Dopamine detox is a lie
A story about how you lost your drive and how to get it back.
As always, if you prefer watching this as a video, it’s linked at the bottom of the page.
Is your life good enough to be as passive as you are?
Or is it too comfortable? Crawling from one distraction to the next, lulled by one dopamine hit (we get back to that later) after another. Like proper addicts, we watch a story here and a YouTube video there. Then one coffee, and another one. Music on demand, and to round up the day, three episodes of a series so well-produced that it can actually keep our demolished attention span on track for hours.
It’s fucking cozy, isn’t it? Our lives burst of opportunities for, what I call, effortless rewards. They are available for everyone. No need to be rich to afford caffeine and a Netflix subscription. Even if that twenty bucks a month are too much, there is still a free endless content stream from news and social media. If you follow YouTube trends, you might get the impression that social media and friends trigger dopamine hits, and that you need fast for a little while to increase reward sensitivity. But that won’t turn your life around.
Biology is never that simple, and dopamine is more than a reward-indicating hormone. Recent research indicates a major role in driving the search for rewards. It makes…