Dopamine Detox – Fact or Fad and How to Perform One
‘Dopamine Detoxes’ are all the rage right now – but is their popularity founded in fact or fiction? From at-home cold plunges to social media fasts, explore how to correctly regulate and ‘detox’ your dopamine.
Since the beginning of time humans have been hardwired to seek out dopamine through self-preservation activities like eating, drinking, and connecting with others.
Although dopamine’s role in the body is rooted in good intentions, this powerful mind molecule’s modern application can be considered to be a bit more sinister. Through drug use, social media addictions, and a variety of other instantly gratifying activities, dopamine highs – and crashes – are reaching never before seen levels.
Not only are these fluctuating levels of dopamine creating a never-ending rollercoaster of high and low feelings, but people are also finding it increasingly difficult to derive pleasure and motivation from more mundane life activities.
Cue the current trend of performing a ‘dopamine detox.’
In this article, we’ll be exploring the science behind ‘dopamine detoxes’ while also uncovering a wide range of ways to healthily regulate your dopamine and boost your baseline levels.
From cold water plunges to social media fasts, you can trust that your version of a ‘detox’ will have you feeling happier and healthier in no time!
Memory, motivation, mood, and more
The role of dopamine in the body is complex and multifaceted, but can be broken down into two responsibilities:
- Dopamine plays a role as a “feel good” hormone, motivating us to perform activities and allowing us to derive pleasure from our engagement in them.
- Dopamine is also known as a part of the “reward center” in the brain, rushing in when we complete tasks, reinforcing our desire to repeat them again.
This powerful neurotransmitter sends messages between your mind and the rest of your body to also control things like:
- Movement
- Memory
- Pleasurable reward and motivation
- Behavior and cognition
- Attention
- Sleep and alertness
- Mood
- Learning
If you feel motivated to do something, or if you feel good after you’ve done it, you can thank this friendly little mind molecule for keeping you happy and content.
Not your typical detox
So is there really a way to entirely detox your body of dopamine? The short answer is no, and we shouldn’t want to!
The term ‘dopamine detox’ was originally coined by Dr. Cameron Sepah as a way to help high powered executives break the addiction of technology and nonstop work. This ‘detox’ relies on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and encourages people to disengage from addictive behaviors that are specific to them.
For example, if you find yourself doom-scrolling for hours a day to evoke dopamine, Sepah would suggest that you set aside specific windows of time to not check your phone. Similarly, if you crave a neurochemical boost from online shopping, utilize safe search features to block your favorite online store’s web pages.
As Sepah acknowledges, dopamine is made by your body whether you like it or not, and is impossible to entirely rid ourselves of. The term ‘detox’ should not be taken literally. Instead, it was simply meant to be coined as a catchy tagline to describe the cycle of breaking autonomic and addictive actions that evoke high levels of dopamine.
Current adaptations of the detox seek to avoid dopaminergic activities entirely, with fad participants going as far as to not exercise or look people in the eye out of fear of evoking this feel-good hormone. Thankfully, there are simpler ways to keep our dopamine levels in check while preventing massive peaks, crashes, and addictive behavior cycles.
Boost your baselines
Dr. Andrew Huberman suggests that there are ways we can boost our overall feelings of dopamine without disengaging from certain activities, leading to higher levels of general happiness and motivation.
- Deliberate cold water exposure
With just two minutes of deliberate exposure to cold water you can experience up to a 260% increase in dopamine levels. That’s greater than dopamine spikes created by stimulant pharmaceuticals!And, unlike spikes from stimulants, the dopamine arch created by cold water therapy is not accompanied by a massive crash. In fact, dopamine levels slowly return to normal over a longer period of time while helping to raise your baseline dopamine levels. For frequent exposure to cold water, consider investing in an at home COLDTUB™ or utilizing daily cold showers.
- Eating a richer, more diverse diet
A whole food diet rich in tyrosine can also be credited for raising baseline levels of dopamine. As a building block of the dopamine chemical, tyrosine is an integral amino acid that can be ingested through red meats, nuts, fermented cheese, and a plethora of other plant based options. - Engage in positive self talk
Although the dopamine system is a physiological one, there is a massive psychological component to evoking dopamine and improving its levels within the body. The prefrontal cortex – a part of the brain involved in dopamine production – also controls motivation levels through the belief effect. This effect suggests that believing something will happen will foster higher levels of motivation and drive to actually make that thing occur.If we tell ourselves that we love the activity we are partaking in, even if it’s the hardest workout, study session, or test of our lives, we will evoke massive amounts of dopamine in our brain while also raising our baseline levels. This encourages us to soldier on through our task while simultaneously making us feel good about engaging in it.
Hop off the dopamine rollercoaster
To further mitigate spikes and crashes in dopamine, it’s important to consider the current activities that offer you instant gratification. Try to avoid:
- Highly rewarding behavior
- Scrolling on social media, excessive video gaming, and eating highly processed and palatable food, are all instantly satisfying activities that require little effort to evoke dopamine. Because of this, these behaviors can easily become addictive as your body continues to crave more and more dopamine which can only be evoked by engaging in heightened levels of these activities.
- Non-prescription pharmaceuticals and supplements
- Melatonin: Ingesting exogenous sources of melatonin as a sleep aid has been shown to cause massive crashes in dopamine for hours and even days after ingestion. Instead of using a melatonin supplement for rest, consider unwinding in your spa before bedtime to mimic the natural rise and fall of your internal temperature, signaling to your body that it’s time for dreamland.
- Stimulants: Stimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines lead to massive peaks in dopamine and a subsequent, rapid crash of the neurochemical. Unless prescribed by a doctor, avoid the unnecessary use of stimulants to better regulate your dopamine and mood levels.
- Layering Dopaminergic Activities
- Avoid layering multiple feel-good activities on top of one another. When we engage in an extensive amount of dopaminergic activities at the same time, we create massive peaks and massive crashes of dopamine before and after our activity, respectively. Each layer of dopamine evoking behaviors will raise our threshold for dopamine production, leading to an overall lack of interest in once exciting activities.
The short of It…
There is no real way to entirely eliminate dopamine from your system, and we shouldn’t want to! Instead of focusing on a fad detox that calls for avoiding any feel-good activity, focus on making decisions that will foster natural motivation, level out dopamine spikes, and improve overall happiness*.
Work to break addictive behaviors through avoidance techniques that are specific to you. And, choose natural mood boosters like cold water therapy, a healthy diet, and relaxing in your hot tub to use dopamine as a tool for pleasure, not an inhibitor of it.
*Arctic Spas® is not a medical expert. Be sure to consult your healthcare practitioner before making any changes to your lifestyle.
