Addiction and fake pleasure: how dopamine fasting became Silicon Valley’s latest wellness trend – plus a four-step guide to doing it
- People receive a hit of dopamine each time they check their social media posts or mobile phones
- Overproduction of this pleasure/reward chemical can lead to problems, and ‘dopamine fasting’, or ignoring your phone, is meant to reset your brain
Feel like your brain is in need of a reboot? If you say that in front of someone who is hip to the latest wellness trends, they might suggest you go on a “dopamine fast”. It’s a thing.
“Dopamine fasting” has taken off in the past few weeks, about a year after YouTuber Improvement Pill published a video in which he, perhaps, coined the term while describing his routine meant to “Get Your Life Back Together”, as the video title says.
That video has been viewed nearly 1.8 million times since it was published in November 2018. Since then, “dopamine fasting” has turned into a buzzy phrase that Silicon Valley tech professionals have used to label rules about semi-regularly avoiding social situations.
It’s the practice for which University of California, San Francisco Medical School professor and start-up investor Dr Cameron Sepah made a “definitive guide ” that went viral this summer. And it’s a phrase that people including American Authors musician Dave Rublin use to describe self-care routines they’ve long been employing.
Let’s start with the basics: