Digital Detox: Dopamine Fasting
Insatiable Craving
Dopamine Fasting in the Attention Economy
For those of you who haven’t encountered the term “Dopamine Fast,” it’s a period during which a person abstains from all activities that trigger dopamine release. 📱 These activities can include social media, video games, media streaming, and email. Yes, you read that right – you are getting a dopamine hit every time you check your email. 📩 The goal is to reset the brain’s dopamine levels so that we’re less reliant on these activities for pleasure or satisfaction.
People addicted to digital technologies often find themselves in a constant state of seeking out new information and stimulation. 👩🏽💻 Sound familiar? Recognize yourself or someone else? Unfortunately, this can lead to feelings of anxiousness and restlessness when we’re not able to get our fix. 😵💫 Dopamine fasting can help break this cycle by giving the brain a chance to recover from this constant overstimulation.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to dopamine fasting. The length of time and activities you abstain from will depend on your situation and goals. 📆 However, it’s essential to ensure that you’re not depriving yourself of things that bring you genuine joy. Of course, how you define “genuine joy” is important here, and I’m not talking about momentary “device joy.” We want to increase those non-screen activities that bring us deep and abiding satisfaction. 💃🏽 With practice, Dopamine Fasting helps improve our relationship with digital technologies, but it might be pretty uncomfortable when we first begin. Breaking habitual patterns can be challenging. That’s why I have put together this 7-Day Reset. We need support to make changes to our routines and meet any challenges. 👯♀️
Dopamine fasting can help us take back control of our time and attention and help us find a healthier balance with digital technologies. 👓 To put this into practice, we need to increase our moment-to-moment awareness and uncover the urges and cravings that drive us to the screen. 🙀 For example, some people are addicted to checking email hundreds of times a day. No exaggeration. How many emails are life-changing or life-altering? Very few, and yet, that urge persists because of those delicious dopamine hits. 💉
The key to fasting is resistance – resisting the chronic urge to reach for the phone or website or streaming service and instead learn to sit in that craving state. ✋🏼 We strengthen our resistance to combat the habitual and often subconscious actions that steal our attention by exploring the craving state and uncovering the compulsion underneath. 🔍
In that act of resistance, what can we allow to arise? 🌅 What resources can we discover within? What feelings can we recognize? What sensations do we have in our bodies? 🧘🏽 What does the breath feel like on the inhale and the exhale? What conscious choice can I make in this moment?
We must first recognize our triggers, urges, and cravings to change our behaviors. 👾 We’ve become so habituated to interacting with devices and notifications that we can’t even identify the origin of the urge. This awareness is one of the most powerful practices that we can use in our mission to recover our time. 🥷🏼 Unfortunately, sometimes the urge is so subtle, and the response is so fast that we have a screen in front of our faces before we’ve even had time to think. This insidiousness makes intervention tricky.
That space between embodied presence and the notification, or vibration, or ding is so tiny that we must slow down to bring the urge to our awareness. 🔔 Slow way down. Slowing and pausing is one of the most challenging practices I have taken on and also one of the most rewarding. My favorite mantra is “Slow the f*ck down.” ⏱
The exercise today is to become aware of your urges and cravings and meet them with resistance. Resistance is a powerful practice. 📵 It’s actually easier to have a complete detox – to remove the object of longing altogether. But unfortunately, few of us are in the privileged place to be able to be device and media-free, so we must learn to resist. That first sensation of craving may worsen momentarily, and then it passes. 😩 On the other side of that initial resistance is a spaciousness, an opening, an opportunity to meet ourselves right here in the present moment. And to make a different choice. 🕊
You might be thinking that this sounds like a spiritual practice, but only in that it is a return to our humanity – a return to being human in a physical world. 🧍🏾♀️ Resistance is a powerful practice because it is going against all of the attention economy’s currents, advertising and marketing, and big business. 🏊♀️ When your eyeballs equal dollars, this resistance puts choice and power back into your hands. Let the Dopamine Fasting begin! ✅
EXERCISES:
Worksheet Download:
Dopamine Fasting Journal
5-minute Hypnosis Audio Download: “Shielding from Digital Distraction”
listen every morning for seven days
