The author is attacking a position that doesn't really exist. You obviously don't fast from dopamine in general. You fast from dopamine peaks. Continuous spiking of dopamine causes your baseline levels to drop, and you feel shitty and unmotivated. A dopamine fast (of the spikes) is intended to let the levels rise back.
> Continuous spiking of dopamine causes your baseline levels to drop, and you feel shitty and unmotivated.
Spiking dopamine levels with pharmaceutical drugs can do this in animal studies, but watching a show on Netflix or eating a donut is not the same thing.
The simpler explanation is that people who spend all of their time passively consuming rewarding activities (junk food, TV shows, Twitter, Reddit, porn) are getting terrible nutrition, very little physical activity, and no real social exposure. They're also piping a constant stream of negative news and unhealthy debates into their eyes and ears.
Going outside and going for a run is also rewarding and can also be shown to elevate dopamine levels, but nobody is going to argue that it makes you "feel shitty and unmotivated".
You can't reduce everything down to one, singular chemical in the brain. Human psychology and motivations are complex and not a function of singular chemical "levels" in the brain. Reward is also a complex topic that involves multiple systems across the brain, especially opioidergic pathways that moderate much of the sensation of reward. Dopamine is also used for functions like movement (think Parkinson's) and even encoding negative stimuli that you dislike.
This pseudoscience idea that "dopamine equals motivation" or that you can modulate your entire motivation/reward circuitry by playing games to modulate dopamine is an egregious abuse of the science.
> The simpler explanation is that people who spend all of their time passively consuming rewarding activities (junk food, TV shows, Twitter, Reddit, porn) are getting terrible nutrition, very little physical activity, and no real social exposure. They're also piping a constant stream of negative news and unhealthy debates into their eyes and ears.
That's not the simpler explanation at all; that's actually a 2nd and 3rd order explanation backed up by nothing but conjecture. The reward center and the pleasure center are separate; this is why people can get addicted to video games they hate, or they can doomscroll all day not really enjoy it, yet be unable to stop. Activities designed to spike dopamine as high as possible and far beyond anything seen in our evolutionary history cannot be taken lightly. It's silly to think that a healthy, active person is immune to addiction. Porn, junk food, twitter are all just socially acceptable, mild addictions, and just like any behavioral addiction like gambling, they are all driven by dopamine. Will you next tell gamblers they're fine, they just need to eat better and hit the gym?
I think you're also attacking a position no one really holds. Of course it's incredibly complicated. But we do know quite a bit about tonic and phasic release of dopamine as well as the effects of dopamine depletion. The video is by a professor of Neurobiology at Stanford. It's not pseudoscience.
> This pseudoscience idea that "dopamine equals motivation" or that you can modulate your entire motivation/reward circuitry by playing games to modulate dopamine is an egregious abuse of the science.
I suggest you listen to the Huberman episode. Of course, he never claims something as simplistic as "dopamine _equals_ motivation", but there's wealth of evidence that he cites in the episode that the two are intimately related. The second part of your sentence is actually pretty close to the truth rather than an egregious abuse of the science, though it depends on what you mean by "playing games to modulate dopamine". The entire episode is about the topic, and I strongly recommend it.
> You can't reduce everything down to one, singular chemical in the brain. Human psychology and motivations are complex and not a function of singular chemical "levels" in the brain.
I'm pretty sure you won't find any instance in the episode where Huberman claims to reduce everything down to dopamine.
Am I the only one who appreciates things more after being away from them for a long time? Or is that more than dopamine? I thought dopamine was involved with motivation and would at least in large part explain why I might get tired of playing a video game but then suddenly get way more enjoyment out of it if I play it again 6 months later.
Perhaps I'm from another planet. It just seems like for anything I find to be helpful there's some academic article discrediting it.
> Misunderstanding science can create maladaptive behaviors
Given that it seems pretty unlikely that someone could become addicted to dopamine fasting, it's really up to the individual and not science as to whether their behavior is maladaptive. It doesn't really matter whether non-academics understand dopamine if they still find benefit in the process.
The general idea is real: Abstaining from an activity for a while can make it more enjoyable.
But the "dopamine fasting" trend has evolved into a weird extremist version of this where people try to avoid everything that might be enjoyable for a while.
The catch, of course, is that you don't have to avoid everything enjoyable to rekindle that feeling of enjoyment for returning to specific things.
These people would be far happier if they simply used their downtime to go exercise, or go for a walk, or socialize, or volunteer, or call up old friends. You don't have to be miserable to restore the enjoyment of something. Just do something else for a while instead of being chronically online all day every day.
I don't know much about how the brain works, but I know that I appreaciate more the chocolate in a vanilla ice cream with small bits of chocolate than in a chocolate ice cream. I know that I appreciate water more after not drinking it for some time and being thirsty. I appreciate more my parents since I moved out and see them not every day but around once a week. On the other hand, after having spent too much time playing a game (ever over a period of years), I start to not feel any pleasure when playing it.
Given all of that, the ideas behind dopamine fasting make sense to me. I won't claim that it does for everyone of course, but if someone tells me that it doesn't make sense because this or that in the brain, I would tell them that it doesn't match my experience of other things. Maybe dopamine shouldn't be in the name, maybe it shouldn't call fasting, but I feel like the article is attacking the content and not just the name.
Sure, but do you find video games more interesting when thirsty? Does chocolate tastes better when eaten without good company?
The argument is that lumping everything together is unnecessary: you can disconnect from different things at different times. I’d say this is true for the biochemistry too: dopamine has myriad roles and avoiding flash photography to reduce retinal dopamine release seems…unlikely to relate to mood.
Heck, about half of dopamine isn’t even in the brain: it’s got a big role in the gut and pancreas too!
Interesting. I would say that video games aren't more interesting when thirsty. On the other hand, depending on the moment, video games, chocolate, having a good company and social media can all fill a certain void, that I wouldn't encounter if I disconnected from each of the things separately. I think that's what might be meant by dopamine fasting, though the "dopamine" term focuses a bit too much on the supposed origin of the feeling instead of the feeling itself.
I like the term "hedonic fast", but I would interpret it as the opposite of what it would be, as I already know "water fast", a fast where you only consume water. Perhaps "stimuli abstinence"? Abstinence is defined as "a self-enforced restraint from indulging in bodily activities that are widely experienced as giving pleasure". "stimuli" would ensure that people don't think directly about sexual abstinence.
If you talk to anyone involved with fasting and mention a water fast they will understand that to mean fasting while still consuming water. If everyone else agrees on how the term is used then you may want to reconsider if the term is wrong or not.
That might be a stupid question but is there a grammar rule or something that would suggest that "water fast" is "abstaining from water" and not "abstaining from food except water"? Maybe it's an expansion of the definition of fasting and thus leads to "abstaining from water", in which case the correct term would be "water diet".
> However, people are adopting ever more extreme, ascetic, and unhealthy versions of this fasting, based on misconceptions about how dopamine works in our brains. They are not eating, exercising, listening to music, socializing, talking more than necessary, and not allowing themselves to be photographed if there’s a flash (not sure if this applies to selfies).
Just one of the wild, reference-free claims [1] the article makes. Who are these legions of people? The few articles I have been able to find about it [2][3] indicate that it's Silicon Valley "trying things out" as usual, and assorted media loudly claiming that it doesn't work.
As such, the backlash against this is the most interesting part to me. Is dopamine fasting enough of a blow to the business model of traditional media outlets that they have decided to snowball it with a series of strawman attacks just in case anyone takes it seriously and decides to try it out? It seems like a harmless form of standard Buddhist-style meditation practices to me, that seek to minimize desire.
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[1] I wonder how much of a "pass" an article unnecessarily gets on basic things like data and references just because it happens to on a Harvard Medical School domain.
> Who are these legions of people? The few articles I have been able to find about it [2][3] indicate that it's Silicon Valley "trying things out" as usual, and assorted media loudly claiming that it doesn't work.
It's not legions of people, but "dopamine fasting" was (briefly) popular in certain social media and tech circles.
It started out as a "put down your phone and go outside" kind of trend with a pseudoscientific tie-in to dopamine (or at least the popular misconceptions about dopamine). Aside from egregiously abusing neuroscience terms, it was actually a decent idea to encourage people to take a break from the easy rewards like social media, video games, and TV. Probably feels like a revelation to people who were chronically online and forgot that there was an alternative way to live.
But then it spiraled into a fad where social media personalities tried to one-up each other or rush to add their own pseudoscientific twists in an attempt to have something new and unique to share. And it evolved into this silly idea that you shouldn't do anything enjoyable during your off time, or even that you had to specifically become uncomfortable or miserable.
Outside of those circles, everyone else is just rolling their eyes. But get caught in one of these bubbles and you'll hear a lot of one-upmanship about dopamine fasting and humble brags about not doing certain things.
At least until it becomes uncool again, at which point everyone will pretend it never happened.
This article probably sounds like nonsense if you haven't been in one of these circles, but it's actually a great resource to give to someone before they go down the "dopamine fasting" rabbit hole. Debunk early and save them the trouble.
Moderation is good. Putting down your phone and going outside is good. Having self-discipline is good. But turning it into a status-signaling social media game and applying a pseudoscientific name is a good way to completely miss the point. Just go outside and enjoy yourself.
I remember first seeing it a long time ago on a 4chan thread.[0]
For what it's worth, it's been pretty useful for treating maladaptive ADHD habits/hyperfocusing on the wrong things. It has been pretty useful for tweaking my habits, and making me aware that I'm able to actually change them (rather than fall into learned helplessness).
I think most people forget that you have to break a fast, at the end of it. Hopefully this time slowly easing into a new, healthier diet regimen.
> They are not eating, exercising, listening to music, socializing, talking more than necessary, and not allowing themselves to be photographed if there’s a flash
This is the standard asceticism routine that every human religion in history followed. (And follows.)
I'll trust the weight of centuries of experience over some random internet source.
honestly - I don't feel sentence/question has nearly enough detail/context to be answerable comfortable in a Yes/No fashion.
But my comment was not even about reproducibility, though that is important, but another fundamental question: What is the goal?
Yes, many people over hundreds of years have behaved a certain way. But putting aside burden of evidence/reproducibility, whether I want to behave a certain way / same way, to me, hinges on a) What's my goal and b) Have those people obtained that goal?
Random trivial examples: IF my goal is to have a happy family life with a partner and bunch of kids; following people who practiced isolation and asceticism will probably not satisfy that goal, no matter how many of them did it over however many hundreds of years. Insert any number of other trivial or complex goals (leading people, developing a rich and meaningful social life, sending a rocket to the moon, experiencing a lot of different experiences, travelling, seeing the world - whatever ). I find the whole "lots of people did this, so I'll trust their experience" pretty meaningless without stating "what is your goal? What do you consider good? What do you desire?" and then "did those people reach that goal? And what are the aspects of their life that contributed to it?"
(FWIW, I find that is frequently the case on internet forums; with my friends, explicitly or implicitly I understand their perspective/context/goals, so we can discuss politics or history or morals knowing each others assumptions or goals. On the internet, a LOOOOT of discussion is pretty circular because nobody stated their goals; so how can we discuss whether something is good/productive/leading to desired state; or bad/counter-productive/leading to negative state; etc. But that's a much broader concern than what we have here:).
>>to poke a hole in the idea that only things that can be reproduced in double blind studies are truth.
I agree, though I will selfishly bring it up to my own point of defining goals/scopes/mandates a priori :)
If my partner and I are discussing what's the best colour for the kitchen, double-blinded studies are of limited help and Truth is ephemeral and subjective :).
If we are discussing mathematical theorems, double-blinded study may be an irrelevant construct.
For some social or psychological areas, double-blinded study may be helpful but difficult or impossible to ethically configure, repeatably conduct, meaningfully interpret, and clean up of confounding variables etc.
And for yet other areas, it's the best tool we have to help confirm at a workable, useful, predictive model.
It's neat that so many of these traditions align with neuroscience. My naive expectation would be skepticism of anything that's mysticism adjacent. Many spiritual practices are being laid bare by science, and found to be effective in modulating neurochemistry, or directly manipulating parasympathetic immune responses, or a myriad other effects that can improve a person's well-being.
There are human superpowers, like increasing or decreasing your core temperature, consciously resisting infections, deliberately triggering the placebo effect, feats of memory, endurance, or cognition. Science is making inroads to the mechanics of many of these feats.
Asceticism seems like a clear cut system for improving cognition by letting the baselines of dopaminergic activity settle down. I can see the potential for negative effects of overstimulation, but where there's atrope, there's usually a kernel of truth to be found. Intellectuals and scholars are known to retreat from the world to silence and study for extended periods. Removing external stimulation is about as obvious as it gets when you want to focus on something. However, sensory deprivation- the extreme end of the axis - is known to have extremely negative effects, sometimes within a couple days. There's clearly a minimum threshold of stimulation needed to retain your sanity.
Running studies on cognitive performance through the use of deprivation tanks, silent retreats, minimal stimulation lifestyles, and other methodologies would be interesting. If a once weekly tank session provides as much benefit as daily silent retreats, or a month of living in isolation, or something like that, it would give people reasons to improve their well-being. My own suspicion is that infrequent tank use is probably as beneficial as more rigorous asceticism, but that's just opinion.
With the doors open to psychedelics research, I'd love to see the comparative results from ascetic practice with and without psychedelics over 6 month periods.
religions have also practiced the punishment of homosexuals and atheists for thousands of years, and doctors have practiced bloodletting for ages. A lot of the standard stuff we've been doing for thousands of years turns out to be pretty terrible
the random internet source in this case happens to be harvard medical laying out basic facts about how dopamine works in the human brain and why you can't actually 'fast' it.
Harvard Medical also extols the virtues of a low fat diet, and managing your cholesterol with statins, both of which aren’t particularly helpful at reducing your mortality.
yes, sometimes established medicine gets things wrong. But we do agree that if you experience chest pain tomorrow you consult the harvard trained cardiologist and not a witch doctor, priest or traditional chinese medicine, correct?
General point being, if you weigh "weights of centuries" higher than modern expertise, you would still believe that night air is dangerous and your four humors are out of balance instead of believing in germs. The chance that anyone who posts on HN actually treats their illnesses with ancient religious practice is, I'd wager, very low. And that tells you all there is to it.
Are there a lot of religions with bans on flash photography?
This, to my mind, is a perfect example of people getting carried away. It is definitely the case that dopamine signalling occurs in the retina, but the connection between that and any sort of higher-level “affective” phenomenon seems pretty tenuous.
Not sure if it applies in this case, but marketers and influencers have discovered that if they sign up for Harvard extension classes, they can publish blog articles and do email with the harvard.edu domain. I think WBUR did an article on the issue.
A doctor at Mass General, which is one of Harvard's teaching hospitals. He's also an instructor at Harvard Med, so his claim to a Harvard affiliation seems about as solid as can be.
None of which should make them exempt from citing some kind of source, or using fewer superlatives in writing. "We have recently seen some patients who told us they were dopamine fasting..." would have been fine.
>>They are not eating, exercising, listening to music, socializing, talking more than necessary, and not allowing themselves to be photographed if there’s a flash
> Just one of the wild, reference-free claims [1] the article makes. Who are these legions of people?
Mental health professionals might have started encountering this kind of person at the end of their attempts of acting this way, and then started talking about it with each other. Other patients are probably reference the misconstrued influencer articles about "dopamine fasting" in therapy sessions. They can't really tell you real numbers because it would break mental health privacy laws. Hell they might of wrote this mostly to show patients as a reference material.
Also the article doesn't make any assertions about the amount of people doing it (your "legions"), just that some people are.
Given the structure of the article, and the fact that its only two outbound links are shilling for a particular kind of dopamine fast, I'd say this article is just PR for the therapist they are "interviewing".
I read the article and I really have no idea where you’re drawing such invidious conclusions, especially when the concept of “dopamine fasting” seems to extend far beyond social media.
Isn't this author interpreting "dopamine fast" too literally? Obviously you can't bring your dopamine levels to zero. But that's not what people are attempting to do. They're avoiding easy dopamine hits. We probably need some studies to know if avoiding them for a period of time has actual benefits, but it doesn't make sense to completely dismiss the idea.
I would love more detail, but I think the point is solid. When I get too caught up in something with negative side-effects, I'll definitely take a break from it. E.g., I'll get compulsive about certain kinds of video game, so I'll take steps to set it aside for a while. (E.g., remove the game from my Switch, discharge the Switch's battery, and then put it in some hard-to-reach place, all so that gratification wouldn't be instant.) So that made me think the dopamine addiction/dopamine fasting people had a point.
But it sounds like some people over-interpret the theory and under-invest in verifying their interpretations through rigorous testing. That's unfortunate, but it's a behavior you see all the time with self-improvement fads. E.g., I think the paleo people had a point with moving away from foods engineered to maximize repeat purchasing. And in the saner parts of that world you'd see people recommending a framework of responsible self-experimentation, where you try things out and look for health improvements. But then there's also the whole "paleo brownies" crowd, where people ate just as poorly but with nominally different ingredients so they could feel virtuous without any actual improvement.
> So that made me think the dopamine addiction/dopamine fasting people had a point.
The term is nebulous, but I think you're mixing concepts.
Taking a break from video games to do other things is a great idea.
But the "dopamine fasting" people have evolved the idea to the point that you would have to take a break from everything enjoyable during the down time. That is, no socialization, no music, no enjoyable foods, and nothing that might make you happy.
And that's the misconception: You don't have to be miserable to restore the enjoyment of one specific thing. You just have to take a break and do something else.
These people would be far happier if they took a break from their easy rewarding activities (Twitter, Netflix, whatever) and simply got up and did anything else, like going outside, going for a walk, socializing with friends, cooking an elaborate meal and inviting some guests over. You don't have to become miserable in general. Diversity of experiences and moderation of the easy rewards is key.
I think we are saying the same thing. I came across people talking about "dopamine addiction" a while back, and they were making the point that there's a sheaf of similar behaviors on different topics/substances. And that one had to learn to recognize the behaviors as a group.
And I'll note that "take a break from everything" approach is both much older than this and can be very effective. People who do extended meditation retreats do basically what you describe. I once spent a week at the SF Zen Center's "Green Gulch Farm". No music, basic food, no tech. One could even sit at a table where nobody talked.
I loved it. I have no idea if my dopamine levels changed. But it was great to set aside the frantic-feeling short-loop behaviors, accept a period of discomfort, and then feel freer once the compulsions/habits were past. As opposed to, say, quitting video games for a week but substituting more time on Twitter and watching videos.
So I could see where they're going with it and I think they had good points. But it sounds like they have taken it too far.
Just a heads up, it’s very bad for the battery to keep it in a discharged state for any longer than absolutely necessary. Batteries are best stored at about 50%
IIRC, the danger with storing lithium batteries at a low SoC is that they do have some small amount of self-discharge and can eventually drop to levels that cause severe degradation - and potentially catastrophic failure when next charged.
This depends entirely on battery chemistry and is different for each one.
Lithium ion batteries want to be stored at low charge and cold. As long as they don’t self discharge below a certain minimum (at which point they are dead forever) you minimize degradation by keeping charge as low as possible. No need to be obsessive about it because the difference between 5% and 50% isn’t much.
Other lithium chemistries want to be stored completely charged, NiCd wants to be about half. Temperature is usually worse than charge state anyway.
Get thee behind me, Satan. The machine is there for me; I am not there for the machine. If tending to my productivity and mental health means replacing a battery every second year instead of every third, then I'm going to pick me over a $35 battery.
If someone is trying to get away from something with addictive characteristics, the last thing they need is somebody coming by to make that harder. The presumption that I don't know anything about batteries is bad enough. Disregarding what I'm up to is worse. It's like somebody talking about how they're quitting drinking and popping up to say, "But studies show health benefits to drinking!" While true, it's well known and incredibly unhelpful.
And as the replies show, his unhelpful intervention could well be wrong to boot.
Maybe it's just me, but are all the assumptions made here true?
Does liking a video, watching a TikTok, reading a blog post, catching up with my Instagram feed, etc. really does anything to my dopamine levels?
Have any of these activities really been shown to be bad for my physical or mental well being?
Naively speaking, I personally don't like wasting my time with them, because they don't make me feel accomplished, and because there are other things I actually want to do and often don't do in favor of the ease of wasting time of my phone instead. But none of that implies those activities are bad for me.
People claim there's an addiction to these things, is that true? Is it really that you're addicted to them? Would you suffer real withdrawal were the internet to be out of order for a few weeks?
> Is it really that you're addicted to them? Would you suffer real withdrawal were the internet to be out of order for a few weeks?
There's various types of withdrawal. Your life wouldn't be at genuine risk compared to the withdrawal you get from various drugs. But yeah, it's entirely possible that you'd feel horrible for a while. True for me, at least. I suggest you try it to find out (never rely on your ability to perceive your own addiction! check and see what actually happens).
> While dopamine does rise in response to rewards or pleasurable activities, it doesn’t actually decrease when you avoid overstimulating activities, so a dopamine “fast” doesn’t actually lower your dopamine levels.
I'm having a genuinely hard time understanding the logic of this statement.
The others being a bit too literally/missing th obvious that your baseline levels of dopamine are lower than when your engaging in the activities listed in the article and that's what people are referring to when they say a 'dopamine fast'. Not literally removing all dopamine from your body, but reducing your overall levels/staying at the baseline more.
I haven't gotten through the entire article but I'm surprised no one's brought up the natural down regulation your body/brain does in reaction to elevated levels of any hormone. This tolerance the body builds up is one of the forces that cause people to become addicted to things because then they have not only the positive reinforcement but the negative reinforcement of needing the thing just to feel normal. Its the hedonic treadmill.
> Not literally removing all dopamine from your body, but reducing your overall levels/staying at the baseline more.
To my knowledge there is no evidence that more dopamine gets created when practicing unhealthy behaviour. Neurotransmitters are much more complex than the simplistic fasting model describes. If you don't have severe malnutrion (e.g. not enough tyrosine etc.) or Parkinson or ADHS or similar, the dopamine is just there in your brain, waiting to be released as needed. We don't create more of it just because we look at insta 50 times a day. And we can't use it all up through behavior alone (but things like amphetamines do, of course).
The metaphor of dopamine levels working like battery levels is simply wrong. High levels of dopamine correlate with good mood, but also schizophrenia. ADHS patients' symptoms can both get better and worse when consuming dopamin produgs.
It's like the author heard about this practice briefly and jumped straight to "Wait, this doesn't make any sense!" and spun his lack of understanding in the most extreme way.
Instead of asking what's driving people to this practice and whether the practice produced noticeable mental health benefits in the participants.
"It can't work how I understand it", doesn't mean it actually can't work, only that you've failed to understand.
It might `work` in the sense that it causes the practitioners feel better, without the biochemistry `working` as hypothesized. Indeed, the author points out that many of the practices are pretty close to more traditional mindfulness/sleep hygiene recommendations anyway.
I think the author took the phrase "dopamine fast" literally and spent a good deal of his article trying to show that dopamine fasts don't reduce dopamine, which is sort of missing the point.
Many people overlook the term 'breakfast'. It's a combination of the words 'breaking your fast'. Dopamine starving happens during deep sleep, so we do it anyway just as we starve ourselves of food whilst sleeping, so I don't see the point of doing dopamine fasts outside of sleep.
There are health benefits to periodically fasting from food for longer than the 8 hours spent sleeping. Many Jewish people who practice Shabbat extol the modern benefits of staying offline for 36 hours every week.
Why assume that a daily 8 hour sleep window is The optimal break for everything?
Has anyone here tried 24 hours isolation [1] to reset perception of time? It's related to dopamine fasts but reportedly more profound. Andrew Huberman from Stanford has an excellent podcast [2] on dopamine. He goes in depth on the importance of using dopamine in the pursuit of goals with a caution around the come down period after achieving goals.
How can the author claim in the same sentence, "While dopamine does rise in response to rewards or pleasurable activities," and "it doesn’t actually decrease when you avoid overstimulating activities". So what, it just rises forever from the time we're born until death? Obviously not; something decreases it.
What fad fasting doesn't take into account is that it takes many weeks, up to many months, to downregulate the dopamine receptors. Dopamine fasting one day per week or a few hours per day is literally doing nothing for your dopamine. In this regard, the author is correct. But if you actually dopamine fast for months in by avoiding highly dopaminergistic activities, your brain will really undergo meaningful changes.
While I can understand that it must be frustrating to see people misunderstand the science and do stupid things, I don't think this article is very helpful for the "dopamine fasters". Thing is, these are troubled people going to a lot of effort to improve their lives, and they are doing almost but not quite the right thing. What they need is a huge helping of encouragement and just a small amount of course correction.
If he sincerely wants to engage with the proponents, he needs to drop the smug.
Dopamine fasting is not for hitting a dopamine zero. It is just to reset the system to its natural state so that it reacts to normal levels of dopamine.
Well, you don't fast from dopamine in that sense even following the "fad". So the article (or at least it's title) is misingenuous - you fast from BS, stressful, and psychologically addictive input...
No, you're right. The whole article misses the forest for the trees. The term "dopamine fast" doesn't literally mean fasting from dopamine. It's about fasting from easy "dopamine hits" from media designed to exploit the way our rewards circuitry works.
I think this criticism is itself missing the forest for the trees. The idea behind dopamine fasting is, (possibly unfairly) reduced to the minimum, that doing less of a harmful behaviour for a while will cure us of our problematic behaviour. In other words, we actually are addicted to dopamine itself, instead of having built up maladaptive cognitions. This is what (I think) the article tried to refute.
Even with the little we know about the inner workings of our brains, this doesn't appear to be true: We have to actively build up alternative behaviour and critically inspect/change the cognitions that actually promote the problematic behaviour.
So if a person has unhealthy bevaviour patterns regarding social media consumption, just doing less of that without also actively changing the cognitions that lead to the unhealthy behaviour in the first place won't help much. We do these things because we have a mostly subconsious theory that doing this is good for us. If this actually isn't, than that assumption has to be challenged, and healthy alternatives have to be built up. Just not doing the thing for a while won't replace the assumption, unless one is abstinent for a really long time (think years).
>So if a person has unhealthy bevaviour patterns regarding social media consumption, just doing less of that without also actively changing the cognitions that lead to the unhealthy behaviour in the first place won't help much. We do these things because we have a mostly subconsious theory that doing this is good for us. If this actually isn't, than that assumption has to be challenged, and healthy alternatives have to be built up. Just not doing the thing for a while won't replace the assumption.
It's not about replacing the assumption. I don't even think there's much of an assumption (that it's good for us), it's rather the opposite: people actually hate themselves for spending so much time on social media, youtube, etc.
So, it's more about kicking a bad habit, than about trying to change some non-existing assumption that it's a good thing.
Seems almost purposefully dense in that way. I'd consider flagging it except, ironically, the headline itself was more informative to me than the article.
Exactly, it's like the author has never hear of the hedonic treadmill. Something I a 24 year old who has taken exactly one psychology course knows about.
This has nothing to do with the hedonic treadmill. The treadmill model describes changed on much larger timeframes and of much larger impact, i.e. how your model of the world changes if you lose both legs, or become a parent, or become rich etc.
Dopamine fasting is a mechanistic model trying to explain unhealthy behaviour patterns that can occur dozens of times a day.
That's an oversimplification of ADHD. The "insufficient" dopamine is extremely contextual; more accurately, dopamine is dysregulated. By suggesting that dopamine itself is a cause, which I think you are suggesting, then that's like saying the a cause of ADHD is a lack of attention. The question for ADHD should be whether abstaining from dopamine-stimulating activities does anything to correct that dysregulation and, barring some evidence I've yet to research, I don't think the answer is obvious or self-evident.
Besides that potentially fallacious point I made, I don't think the ADHD brain is really relevant to whether dopamine fasting is beneficial for other brains than those with ADHD.
This has to be the stupidest sentiment I've seen other than the dopamine meme itself where laypeople online use the word to back up reactionary politics.
Talk about sensational title with zero information. And is there banner ad on .edu website of institute with multi billion dollar endowment? I had hoped to see citations and list of things that is wrong but instead came out with two statements which said there is nothing new, it’s all ok and the only bad thing was some people depriving them of human contact.
If you take any given drug which periodically spikes dopamine or serotonin or GABA or generally any neurotransmitter, your body adapts by lowering the baseline. Isn’t the point of fasting to allow the body to upregulate, thereby increasing your baseline? It sure sounds like a good thing to me.
There are some dopamine reuptake inhibitors you can take. IIRC the amphetamine class of drugs also stimulates release when some is already released due to environmental factors.
If you have 2 hours there is no better guide than Andrew Huberman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU