Could a dopamine detox help restore your sanity?

As basically anyone who has found themselves in thrall to their iPhone will tell you, engaging with the never-ending stream of content online often leaves us feeling grubby, uninspired and guilty. Research affirms that there’s a correlation between excessive use of phones and negative effects on physical and mental wellbeing, but as most of us know, wrenching ourselves away from our phones isn’t easy.

As studies have shown, this is largely because using social media activates the brain’s ‘reward centre’, as getting lots of likes on a tweet or seeing a particularly good TikTok video floods our brains with dopamine – the same neurotransmitter which makes us feel good when we eat nice food or have sex. The more often we get a social media-induced dopamine hit, the more we want to seek them out. And the more we seek them out, the less exciting these hits become, causing us to scroll on in search of even more content to give us the same level of pleasure as before.

Still, as hard as it is, many of us are continually trying to quit being so addicted to our phones. New research has found that 50 per cent of Gen Z want to “take a break” from their smartphones – the most of any generation. Enter: the dopamine detox.

The term ‘dopamine detox’ (or ‘dopamine fast’) is usually used to describe a short break from social media, although it can also include abstaining from watching films and videos or even listening to podcasts and music. The practice first gained traction in the late 2010s, with entrepreneur Greg Kamphuis, one of the first to post about the idea on Reddit in December 2016. “The idea is to reset my motivational system and to learn to focus on who I actually am rather than bouncing from TV to social media to the fridge and on and on,” he wrote. “I am quitting [alcohol], nicotine, caffeine, processed sugar, TV and porn”.

A few years later, Dr Cameron Sepah began using the method to help clients with behavioural addictions, and by 2019 dopamine fasting had become a popular wellness trend among the “tech bros and venture capitalists” of Silicon Valley. For these ‘theta male’ types, a typical dopamine fast wouldn’t just involve abstaining from smartphones and the internet, but also reading, having sex, masturbating and even eating food. Fast forward to today, and the trend appears to have shed these more extreme elements and entered the mainstream. At present, the #dopaminedetox hashtag on TikTok has nearly 72 million views, with some videos racking up hundreds of thousands of likes.

@annierosenelson if u have the attention span of a chickpea this is for u 💯💯 #dopaminedetox #brainhealthtips #mentalhealthtiktok ♬ Miss You (Sped Up Version) - _

“I did a seven-day dopamine detox (because everyone on YouTube is talking about it and I hate being addicted to my phone,” writes TikTok user Amelie in one video which has amassed over 1.6 million views. For her detox, Amelie abstained from social media, TV shows, movies, YouTube, and music (except for instrumental). She says she felt anxious in the first few days, but soon began noticing a number of benefits. “Went on a walk and noticed more beautiful things around me because I wasn’t on my phone,” she notes on day two. She started writing a book on day three. By day five her brain fog was “gone”, and by the end of the detox she claims she felt “calmer, less anxious, clearer in the head and more focused”.

Shannon, 27, also recently jumped on the trend after noticing she noticed a huge dip in her motivation to do mundane tasks and work. “All I wanted to do was sit on my phone,” she tells Dazed. Then she heard about the benefits of a ‘dopamine detox’ on TikTok. “I had tried fully giving up social media in the past and really struggled, so I decided that doing it for just a couple of days a week would be more attainable.” During a detox, Shannon temporarily deletes the Instagram and TikTok apps off her phone, as she says these are the apps where she can fall into the trap of “mindlessly” scrolling.

Like Amelie, Shannon feels better when she’s making a conscious effort to reduce her screen time. At work, she says she can “stay more focused on tasks and get so much more done”. At home, she no longer puts off chores by procrastinating on her phone and feels as though she has “more time to get life admin tasks done, like returning parcels and buying birthday gifts [...] things feel like less of a chore now I’ve got nothing else to do”. Her relationships are also improving. “I am more likely to message friends and family, instead of scrolling through strangers’ feeds and sharing photos to everyone on Instagram,” she says.

“I guess I approve of the practice in practical terms. But I’m very wary of the way it’s currently being packaged and perceived” – Dr Dean Burnett

As aforementioned, there’s a clear link between high social media usage and poor mental wellbeing, so it tracks that people like Amelia and Shannon feel better after using their phones less. But, as with any wellness fad, it’s worth approaching the idea of a dopamine detox with a healthy dose of scepticism. “On one hand, it’s probably no bad thing that people are voluntarily disengaging from their devices for a bit,” says neuroscientist Dr Dean Burnett. “Our brains haven't evolved to engage with the world entirely via a small glowing rectangle, and there are many studies which show that interaction with the real world can be a healthier thing for our brains.”

But he stresses that he feels “uneasy” about the dopamine detox trend. “For one, cutting yourself off from all devices but recording yourself doing so in order to share it on TikTok and get people to like it, seems... counterproductive?”, he says. It’s a fair point: is it possible to try and meaningfully disengage from social media if you’re recording yourself doing it to post on TikTok for likes?

@nigima_pun This was me, a month ago 🥲 #student #studytok #study #studywithme #studytips #growth #growthmindset #selfimprovement #dopamine #dopaminedetox #detoxdrink #mentalhealth #edutok ♬ original sound - .

His biggest concern, though, is the pseudoscientific way people talk about dopamine on social media. The word’s definition appears to have bloated in recent years, and is now often invoked when talking about literally anything which causes pleasure – a change which is known as ‘concept creep’. But dopamine has a lot of other roles in many body functions, such as memory, movement, attention and motivation.

“Dopamine has countless functions in our brain, many of which are vital,” Dr Burnett says. “Yes, one of those is allowing activity in the reward pathway, the part of the brain that allows us to experience pleasure – but this has, presumably, led to this assumption that dopamine is like some internally-produced narcotic, giving you low-key highs on a regular basis while slowly corrupting you.” And this is “nowhere near how dopamine works,” Dr Burnett stresses. “If you really did ‘detox’ from dopamine and flush it out of your body, you’d probably be dead within minutes. At the very least, you’d be completely non-functional.”

Nearly everyone who has tried abstaining from social media reports feeling good afterwards – so does it matter if they call it a ‘dopamine detox’, even if it would make more sense to just call it ‘taking a break from social media’? Dr Burnett thinks so. “I get very wary whenever I see neuroscientific terms and concepts being thrown around casually by people who clearly don't understand them,” he says. “It spreads misunderstanding and flawed ideas about how our brains work, and devalues the expertise of those who know better. And I worry that invoking dopamine is a way to seem more credible by those who really don’t warrant such credibility.”

“I guess I approve of the practice in practical terms,” he surmises. “But I’m very wary of the way it’s currently being packaged and perceived.” This is fair – words have meaning, after all, and it’s important to use words correctly to avoid spreading false information or perpetuating baseless pseudoscientific ideas – especially in an age where we have an increasing tendency to pathologise normal behaviours and drop ‘therapy speak’ into our everyday language. But still, even if you aren’t actually ‘doing a dopamine detox’ – which, as Dr Burnett says, would leave you dead or incapacitated – if ‘taking a break from social media’ is working for you, keep going with it.