Dopamine Fast: Helpful Hints

If you're thinking about a dopamine fast, click through to this post to help you decide. If you're going to give it a try, here are five tips to make you more successful at it:

It's like working out, only not.

1. Treat it like working out. A lot of beginners at the gym ("Like you know anything about a gym," said Mike's conscience) work too hard on the first day, can't move the next day, and give up--too much, too soon. Dopamine fasts fail the same way, so start with small changes and build on them.

2. Don’t cut back, cut it out. Pick something to eliminate, not to trim. The sudden loss of dopamine stimulation will leave you feeling deprived. But if you stick it out, you'll be surprised at how easy the new habit is to maintain for the duration of the fast.

   
   

3. Don’t torture yourself with a goal of feeling nothing at all. Don’t set yourself up

   for failure by aiming for an outcome no one could achieve. Do a little, and congratulate yourself: before you began, you were doing zero. Anything you do, anything at all, is progress.

4. Remember that big changes usually begin with unpleasant feelings, and those feelings will fade. The human body resists change—it seeks to maintain homeostasis—so it’s going to fight back, but this won't last forever. And when the body readjusts, something wonderful happens: your dopamine stimulation set-point will be lower, and that's the goal.

5. Remind yourself frequently of the payoff. When you avoid overstimulation of the brain’s pleasure circuits, they become more numerous and more sensitive, giving the pleasures you experience greater variety and depth. You get more enjoyment from a handful of berries than you previously did from a glazed donut. You get pleasure not only from the natural sugars in the berries, but also from the multitude of subtle flavors. It’s like the difference between the blinding flash of a nightclub strobe light and the blues and pinks that attend the setting sun.