Depriving your brain of stimulation can rewire your frazzled neural circuits – but the problem runs deeper than that
The problem with ridiculous Silicon Valley lifestyle trends used to be the risk that people might take them seriously: that it might seem sensible to eat an all-carrot diet, while bathing in liquid nitrogen and administering electric shocks to your brain, just because some tech billionaire was doing so. Now that we’re adjusting our views of tech titans, the risk is the opposite: that if they actually came up with something good, we’d be too busy jeering to realise. So it goes, I think, with “dopamine fasting”, which got its moment in the mockery spotlight a few weeks back. The idea is to deprive yourself of dopamine hits, to break your addiction to our hyperstimulating world, thereby finding pleasure once again in life’s more meaningful but less buzz-inducing delights, such as natural beauty, good literature, or time with old friends.
To be fair, it’s still nonsense in many ways. Stimulation is more complex than dopamine hits; it’s misleading to talk of addiction; and there’s no evidence that a fast will “reset” your levels. (“Reset”, here, seems like a classic case of importing a computer metaphor into human biology.) But I like the concept anyway, because it shifts the focus from individual sources of stimulation to the brain being stimulated. If your goal is to end your dependence on excitement, and the treadmill effect whereby you require ever more of it, then it’s definitely helpful to spend a day without, say, social media. But it’ll be of limited use if you fill that time with different forms of stimulation – watching thrilling movies, taking drugs, eating junk food, shopping. The most radical proponents of dopamine fasting swear off any conversation at all.
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