Dopamine Fasting: What Science Says About the New Silicon Valley Fad that Limits Excess Pleasure

Dopamine fasting is one of those techniques that has become fashionable in Silicon Valley, very much in the style of microdosing, and that seeks to improve the rhythm of an extremely fast life full of frenetic stimuli.

To do this, those who practice it abstain from daily pleasures with the idea of "recovering" the capacity to feel, once again, the well-being that has been stolen from them by an excess of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that controls it. This neurological argument makes sense from a superficial scientific point of view. However, what if we look into its depths? Does it make any sense?

Dopamine Fasting: Against a World of Immediate Pleasure

We live in a world full of immediate experiences and pleasure. That notice on your mobile phone that indicates new "I like you"; that advertisement full of suggestive images and attractive music; the ultra-processed food that makes your mouth water... the examples of everyday life are numerous. Every time we receive a stimulus that we consider pleasant, in fact, it is the dopamine that makes this happen.

For advocates of dopamine fasting, living with constant exposure to this neurotransmitter is a problem. At some point, our brain is not able to provoke the same reward response as it is overloaded with the daily bombardment of dopamine. This causes a typical addiction phenomenon known as tolerance.

This is when it is necessary to "fast" and limit for a time all the positive stimuli that produce pleasure. Each person does his or her own version of this dopamine fast, but always under the same premise: to reduce pleasure to the maximum, seeking absolute boredom. With this, those who practice it intend to feel the motivation and pleasure again in all its splendor. This means leaving behind laziness and laziness, recovering some of the creativity and well-being.

How is dopamine fasting done?

For those who practice it, dopamine fasting serves as a maintenance checkpoint; it is performed when they feel distracted, stressed, uncreative, too lazy, or any other expression related to a "low" or unmotivated mood.

Usually, this technique consists of controlling any impulsive behavior, especially stimulants. This involves reducing the use of mobile devices or similar (games, social networks, etc). It also involves doing other activities, as explained, that involves effort and do not produce immediate pleasure. A key point of dopamine fasting is to control the "urge to surf" or the urge to satisfy the need for reward. What can and cannot be done? That depends on the individual.

This is one of the most difficult issues to address since it is almost impossible to effectively control the amount of dopamine we secrete. Thus, stimuli that are harmless to some people can be strongly rewarding to others. To ensure that we do not encounter dopamine spikes, it is recommended that we do gentle, simple activities that do not provoke strong emotions or very fast ones.

Reading, listening to music, walking... On the contrary, we should avoid anything that produces a certain feeling of "anxiety" to obtain it. In short, it consists of avoiding the acts that produce quick and immediate satisfaction, normally associated with small gestures of the day to day (whims, mobile devices, actions that only look for the quick well-being). This usually causes a situation of "boredom" for many people who practice it.

This situation is repeated daily, between one and four hours, once every weekend, one weekend every four months or one week per year, depending on the "tolerance" and capacity for self-control. Of course, this is only a guide, says Dr. Cameron Sepah, a leading advocate and author of guidelines for carrying it out. For people who are used to doing it, he recommends practicing it for 5 to 30 minutes once to three times a day.

So, the dopamine fast, does it work?

At the moment, there is no scientific evidence that it does. Of course, we do know two basic things that dopamine fasting claims to be based on. These are classical conditioning and addiction theory. In the first, a stimulus triggers a response that is learned and reinforced. This happens with those little everyday things: a message from someone we care about; the reassurance that a picture we like is appreciated by others; an advertisement that appeals to our emotions - in the end, these stimuli predispose us to feel pleasure, and to produce dopamine, even when they are not truly pleasurable.

This is where the second aspect comes in: although these stimuli predispose us, in reality, they do not provoke the same sensation. As a result, pleasure begins to decrease, so more dopamine needs to be produced to receive a similar stimulus. This is called tolerance and is one of the three components that clinically determine an addiction. Another component is abstinence: not receiving the dose of dopamine needed to activate the feeling of a reward triggers a series of negative responses.
From a "superficial" point of view, this mechanism seems to explain accurately how, or why, dopamine fasting works. But, we insist, it does not. Firstly, in addiction the production of dopamine is tremendously high: the substances and behaviors that cause it are capable of generating real dopamine torrents which, in turn, change neurological make-up.

Among these changes is the inhibition of dopamine receptors, which explains the appearance of tolerance. This action is carried out automatically to protect the body. Secondly, and totally related to the above, dopamine does not only serve to produce the sensation of pleasure. This neurotransmitter is involved in a number of other physiological and cognitive functions. Therefore, an excess or lack of it can cause serious problems.

Hence, the brain controls its secretion and also its reception. There is no evidence that the production of dopamine reaches the levels that cause other addictive substances. Hence, not all behavioral disorders, such as so-called "cell phone addiction", are true addictions in the classical sense of the word.

In order to determine whether it makes physiological sense, it would be necessary to determine whether the daily amounts produced by these daily stimuli actually cause a change in our nervous system. Then, we would have to check whether by reducing the stimuli we can return that observed change to its previous state.

For the moment, and although it sounds logical, none of this has been measured. Does this mean that dopamine fasting does not work? Neither does it: the only thing it means is that we are completely unaware of its mechanisms if they exist at all.