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Optimize Me
Everyone is Wrong About Dopamine Fasting
Avoiding pleasurable activities to reset the brain’s ‘reward chemical’ sounds great. Too bad that’s not how dopamine works.
Welcome to Optimize Me, a new Elemental column exploring (and fact-checking) the weirdest self-improvement trends.
“In an instance of the Bay Area being very Bay Area: today was my first day in SF since moving here, and I ran into someone from my YC batch who told me he was on a ‘dopamine fast’ and thus had to cut our convo short (lest he acquire too much dopamine)”
It was the tweet that launched a dozen take-downs: Look at how ridiculous these Silicon Valley bros are being now! WTF is dopamine fasting?!
The practice is ostensibly the avoidance of any pleasurable or exciting stimuli in order to recalibrate the brain’s “reward” chemical. In other words, you temporarily swear off food, sex, drugs, music, exercise, conversation, email, internet — anything that could trigger the release of the neurotransmitter. (There is no agreed-upon dopamine fasting regimen, though most people tend to follow the restrictions for 24 hours.)
Dopamine fasting stems from the idea that a constant barrage of junk food, porn, social media…
