Dopamine Fasting: A Maladaptive Fad (2020)
health.harvard.edu
health.harvard.edu
If you have 2 hours there is no better guide than Andrew Huberman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU
Spiking dopamine levels with pharmaceutical drugs can do this in animal studies, but watching a show on Netflix or eating a donut is not the same thing.
The simpler explanation is that people who spend all of their time passively consuming rewarding activities (junk food, TV shows, Twitter, Reddit, porn) are getting terrible nutrition, very little physical activity, and no real social exposure. They're also piping a constant stream of negative news and unhealthy debates into their eyes and ears.
Going outside and going for a run is also rewarding and can also be shown to elevate dopamine levels, but nobody is going to argue that it makes you "feel shitty and unmotivated".
You can't reduce everything down to one, singular chemical in the brain. Human psychology and motivations are complex and not a function of singular chemical "levels" in the brain. Reward is also a complex topic that involves multiple systems across the brain, especially opioidergic pathways that moderate much of the sensation of reward. Dopamine is also used for functions like movement (think Parkinson's) and even encoding negative stimuli that you dislike.
This pseudoscience idea that "dopamine equals motivation" or that you can modulate your entire motivation/reward circuitry by playing games to modulate dopamine is an egregious abuse of the science.
I suggest you listen to the Huberman episode. Of course, he never claims something as simplistic as "dopamine _equals_ motivation", but there's wealth of evidence that he cites in the episode that the two are intimately related. The second part of your sentence is actually pretty close to the truth rather than an egregious abuse of the science, though it depends on what you mean by "playing games to modulate dopamine". The entire episode is about the topic, and I strongly recommend it.
> You can't reduce everything down to one, singular chemical in the brain. Human psychology and motivations are complex and not a function of singular chemical "levels" in the brain.
I'm pretty sure you won't find any instance in the episode where Huberman claims to reduce everything down to dopamine.
That's not the simpler explanation at all; that's actually a 2nd and 3rd order explanation backed up by nothing but conjecture. The reward center and the pleasure center are separate; this is why people can get addicted to video games they hate, or they can doomscroll all day not really enjoy it, yet be unable to stop. Activities designed to spike dopamine as high as possible and far beyond anything seen in our evolutionary history cannot be taken lightly. It's silly to think that a healthy, active person is immune to addiction. Porn, junk food, twitter are all just socially acceptable, mild addictions, and just like any behavioral addiction like gambling, they are all driven by dopamine. Will you next tell gamblers they're fine, they just need to eat better and hit the gym?
Am I the only one who appreciates things more after being away from them for a long time? Or is that more than dopamine? I thought dopamine was involved with motivation and would at least in large part explain why I might get tired of playing a video game but then suddenly get way more enjoyment out of it if I play it again 6 months later.
Perhaps I'm from another planet. It just seems like for anything I find to be helpful there's some academic article discrediting it.
> Misunderstanding science can create maladaptive behaviors
Given that it seems pretty unlikely that someone could become addicted to dopamine fasting, it's really up to the individual and not science as to whether their behavior is maladaptive. It doesn't really matter whether non-academics understand dopamine if they still find benefit in the process.
A much better term for this practice is “hedonic fast”.
Given all of that, the ideas behind dopamine fasting make sense to me. I won't claim that it does for everyone of course, but if someone tells me that it doesn't make sense because this or that in the brain, I would tell them that it doesn't match my experience of other things. Maybe dopamine shouldn't be in the name, maybe it shouldn't call fasting, but I feel like the article is attacking the content and not just the name.
The argument is that lumping everything together is unnecessary: you can disconnect from different things at different times. I’d say this is true for the biochemistry too: dopamine has myriad roles and avoiding flash photography to reduce retinal dopamine release seems…unlikely to relate to mood.
Heck, about half of dopamine isn’t even in the brain: it’s got a big role in the gut and pancreas too!
But the "dopamine fasting" trend has evolved into a weird extremist version of this where people try to avoid everything that might be enjoyable for a while.
The catch, of course, is that you don't have to avoid everything enjoyable to rekindle that feeling of enjoyment for returning to specific things.
These people would be far happier if they simply used their downtime to go exercise, or go for a walk, or socialize, or volunteer, or call up old friends. You don't have to be miserable to restore the enjoyment of something. Just do something else for a while instead of being chronically online all day every day.
I've noticed the same thing.
Just one of the wild, reference-free claims [1] the article makes. Who are these legions of people? The few articles I have been able to find about it [2][3] indicate that it's Silicon Valley "trying things out" as usual, and assorted media loudly claiming that it doesn't work.
As such, the backlash against this is the most interesting part to me. Is dopamine fasting enough of a blow to the business model of traditional media outlets that they have decided to snowball it with a series of strawman attacks just in case anyone takes it seriously and decides to try it out? It seems like a harmless form of standard Buddhist-style meditation practices to me, that seek to minimize desire.
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[1] I wonder how much of a "pass" an article unnecessarily gets on basic things like data and references just because it happens to on a Harvard Medical School domain.
[2] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/11/13/20959424/dopam...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/style/dopamine-fasting.ht...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Grinspoon
EDIT: Peter has his own Wikipedia page too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Grinspoon
This is the standard asceticism routine that every human religion in history followed. (And follows.)
I'll trust the weight of centuries of experience over some random internet source.
the random internet source in this case happens to be harvard medical laying out basic facts about how dopamine works in the human brain and why you can't actually 'fast' it.
General point being, if you weigh "weights of centuries" higher than modern expertise, you would still believe that night air is dangerous and your four humors are out of balance instead of believing in germs. The chance that anyone who posts on HN actually treats their illnesses with ancient religious practice is, I'd wager, very low. And that tells you all there is to it.
Why?
Shouldn't any such practice / experience be based on results, ideally well controlled, rather than just something people did or do?
There's any number of things people in my old neck of the woods did for hundreds of years that I'm very happy to have escaped the heck away from :-)
That is to say that there are meaningful answers to that question that go either way. Not to mention Tarski's undefinability theorem.
But my comment was not even about reproducibility, though that is important, but another fundamental question: What is the goal?
Yes, many people over hundreds of years have behaved a certain way. But putting aside burden of evidence/reproducibility, whether I want to behave a certain way / same way, to me, hinges on a) What's my goal and b) Have those people obtained that goal?
Random trivial examples: IF my goal is to have a happy family life with a partner and bunch of kids; following people who practiced isolation and asceticism will probably not satisfy that goal, no matter how many of them did it over however many hundreds of years. Insert any number of other trivial or complex goals (leading people, developing a rich and meaningful social life, sending a rocket to the moon, experiencing a lot of different experiences, travelling, seeing the world - whatever ). I find the whole "lots of people did this, so I'll trust their experience" pretty meaningless without stating "what is your goal? What do you consider good? What do you desire?" and then "did those people reach that goal? And what are the aspects of their life that contributed to it?"
(FWIW, I find that is frequently the case on internet forums; with my friends, explicitly or implicitly I understand their perspective/context/goals, so we can discuss politics or history or morals knowing each others assumptions or goals. On the internet, a LOOOOT of discussion is pretty circular because nobody stated their goals; so how can we discuss whether something is good/productive/leading to desired state; or bad/counter-productive/leading to negative state; etc. But that's a much broader concern than what we have here:).
My comment was solely to poke a hole in the idea that only things that can be reproduced in double blind studies are truth.
When reality, our modern science is many times far from reality, and getting further each day. (See: reproducibility crisis)
Even “scientific proof” should have a healthy dose of skepticism, and “nothing but anecdotal evidence” should be considered more thoroughly.
The pitfalls of outsourcing critical thinking to double blind studies is the thrust of my point.
I agree, though I will selfishly bring it up to my own point of defining goals/scopes/mandates a priori :)
If my partner and I are discussing what's the best colour for the kitchen, double-blinded studies are of limited help and Truth is ephemeral and subjective :).
If we are discussing mathematical theorems, double-blinded study may be an irrelevant construct.
For some social or psychological areas, double-blinded study may be helpful but difficult or impossible to ethically configure, repeatably conduct, meaningfully interpret, and clean up of confounding variables etc.
And for yet other areas, it's the best tool we have to help confirm at a workable, useful, predictive model.
There are human superpowers, like increasing or decreasing your core temperature, consciously resisting infections, deliberately triggering the placebo effect, feats of memory, endurance, or cognition. Science is making inroads to the mechanics of many of these feats.
Asceticism seems like a clear cut system for improving cognition by letting the baselines of dopaminergic activity settle down. I can see the potential for negative effects of overstimulation, but where there's atrope, there's usually a kernel of truth to be found. Intellectuals and scholars are known to retreat from the world to silence and study for extended periods. Removing external stimulation is about as obvious as it gets when you want to focus on something. However, sensory deprivation- the extreme end of the axis - is known to have extremely negative effects, sometimes within a couple days. There's clearly a minimum threshold of stimulation needed to retain your sanity.
Running studies on cognitive performance through the use of deprivation tanks, silent retreats, minimal stimulation lifestyles, and other methodologies would be interesting. If a once weekly tank session provides as much benefit as daily silent retreats, or a month of living in isolation, or something like that, it would give people reasons to improve their well-being. My own suspicion is that infrequent tank use is probably as beneficial as more rigorous asceticism, but that's just opinion.
With the doors open to psychedelics research, I'd love to see the comparative results from ascetic practice with and without psychedelics over 6 month periods.
(Ok, granted, "worth" of civilization might be debatable.)
This, to my mind, is a perfect example of people getting carried away. It is definitely the case that dopamine signalling occurs in the retina, but the connection between that and any sort of higher-level “affective” phenomenon seems pretty tenuous.
>Who are these legions of people?
parents of new born twins.
It's not legions of people, but "dopamine fasting" was (briefly) popular in certain social media and tech circles.
It started out as a "put down your phone and go outside" kind of trend with a pseudoscientific tie-in to dopamine (or at least the popular misconceptions about dopamine). Aside from egregiously abusing neuroscience terms, it was actually a decent idea to encourage people to take a break from the easy rewards like social media, video games, and TV. Probably feels like a revelation to people who were chronically online and forgot that there was an alternative way to live.
But then it spiraled into a fad where social media personalities tried to one-up each other or rush to add their own pseudoscientific twists in an attempt to have something new and unique to share. And it evolved into this silly idea that you shouldn't do anything enjoyable during your off time, or even that you had to specifically become uncomfortable or miserable.
Outside of those circles, everyone else is just rolling their eyes. But get caught in one of these bubbles and you'll hear a lot of one-upmanship about dopamine fasting and humble brags about not doing certain things.
At least until it becomes uncool again, at which point everyone will pretend it never happened.
This article probably sounds like nonsense if you haven't been in one of these circles, but it's actually a great resource to give to someone before they go down the "dopamine fasting" rabbit hole. Debunk early and save them the trouble.
Moderation is good. Putting down your phone and going outside is good. Having self-discipline is good. But turning it into a status-signaling social media game and applying a pseudoscientific name is a good way to completely miss the point. Just go outside and enjoy yourself.
For what it's worth, it's been pretty useful for treating maladaptive ADHD habits/hyperfocusing on the wrong things. It has been pretty useful for tweaking my habits, and making me aware that I'm able to actually change them (rather than fall into learned helplessness).
I think most people forget that you have to break a fast, at the end of it. Hopefully this time slowly easing into a new, healthier diet regimen.
[0]https://test.desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/fit/image/1519/35...
"Metacognition is the key to self-mastery. The limbic system is how those who perceive themselves to be our betters attempt to gain control over us."
With this in mind, I agree fully with your statement on the backlash.
Mental health professionals might have started encountering this kind of person at the end of their attempts of acting this way, and then started talking about it with each other. Other patients are probably reference the misconstrued influencer articles about "dopamine fasting" in therapy sessions. They can't really tell you real numbers because it would break mental health privacy laws. Hell they might of wrote this mostly to show patients as a reference material.
Also the article doesn't make any assertions about the amount of people doing it (your "legions"), just that some people are.
I literally took the word "legions" from the article. You can find it by searching the article text for that word, finding this line:
> Unfortunately, legions of people have misinterpreted the science, as well as the entire concept of a dopamine fast.
But it sounds like some people over-interpret the theory and under-invest in verifying their interpretations through rigorous testing. That's unfortunate, but it's a behavior you see all the time with self-improvement fads. E.g., I think the paleo people had a point with moving away from foods engineered to maximize repeat purchasing. And in the saner parts of that world you'd see people recommending a framework of responsible self-experimentation, where you try things out and look for health improvements. But then there's also the whole "paleo brownies" crowd, where people ate just as poorly but with nominally different ingredients so they could feel virtuous without any actual improvement.
Lithium ion batteries want to be stored at low charge and cold. As long as they don’t self discharge below a certain minimum (at which point they are dead forever) you minimize degradation by keeping charge as low as possible. No need to be obsessive about it because the difference between 5% and 50% isn’t much.
Other lithium chemistries want to be stored completely charged, NiCd wants to be about half. Temperature is usually worse than charge state anyway.
The term is nebulous, but I think you're mixing concepts.
Taking a break from video games to do other things is a great idea.
But the "dopamine fasting" people have evolved the idea to the point that you would have to take a break from everything enjoyable during the down time. That is, no socialization, no music, no enjoyable foods, and nothing that might make you happy.
And that's the misconception: You don't have to be miserable to restore the enjoyment of one specific thing. You just have to take a break and do something else.
These people would be far happier if they took a break from their easy rewarding activities (Twitter, Netflix, whatever) and simply got up and did anything else, like going outside, going for a walk, socializing with friends, cooking an elaborate meal and inviting some guests over. You don't have to become miserable in general. Diversity of experiences and moderation of the easy rewards is key.
And I'll note that "take a break from everything" approach is both much older than this and can be very effective. People who do extended meditation retreats do basically what you describe. I once spent a week at the SF Zen Center's "Green Gulch Farm". No music, basic food, no tech. One could even sit at a table where nobody talked.
I loved it. I have no idea if my dopamine levels changed. But it was great to set aside the frantic-feeling short-loop behaviors, accept a period of discomfort, and then feel freer once the compulsions/habits were past. As opposed to, say, quitting video games for a week but substituting more time on Twitter and watching videos.
So I could see where they're going with it and I think they had good points. But it sounds like they have taken it too far.
Does liking a video, watching a TikTok, reading a blog post, catching up with my Instagram feed, etc. really does anything to my dopamine levels?
Have any of these activities really been shown to be bad for my physical or mental well being?
Naively speaking, I personally don't like wasting my time with them, because they don't make me feel accomplished, and because there are other things I actually want to do and often don't do in favor of the ease of wasting time of my phone instead. But none of that implies those activities are bad for me.
People claim there's an addiction to these things, is that true? Is it really that you're addicted to them? Would you suffer real withdrawal were the internet to be out of order for a few weeks?
There's various types of withdrawal. Your life wouldn't be at genuine risk compared to the withdrawal you get from various drugs. But yeah, it's entirely possible that you'd feel horrible for a while. True for me, at least. I suggest you try it to find out (never rely on your ability to perceive your own addiction! check and see what actually happens).
I'm having a genuinely hard time understanding the logic of this statement.
Doesn't lower your level from a baseline.
I haven't gotten through the entire article but I'm surprised no one's brought up the natural down regulation your body/brain does in reaction to elevated levels of any hormone. This tolerance the body builds up is one of the forces that cause people to become addicted to things because then they have not only the positive reinforcement but the negative reinforcement of needing the thing just to feel normal. Its the hedonic treadmill.
To my knowledge there is no evidence that more dopamine gets created when practicing unhealthy behaviour. Neurotransmitters are much more complex than the simplistic fasting model describes. If you don't have severe malnutrion (e.g. not enough tyrosine etc.) or Parkinson or ADHS or similar, the dopamine is just there in your brain, waiting to be released as needed. We don't create more of it just because we look at insta 50 times a day. And we can't use it all up through behavior alone (but things like amphetamines do, of course).
The metaphor of dopamine levels working like battery levels is simply wrong. High levels of dopamine correlate with good mood, but also schizophrenia. ADHS patients' symptoms can both get better and worse when consuming dopamin produgs.
Instead of asking what's driving people to this practice and whether the practice produced noticeable mental health benefits in the participants.
"It can't work how I understand it", doesn't mean it actually can't work, only that you've failed to understand.
It might `work` in the sense that it causes the practitioners feel better, without the biochemistry `working` as hypothesized. Indeed, the author points out that many of the practices are pretty close to more traditional mindfulness/sleep hygiene recommendations anyway.
Why assume that a daily 8 hour sleep window is The optimal break for everything?
Maybe they're just different versions of the same thing: finding more elusive dopamine rewards.
I do agree that disconnecting from technology is a good practice.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/24/wilderness-solo...
What fad fasting doesn't take into account is that it takes many weeks, up to many months, to downregulate the dopamine receptors. Dopamine fasting one day per week or a few hours per day is literally doing nothing for your dopamine. In this regard, the author is correct. But if you actually dopamine fast for months in by avoiding highly dopaminergistic activities, your brain will really undergo meaningful changes.
If he sincerely wants to engage with the proponents, he needs to drop the smug.
Dopamine fasting is a mechanistic model trying to explain unhealthy behaviour patterns that can occur dozens of times a day.
Even with the little we know about the inner workings of our brains, this doesn't appear to be true: We have to actively build up alternative behaviour and critically inspect/change the cognitions that actually promote the problematic behaviour.
So if a person has unhealthy bevaviour patterns regarding social media consumption, just doing less of that without also actively changing the cognitions that lead to the unhealthy behaviour in the first place won't help much. We do these things because we have a mostly subconsious theory that doing this is good for us. If this actually isn't, than that assumption has to be challenged, and healthy alternatives have to be built up. Just not doing the thing for a while won't replace the assumption, unless one is abstinent for a really long time (think years).
It's not about replacing the assumption. I don't even think there's much of an assumption (that it's good for us), it's rather the opposite: people actually hate themselves for spending so much time on social media, youtube, etc.
So, it's more about kicking a bad habit, than about trying to change some non-existing assumption that it's a good thing.
Besides that potentially fallacious point I made, I don't think the ADHD brain is really relevant to whether dopamine fasting is beneficial for other brains than those with ADHD.
Also not new: marketing, and blowback against marketing.