, is also managed through dopamine.
When your dopamine levels are too high or too low, several health conditions can arise. One of these is obesity, especially since the reward system of an obese person might not activate until they eat a certain, often large quantity of food. Parkinson’s disease degrades neuronal activity, preventing the transmitting part of dopamine’s job so your body makes less of the hormone.
Drug addiction is tied to dopamine as well, as the levels of this hormone/neurotransmitter shoot sky-high when you take drugs, especially cocaine. However, with time, it takes more and more of the drug to reach the same sort of pleasure, which is how addiction can escalate.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD may in part be caused by a lack of dopamine, whereas too much of it could be tied to schizophrenia, especially the delusions and hallucinations caused by this mental health condition.
What Is Dopamine Fasting?
That brings us to dopamine fasting. Knowing what you do now about dopamine, why would you consider restricting it? What are the benefits supposed to be for this fast?
Dopamine Fasting Rules – What You Can’t Do
Per the information from the intro, when you go on a dopamine fast, you’re supposed to stop doing stimulating, even addictive activities for a brief period. These can include enjoyable hobbies such as playing games on the Internet to streaming music on your favorite platform and even scrolling through social media. If you wanted to take things a step further, you could even curtail eating and social interaction.
Unlike intermittent fasting, which has long been a time-trusted health measure, dopamine fasting is a newer phenomenon. No one seems to be quite sure where it came from, but a man named Richard, the creator behind popular YouTube channel Improvement Pill, supposedly created and certainly popularized the idea in late 2018 when he went on a dopamine fast.
He discussed how it went for him in this video. In the video title, Richard calls dopamine fasting a way to “get your life back together.”
Richard says that he was in a rut with his own life, and that he suggested dopamine fasting for those who were slacking off in achieving their personal goals. He says that he had been following this form of fasting since his college days, calling it a ritual he relied on when he was partying too hard as a college student and needed to take a break.
According to Richard, a dopamine fast should last for an entire waking day or even 24 hours. Then, he says, you have to avoid fun activities. What does Richard recommend abstaining from? Anything you’d consider fun, pleasurable, or entertaining.
What a person finds enjoyable varies. For you, you might enjoy playing video games after work, while for someone else, they don’t like video games, so they wouldn’t have fun doing that. Some people find reading fun, others watching movies. Certain people like to go out to find enjoyment and others prefer staying in. Whatever it is you like doing though, it has to stop.
Richard also says you have to quit eating for the day, consuming just water. Your phone can’t be a source of entertainment, only to be used for emergency calls. Oh, and you must go Internet-free for the day too, especially avoiding social media.
Don’t even turn on your TV for the day, nor can you watch YouTube, as it’s social media. You can’t listen to music either. If you drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or use drugs recreationally, these are most certainly not allowed.
Richard even recommends you stop talking to others unless it’s absolutely necessary (such as in an emergency).
Dopamine Fasting Rules – What You Can Do
Okay, so you can’t read, watch TV, go online, listen to music, eat, or socialize. What does that leave you to do on your dopamine fasting day? Richard suggests in his video that you immerse yourself in the following activities:
- Go outside and take a walk
- Drink water
- Meditate
- Exercise
- Write on paper
It won’t be a super-exciting day, but that’s supposed to be the point of the fast.
Supposed Dopamine Fasting Benefits
With dopamine fasting, you strip away anything you enjoy doing and leave only the bare-bones, boring essentials. Richard isn’t the only one to do a fast of this nature, either. Dopamine fasting has majorly caught on in Silicon Valley, and online, there are plenty of accounts of those who have tried dopamine fasting. Here’s one from Medium and here’s another account on the BBC.
Why deprive yourself like this, even if only for a day? Isn’t life too short? Here are some reasons Richard at Improvement Pill and others advocate for dopamine fasting.
- Change Your Habits
According to Richard, the point of a dopamine fast is to change your habits. Normally, if you have to commit to a hard task, knowing there’s a reward coming up when you complete the task makes it somewhat easier to do. That reward can be something physical that you grant to yourself, such as an ice cream cone after mowing the lawn on a hot summer’s day. It can also be the reward of dopamine itself, which makes you proud of your accomplishments.
Richard compares this rewards system to a donkey with a carrot on a stick dangling in front of its face. He says the carrot motivates the donkey to get things done. This figurative carrot, be that an ice cream cone after mowing the lawn, may be enough for a while, but not forever. When you spend your spare time watching Netflix, playing video games, and doing other activities that release dopamine, Richard likens it to feeding your donkey a buffet meal instead of the carrot.
Suddenly, the small reward that is the carrot no longer suffices since you’re getting shots of dopamine all the time. You may need a bigger and bigger reward to tackle hard tasks, decreasing your motivation. By taking away all your dopamine-inducing activities, Richard says you can reclaim your motivation. Also, after that period of deprivation, the carrot on the stick is a suitable enough reward once again.
- Stop Pain Masking
Another reason to consider a dopamine fast according to Richard is that it can help you home in on where your pain is coming from, both physical and emotional pain. In his video, Richard says that people mask their pain all the time with pleasure-inducing activities. For instance, after a breakup, you might binge on ice cream and Netflix, and some people even turn to alcohol to escape their problems.
With no more vices left on a dopamine fast, you can’t self-medicate, as Richard puts it. This forces you to address the source of your pain head-on and do something about it, whether that’s mending a broken heart or seeing a doctor for a persistent ache.
- Have More Time for Self-Reflection
Fun activities sure do take up a lot of our time, but we don’t mind that because we genuinely like doing them, right? When you have nothing to do in the form of entertaining yourself or killing time, the mindset is that you’ll find more meaningful ways to spend your time. You might meditate and self-reflect, looking into yourself to decipher what your motivations and goals are.
Does Dopamine Fasting Work?
Although dopamine fasting isn’t easy, the benefits do intrigue you. Should you consider trying this type of fast yourself? Does dopamine fasting even work?
Jari Roomer, the Medium writer who went on a dopamine fast, says yes. He mentions how his mind was quieter so it was easier to focus. He also said he more liked the thoughts in his head, and that some of them were even useful ideas for his business.
Kirsty Grant, the writer at BBC who also dopamine fasted, said no, it didn’t work for her. More than missing her phone, she missed food. The next day, when the fast ended, she resumed her normal habits and only had a greater appreciation for eating, not much else in her life.
What does the science say about dopamine fasting? University of Michigan neuroscience and psychology professor Kent Berridge, PhD, told Healthline that this fast “will stop turning on the dopamine system over and over like everyday life does, but it isn’t going to reset it…That’s not that clearing your mind won’t allow you to enjoy pleasures more…It just won’t be the result of the regulation of dopamine.”
This Harvard Health Publishing article from 2020 agrees. Peter Grinspoon, MD says that the brain naturally produces dopamine. You’re not stopping your brain from making the neurotransmitter and hormone when you take away pleasurable activities, nor are you even reducing your levels of dopamine. You’re just not getting the dopamine hits to your brain’s pleasure center while on this fast because well, what you’re doing isn’t fun.
Does this necessarily mean dopamine fasting is useless? No. Taking a break from the overstimulation of life can give you a chance to step back, evaluate your life in its current state, and make plans to get where you want to be.
You can also free up more of your schedule by taking some time to stop gaming, checking your phone, or posting on social media, as all these activities are quite time-consuming.
As for making your brain produce less dopamine or even stop production altogether on a dopamine fast? That’s not going to happen.
Conclusion
Dopamine fasting involves a daylong period where you quit everything you enjoy, including food, social media, movies and TV, music, reading, the Internet, and communicating with others. You can still go outside and write, but that’s about it.
Although this form of fasting is a good chance to press the pause button on life when things get too hectic, experts have found that dopamine fasting will not affect the levels of dopamine produced in the brain. The fast just impacts how pleasurable you find life, which won’t be very.
If you’re interested in the concepts of a dopamine fast but you’re not sure whether it’s right for you, meditation, especially the ancient Indian technique called Vipassana mediation, may be the better option.