Dopamine Fasting

The latest craze to hit Silicon Valley is called "dopamine fasting." The exercise was named by San Francisco psychologist Dr. Cameron Sepah, who is not only a believer in dopamine fasting, but he practices and teaches the discipline. It is becoming increasingly popular and is generating international interest.

But what exactly is dopamine fasting and does it really work? Let's investigate.

The general idea behind dopamine fasting is that by reducing the brain's feel-good chemical dopamine, you can reset the brain to be more effective and appreciate simple things more easily. Fans of the practice suggest reducing dopamine production by restricting things that make you feel good like food, sex, alcohol, social media and drugs. Some fanatics are so extreme that they avoid all social activities and even avoid eye contact with people.

So, dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain. It travels around the brain conveying signals related to functions like motor control, memory, arousal and reward processing. It is very important to the reward system in the brain and is activated by things like food, sex and drugs. The brain's reward system can "learn" over time. Cues in our environment that we associate with rewards can increase dopamine activity even if we don't actually get the reward. So just bring in a doughnut shop and thinking about doughnuts can activate our brain's dopamine. This is called "wanting" in neuroscience lingo.

Those suffering from depression experience a lack of wanting, interest and pleasure in and during what are normally pleasurable experiences. Dysfunctional dopamine regulation has been linked to depression and some drug treatments for depression are designed to increase dopamine in the brain.

So dopamine seems like it's pretty awesome right? Why on earth would anyone want to fast from it? Dopamine fasting is based on the fact that dopamine is involved in unhealthy, addictive behaviors. Dopamine fasters believe that they can curb cravings and desires for unhealthy and unwanted habits and behaviors by reducing dopamine.

Great. But does it work?

Before I get to that I just want to share something that I think is pretty important to note. One thing that I kept seeing over and over again during my research for this post was that it is not advisable to reduce the amount of dopamine in the brain because we need it for our everyday normal functions.

Also, restricting a certain activity, like social media, isn't going to reduce your dopamine levels. It does however help to reduce the stimulation of dopamine.

So at the most, it is possible to reduce your dopamine activity. The key to doing this successfully is to reduce your exposure to the triggers that are associated with the rewards that initiate wanting the rewards in the first place. These cues initiate the cravings and desires to engage in the behaviors that get us the reward. Basically, cutting out the reward does not stop us from craving them.

However, from a neuroscience perspective you cannot "reset" the brain because there is no way to know what the baseline is.

So if you feel like you need to cut down on what you think are unhealthy behaviors, you should start by reducing your exposure to the environmental cues that trigger the urge to engage in the unhealthy behavior. For example, if after lunch at work you usually go outside for a smoke, go for a brisk walk instead.

Symptoms of unhealthy behaviors are not that different from those of substance abuse. These could include spending a lot of time engaging in the behavior, continuing the behavior despite negative results, difficulty cutting back despite wanting to stop and neglecting work, family, school or friends.

It's possible that after you make the decision to cut back that you will experience withdraw symptoms. SO you may want to consider removing the cues that stimulate your dopamine neurons. Which I suppose is a sort of dopamine fast.

Recently, on The Cut there was a great piece that described one woman's first-hand experience with dopamine fasting. It's a great read if you are interested in the practice and want to hear someones thoughts on the process.